How little we know

[Darth Wong]

That's not a bad idea.

"You know a lot about computers, right? You consider yourself pretty knowledgeable? You know the basics of how they work? OK, you have six months to design and fabricate a CPU. Try to make it at least as powerful as an old Intel 386 processor, circa the early 1990s. Ready, set, and GO!"

That's a little bit unfair, since that was done by a rather large design team.

And evolution theory has been examined by rather large numbers of scientists, but that doesn't stop Joe Blow from declaring that he understands it better than any of them and can point out flaws that they were obviously too stupid to notice.

[Spyder]

What I think is important to understand is that any reasonably intelligent person is going to be able to find their niche but no one's going to be incredibly knowledgeable on every subject. I suppose the difference really between an intelligent person and a stupid person is that an intelligent person is that an intelligent person knows that their knowledge of quantum mechanics probably won't translate very well to a career in law.

One method you can use however to determine whether or not a particular area is bullshit is to see if you can get an expert in the field to provide simple explanations for advanced concepts that you can understand. Chomsky for example could get physicists, psychologists and various Business lecturers to provide explanations for their concepts, the post modernist professors however just responded with more "illiterate gibberish."

[Magus]

I suppose the difference really between an intelligent person and a stupid person is that an intelligent person is that an intelligent person knows that their knowledge of quantum mechanics probably won't translate very well to a career in law.

Unlike those annoying people who insist on drawing analogies from their field of expertise and comparing everything else around them to that one field of expertise.

It must be especially difficult being a political scientist, economist, sociologist, or psychiatrist...because everyone seems to think they're an expert on at least one of these fields....

[Darth Wong]

Mind you, if you've ever seen the university texts used by political scientists and sociologists, it does make you wonder why they claim to know anything that regular people don't. Don't think that everything which bills itself as a science demands equal ability and rigour from its practitioners.

[Spyder]

From my very minor understanding of the subjects involved, they need to test a lot of theories and come to conclusions that most people would find incredibly obvious. This is because they need to have something they can refference other then "well it's a known fact that..." and it's the only way they can disprove commonly held misconceptions about social constructs. Now that's not to say that psychology is going to be as involved or taxing as physics, far from it, but the point is that regardless of how simple something looks, there will always be some hidden complication that you may overlook without some research into the field.