Qualified experts of Lemmy, do people believe you when you answer questions in your field?

The internet has made a lot of people armchair experts happy to offer their perspective with a degree of certainty, without doing the work to identify gaps in their knowledge. Often the mark of genuine expertise is knowing the limitations of your knowledge.

This isn’t a social media thing exclusively of course, I’ve met it in the real world too.

When I worked as a repair technician, members of the public would ask me for my diagnosis of faults and then debate them with me.

I’ve dedicated the second half of my life to understanding people and how they work, in this field it’s even worse because everyone has opinions on that topic!

And yet my friend who has a physics PhD doesn’t endure people explaining why his theories about battery tech are incorrect because of an article they read or an anecdote from someone’s past.

So I’m curious, do some fields experience this more than others?

If you have a field of expertise do you find people love to debate you without taking into account the gulf of awareness, skills and knowledge?

toiletobserver,

Common workers, mostly yes. Common managers, lol no.

Delphia,

Im no expert but after 15 years in mail and parcel logistics I know shit. Ive been told Im “too close to the issue” to be objective. I even posted links to business services for a major international carrier to back up what I said and apparently any evidence I provide is “Biased”

So the only people you can turn to for factual answers are people with no fucking idea apparently.

ArmokGoB,

I have a MSc in Computational Media. I’ve had to read a lot of research on the dangers of social media, how harmful ideas spread online, and how people form unhealthy relationships with platforms. LW is still federated with LML, and I think my instance is still federated with Hexbear. So no, people don’t give a quarter of a fuck what I have to say.

bradorsomething,

I do specialty work in electrical engineering systems, and I am meticulous and careful about what I say, because it appears that at a certain level in this field no one will question anything you say, because no one understands what you’re talking about.

aodhsishaj,

I’m a cloud engineer that works for a large software company that does R&D for 3D modeling companies, aero space, a couple alphabet agencies. They fucking hate me in /c/selfhosted

TimewornTraveler, (edited )

in mental health, yes actually, a surprisingly large amt of people look to me to be the expert. it’s often just as challenging to help someone see that they’re the expert on themselves.

you’d expect a lot of tiktok diagnoses and bizarro pseudo science attitudes, and while those do come up, they aren’t that prevalent. and it’s usually a symptom of something, i.e. someone with paranoid/grandiose delusions preaching med noncompliance.

I dont encounter anyone who thinks my work is just a joke, but plenty who believe I cant help them and they’re better off on their own

PsychedSy,

Imagine what working in aerospace feels like with the Boeing shit.

essell,

That would very much depend on whether you work for Boeing or not, I guess.

PsychedSy,

I do not work for them, but I’ve been making Boeing parts off and on for almost 19 years.

essell,

Promise not to hold you responsible for all the recent stuff

some_guy,

Ha. The VIP that I work for doesn’t have time for me to tell them how to solve their technical issues. So, no, not currently. But in the past it was different.

dgmib,

LOL, I work in climate science.

Specifically in consequential carbon accounting analysis. Which is the branch that specializes in quantifying how much impact decisions and policies will have on greenhouse gas levels.

We are fucked. We are so incredibly fucked.

I comment regularly on social media about what actually needs to happen if we’re to limit the damage from WW3 to just seriously fucked. You can imagine how that goes.

People advocate for things on Reddit or Lemmy about what we should be doing to avoid the disaster. Most of the time these things will have little benefit, and often will make things worse. I try to educate people but everybody has their pet issues usually based on whatever article they read last and they don’t actually want to seek the truth, just defend their opinion.

It’s tough because they are all very nuanced issues, every decision has trade offs, makes things better in one way worse than another. People aren’t wrong about the small part they’re looking at, just its impact on the bigger picture.

Everyone is pulling in different directions on this issue because the waters have been so incredibly muddied by the people who stand to lose from real climate action.

rekabis,

We are fucked. We are so incredibly fucked.

Very interested in hearing your best-case and worst-case outcomes for humanity over the next 30 or so years. Worst-case being, of course, the “business as usual” path that we have not deviated from at all.

dgmib,

I don’t know, but it’s bad.

At this point even our best case scenarios are still pretty bad; barring some massive breakthrough in carbon sequestration tech.

And the “business as usual” scenarios are down right scary, millions of deaths annually. Never mind the economic consequences.

In my other comment I talked about what needs to happen on the macro level.

But the micro level is another story.

I’m worried because the paths to mitigating the worst of it depend mostly on countries, people, corporations etc… making major changes to drive reductions.

