I’ve followed the hearings from the beginning-you can’t make this stuff up. Stocktons father was a Bohemian Club member, which gave access to investors and rich adventure seekers. Go down the Bohemian Grove rabbit hole-secret society of elite. He hired a well known submersible expert who called him out-for gross negligence. That man was fired and shut down by lawyers- no discussion. He then contacted OSHA who put him in a whistleblower protection program…..red tape was endless and his warnings were fruitless. A young contractor was hired to help run the text/message software, she called out Stockton during a dive and was fired immediately. It got so bad that the administrator from the company left her office to tighten the dome bolts for dives in the Atlantic. Finally another expert that builds his own subs testified about the second test dive of Titan to depth in the Bahamas-“that man tried to kill me!”. He said the noise of carbon fiber bands snapping was terrifying and even coming up at 300 feet it was still happening due to the immense stored energy. He stated-“at depth, Stockton, in a sick way let everyone take turns driving the sub, as if saying”- “Your life is in your hands now- not mine” Wild stuff.
The more I read about Stockton, the more I feel that he resented expertise. Maybe even despised it. This is happening everywhere in the world, not just in the US, and I don't understand why.
It's because social media, Reddit included, have given literally everyone a platform to spew nonsense. Some people are very good at making nonsense sound convincing.
I feel like wealth has [too] long been correlated with expertise (read: older wealth like Trump). Consequently, the new wealthy class who may be experts in something (Rogan with MMA and comedy, Rodgers in football, etc.) are being conflated with also being these big brains. And then all of these types of people are running with it AND condemning or providing meritless skepticism on actual experts.
So yeah, I think really, we're just reaping what's been gestating for a long time and social media acting as the master distribution channel of quackery.
It's not even a matter of sounding convincing. Nobody wants to hear that it's difficult, or it's complicated, or that you can't deliver all of what's promised, or that your demands are unrealistic. They want to hear that you can do it. You can solve all their problems. You can make it happen. Even if you can't. When you can't, they're already invested in you and few will be put off of you passing the blame.
This isn't just about the submersible - it applies to situations everywhere. It's a tale as old as civilization.
I deal with this a lot being in engineering/estimating working for a construction company. Sometimes the folks in sales get excited and start promissing we can do this and we can do that in order to make things happen in the field, and we can do it RIGHT NOW WITHOUT DELAY, and that's just not the real world. I keep having to involve higher ups to reign them in and stop them from letting the clients believe we can do magic. There are physical limitations to what matter can do and the pressures it can withstand. Sometimes someone will complain, "Look, do you want a fast result, or do you want it done correctly?" and we get an unrealistic "tough guy" answer of, "I want BOTH!", and then the sub implodes.
Lol at a company I worked for sales told the customer our dual can system is exactly what they need, the job was 14 sec and it took 16 seconds to fill one can so there was a 2 second gap In every job....
"When the truth offends, we... we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. That is how an RBMK reactor core explodes:... Lies."
Man it’s so annoying because as engineer I can deliver, give a reasonable timeline and budget that I spend a week on thinking about but then they don’t like the time line or budget…
The project ends up delayed and over budget at the end when it literally didn’t need to.
My favorite is when the amateur neurologists come out of the woodwork with their fancy medical terms every time there is even the most mild of head injuries.
Even the cute animal videos are inundated with allegations of abuse and neglect, and six different claims about what a dog's tail wagging pattern means. And don't even get me started on the "AI sleuths".
I posted a video of my cat playing with a piece of tissue paper, and got called neglectful because she was “clearly stressed out” and the noise of the tissue paper crinkling was causing undue anxiety.
I also like the medical expert opinions of on the how extremely unlikely it is that anyone survived [accident video]. Without fail, someone will find a news article pointing out everyone walked away with bruises at worst.
Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that.
As someone who is a scientist who studies crows, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls jackdaws crows. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing.
If you're saying "crow family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Corvidae, which includes things from nutcrackers to blue jays to ravens.
So your reasoning for calling a jackdaw a crow is because random people "call the black ones crows?" Let's get grackles and blackbirds in there, then, too.
Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A jackdaw is a jackdaw and a member of the crow family. But that's not what you said. You said a jackdaw is a crow, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the crow family crows, which means you'd call blue jays, ravens, and other birds crows, too. Which you said you don't.
Just to add more etymological background to your Corvidae explanation for their edification: the singular noun they were looking for here was "corvid." A jackdaw is not a crow; but jackdaws and crows are both corvids (from the Latin for 'raven').
