In response to my lament regarding how some people think watching movies makes them an expert in a public policy area, Kevin Drum points out a broader problem with how people judge what they do and don’t know:
Everyone with the manual dexterity to hoist a beer can regale you with confident answers to all the ills of society, while in the very next breath insisting that you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to subject X. That’s a lot more complicated than you think.
Subject X, of course, is something they happen to know a lot about, probably because they work in the field. But it doesn’t matter. The fact that they’ve learned to be cautious about the one field they know the most about doesn’t stop them from assuming that every other field is pretty simple and tractable.
It would be absurd to deny this sad phenomenon. Kevin is describing how possession of deep knowledge in some areas doesn’t generalize into an assumption that there is also relevant deep knowledge in areas in which we are not specialists. During some of the hottest cultural debates of recent years, I have been thinking about this same lack of generalization from the other direction: Why don’t we assume we are ignorant in unfamiliar areas when we have the experience of ignorance in familiar ones? I am thinking in particular of our quotidian experience of misunderstanding or misremembering our interactions with other people. Continue reading “I Wasn’t There, But Let Me Tell You Exactly What Happened”