Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
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.
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Disagree somewhat. Overall we are smarter and more educated than we have been at any point in history. We have more people attending things like post secondary education and more vehicles to attain knowledge such as TV and the Internet. It may appear to the layman that more and more people who do not have the knowledge are speaking out, but that is more a factor of the methods (Internet, TV) than it is the people themselves.
There have always been idiots passing judgment about politics, religion and a variety of other topics at any period in human history. Now they can make their own webpage or Twitter handle and gain followers. There is more noise.
One can argue that the amount of knowledge required to be a specialist in a field has been expanded (and more to the point, the total amount of knowledge available), but overall the average person is in a better place and more informed than they were 20, 50, or 100 years ago.
Speaking out about things we really don't know isn't unique to "ultra-specialists", it is more just in our nature.