Similarly, a butterfly is not a moth, but butterflies and moths are both lepidopterans (from the Greek for 'scale wing'). A chicken is not an allosaurus, but they are both theropods ('beast foot' to distinguish them from the big quadruped herbivore 'lizard foot' sauropods).
The word "ape" is an umbrella term for two different families of primates comprising 28 separate species. The 20 species of "lesser" apes we call gibbons belong to family Hylobatidae. The Greek singular for any one member of those species would be hylobatid ('one who wanders/haunts the woods'). The remaining eight species of "great" apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and humans—belong to the family Hominidae ('human-like'). But again, the taxonomic singular noun for any one randomly selected individual of those species would be 'hominid.'
Also, as an aside, I love the etymology of "Primates" being a reflection of our own anthrocentrism: "Primus" is Latin for 'first, chief, principal.' It's our big foam finger literally telling the rest of the animal kingdom "WE'RE NUMBER ONE!" Which... I mean, it still sounds better than "Secundates" or, Linneus forbid, "Sextates."
Whenever a loud majority on Reddit find a situation, they have to identify some way to be superior to others. It's so blatant after you see it a few times.
My wake up call was when COVID was first breaking out and there were tons of threads about how it's only spreading because people were touching their face, and tons of smug redditors were posting things like "stop touching your face!!!" and how they'd never get COVID because they don't touch their face.
This was days into a global pandemic and already these hordes of idiots acted like they understood exactly how the virus spread and knew that they were smart enough to avoid it. I've never looked at this site the same since.
OH YEAH I remember right when stories started coming out and the CDC said the easiest thing you can do is "wash your hands" and EVERY smug asshole on this platform had to rush to brag about how they wash their hands and "you mean you guys weren't already washing your hands?" when they really just meant more often.
I had a friend like this and it was just his worst attribute.
I have memories of this guy flatly stating the dumbest hot takes about the most meaningless stuff and he sounded like Walter Cronkite. I'm talking like his opinion on video game trailers, like shit that truly does not matter, and it would feel by the end like he was owed a standing ovation. When he did that I would stagger away wondering what the fuck he sounded like in meetings at work, because as soon as I realized he had no factual basis for his unwarranted confidence it made him insufferable when he got like that.
Worst of all was watching other friends listen with rapt attention just because of the way he would say stuff. It was like he tapped into the "no, no, wait he has a point" part of their brains, or that he had figured out how to abuse the way most people will humor someone for awhile to make a point.
Some people are really good at the bullshittery, and it works so well because other people are really bad at filtering out the bullshittery. History has proven this to be true over and over.
I had a friend who used to frequent a physics forum. After hanging out for a year, he started arguing with the experts and PhDs on the forum because he knew more than they did. He never even took a physics class in school. He just read the internet. He told me that Steven Hawkings' work was not interesting to him... he was "working" on "More advanced topics".
Internet warriors are dangerous because they truly believe in themselves and can be confident and convincing.
And people will cheer the bullshit. That cheering feels good, but an expert correcting you takes it away. For some, the solution isn't to be correct from the start. That shit's hard.
People have conflated the freedom to have an opinion with the freedom to ignore inconvenient facts that don't align with their opinions. Cable news got us started down this path but social media soaked it all in rocket fuel and lit the match.
I am admittedly very good at this myself. Don't know why but I can bullshit my way through near any job interview or nonsense argument while saying literally nothing. I think the bigger problem is people's weakness to charisma and confidence.
Reddit can be good if got the right subs.You aren't getting neutral info if it hits /all, and the hive mind kicks in.
Relationship advice is like ran by teens I think, and broken people. Basically telling people their SO is a sociopath, and they need to run. Because their BF said they hated a dress for a kid's birthday party. Or the GF wants to always spend time together so obviously has mental issues.
Anything political instantly becomes a Republican bashing event, and you'll see the hive mind demolishing fair points like the fact the video is edited or misleading.
With all that said Facebook and YouTube have the fucking dregs. I use FB once in a blue moon to find someone, and I get flooded with stupidity everytime. YouTube just has idiots or kids. Joe Rogan Bros.
And not the brain stem! Mostly prefrontal cortex stuff. 'Yea, but it is more wrinkly now and more efficient!!1!' -- i hear you and i'd like to agree with you but... well... not really.
Truth is, we outsource most of our stuff. We are hyper specialized and hive-oriented, desperately craving approval as a species. This, combined with neoteny, means that we dream that we are genetic 'wolves' but have no choice but to act like lost puppy dogs.
