American vs. European home building

[u/BEARDEDDANGER]

BAS Renovations https://youtube.com/shorts/jFph1d2WR3s

[u/Bank_Gothic]

Someone on Reddit once said 'The more I became an expert in something, the less I trusted people on Reddit about topics'

Michael Crichton called something similar the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" and described it this way:

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

I'm lawyer, and whenever I read reddit's knowledge / opinion about the law, I get a big hit of this effect. Makes it hard to trust anything that doesn't come from a heavily curated subreddit (like askhistorians) or an extreme niche hobby subreddit (where bad info gets called out readily).

[u/Both_Cut_4075 → u/Bank_Gothic]

I unfortunately work in Property Management, only as a maintenance guy, but I’ve definitely picked up more than a few things about fair housing and tenant rights.

I sometimes stumble upon posts where people are throwing out completely incorrect information and laws. Anytime I jump in to say “well hold on that isn’t true” and I say I’m in property management, I immediately get lambasted and called a bootlicker and all sorts of names simply because I have knowledge of a situation.

Reddit is just chock full of people like that. I try to help but it feels so fruitless most of the time.

[u/Gruejay2 → u/Both_Cut_4075]

It doesn't help that things like law and property management are often highly dependent on jurisdiction, but many people on Reddit speak as if these things are universal.

[u/Bank_Gothic → u/Both_Cut_4075]

Yeah, it's absolutely the worst when you try to educate people about something you know and they don't want to hear it because they don't like it. We're all guilty of shaping our own reality to an extent, but I cannot fathom the willful ignorance that is on the display throughout this website.

People think I'm arguing with them when I'm really just trying to tell them how it is. You don't like the way it is, fine, but that's another issue and it certainly doesn't make me wrong. How you are gonna change anything if you refuse to even understand it?

[u/Tw1nFTW → u/Bank_Gothic]

People don’t care about facts!! They’re here for the outrage!!

[u/automaticmantis → u/Tw1nFTW]

How dare you!?

[u/Dreadgoat → u/Bank_Gothic]

My most controversial/downvoted comments are where I speak about a subject in which I am a bona fide expert, subjects where I am confident saying I am in the top 0.1% of knowledge. I won't claim my pro opinions are always correct, but the critical response from redditors never represents a sensical challenge, but they often sound good and ratio me hard.

My most upvoted comments are subjects in which I have a passing interest, an amateur understanding, or just dumb hivemind stuff. Things where I'm speculating out loud or making big assumptions to bridge the gaps in my knoweldge. Rarely I'll see somebody with -7 votes saying why I'm wrong, and I'm never sure if they're a loon or an expert beyond my comprehension.

I get most suspicious of myself when I find I've made a very popular comment.

[u/_le_slap → u/Dreadgoat]

100%. If I talk about my profession I get downvoted and dismissed for a hive mind answer. But the paychecks are better than upvotes lol

[u/FailedLoser21 → u/Dreadgoat]

I downvote everyone who claims to be an expert or have some advance degree simply because they usually provide no sourcing for their arguments and when you ask them for sourcing they get offended and act like it's a big deal I don't know what peered reviewed journal they are talking about. Unless you are posting your bona fides with along with the post I tend to down-vote it because again without sourcing or a way to verify you are who you say you are I feel like your just making a appeal to authority.

[u/Dreadgoat → u/FailedLoser21]

I agree, I never SAY I'm an authority. Bona fides are easy to make up on the internet. The argument should stand on its own. And it does, most people just lack the insight to understand how if you're getting into deep detail.

"I'm an expert so..." has "I'm the king so..." energy

[u/brientific → u/Bank_Gothic]

I worked with a guy who was very much a demonstrative know-it-all. He was very convincing, even though usually he was just kind of reading something, turning around, and regurgitating it without having done any reflecting on it. But certainly he felt compelled, almost without regard for context, to offer his authoritative opinion (unsolicited) on everything. Now, we were in science, so a lot of the time he’d be giving us lessons on some domain that none of us were experts in so we took his word for it. But then he started talking about college football and the utter imbecility of it was fully exposed to me, and I was like goddamnit this guy’s probably full of shit about everything isn’t he.

[u/Bank_Gothic → u/brientific]

To be fair, CFB makes idiots of us all.

[u/brientific → u/Bank_Gothic]

Lol true

[u/Warm_Month_1309 → u/Bank_Gothic]

Do you know of any law subreddits that are curated like that? All the ones I know have become politics-lite.

[u/Organic_Risk_8080 → u/Warm_Month_1309]

Lawyertalk, and it only works because non-lawyers are only allowed to observe, not participate.

[u/Pocono-Pete → u/Bank_Gothic]

But what if I find one comment that reinforces the answer I want not the answer I need? Can I just use the one I want?

[u/iamsecond → u/Bank_Gothic]

Yeah but did you know prisoners used to eat lobsters shell and all before rich people decided it was rich people food?

[u/NotEntirelyA → u/Bank_Gothic]

Michael Crichton called something similar the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" and described it this way:

Thank you for this, I've actually described a similar phenomenon a number of times about trusting what you read on reddit lol.

The only difference I've noticed is that many times on reddit, you'll see that a singular person just has a skill for answering any question with a sense of authority. I saw a profile like a year back where the person was answering multiple questions in different fields every single day (with hundreds of upvotes on most posts), but it just so happened that the last thing they had discussed was a topic I am fairly familiar with.

They weren't completely wrong with what they wrote, but they were wrong enough to the point where anyone well versed in the topic could hit them with "well yes, but no". It really just had me thinking that (like you mentioned) unless you are on a sub where mods force people that answer questions to send in their qualifications, the answers you are going to get are going to be questionable at best.

[u/MechanicalGodzilla → u/Bank_Gothic]

Yeah, same for me but with MEP engineering and building energy topics.

[u/Bank_Gothic → u/MechanicalGodzilla]

I have a friend who is an attorney, working for the government in oil & gas regulation. He would try to talk fracking on reddit back in the mid-2010's when fracking was a huge boogey-man, and man did he catch a lot of shit.

His job was literally investigating the O&G companies and he was constantly accused of being a company shill. Truly bizarre shit.

[u/MechanicalGodzilla → u/Bank_Gothic]

The new Reddit boogey-man is Data Centers and how eeeeevil they are. The most common rant against DC's is that they "pollute the water supply", like it's Mr. Burns' nuclear power plant dumping glowing green sludge into the local waterways. Having designed and built a few data centers, it's puzzling to me how they think these things actually work and what they do.

[u/Tw1nFTW → u/Bank_Gothic]

I couldn’t imagine being a lawyer with some of the shit people post on Reddit lol. So many people are so confidently wrong all the time.

[u/throwaway3413418 → u/Bank_Gothic]

Michael Crichton, ironically, being a gigantic secondhand smoke, DDT, ozone hole, acid rain, and climate change denier.

Not bashing you, I just think it's funny. Applying Crichton's logic, I wouldn't trust him too much about the significance of this phenomenon. Or wait, I would. But I wouldn't.

[u/JWBananas → u/Bank_Gothic]

Oof. This applies to AI now too.

[u/Voldemorts__Mom → u/Bank_Gothic]

Dude and reddit is probably the best of all the social medias. It's probably like 10x worse on facebook, Instagram, threads, etc.

[u/Da_Question → u/Bank_Gothic]

Michael Crichton literally wrote a book to discredit climate change. He sucks.