I seen the strategies the big companies have… they’re not coming close to making the difference needed. And the small companies aren’t even trying to measure their emissions let alone reducing them. It’s that lack of data that’s a part the problem. The data needed for decisions at the micro level isn’t available. It’s difficult to even identify what changes to make because you don’t know what impact a change might have outside of your control.

So far it means we haven’t even got emissions to start going down. At best, they’ve just slowed the rate at which they’re going up.

Governments should be pushing harder to mandate emissions reporting, but it’s politically unpopular so we’re still largely guessing about what decisions to make and that’s what leads to us all pulling in different directions making little progress.

rekabis,

I recall hearing about this one informal conference between climate scientists, ethnographers, and collapse-aware economists. About two dozen ppl in total, IIRC.

Their exceedingly conservative estimate of the BAU path had humanity experience a 40-60% collapse (3.2B to 4.8B dead) by some point in the 2050s. And you don’t see that without a whole hell of a lot of secondary civilizational/technological collapse and loss of knowledge.

And they concluded that humanity existing past 2150 or 2200 was vanishingly unlikely due to polar restriction due to lethal wet bulb temperatures making the rest of the planet uninhabitable for year-round occupation, and the sheer lack of arable land in the polar region.

The problem is that we have been accelerating past 1.5℃ of warming in terms of CO2 production. We haven’t even begun to slow down, much less reverse to net zero. And since climate change has an inertia to it that is thousands of times stronger with our current change than in prior changes, there is now a non-zero possibility that - even if we go extinct - the planet itself could end up in a Venus scenario. Things are moving just far too fast for any ecosystem - much less the entire planetary ecosystem - to adapt and migrate in order to remain maximally productive in natural CO2 sequestration.

bradorsomething,

Well, that’s just your rigorous analysis of multiple data sources and field expertise, man.

dgmib,

Thanks, this made me laugh, hard.😊

TempermentalAnomaly,

It’s tough because they are all very nuanced issues, every decision has trade offs, makes things better in one way worse than another.

This is one of the major truths of adulthood that keeps on coming up over and over again. The other is how do you know that some really knows what they say they know without investing time, money, and mental power into meeting them and knowing the basics of the subject all while being humble enough to know you don’t know shit about it.

I’d love to hear your top points of what actually needs to happen.

SkyezOpen,

I’d love to hear your top points of what actually needs to happen.

And I’d love to say they’re stupid and wrong!

/s

dgmib,

(Sorry for the length here… this is actually my shortened version)

89% of climate change is because we took carbon that was permanently sequestered underground in the form of oil, gas, and coal and burned it for cheap energy. We need to stop that entirely but you can’t “just stop oil”, you need to remove the demand not try to disrupt the supply.

There are 4 broad strokes to making that happen:

  1. We need a metric fuck ton more carbon-free electricity generation asap. Not just enough to replace all existing fossil fuel-based electricity generation, but enough to supply double to triple the current generation capacity. Only about a quarter of the energy we get from fossil fuels is used to generate electricity, so as we switch things over to electricity, demand will increase exponentially.

Renewables are great and we need to build as much as we possibly can, but what people don’t get is the sheer quantity needed. No matter how much money is thrown at new renewables projects we simply can’t build enough of them fast enough due to bottlenecks in supply chains, raw material mining, grid interconnection times, and other limits.

New nuclear is the only other major option to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels. People resist it because of safety or waste concerns (neither are backed by data, nuclear is tied with solar for the safest tech, and it generates less radioactive waste than coal). Or they think nuclear has a big carbon footprint when you include the manufacturing and disposal (also not what the data says, nuclear is tied with wind for the lowest full lifecycle carbon emissions and is about half as much as solar). Or they argue renewables are cheaper which is at least mostly true, but it isn’t as clear cut either when you factor in the costs of connecting that many renewable power projects to the grid. Connecting one nuclear power plant to the grid is significantly cheaper than connecting the 100+ wind and solar farms needed for the same quantity of electricity. Not to mention the cost of storage.

We want to be building renewables, but we can’t wait around for renewables to save us that’s just not going to happen fast enough, our best option is building as many renewables as possible and a bunch of new nuclear and anything else carbon free at the same time.

  1. We need to electrify everything that runs on fossil fuels. Cars, furnaces, industrial uses, everything needs to switch from burning oil, gas, and coal, to being electrically powered.

But deciding what to electrify, when and in what order is complicated too…. adding to electricity demand before we’ve removed fossil fuel power generation from the grid, results in the scale-up of the fossil fuel generation to meet the increased demand. Until fossil fuels are gone from the electric grid, we should only electrify something if its efficiency is sufficient to still reduce emissions when we assume it’s powered by the most polluting form of electricity generation on the grid.