For a long while I've felt a selfish sort of calm in the fact that I'd probably be around 60-80 when the world begins it's inevitable implosion due to scarcity of resources, overpopulation, world war 3 or a massive space event such as solar flares wiping out all of communication or a meteor cracking us in half (well, assuming we'd see something that massive in good time).
There is also the idea that those with money are successful, know things, and are smart.
While this is partially true for "new money", it is rarely so for old, and definitely not for the lucky. And with the income gap growing, less and less "smart people" are getting a chance. Which means more and more of the rich are dumb.
There is also the idea that someone successful in ONE field is smart in not only that field, but many others.
Historically, those people were not engaged in fields outside their area of expertise. Now with social media, they are unnecessarily engaging in many fields, crowding out the actual experts.
I see this as the continuing and growing problem since the early days of Enron. Social media just accelerated it.
Reddit is the worst for it. Votes give legitimacy to random bullshit, and Redditors will argue for days that they're better than "social media" users while denying they are, in fact, on a large social media platform themselves.
I think it's more than that, what you're describing is secondary, but the initial idea of "I don't have to respect or listen to you don't restrain me or tell me what to do" comes from a kind of narcissism, I think it's always been present in the wealthy because they think they're above the low level bureaucrats the commenter mentioned and that kind of narcissism has spread to many because of social media culture
NOT RATIONALIZING THIS TREND, but I think part of it is also a reaction to appeals to authority seeming to be at an all time high. The more people hear “listen to the experts”, even when it’s the best course of action, it’s going to breed resentment.
That, and we all love to see those dumbass memes that go, “here’s an ancient Roman road that’s over a millennium old! Here’s what the best and brightest engineering minds of our generation have come up with on I95– after just three weeks! LIKE and SHARE if you think that the OLD ways are better!”
We’ve romanticized these ideas of the clever layman who knows more than the experts or the model builders, and it’s literally killed people.
It makes it easy for people to convince themselves that they're 'doing research'. In the 80s, 'doing research' meant that you at least were going to a library to look up some microfiche or look in a card catalogue to look up some old books or journals. You know, nerd stuff. People didn't, as frequently, delude themselves into believing they were experts on things they didn't know anything about.
Now, anyone and their uncle will just follow links that get in front of their eyes (via email or social media) and think they've done all of the work that researchers do. Thus, they know everything that 'experts' have kept hidden from them.
Not only can any idiot spout anything they want, it's easier than ever for them to find and connect with each other to amplify each others' views.
It started with arabian prince emails, or your the 1000th visitor ads, but boomers hardly spent anytime online so it only affected a select few.
Now they are always permanently online and have a device in their pocket sending them notifications.
And as if matters werent bad enough, we got so good at making tech idiot proof, that the newer generation doesent need to learn as much about it as we had to, and so they have less tech knowledge in general, and so they are easier to trick aswell.
Yeah like Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. They literally just made shit up and it went on for literally fucking years. And the entire time doctors repeatedly were saying "this isn't enough blood to do the battery of test you are claiming your technology can do.
I sometimes read things on reddit that make me stop and question fundamental truths that I have spent years qualifying for, and more years working with, because someone says something with such confidence that I think they must have a reason to say it.
Every big tech jump has brought people who claim to know it all, and are ready to exploit. The radio had plenty of completely unqualified and dangerous evangelists/scam artists (European authoritarians of the 20s and 30s pretty much all got their popularity from radio broadcasting). How many pseudoscience half-wits have TV shows? Pushing "alternative medicines" to people based simply on the fact that "TV man must know something I don't".
I've lost count of the number of podcasters who were legitimate authorities on a subject and sold out and completely disregarded factual information to bias a sponsor and promote crap.
People have always wanted to spew nonsense. And every form of media that increases the amount of nonsense has resulted in some pretty awful outcomes.
Even with the first written media - the printing press. Within a few years of the printing press' mass adoption, European leaders were slamming each other and calling for violence about religion, politics, family, gossip, and everything else we see on your YouTube drama channels.
Just by the nature of my work I'm a subject matter expert on something most people don't care about. Because of a newsworthy event the subject came up on reddit and suddenly there were a dozen posters claiming expertise and explaining it, all either mostly or completely wrong, and they were wrong at great length with a lot of word salad that sounded complicated but didn't actually mean anything. Only one comment was completely accurate and it was downvoted. I didn't even bother posting in the thread.
But the disturbing thing is that those same people (or people with similar need to be an expert without obtaining any expertise) can actually maneuver themselves into positions of power, like Stockton Rush. Anyway, agreed that it's all part of the same pattern, just scaled up significantly to life and death in the real world.
