I had an exchange on Discord with someone in the astronomy club that I'm a part of that made me realize a common epistemological pitfall that a lot of people fall into nowadays (including myself, at times).

I posted a video about some research into dark matter (look back in my feed), and this guy was like "Neat idea, but dark matter can't interact with normal matter, so it'll never work."

When pressed, he said it was because the YouTubers he watches say that.

/1

Ignoring the fact that his statement indicates he did not actually *watch* the video, and that a YouTube video is not a reliable source of truth, there are a couple of bigger issues at play here.

One is a fundamental misunderstanding of how knowledge works. It's not a binary thing; knowing something is not like flipping a switch. There are levels to it, gradations.

The other is that knowledge is not a thing you *have* it's a thing you *use*.

/2

What do I mean by this? Knowledge is an active thing, not a passive thing. How knowledgeable you are on a subject is not directly related to how much information about the subject that you have absorbed. Reading a book or an article or watching a video on a topic does not mean you actually *know* anything about that topic. Reciting facts is not knowledge, or more precisely, it's an infinitesimal amount of knowledge.

/3

How well you know something is related to your ability *use* that knowledge.

To use the dark matter example, an astrophysicist doesn't know more about dark matter than me because they have read more books or taken more classes than me. It's not because they can recite more facts about it.

They know more because they can actually *use* that information to do meaningful things. They can design and execute experiments. Interpret data. Make predictions. Come up with explanations for things.

/4

Nowadays, it's possible for one to read an article (or watch a video, or read the Wikipedia article) about something like dark matter and _feel_ like one knows something about the topic. It makes sense to you. You can recite facts, and maybe even form an opinion and argue with other laypeople about it.

But that's *all* you can do with that level of knowledge. The experts can do so much more, to the point that you don't even have the knowledge to really grasp _how_ much more.

/5

Reading or watching videos about complex topics is great. I don't even think that people forming opinions on stuff they know little about and arguing about it on the internet is necessarily bad.

My only point is to keep things in perspective. Your opinions or understanding of things like dark matter are essentially irrelevant. Unless you are directly involved with astrophysics on a daily basis, it doesn't matter if your opinions or understanding on that topic are correct or not.

/6

This is fundamentally what separates a crank from a legit scientist. There are millions of YouTuber cranks going on about the magical theory they invented that explains all this stuff that the scientists can't. They know something the experts don't, but it's all a conspiracy or something.

Okay, maybe you *do* know something the experts don't. It's totally possible. But that means you should be able to do something they can't. So demonstrate that. And not to me, a nobody, but to the experts.

/7

I'm always annoyed when people throw their favorite pet theory at me about some topic, as if I'm equipped to evaluate their claims. As if *my* opinion on the topic matters at all.

I'm not the person that needs to be convinced. If your idea is correct — if you can clearly demonstrate how your idea is valuable and useful — the experts will listen. If you do it right, they will not be able to ignore you. The fact that they do ignore you should tell you something.

/end

This all applies equally well to me and this entire thread. What do I know about epistemology? Very little, compared to professional philosophers who think and debate about such things every day. I might talk like an authority and asserting truths, but I don't know shit. I'm just thinking out loud and forming baseless opinions, as is my right as an intelligent agent.

Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong. Does it matter? Hard to say. I'm not equipped to evaluate that.

/PS