@jacob - Feel free to edit this into your earlier post, or delete this duplicate without doing anything, or whatever.
jacob wrote: ↑Thu Oct 26, 2017 3:47 pmThere's another thing I've been thinking about. I kinda hesitate to post it, because I'm not sure it's a good idea as it might quench people's desire to post---seeing how so many are already hesitant to do so in this ... illustrious company
My issue which l vent not as the benign dictator and overlord of this domain but as a private person is the frustration of sharing expert knowledge in general.
The problem is that with modern era social media, that "rule" is often replaced with
Now what we see in practice is that when some beginner asks a question, they will often get a combination of answers with varying levels of expertise and opinion. You can see the quantitative ratio by clicking on the second link. Having different perspectives when it comes to opinion is a good idea when it comes to politics, lifestyles, life-lessons (anecdote), ... But when it comes to verifiable facts, multiple perspectives a terrible idea. There aren't sides or alternatives to reality.
There's something in either the Analects or the Tao Te Ching about how it is the expert's role to teach and the beginner's role to learn, but also how it is the role of other people (non-beginners) to point out who is the expert and who is the beginner because otherwise beginners can't tell the difference between experts and other beginners.
See, ideally, the graph would be an increasing monotonic function where the more expertise one had, the more inclined one would be to share it. Instead, there's a tendency for humans to get fairly strongly opinionated after just a little bit of knowledge and then shutting up after learning some more and realizing how little they know. At this point people close their mouth and open their ears; and therefore they create the valley in the graph and thus do not serve the function underlined above.
So instead of sharing expert knowledge, the consequence is that experts end up debating people who know just enough to have an opinion but not enough to know how little they know.
For sharing expert knowledge, this is both enervating and aggravating. You end up arguing 101 stuff in the form of a debate which is very frustrating. Worse, you never get to move onto 202 stuff because there's a continuous influx of new beginners who want to share their own opinion. It's exasperating debating multiplication with people, who believe multiplying is impossible because they can't be bothered to learn it, when you could be teaching calculus.
Now, some eventually catch on as to who is the expert and who is just opinionated. They will then reveal (privately) how they’re eventually only paying attention to one "side" of the debate (the expert side) and how they actually learn a lot.
As an expert in a couple of fields (finance, climate) it's nice to be appreciated and told [usually in private] that all the energy that has been sunk into stupid debates wasn't completely wasted. It's also nice to be told when someone realizes that you actually know a lot more than they initially thought but that they didn't realize it at first [almost always in private ... few people will admit this publicly]. I'm sure people with expert knowledge in other fields have felt the same and experienced the same secret appreciation in other fields.
But...
The problem is that we could be sharing so much more expertise if it was pointed out more publicly. I don't mean that as some kind of public thank-you note or expressions of support. I don't think such make much of a difference. Rather:
If there's an ongoing debate between whether it's possible to master the multiplication table or whether 5x7 consistently gives the same result. Then beginners ought (in my opinion) pick up a basic math book instead of figuring that the truth is that math is really hard and not worth learning because because you get ten different answers when you ask online followed by lots of debate on who is right(*)
This is a far more effective approach than trying to learn by watching a pseudo-debate.
(*) I'm sure everybody has seen one of those facebook memes, where people are asked the result to 3 - 1 * 5 + 2 always resulting in several different answers (12, 0, 14, etc.) as people are only too happy to share their opinions/effective math expertise or lack thereof for the world to see You might also have noticed that even for something like that the signal/noise ratio is absolutely shameful and debates can carry on for a long time. This might even have happened on a sufficiently regular basis that you have a fairly good idea of who of your friends and family are going through their adult lives with a 3rd or a 7th grade math level understanding and who is 11th grade or higher.
Someone originally believing that 5x7 is such a large number so as to be impossible to compute but eventually realizing that it's possible to add five sevens and even memorize severals dozens of such results should not shut up and sit back only paying attention to the experts, but point out the difference between the expert and the math-resistant first grader to the kindergarteners, so they don't hold themselves back by listening too much to the resistant first-graders.
More importantly, talk about what you learned, how you learned it, and why it's important. This takes attention away from the uninformed sophomores who otherwise dominate the threads and frees energy for the experts from wasting time on a pseudo-debate to spending more time adding insight.
In conclusion: When it comes to ethics (the moral rules for a well-functioning community), I don't blame the unconsciously incompetent for debating because they're often not conscious of their own incompetence. Therefore, they can be forgiven---kinda like how you forgive fools and children or yourself, because they're just acting according to their nature. The blame, rather sits with those who do know better but don't point out how they used to be that ignorant and how they learned more. The blame also sits with those who know they know nothing but can't be assed to make an effort to learn i.e. those who don't read links, books, and ask the same questions over and over.