The triumph of ignorant people over rationality: the Armenian experts about “The Death of Expertise”
Everyone can find and read everything on their phone. This creates an illusion of knowledge. Tom Nichols is worried that the opinions of a scientist who has worked for decades and become an expert, and a teenager who has never done anything, are given equ
What Putin ate for breakfast or what Trump said to Erdogan while playing golf. Thousands of people can have the answers to such meaningless questions, and according to Suren Sargsyan, an expert in American politics, each of them is confident about the exclusiveness of such kind of information. "Of course, there are people who claim such things, and when you ask whether you were there, they say no, but insist that they were informed by an important person who is very well aware of everything".
According to Tom Nichols, the author of “The Death of Expertise”, it is paradoxical that the spread of information has not created an educated society, but an army of those who reject intellectual achievements, ignorant people and nihilists.
Suren Sargsyan has dealt with such hopeless cases a lot. Any professional analysis of, for example, Trump, faces the absurd claims of thousands of know-it-alls. Arguing is pointless, they accept any fact that contradicts their opinion with hostility. "You cannot prove something to a person that does not want to understand or believe, even the facts are meaningless to them. When you present facts and figures, argue that they are not right, they say no, you are wrong and that's it".
This social media madness is only getting deeper and bigger. According to IT specialist Artur Papyan, one of the reasons is that people consume services, and the sellers use primitive psychological tricks. "Modern social networks encourage people to be enclosed in bubbles, they deceive everyone and make them believe that they are the most important persons in the world. And they try to sell different services to them". Encouraging a person to stay a lot, write a lot, and argue a lot on social networks, they take time and create the illusion that their opinion is important to everyone. There is an unfounded rise in self-esteem, people find themselves in a parallel reality where facts are not important. We are wasting our time, our lives, they are deceiving us, they are giving us some falsehoods, and we are trying to prove something to ourselves."
When political interest is added to the corporate one, we get what we have today: the triumph of ignorant people over rationality. Globally.
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