- What's up kids?
Mark here again,
and I've got an old man rant that I got to get off my chest.
That's right, I'm a little off at, well, I'm always off,
but it's today in particular,
the world has just been a shit fest,
and I just feel like there's something
that needs to be said and nobody is saying it.
Opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one,
and most of them are full of shit.
In the age of the internet, everybody's got an opinion
about fucking everything
and they feel like you deserve to hear it.
The barista at the coffee shop is an expert on criminology
'cause he saw a YouTube video
and your hairstylist is now an expert on epidemiology,
'cause she saw a PDF her uncle posted on Facebook.
I'm gonna make an argument in this video
that I don't think it's said often enough.
People need to have fewer fucking opinions.
Now I realize, before you go down to the comments,
Mark, you've got an opinion about having opinions, hahaha,
shut the fuck up.
I know I'm contradicting myself, that's okay.
Just stick with me for like five minutes,
let me get this out.
Cue them intro.
(upbeat music)
Call me old fashioned, but I feel like there used
to be a little bit more humility in the world.
People understood that not everything is perfect.
Experts get things wrong sometimes,
but generally the guy or girl in charge
knows what they're doing.
This is because in the good old days,
authority was based on credentials and expertise.
You used to have to go to medical school for 12 years
to have an opinion about a vaccine.
Now you just sit on Twitter for 20 minutes.
There's an implicit fallacy that we all make,
and the internet brings it out of us.
We believe that because we can have an opinion
about something that we should have an opinion
about something.
There's a great book by a professor named Tom Nichols
called "The Death of Expertise".,
and in that book, he makes a really great argument
about the internet, which is that by flooding us
with information, by making all the information available
at our fingertips,
it's caused people to mistake quantity of knowledge,
for quality of knowledge.
What Nichols argues is that expertise is not about knowing
a bunch of stuff,
it's about knowing what stuff not to pay attention to.
And this is where you and I,
and everybody else gets into trouble
because we pay attention to fucking everything.
Everything we see, we're like, oh, that must be important,
it's on my newsfeed.
If there's anything I learned from 2020,
it's simply that nobody has any idea
what they're talking about roughly 90% of the time.
I even fell victim to it too.
I started writing emails about the pandemic
and quarantine and lockdown,
within a few months, pretty much everything I said
was probably wrong, but so were all my readers,
and so were all the people I was reading.
I mean everybody is wrong about, just about everything.
It takes many years for us to zero in
on useful, reliable knowledge.
And that generally doesn't happen on the internet.
That's why I've made it a personal goal in 2021
to simply not know things.
I mean, I, even now I get emails every week asking me
to comment on this, this political thing happened
and this crazy shit happened,
and this like rocket went the space
and what's AI gonna do?
And it's like,
I don't know.
That's okay.
I'm okay.
(laughing)
God help us.
But as a social observer, it's interesting for me
because it's, I've noticed the last year or two,
how difficult it is for people to simply not know things.
There's this phenomenon in psychology called
the Dunning-Kruger effect,
which I think just makes this whole project
of not knowing much more difficult.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a phenomenon
that I've found that the less people know about a subject,
the more confident they are in their knowledge.
And the more people know about a subject,
the more they doubt their knowledge.
It's a weird paradox, but it makes sense
because it's the more time you spend with a subject,
the more you research something and learn about something,
the more aware you become of everything
we don't know and understand.
Whereas if you haven't really spent any time thinking about
a subject, you assume it's pretty simple,
pretty cut and dry, right?
I think the fact that the internet
lets anybody post anything anywhere at any time
to be read by anybody,
it's just the Dunning-Kruger effect on steroids.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell said many years ago,
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics
"are always so certain of themselves,
"and wiser people so full of doubts."
And I just think that kind of sums up where we're at
in a nutshell.
And this ties in the Nichols point,
which is that amateurs know what they know,
experts know what they don't know,
therefore, a useful way to measure your knowledge in an area
is to simply ask yourself,
what are the things I don't understand about this?
If you can't easily come up with a list of things
you don't understand about a subject, then you're a moron
and you have no idea what you're talking about.
When I test this in my own life,
I think kind of the one area
that I feel like I know a lot about, which is psychology,
I could write like a list of 50 things
that I don't know about psychology
or that the field of psychology doesn't know
that we still haven't figured out yet.
Having a lot of low expertise opinions
is dangerous for two reasons.
One is in this day and age, pretty much anything you believe
a Google search will confirm it for you.
It doesn't matter who you are, doesn't matter
how batshit insane it is, you type it into a search engine,
something is gonna come up that tells you you're right.
But the second and more important danger I think is that
we are now influencing each other.
It used to be that, if I decided the earth was flat,
it's my loss.
I just get to sit in my house and stare at the horizon,
wondering how far away that is.
But now I have all sorts outlets
for my batshit insane views.
I can actually post something on here,
and hundreds of thousands of people will look at it
and think, huh, that horizon,
it really doesn't bend, does it?
(upbeat music)
So I wanna leave you with a few tips to kind of,
I guess, navigate life in this world of high uncertainty.
First one is seek out long-form content.
Yes, I know this video is not long-form content,
shut the fuck up, but seek out long-form content,
because generally any important issue
is gonna be so multi-variate and nuanced
and have all sorts of different perspectives that are valid,
you can't really summarize it in less than like 30
or 40 minutes.
So if something takes you less than 30 or 40 minutes
to watch or read or listen to,
then it's probably not a good representation of that topic.
Two, pay attention to credentials, but not too much.
Credentials do matter, they do represent a person
has spent a certain amount of time
with a subject studying that subject.
But I need to warn you on the ecosystem of the internet,
there's always that one crazy doctor or that one crazy PhD
that is willing to go against all conventional wisdom
to get some hits on their YouTube video.
So be wary of those people,
but generally speaking credentials do matter.
And number three, if you're gonna go against
the conventional wisdom,
you need to have a very good reason.
You can't just decide, well, hey,
the government was wrong about that one thing,
therefore, they must be wrong about everything.
That doesn't make sense.
If you're going to go against the grain,
you need to have thought through the repercussions.
I'll give you an example from my own career.
When I started writing life advice and blogging
and everything, there was like a happiness boom.
So there was a million books on "How to be Happy",
How to be a Happier Person",
"How to Become Happy", blah blah blah,
"Why Aren't You Happy?"
Everybody like from like 2008 to 2015,
there was just this happiness obsession
in the self-help and psychological world.
And I always thought this was bullshit.
I mean, I will admit it came from a very intuitive thing,
but it just seemed to me that if you're obsessing about
how to be happy, that obsession itself makes you unhappy.
And sure enough, you don't have to read very far back
in the philosophy and other great thinkers
to discover that people have been saying this shit
for thousands of years.
And so for me, I saw it as an opportunity to say something
that was unconventional and unpopular,
but I believe was true.
But before I was willing to say that,
I went back and I did all the reading.
I read Camus, I read Frankl, I read the "Stoics",
I read Aristotle, I dug up the happiness studies,
I looked at the effect sizes
of these supposed interventions,
a lot of them don't hold up the scrutiny.
So while it's fine to have an intuition about
how some conventional wisdom may be wrong,
you can't just go all in on a feeling,
you've gotta do the homework.
So here's to a new year, hopefully a little less shitty
than this past year.
And hopefully a little less certainty for you in this year.
I invite you to take it on as a challenge,
be less certain of your opinions,
be less willing to share those opinions,
and do a little more homework and see how it goes.
Till next time, Manson out.
(upbeat music).