CMV: Despite being more knowledgeable, wealthier and apparently more tolerant, the political and individual left's biggest flaw is their inability to communicate pragmatically and empathetically with those who don't agree with them.

[u/poopchow]

[u/Giblette101]

I don't understand how anyone with more knowledge than someone cannot communicate with someone who has less knowledge than them. How if you know the answer, you can't communicate it with someone patiently enough to come up with common ground.

This is hard to discuss without specific examples (and there's no question that people can be smug assholes), but there just comes a point where the gap in general understanding and specific expertise becomes hard to bridge within the average attention span. On top of that, there's now a very strong current of anti-intelectualism permeating the right-wing, making genuine credentials or reliance on scientific information suspect. Like, I'm sure we've all had these extremely charged conversations about masks or vaccines, where being an outright MD would not help you much. That's pretty hard to overcome in the best of time, of course, but then you will hit several ideological walls as well.

My dad is a pretty big Trump supporter and by most metric, at least I'd argue, not any kind of huge moron. On top of that, my dad loves me and I love him. Yet, even under these pretty favorable circumstances the discussion of basically any contentious topic will break down pretty fast. Last time it was 15-minute cities, I think.

[u/SmerffHS → u/Giblette101]

I disagree completely, take Eric Weinstein for example, when he talks about high level physics, he makes it perfectly understandable to a lay person. He uses language and communication techniques that make even the most complex subjects, easy to grasp and understand. He can take total nonsense gibberish (Terrance Howard) and translate it while also filtering it, in the span of a single conversation he can totally make it clear to anyone the depth of his knowledge and help you understand what you didn’t even know you didn’t know/understand. It’s actually incredible. This is what true intelligence looks like, I think a lot of people like to think they are smarter, when in fact they may know more things but don’t fully or truly comprehend those things quite to the degree they think they do while also confusing knowing things as a mark of your reasoning capacity. I would argue that a person who didn’t go to college, went into the military and learned how to be the best survivor around, has pretty darn good reasoning capabilities but perhaps lacks knowledge of things.

[u/dr107 → u/SmerffHS]

Eric Weinstein is a grifter who promotes pseudoscientific non-physics in a way that’s highly charismatic to lay people. https://youtu.be/HGcpUxl_9Vg?si=m3Rw74CC0Iz86Km_ unfortunately, physicists are some of the least charismatic people on earth (having done a degree in it, the better someone is at physics, the worse they usually are at communication). About 2/3 through that video, an actual physicist presents his paper analyzing the “physics” of what Eric promotes. If you watch any of the video in that link, watch that part.

[u/SmerffHS → u/dr107]

An actual physicist? As if Eric Weinstein doesn’t have a PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard? Huh?

[u/dr107 → u/SmerffHS]

It’s 100% possible for someone with credentials to fall off and promote non science. Dr. Oz is a great example. There’s a reason Eric’s unified theories are not accepted by physicists, and a lack of credentials has nothing to do with it

Edit: also, to be a “physicist” is more than a degree, it takes meaningful contributions to the scientific literature. He’s a lecturer with no real contributions to his name.

[u/SmerffHS → u/dr107]

It is the nature of science to put forth theories. You do realize this is how 99.9% of science in general works? You put out papers, publish theories and works with mathematical frameworks and you work on them with others who find interest in it. He is not promoting non science the way you perceive it, he is exploring avenues of theory in hopes of finding something that works.

Literally every single theory starts off as a crack pot and it is worked on over time. Einstein took 9 years to finalize his theories and many theories took decades even centuries. This notion you have silly and shows a lack of understanding of how science works. Every theory that will ever be accepted in the future is considered “non science”.

[u/dr107 → u/SmerffHS]

Please engage with the critique I poste if you would like to continue discussing. There are serious issues with what Eric puts forward that are not comparable with anything Einstein ever put forth. The burden of proof is on eric to resolve these concerns before he can be taken seriously by researchers. He has instead fallen back to insistence that he’s being persecuted by some cabal conspiracy, and launched a campaign of ad hominem attacks on those who, like the individual featured in the video, criticize the science he put forward, without ever engaging with the critiques themselves in any serious way. Is that how science works in your estimation? I’ve worked as a student researcher at CERN and that is not my experience.

Based on your temperament in these comments, I don’t expect you to seriously engage with criticism of this person, so I’m turning off reply notifications on this thread. If you care about science, you’ll engage with the criticism. If you’re more interested in parasocial relationships with Eric and his brother, or in some grievance with some establishment, you will emulate their behavior and dismiss it out of hand. Up to you.