alt Hacker NewsSociety is hierarchical, and there are people who are closer to various fires, and thus do have more authoritative insight, than others.
I don't see merit to discounting this, even though cheap deflections to authority do bother me too.
Society is hierarchical, and there are people who are closer to various fires, and thus do have more authoritative insight, than others.
I don't see merit to discounting this, even though cheap deflections to authority do bother me too.
The problem is not that society is hierarchical, the problem is that position in the hierarchy rarely maps to expertise or trustworthiness. Instead it usually maps to whoever is best at exploiting and then destroying others to raise their position in the hierarchy.
Edit for clarity: The biggest part of the "You're too stupid..." thing I mentioned is that we are being led to believe we can't even determine who is and isn't credible in any given field, so we must solicit claimed authority and then blindly obey whoever shows up first. Sometimes this solicitation is in the form of a post, but increasingly it's an AI-generated "web" search response where the index/training data has been torqued to direct people toward economic outcomes desired by the AI/search engine's owners.