I very broadly agree with you. And I think it would be helpful to discover how one finds oneself on Mount Stupid and how to properly descend. This is all only from my own personal experience and so I well may be on Mount Stupid opining about Mount Stupid. But from whatever hill, mountain and peak I rest on, these have been my observations so far:
Some popularizer will write a book, essay, or regular column and explain in broad strokes a mixture of his opinions, the hard facts and the scholarly consensus of what those facts mean. To a layman that mixture of tonic, toxic and placebo is impossible to sort out. Further, since the popularizer cannot go too many inferential steps ahead of the reader without needed to split a book into multiple volumes, explainers commonly resort to lies to children. Instead of having a healthy respect for the known unknowns and difficulty of a given subject, they feel free to shout from Mount Stupid’s peak. After all, it is not they who suffer any unfortunate avalanches as they yell at the top of their lungs half remembered quotes from a journalist’s attempt to explain experimental physics. Those on mount stupid did not climb to get there. Somebody build a ski slope of lies to children, narratives and metaphors that lead them up and up until they acquired a degree of unwarranted confidence and a reverence to the bearer of good info. The difficulty of Mount Stupid rests in the fact that you were taken there without the proper tools to get down and where you could go to get those tools is usually unclear or at least costly in terms of time and effort.
How accurate does this judgment seem to your own knowledge of Mount Stupid, and further, what tools other than having your gross ignorance exposed have led you downhill toward expertise and humility?
How accurate does this judgment seem to your own knowledge of Mount Stupid, and further, what tools other than having your gross ignorance exposed have led you downhill toward expertise and humility?
I mostly agree with your analysis above; I would add, however, one very internal factor. People who do not possess significant expertise in a complex area almost always tend to underestimate the complexity of all complex systems. Even if they read on complexity, they rarely get an intuitive feel for it. So, reading a few popular books doesn’t just introduce the problems you have stated above. Since there is no intuitive understanding just how complicated things are, a person feels that the few information they have gleaned are sufficient to make an informed opinion on a topic. IMHO, this general problem also stands behind the popularity of many simplistic (and ultimately destructive) ideologies based on simplistic approaches to complex systems (such as, say, communism or libertarianism).
Along those lines, a thing that helped me a lot in this regard was becoming an expert in a complex field. Seeing how very intelligent people form deeply wrong opinions about things I understand made me very, very aware of similar biases in my thinking about other fields. It didn’t cure me from forming such opinions, but it does force me to reexamine them aggressively as soon as I realize their existence within my mind.
I very broadly agree with you. And I think it would be helpful to discover how one finds oneself on Mount Stupid and how to properly descend. This is all only from my own personal experience and so I well may be on Mount Stupid opining about Mount Stupid. But from whatever hill, mountain and peak I rest on, these have been my observations so far:
Some popularizer will write a book, essay, or regular column and explain in broad strokes a mixture of his opinions, the hard facts and the scholarly consensus of what those facts mean. To a layman that mixture of tonic, toxic and placebo is impossible to sort out. Further, since the popularizer cannot go too many inferential steps ahead of the reader without needed to split a book into multiple volumes, explainers commonly resort to lies to children. Instead of having a healthy respect for the known unknowns and difficulty of a given subject, they feel free to shout from Mount Stupid’s peak. After all, it is not they who suffer any unfortunate avalanches as they yell at the top of their lungs half remembered quotes from a journalist’s attempt to explain experimental physics. Those on mount stupid did not climb to get there. Somebody build a ski slope of lies to children, narratives and metaphors that lead them up and up until they acquired a degree of unwarranted confidence and a reverence to the bearer of good info. The difficulty of Mount Stupid rests in the fact that you were taken there without the proper tools to get down and where you could go to get those tools is usually unclear or at least costly in terms of time and effort.
How accurate does this judgment seem to your own knowledge of Mount Stupid, and further, what tools other than having your gross ignorance exposed have led you downhill toward expertise and humility?
I mostly agree with your analysis above; I would add, however, one very internal factor. People who do not possess significant expertise in a complex area almost always tend to underestimate the complexity of all complex systems. Even if they read on complexity, they rarely get an intuitive feel for it. So, reading a few popular books doesn’t just introduce the problems you have stated above. Since there is no intuitive understanding just how complicated things are, a person feels that the few information they have gleaned are sufficient to make an informed opinion on a topic. IMHO, this general problem also stands behind the popularity of many simplistic (and ultimately destructive) ideologies based on simplistic approaches to complex systems (such as, say, communism or libertarianism).
Along those lines, a thing that helped me a lot in this regard was becoming an expert in a complex field. Seeing how very intelligent people form deeply wrong opinions about things I understand made me very, very aware of similar biases in my thinking about other fields. It didn’t cure me from forming such opinions, but it does force me to reexamine them aggressively as soon as I realize their existence within my mind.