I’d like to ask the undereducated idiot who wrote this piece for the Atlantic, what does “overducated” even mean? Is it even possible to be overeducated? Maybe we should stop people from attending school after the fifth grade, as the Taliban assholes do to girls in Afghanistan? Trump won not because of “overeducated” people, but because of pig-ignorant people!
And here is The Atlantic, which is aimed at literate and educated people, publishing this swill!
Overeducated means reading a book once in a while at this point.
My understanding at this point is that it means "anyone both educated and intelligent enough to shut my arguments down with reason and logic in a way anyone with similar intelligence can validate".
Instead of forwarding reasonable ideas, the GOP floats emotional appeals and "-y" versions of science, education, and intelligence, things that "cargo cult" actual reason. This works because, and I hate to say this,
most people derive their knowledge from social trust rather than vigorous applications of doubt. Sadly, this is true even for the majority of intelligent folks who get through academia: they trust their teachers and educators, trusting in yet more "priests" in a stranger church.
Sure, the doctrine is better because many are not really priests, but for most it's still just doctrine and dogma of a different flavor.
It is far easier to avoid ending up like that when someone only allows social elements to influence them a little bit, when society can only inform rather than steer. I would assume this is why, if you were to ever actually meet the majority of people who build our technology, there is going to be at least 1-3 "one in a thousand" atypical working among a team of 9 or fewer.
This is overrepresentation by a few orders of magnitude, and I expect similar rates among instructors of any social-agnostic subjects.
The social "trust" aspect of most people's "knowledge" has, in fact, been one of the most frustrating aspects of the majority of discussions I have on topics that interest me. This has consistently been the final reason that shuts down discussion: their trust combined with a distaste for verification, because
verification is hard, and construed as a social attack.
And, the social effects of having someone doubt what you say are painful at times. Someone can be very easily made to have "egg on their face" when they trust and
someone else verifies, or fails to. These kinds of situations lead to a fertile field for seeds of pettiness to grow into unearned hatred, especially for those with an excess of dubious knowledge and pride in their self-image as a "learned person".
Certainly it does help a little bit when those incapable of effectively doubting their knowledge at least have mostly accurate knowledge, but I think we should start recognizing as a society that this is the case for at MANY people.
We clearly need something like that, because it's impossible and impossibly costly to guarantee everyone is really learning to be educated rather than learning to be "religious" in some way. For what it's worth, blind trust in something true actually allows faster response to myriad situations -- verification takes time and effort every time, which is not generally going to be available.
What this really comes down to is that asshole speaking against those who are educated enough to see through his bullshit.
