I think this is a more global problem of “people now think they’re experts on everything, and shout about it loudly”

I dunno… I don’t think the average person in 1926 assumed they were an expert on medicine or physics or finance or whatever. If a doctor, or physicist, or banker told them something, they’d generally nod their head.

it's crazy to me that you're citing the authoritative and very top-down approach of the 1900s as a positive example here. never before or after has a society been more militarized.

Vaccine denialism was a problem during the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918.

In the eighties, I remember that Christian Scientists would refuse medical treatment for their dying children, choosing to pray instead. The kids usually died.

There was always a subset of the population who refused to acknowledge science or expertise.

These days, we've gotten rid of the government departments of experts that are supposed to advise our legislators regarding the consequences of the bills they want to pass. Instead they just listen to the lobbyists of the corporations who finance their campaigns.

Or in the case of Trump, his own imagination, since he hallucinates more than Google Gemini. A recent example is his belief that the CHIPS act requires the hiring of trans folk to run microchip-making factories. (It doesn't. Also the rumor that he confused transgender with transistor is probably false.)

don’t think the average person in 1926 assumed they were an expert on medicine or physics or finance or whatever. If a doctor, or physicist, or banker told them something, they’d generally nod their head.

So many of those professionals were just professional scammers back then. Until the professionalization of these fields, in the 1940s/50s, you really couldn't trust them. And avoiding people who claimed to do surgery/treat cancer, while keeping all your money in your mattress was genuinely a smarter move.

the other half is that they weren’t able to shout it into an algorithm that absolutely loves the controversy it generates, and serve it to billions of people automatically.

A lot of this shit is amplified and filtered to operate as it's own native advertising.

The shit opinions that align with the marketing agenda are the ones that get front-paged.

And to be fair nodding your head to bankers was often not a good idea. And doctors killed patients because they refused to wash their hands.

The problem is a lot more nuanced than trust the experts. Experts in publicly exposed fields have just very often shown incompetence or just blatant corruption that a growing part of the population just lost institutional trust.

I always say, there was always the village idiot who was talking dumb shit but you just kind of nodded along and offered the to drink another beer so they go and bother someone else. But they were largely isolated and never got in contact with each others.

Nowadays, with social media, all the village idiots can, and do network with each other.

Social Media is the source of 90% of the stupidity in the world today