The internet has made a lot of people armchair experts happy to offer their perspective with a degree of certainty, without doing the work to identify gaps in their knowledge. Often the mark of genuine expertise is knowing the limitations of your knowledge.
This isn’t a social media thing exclusively of course, I’ve met it in the real world too.
When I worked as a repair technician, members of the public would ask me for my diagnosis of faults and then debate them with me.
I’ve dedicated the second half of my life to understanding people and how they work, in this field it’s even worse because everyone has opinions on that topic!
And yet my friend who has a physics PhD doesn’t endure people explaining why his theories about battery tech are incorrect because of an article they read or an anecdote from someone’s past.
So I’m curious, do some fields experience this more than others?
If you have a field of expertise do you find people love to debate you without taking into account the gulf of awareness, skills and knowledge?
I was once accused on Reddit of being a bot after spending half an hour crafting a reply to a question with detail and examples. It’s a great way to discourage people from trying to be helpful 🫠
“This is AI-generated content” seems to be the new slur seeking to shame people into silence. Better than “Incel”, I suppose, but certainly more insidious and less dismissively hyperbolic.
My guess is interactions like that are probably going to get more frequent as LLM use and possible backlash against them increases, since people who aren’t particularly good at spotting LLM text just think long = bot.