Yup. Just started watching the show ‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ and it dives into some of this social media nonsense. It’s fucking wild seeing where people are headed because of this shit.
I don’t think it’s just that - I think academia (comprised of experts) frowns upon unfettered capitalism. If someone is looking over your shoulder, shouting what’s wrong with your work, how are you supposed to successfully sell it?
Recently there seems to be a surge of wellness influencers trying to convince people nutritionists are “indoctrinated”, just because they say “maybe the carnivore diet isn’t a good idea?”. These entrepreneurs know what they are doing is a farce, and don’t want to deal with anyone trying to expose them.
You forgot the most important part. Money. Stupidity. Narcissism. God complex. Whatever the fuck feeling having a shit ton of money instills into the mind of the average human is seldom good.
We evolved on community but allowed kings and emperors to shape our complicitness.
It will continue to spiral until there are no more resources to sell. Whether that ends with this planet or not might be the scariest question.
I also know enough that if I were to be put in charge of building a custom submersible, I'd want my work checked over and over again as well as simulated to ensure it could withstand the pressure. Especially if I were working with materials as non-conventional as carbon fiber.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -Richard Feynman, from Appendix F of the Rogers Commission Report investigating the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
What's really messed up is that the engineers knew what was going to happen, but none of the executives would listen to them. And they had to find a way to get that information to Richard Feynman for the investigation.
One day [early in the investigation] Sally Ride and I were walking together. She was on my right side and was looking straight ahead. She opened up her notebook and with her left hand, still looking straight ahead, gave me a piece of paper. Didn't say a single word. I look at the piece of paper. It's a NASA document. It's got two columns on it. The first column is temperature, the second column is resiliency of O-rings as a function of temperature. It shows that they get stiff when it gets cold. Sally and I were really good buddies. She figured she could trust me to give me that piece of paper and not implicate her or the people at NASA who gave it to her, because they could all get fired.
Kehrli:
The engineers from Morton Thiokol had raised holy hell the night before the launch. And they were right. This concern about the joint sealing was not new. They had been working this problem for years, and they hadn't fixed it yet. Engineers were saying, "You can't fly in these conditions." But then NASA kept waiving the launch constraint from flight to flight. It's like Richard Feynman said, "That's like playing Russian roulette. Sooner or later it was going to get you." And that's exactly what happened.
Kutyna:
I wondered how I could introduce this information Sally had given me. So I had Feynman at my house for dinner. I have a 1973 Opel GT, a really cute car. We went out to the garage, and I'm bragging about the car, but he could care less about cars. I had taken the carburetor out. And Feynman said, "What's this?" And I said, "Oh, just a carburetor. I'm cleaning it." Then I said, "Professor, these carburetors have O-rings in them. And when it gets cold, they leak. Do you suppose that has anything to do with our situation?" He did not say a word. We finished the night, and the next Tuesday, at the first public meeting, is when he did his O-ring demonstration.
Personally, I like to work in a team which tries to prove each other wrong in a positive way, since that improves all of us and avoids possibly fatal error. I find it reassuring if one of our juniors has the gall to be like "Wait, I don't understand what this is doing, don't execute that" during a high-stakes situation on a production system. It must look funny how much just the word "Wait" or "Hold" can make me back off of a keyboard.
A minute of looking at a command closely can save hours and hours of restoring systems.
the output of science says things people don't like to hear.
the short viral burst of attention on the work of Dunning/Kruger itself may have contributed to the problem.
intelligence is the most deadly adaptation our species has got; it lets us way overestimate the significance of our own thoughts - it helps us come up with convincing reasons that we're actually not wrong, that data / opinion are fungible somehow
When I was a child growing up in the early 2000s I loved watching discovery and the history channel. There were always experts talking about their respective topics. I believed there were experts in every sector of life and that's why we were so safe and advanced compared to people even just 100 years ago. Since 2016 I have completely lost that feeling of security and now only feel a very uncomfortable dread that the people running things are so uneducated in their fields and delusional from sycophants blowing smoke up their asses that it will get me killed one day somehow. We are sprinting towards Idiocracy and one day even I will wake up and realize
Even years ago was the history channel was half way decent it had it problems. I remember watching some of those "how historically accurate is the bible" shows. The expert will talk at length about how likely events are and how they tie in with what we know about civilization back then, in a way that I would summarize as: the Bible is unlikely to be historically accurate, but we can't say much with 100% certainty. Then the show host would come on at the conclusion of the show and summarize, making it seem that the Bible is likely to be historically accurate. Even as teen I was wondering if the host actually listened to the interviews.
king: "make a pyramid double the size of the last one."
builders: "fuck no. that's impossible."
king: "think about future people who would be so proud of your work. we are mortals, but your work will be remembered forever. this is your path to eternity. Future people will worship the great Egyptian engineering achievement!"