Battery electric vehicles have reached that point including factoring in the high-carbon footprint of lithium-ion manufacturing. Even if charged exclusively with coal power a BEV has lower lifetime emissions than an ICE car. Even discarding ICE cars before their end of life to replace with a BEV will generally be a net win.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the other hand (pretty much anything hydrogen-powered for that matter) aren’t even close. Using Hydrogen to power vehicles is not a tech we should be investing in right now.

Even if you’ve built a dedicated solar or wind farm to power something you want to electrify that hasn’t reached that efficiency threshold, you need to ask if it’s better to use that solar farm to displace current coal or natural gas-based electricity generation than to power your newly electrified whatever. This is why even so-called “green hydrogen” is a counter-productive tech to be investing in right now.

It’s also why some DAC and CCS techs shouldn’t be built yet. Even if you plan to build a dedicated solar or wind farm to power it. It’s often more impactful to just connect that solar/wind farm to the grid instead to reduce fossil fuel-based generation than to use it to power CCS. DAC and CCS is a rapidly developing space, we’re all hoping for some new breakthrough techs here that changes this story… so don’t criticize research in this area as a dead end… we don’t know that.

Hopefully, you’re starting to understand why so many of these discussions are more nuanced than people on Reddit/Lemmy claim…. a lot of new electrification technologies are just on the borderline here for not causing more emissions, and it often depends on where you live and what will be scaled up to meet the added electric demand.

All of this points back to why we need massive quantities of carbon-free electricity. Without clean electricity, these other techs aren’t a net win. Many things will cause a net increase in emissions if they’re electrified before carbon-free electricity is abundant. We need more new carbon-free electricity generation built in the next two decades than all the fossil fuel generation we’ve built in the last century put together. Even with ridiculously optimistic exponential growth projections of renewables, it is just not going to be enough. Until we’ve sequestered so much carbon that we’re back to pre-industrial levels, there will always be new techs that are “unlocked” by any additional carbon-free electricity generation.

  1. We need society to transition to lower consumption of everything in general. Every product or service you buy has a carbon footprint of some kind. There’s a LOT to be done around making smarter choices about what you buy, yes an EV is better than an ICE car, but public transit, electric scooters, bicycles, and ton of other things are better than any car, and not buying things at all if you if you don’t need them is better still.

Capitilizim’s tendency to push towards ever more consumption is the largest driver of the problem here. We can’t have circular economies if the only metric we’re looking at is the bottom line. Our modern mentalities of disposable products, planned obsolescence, fast fashion, and other things we’ve come to associate with a “high quality of life” in wealthy nations need to be re-evaluated.

  1. We need better data to make better decisions. Corporations aren’t required to measure and report their emissions. We’re still largely making educated guesses at the carbon footprint of things because the only data available for most things are broad estimates and industry averages. Our supply chains are so interconnected, that trying to calculate how much of an impact a particular product has requires data from potentially thousands of companies that they’re not even collecting, let alone publishing.

The EU is starting to mandate carbon reporting, but the US and Canada are lagging in this area. The US SEC proposed last year making reporting mandatory for publicly traded companies but caved to a bunch of pushback from corporations. They did pass a mandatory reporting rule a couple of months ago, but with significant retractions on what needs to be reported and how soon. They dropped a provision that would have required companies to report on emissions they’re causing to occur in their supply chains (known as “Scope 3” emissions), which would have put significant pressure on smaller and non-publicly traded companies to also report on emissions.

Until the vast majority of corporations are tracking emissions, even the corporations that are trying to reduce emissions are limited in effectiveness because they are basing decisions only on how it impacts them directly and not what impact it might have elsewhere.

Anyhow… that’s the “big things”….

There are a lot of interesting little things that could be happening but aren’t, usually because they clash with a particular political ideology. For example, the government could pay contractors to go from house to house and upgrade the insulation, and it would have one of the best emission reductions for the dollar than almost anything we’ve quantified. But politically there’s a “It’s not fair to take money from my pocket to pay for someone else’s insulation” mentality that some people have that prevent many low-hanging fruit things…

And on the flip side, some of the things that we’re doing that generally aren’t working include:

Most carbon offsets on the market are bullshit, including a lot of nature-based offsets. The mentality of “don’t reduce just offset” emissions doesn’t work. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for offsets, there is, but the carbon offset market in general is full of bad actors. It’s trivially easy to misrepresent creative accounting as a carbon offset, even if it’s not intentional. And since there’s no tangible product delivered, some companies will sell the same carbon offset to multiple buyers. If you don’t believe me, I have a bridge carbon offsets to sell you.

