A.R. Moxon: Your Ignorance Doesn't Make You An Expert

[Nevilledog]

https://www.the-reframe.com/your-ignorance-doesnt-make-you-an-expert/

Today, cousins, I want to share with you the words of a towering figure in modern philosophy named Arya Hamendani. But first, some thoughts from a couple lesser though still significant recent lights of human awareness.

The Christian apologist and sometime fantasy author C.S. Lewis once told a story about the end of the world, for children. In the story, there are some dwarfs who had seen through the machinations of a talking ape who fancied himself a king. This was a great charlatan primate in ill-fitting clothes whose constant lies and bullying machinations confused and cowed most of the other magical beings in the land of Narnia. They'd been thrown into a barn, the dwarfs, detained for their opposition. This being a book for kiddies, though, magic was afoot and the barn had actually transformed into a sort of Edenic landscape clearly meant to evoke heaven. This transformation was not in effect for the dwarfs, though—all they could see was the barn, and nothing that anyone could do would make them see or smell or taste anything other than things you find in barns. They were skeptics about everything, in the end, the dwarfs, not just about ape-kings, but also about the splendor unfolded all around them. It's a metaphor about the usefulness of skepticism and its limits, and how people who confuse skepticism for knowledge might miss a lie but will leave themselves unable to detect truth even when truth lies all around. Metaphor-resistant people tend to take metaphors like this one (which are ironically enough about metaphor-resistant people) to form dogmas about the importance of accepting dogmas. More on this soon enough.

In the movie The Matrix, a working drone named Anderson discovered that he was actually living in a simulation along with all the rest of humanity, and that the world he knew was only an illusion. In the movie, this was truth that only Anderson (renamed Neo) and a small coterie of like-minded friends could detect or handle, and this made them special in ways that nobody else was, and gave them the superhuman ability to download human knowledge and expertise at the push of a button. The movie is a metaphor, created by two trans sisters, meant to tell a deeply personal tale of breaking free of societal norms to access the power of knowing your true self. Metaphor-resistant people have taken this narrative to mean that reality is a simulation and only they and a small coterie of their friends are equipped to detect it, that their skepticism about the nature of reality places them on a higher plane than the rest of humanity combine, that nothing that takes more than a matter of minutes to learn is worth knowing, and that literally nobody else in the world without their special knowledge matters, so it's OK to kill the unknowledgeable if you need to because others aren't real in the same way as they are.

So now back to the great philosopher Hamendani.

Hamendani is not a professional philosopher, it should be noted; according to his Instagram bio he's a private chef and a food content creator, and a quick stroll through his feed bears this claim out, at least insofar as almost all of his content involves him shouting about cooking food, and especially about not fucking it up. I just watched the first fifteen seconds of a video of him shouting about the right way to make a fucking burrito. Then I watched the first fifteen seconds of a video of him shouting about the right way to make fucking salads. I decided that was enough food-shouting for me, but the general vibe is that cooking-wise you are fucking everything up and it is up to him, Arya Hamendani, to show you the right fucking way to fucking do it. To his credit, he really seems to know the right fucking way to make a fucking burrito, or at least a right way—there are many right ways to make a burrito. His burrito looks pretty good is my point. He seems to have the authority of knowledge he claims in the food space. I'd trust him.

*snip*

[FadedMullet]

1. Interesting post, particularly the part about burritos. TRhanks for posting.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. I skimmed essay at link. Example influencer he gives reminds me of Bill O'Reilly saying nobody knows how tides work. .nt

[eppur_se_muova]

3. A very good post, but not succinct, because he is trying to convince those who are not prepared to be convinced.

I'll give a much more succinct version, probably too succinct for the uninformed or simple-minded:

Just because you don't know how to prove something doesn't mean it can't be proven. It only means you're ignorant of that knowledge.

It may be that there are large numbers of other people who are similarly ignorant; we can't all know everything, after all. But as long as there are knowledgeable, informed people -- let's call them, oh, I don't know, experts --who can prove it when called upon to do so, we should be willing to consider it reliably true, if not outright proven (strictly speaking, outside of the formal logic of (meta)mathematics, it's hard to genuinely prove anything). Thus RFKJ's suggestion that we should "stop trusting the experts" is sheer foolishness of the highest caliber.

One response to the "pathologically skeptical" view described by RFKJ, other conspiracy theorists, and of course Screaming Burrito Guy, is to consider the opposite extreme of the very explicable waterfall: something whose proof is so extremely difficult that it would never have been proven without deep expert knowledge and ability -- to give a well-known example, Fermat's "Last" Theorem. First proposed by an extremely capable mathematician (and accomplished professional jurist) who probably did not prove it, though he thought he had. It remained unproven for over three centuries despite numerous efforts by the most preeminent mathematicians of history, and an uncountable number of inspired, or obsessed, amateurs. Finally, it was proven by an extended argument using some of the most subtle concepts in formal mathematics, many of which were developed only in the 20th century (hence the skepticism that Fermat ever proved it). Yet, for all those three centuries -- and for all the centuries before that -- it was perfectly true, just unproven. There are many, many such examples, including the old chestnuts that the Earth is flat, and that Man was never meant to fly (with all the unfounded assumptions that "meant" implies).

Personal note to Screaming Burrito Guy: try visiting a waterfall during an extended drought. Take your camera with you to record the Moment of Enlightenment.