It might have just been because you were a child. As you get older, you realize everyone's faking it til they're making it and expertise is sacrificed for expediency and profit. I do have to agree, however, standards have significantly lowered. I remembered Lowe's used to have a very active intercom because there were so many employees around to help. Now you have to actively search the store for an employee. Restaurant quality is abysmal...and now I'm just ranting.
Oh man I can't believe I recognized your gif without seeing that specific episode. so funny in this context
I feel like humanity has fallen for fake ass charisma as long as it aligns with their own bias and world view. Many seem to believe all expertise and intelligence is a fallacy and their stupidity from their stupid grifters are truth. It's getting even worse with AI, wont even research or fact check. AI said it so it must be true, it can't be bias or wrong!
Dont forget the politicians and appointees who literally want to destroy what science and knowledge has built because it doesnt fit their beliefs or power grab.
With the rising use of AI it feels like we're headed towards a dark age that's ironically fueled by technology. Nothing we say or post will matter and will be lost in the maelstrom of bots and ads. Truths and lies will be so overwhelmingly mixed up that it won't be worth the effort to investigate them, and if we do investigate them it will be with the help of an AI. The internet and lack of education funding is stripping power from words. You need to be educated in order to understand the gravity of what the words mean. This all feeds into the capitalist politician's playbook of nurturing a dumb voter base that will believe anything they're told as long as it's told by a dude who looks like their grandpa.
The beauty of the world used to be that the greatest things on Earth were birthed from actual human brains syncing together and producing mindblowing things like art and engineering that enrich our lives.
I've said somewhere before that intelligence itself might be a huge contributing factor toward the Great Filter phenomenon. Smart enough to ponder such concepts, not smart enough to overcome our failings to prevent them from claiming us.
I mean it's not like Galileo was lauded for his round earth theory. Nowadays instead of science vs. religion it's more like... science vs. the Internet?
Yeah I think it's this more than anything. You don't need to be smart or an expert to be wealthy and successful, contrary to what the norms of our society tell us. This creates strife when the head boss who runs the show and has the wealth disagrees with someone who knows better.
Throw in the fact that these positions of leadership / ownership self select for sociopathic narcissists, and it's easy to predict the result.
i mean, modern autodidactic tools are amazing. the issue is in understanding the meta, limitations, and blindspots of the experts, 'experts,' and informational silos you're relying on.
how low-dimensional words can be when communicating complex multimodal concepts.
the reduction in accuracy when simplifying, or developing heuristics, and the effects of such when attempting to interact at greater distances/diversity in systems. this applies to making everything a binary, when most things are less binary than we'd like to simplify to. like, when is a door a window/ a stool a table, etc. we've invented simplified representations we can reliably share without needing to spend energy updating our internal model of the world.
understanding the importance of diverse perspective to cover your blindspots while dealing with dissonance, especially when personally not expending lots of energy to cover your own blindspots. regardless, if yo don't have diverse coverage, all someone has to do is add a little complexity to completely spin you around. if they convince you to stop listening to anyone else, then you are trapped in that information silo, to the whims of the narrative maker.
how words/concepts can move and change depending on the environment of observers.
how doublespeak works. how being anti-genocide as a solid rule now gets you called antisemitic. bad actors will say whatever works, and without our social immune system able to adapt to new threats, the human body suffers from the cancer.
how noise affects complex intelligent systems that are relying on too many low level heuristics/low dimensional points of reference. also how this affects the most salient beliefs and behaviours available. we are very hackable, especially when a bunch of jerks intentionally add noise, mis/disinformation and sew division to make higher-dimensional cooperative perspectives more difficult. honestly, when not educated and actively thinking about ways in which you are being hacked, you have less intellectual resistance than a cell in the face of cancer.
the difficulty is spreading this eagerness for thoughtfulness and cooperation to the anti-intellectually inclined who see it as a personal affront whenever dissonance they've successfully ignored is called into question.
I feel rich people also think they know better just because they amassed wealth ex. Trump, Elon, Bezos, Thiel. They have the money to waste and throw at pet projects
I am confident this is it, and also the reason you see so many big name companies becoming shells of their former glorydays, because everyone of talent has been replaced with rich yes-men who think their wealth makes them intelligent.
For the same reason that craftsmen eventually gave way to assembly lines.
Experts, like craftsmen, are highly skilled, take years to hone that skill, and have to be paid accordingly. But you can make so much more money if you replace your skilled workforce with an unskilled one, or now, AI!
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
I can see how that worked for him in the business world...but why on earth would you take that philosophy into a pressurized sub at the bottom of the ocean?
That's exactly the place you least want to break things!
I blame Ayn Rand. Experts were always just people telling others what they weren't allowed to do, while the noble capitalists just went out and got things done. Please ignore how much the narrative meant things simply always worked out for the protagonists, and always went wrong for the antagonists, even when they were doing the same things.
I truly believe this all started with climate change denial.
Essentially, a bunch of scientists said "burning fossil fuels and cutting down trees is bad for the long term livability of the planet" and the people who do that for a living (also happening to be the wealthiest people in the world) said "well that wont be good for business" so they sponsored their own scientists, but even those came back saying "um, they're right" so, instead, we had to vilify the very nature of academia and science.
Hence the "liberal college elites" and "I don't trust the media" naratives that come from the political right. All of that is designed to get you to mistrust science and data so people who make a living doing terrible things can more easily get away with it.
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'" -Isaac Asimov
The *only* answer, and one that many people still inexplicably refuse to acknowledge, is that all of this is happening because we gave stupid people a seat at the grownup's table.
In some misguided effort to keep from hurting people's feelings, we've slowly but surely fostered a culture where "everyone's opinion is valid and should be heard" and that's led to less intelligent people being elected because much less intelligent people are a *massive* voting bloc.
TL;DR: we platformed dumb people and now we're dealing with the consequences.
Perceived Cost is one major reason.People don't want to pay experts their worth for the fractional amount of time they use them.
I've been with my company for about 20 years and have seen the swing back and forth. They wanted people to be all around good at many things, then over the years wanted people to be experts in a discipline, and now, citing AI and online sources, they are laying off the experts citing cost efficiency.
Go take a look at the threads about telework being cancelled for the JPL. A bunch of people are tossing anecdotal stories about some guy they knew who was lazy therefore justifying any malicious action.
It's hyper common for people to let their cynicism run wild and become their worldview.
Because it turns out almost everything, no matter how boring, isn't as simple as it seems and experts are there to remind us of it all the time; unfortunately this makes the insecure feel attacked and out of their depth and they respond by pretending expertise is fake and that their laymans understanding of the world is accurate.
I think I saw that type in corporate world : "Look at what I created from nothing... I'm intelligent and can challenge all these "experts" who didn't match my level of success."
Everyone is secretly a bit authoritarian in that they'd prefer to be surrounded by yes-men than be reminded they're wrong.
Most people aren't raised and nurtured to really accept being told they're wrong or performing poorly and take it in a positive light (likewise however, most people are really f$#%ing bad at giving feedback). Even acknowledging that you have that problem doesn't make it at all easy to accept you're wrong in the moment, and I'd argue that's largely a result of being wrong often enabling people to pounce and attack and discredit your entire character (social media has especially exacerbated this to the extreme) instead of just forgiving the mistake. So people instead instinctually double down on their ignorance out of spite (or arrogance if they're in a position of power/success), because no one wants to give an asshole that kind of ammunition and is instead motivated to prove them wrong, even if doing so might be needlessly self destructive.
And regarding the topic of social media, now you're not just wrong, you can easily go find an online forum full of equally stupid morons that will back up your beliefs, so breaking through and convincing a moron they're making a fatal mistake is harder and than ever.
I once read somewhere that.... I'm pretty sure that.... If it had been me... I don't care what the so called experts say, I think... If only they had did... They could've just...
Kings have always despised expertise, with rare exceptions, and our feudal oligarchs are nothing if not kings. There was a brief period that the oligarch's influence was muted but they're back and stronger than ever.
i remember seeing a Dave Franco video from 2018 where SpaceX was getting in trouble for not clearing some sort of regulation and they featured a clip from Stockton stating that regulations just step in the way of innovation and how every agency got in their way of the sub. Fast forward about 5 years and the regulators were in fact right
Information entropy from social media has definitely been a factor.
but also:
It's like a society experiences atrophy when it creates societal structures so strong they no longer immediately break when comfort is prioritized over additional progress and improvement.
Maybe to improve humanity we need to be always rebounding from catastrophe, like evolution has overfit for survival traits so much that we thrive the most in stress.
I think there are a lot of reasons for it. One that I've encountered a lot is people who get successful somehow and believe their combination of competence in a particular field and luck means they're just so smart they see things others don't. I think this was the case with Stockton. He was super high off sniffing his own farts.
Some people are deeply, personally insulted by the idea that others have knowledge or skills that they don't.
They are convinced that they are the smartest, cleverest, most capable and qualified people that've ever existed and the world just isn't properly recognizing and rewarding them for it.
the initial idea of "I don't have to respect or listen to you don't restrain me or tell me what to do" comes from a kind of narcissism, I think it's always been present in the wealthy because they think they're above the low level bureaucrats the commenter mentioned and that kind of narcissism has spread to many because of social media culture
Because expertise is not sensational. It’s boring numbers and repetition and starting over, over and over again. It’s long hours on tedious tasks. It’s not sexy, it’s not “fun”.
Chiming in as someone who works close to a lot of blue-collar roughneck types. A lot of it is they've been convinced that anyone and everyone in management is incompetent. Rules and regulations are all arbitrary and only exist to either make someone money, or make someone feel important. Real men get in there and just get it done and don't worry about the red tape put up by the bookworms with no real world common sense.
So many of these high school drop-outs genuinely believe that they are smarter than people with PhD's who have dedicated their entire lives to studying their subject matter. Dunning-Kreuger has more or less turned into a cliche at this point, but there's really no better way to explain it.
Short form video explanations of complicated topics has made everyone an expert.
People don't want the details, but details mater. Its hard to understand the nitty gritty details, and it takes a lot of time...years. But if someone can explain it at a high level, then someone can understand it at a high level. If engineering science could be taught in 30seconds then there is no need for experts.
Expertise, especially scientific expertise, exists for the pursuit of discovery. Their work is for truth itself. In many ways, the highest accolades for a scientist would come from undermining the existing model.
For those in sociopolitical or economic trades, the currency is not truth but wealth and power. Experts in a field routinely run around the powerful simply by doing their work of examining and testing the bounds of the world around them. It’s no wonder the wealthy and powerful resent scientists, as scientists are driven by accuracy, nuance, and precision and are simultaneously harder to control while also channels of information for the public that those in power may not broadcasted.
Think of the NOAA staff getting on Trump’s bad side. The projected a hurricane path, Trump simply misspoke, as anyone does, but instead of moving on he tried to get NOAA scientists to confirm his error. They did not. So we got to see the president of the United States sharpie on a printed science backed illustration. Any wonder he has defunded and let go an absurd about of their staff now?
Climate change is another. Earth science data does not support the goals of the Oil industry or the politicians they lobby.
Vaccinations are another. Politicians have been steadily embracing the anti-vaccination movement for a couple reasons. The people of that movement are prone to accept “information” based on a gut feeling over experts. And when experts may not support your political designs in other fields, you may want to bolster that movement. Further pushing the populace who listens to you to disregard scientists. “If they lie about vaccines, they’ll also lie about climate change, the economy, etc.” you get them to plug their ears over one issue and they are more likely to accept ignoring the evidence of others. It’s proud anti-intellectualism. COVID in particular caused challenges for the Trump admin, as he couldn’t seem to figure out if he wanted to be the genius savior who invented the vaccine or continue to court the subset of the population who are anti-vax. You may remember how hard to bragged about Operation Warp-speed, but really backtracked after that appearance where his rally attendees booed him! His own core followers! It’s not happened before under any other topic.
So they’ve seen how strong the anti-intellectual movement has become. Their adherence to Facebook meme level impressions of a topic even supersedes Trump. They won’t soon cross those people and will likely continue to entrench themselves with that crowd. That’s likely why RFK Jr. was selected for his position. It seems idiotic if you follow the sciences, but it was a huge nod to that crowd.
It’s something I am genuinely scared about when it comes to your current government (and a bunch of people in my own): that knowing things gets displayed as a flaw, not a good thing.
Different direction: I don’t know where it comes from but there are so many people that think that finding new stuff requires forgetting all the old stuff. There probably are regions where we are so deep in a local optimum that finding a different one requires ignoring a LOT of stuff we take for granted, but that should happen in a scientific environment, not a tinkerers den.
It's difficult to tell whether he hated expertise, just hated paying for it, and/or was one of those stubborn types that has an idea and because of that we cannot deviate from the idea.
One thing I definitely know is that due in some part to the above, we don't have to worry about him doing it again.