Another thing that isn’t working is most (if not all) RECs, GOs and similar market-based instruments for purchasing “green electricity” from the grid. You’re not changing the net emissions, you are literally just paying for the privilege of claiming your electricity consumption isn’t generating emissions. You’re not making more renewable get built, renewables are already cost-effective, they don’t need someone voluntarily paying extra for them for them to happen. If you pay extra for them, you’re just increasing someone’s profits.

Note that RECs and GOs are not the same things as private PPAs, like when Amazon or Microsoft pay to build new nuclear to power their data centres. Again lots of nuances here, but PPAs are causing additional carbon-free electricity to be built. RECs and GOs where you’re selling renewables that have already been built aren’t changing anything, just upping profit margins.

TempermentalAnomaly,

Thank you for writing that up! Much appreciated.

Toes,

I’ve worked in a bunch of environments and the most common thing I encounter are people stuck in the old way of doing things. Such as using WINS because they firmly believe if nothing bad has happened since they set it up, nothing could happen.

Hadriscus,

I kinda feel like a fraud with all the experts here, but I work in CGI and am quite active on some forums to help out people with their technical issues. The vast majority of people are good willed and are either happy to use a solution I -or someone else- provided, or respectfully dissatisfied with the efficiency of said solution. Which is fine because sometimes there aren’t solutions, only workarounds.

But once in a while… there’s gonna be a guy… and it’s always a dude, of course- there’s gonna be a guy who just demands a solution to a problem he doesn’t even care to explain fully. And he weaves into his question a bunch of unfounded attacks towards the developers of the software in question, which he didn’t pay for, because it’s free and opensource. And more often than not, he will not try the proposed solutions, instead questioning 1.your legitimacy and proficiency 2.your understanding of his issue 3.your very presence on these forums, etc It’s crazy. When it starts to look like one of these, I don’t bother going in anymore.

essell,

I hope one day when countries start passing laws banning children from the internet or smartphones, it includes the people like this

Hadriscus,

“Article 7 : (…) are therefore prohibited to surf the web : children, man-children, and people who are generally a huge pain in the ass”

altima_neo,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

Those are always funny to read after the fact. The whole post and replies of him digging himself deeper into the shit, while people try to help at first, but then bury his ass for being so difficult and stubborn.

Hadriscus,

Absolutely exactly

Maggoty,

50/50.

When I talk about how combat really is some people can’t let go of what Hollywood has taught them in movies. Or they have some preconceived notion to do with a political position. Usually that happens when a police officer panic shoots someone and I point out the problems with the officer’s story.

essell,

Honestly, I’m a little envious. being able to see those stories and make an informed clear judgement would be really valuable for me

Maggoty,

That’s a good problem to have though.

PsychedSy,

Acorns are real threats.

Maggoty,

It’s not the acorn you need to watch out for, it’s the squirrel with the chainsaw trying to drop the branch on your head. ;)

PsychedSy,

It’s apparently the black man in the back of your suv that needs to be dealt with.

mtchristo,

I struggle to make my mum take my advice about subjects of my field of expertise for which I had spent 5 cruel years at Uni. So I am at peace now not being able to make my point across the internet.

Kecessa, (edited )

Oh that’s a classic with people you’re close to

Complain about issue X that you know how to solve

Hear you tell them how to solve it

Doubt

Don’t listen to you but ask someone you know for their opinion which is the same as yours

Never say they’re sorry for doubting you

magikmw,

I work in IT and security, where everyone is an expert. Couple that with my inability to tell half-thruths about complex subjects I have incomplete info about, and I come out as incompetent. Yay.

essell,

Are you one of the people I depend on who write useful information on the internet sharing their expertise?

magikmw,

I strive to be. Not enough time for everything.

altima_neo,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

That’s my experience too. There’s always a “bigger expert”.

They tell you you’re expertise is irrelevant. They’re the real expert.

What a joke

captain_aggravated,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

I’m a CFI. on the subjects of aerodynamics, navigation, instrumentation, aircraft systems, aviation law, my word is usually accepted. I’m apparently the least knowledgeable person in the world on the subjects of aviation physiology and aeromedical factors. What could a pilot possibly know about hypoxia?

essell,

I’ve read a lot of Greek mythology but never met hypoxia. Was she one of the nymphs?

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • asklemmy@lemmy.world
  • DreamBathrooms
  • ngwrru68w68
  • modclub
  • magazineikmin
  • thenastyranch
  • rosin
  • khanakhh
  • InstantRegret
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • Durango
  • kavyap
  • mdbf
  • GTA5RPClips
  • JUstTest
  • tacticalgear
  • normalnudes
  • tester
  • osvaldo12
  • everett
  • cubers
  • ethstaker
  • anitta
  • provamag3
  • Leos
  • cisconetworking
  • megavids
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •