Quote:
Originally Posted by Flame Of Liberty
Even a well-educated and well-spoken guy can be dead wrong on several fronts.
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I'm not sure if this is a veiled rebuke or merely a general assertion that is otherwise unrelated to my post above. However, I should like to point out a few things.
First, I completely agree, and at no point have I made any knowledge claims that would invalidate your statement. I am most certainly wrong more often than not, but on that note, "wrong" is also best understood on a spectrum. Some opinions are clearly more or less wrong than others.
Second, as an extension of the above premise, the correctness of any given opinion most often is directly proportionate to ones knowledge and expertise in the subject area. Not all opinions are equal, and like it or not, well-educated opinions are almost always superior to the notoriously entitled "public opinion".
Third, our society has necessarily emerged as a collective of "ultra-specialists". Generalism has disappeared with increased needs for specialisation, and as a consequence, most of us tend to know a great deal about only a fraction of things. What so often occurs under these conditions is that we misconstrue a lot of knowledge about a few things for a lot of knowledge about everything: We extrapolate from the minutiae of our expertise to pretend to speak articulately about a great number of things of which we actually know very little.
Alas, this is the frustrating thing with opinions globally. Everyone has one about practically everything, but it is virtually impossible for most of them to be even remotely valid.
The lesson in all of this?
Defer to the experts.