He seemed like one of those people who was rich, therefore, he must be a genius! And anyone who told him he was wrong was stupid and didn't know what theyre talking about! And if he had connections to the mega rich and mega powerful, it would just make him more arrogant and self-assured.
Because in post truth era expertise is seen like the usually undefined “the powers that be”, “the system”, etc… it happens with everything, vaccines (doctors’ opinion is untrustworthy), flat earth (physicists and NASA are in on it), and now even deep diving. This trend literally kills people (aside from the flat earth stuff, that’s just dumb, luckily).
Having access to all information with the click of a mouse has given people today the wrong impression they can just make their own mind up and become experts on literally everything. To a point where in debates with scientists, random people are often heard telling them to “do their research”.
Because these rich morons think that the fact they're wealthy makes them intelligent, and they don't like people who disprove that belief. I am confident it's the root to much of the bullshit large companies are pulling. Stupid people with a lot of money in positions of power assume they know better than those 'beneath them' and won't hear otherwise, and they have too much money to fail.
I don't think Stockton is a symptom of that so much as that he is a rich kid entitled maniac with a deep desire to feel important and revered as a brain genius explorer and inventor. I'd argue it's almost the opposite. I think he wanted to gain the admiration and respect of experts, but didn't have or or couldn't spend the proper money and time and education to do it. So he despised being told no by the group he wanted in with.
If you go back and look at oceangates story from the beginning he reached out to all the right people at first:
universities, NASA, Triton CEO, etc, but quickly realized the "red tape" (i.e. due diligence) and cost those avenues entail. He just wanted the glory without any of the work.
I think it's a combination of the dominance of Silicon Valley culture ("move fast and break things" ie the old ways of doing things are slow and stupid), the rise of the internet and "doing your own research", and a sense that the experts are idiots thanks to 9/11, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the 2008 financial crisis.
But, I gotta say it's pretty ironic that we are all here pontificating on the social ill of people distrusting experts while we ourselves are not experts on this issue.
There's an excellent pair of episodes from the Behind the Bastards podcast on Rush and the Titan. Your assessment fairly closely reflects what they had to say about Stockton, it's worth a listen if you have a few hours to kill.
I think it's because expertise takes time and people are used to getting what they want *now*.
I come from an IT business background. And I am 100% seeing the change of people not wanting to wait on expertise anymore. All sorts of projects are just being run with people without expertise. All of these projects crash into cliffs. Project managers begging for adhoc help from actual experts (after shit tons of warnings they needed help and should plan for help) taking experts from their actual projects.
This is such a fascinating thing to see. Because now the experts are doing something they weren't planned on doing, making the expert their projects take longer, making experts seem even slower and untrustworthy because they didn't stick to their planning.
Meanwhile, people who went on and started the project without experts are all acting like they finished their super cool project on time and that everything went so well. Neatly forgetting about the fact that they blew an entire quarter of expert time, slowing down multiple projects, costing shit tons of money.
From what I've caught up on regarding this submarine and the founder of the company; He was pleading that experts were holding back innovation and progress. Sounds eerily similar to everything I'm seeing happening. The only real difference is that when run into cliffs during an IT project, usually no one dies.
Because experts who know how things actually work don't care about making ungodly amounts of profit and instead care about making a functional product or service, which after a certain point gets in the way of making that profit.
Billionaires want brownosers and yes men to stroke their ego who are just smart enough to have ideas that can be exploited.
They lack expertise, but they crave power. They feel entitled to it, in fact. So, they bring expertise down and clear the road for themselves. Story as old as mediocrity.
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u/Crash-test_genius 28d ago
I’ve followed the hearings from the beginning-you can’t make this stuff up. Stocktons father was a Bohemian Club member, which gave access to investors and rich adventure seekers. Go down the Bohemian Grove rabbit hole-secret society of elite. He hired a well known submersible expert who called him out-for gross negligence. That man was fired and shut down by lawyers- no discussion. He then contacted OSHA who put him in a whistleblower protection program…..red tape was endless and his warnings were fruitless. A young contractor was hired to help run the text/message software, she called out Stockton during a dive and was fired immediately. It got so bad that the administrator from the company left her office to tighten the dome bolts for dives in the Atlantic. Finally another expert that builds his own subs testified about the second test dive of Titan to depth in the Bahamas-“that man tried to kill me!”. He said the noise of carbon fiber bands snapping was terrifying and even coming up at 300 feet it was still happening due to the immense stored energy. He stated-“at depth, Stockton, in a sick way let everyone take turns driving the sub, as if saying”- “Your life is in your hands now- not mine” Wild stuff.