Also, whether someone needs qualifications to comment entirely depends on what they're commenting on, surely.
Like, if I'm saying "I don't want a jab because I don't like needles" then zero PhDs are required.
But if you're saying "it's the 5G! 'They' are using it to transmit the virus!", then it would behove you to have at least a basic science education to realise what a nonsensical crock of shit you're talking. You can't transmit physical things via radio waves. That whole concept is a complete non-starter. The very premise of it is not physically possible.
Again, though, you don't need a full-blown PhD or anything to understand that; but you do need some basic science literacy to know that 5G is just radio waves - which is the same stuff as light, but at a different frequency - so, like, could you "transmit" something physical with a torch? No? Then you can't do it with 5G either.
In essence, this is the same "we're tired of experts" that Michael Gove was spouting during Brexit. That post-factual nonsense that your personal opinion outweighs measurable scientific fact, or the laws of basic arithmetic.
Yeah, no, that's bollocks.
You can "disagree" with gravity all you like, you're still going to go "smack!" against the pavement if you jump out of the window on the 100th floor of a skyscraper. You can "disagree" that 2 + 2 = 4, but you're just wrong and any arithmetic that you attempt using your "alternative rules" won't actually produce the correct answers.
It's that Cecile B. deMille quote: "You cannot break the law... you can only break yourself against the law".
That is, you can't break the Second Law of Thermodynamics... you can only break yourself against the rocks of reality, wasting your time trying to create a perpetual motion machine or investing in the latest scam (there's always one on the go, as we know from other threads) that claims it can do the impossible with magnets or something.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but if you can't override reality's opinion. If reality says "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" then if your personal opinion differs from this then, to the extent of that difference, you're just wrong.
In a sense, the problem with the modern world is that science literacy is shite. They don't teach it well enough at school. Modern education focuses too much on "feelings" and "opinions", and not enough on facts. It's creating generations of people who erroneously think that reality is composed of just opinions. It's created this "post-factual" world.
You need at least a basic science literacy to be able to tell the difference between someone saying "I think there's enough oil left in the world to keep burning it for the next million years" - an opinion, based on fuck all - and someone saying "we have, at best, 41 years left (at current rates of consumption but, as the rate of consumption has always historically gone up all the time, that's why I'm saying 'at best', as it's going to be less than that in reality - and that's "to the last drop" but the price will get exponentially more expensive, as oil runs out, that it'll be unaffordable to most people way before it goes extinct)" - based on actual data (
https://www.worldometers.info/) and logical reasoning that I've provided in what I said.
Basically, do the maths and, as we're all roughly of similar age here, I can say that oil will die within our lifetimes. Not a personal opinion, but the logical conclusion of the established facts.
I can see where the problem comes from, though. If you lack that basic science literacy, then you possibly don't know how to assess someone's claim. You don't know how to look up the facts for yourself to independently verify what they're saying.
If I say one thing and someone else says another, then you can't tell - without that basic set of skills in science literacy and critical thinking - which one of us is trying to report the facts, and which one of us is spouting some personal opinion that's just pushing a political agenda.
If you lack the ability to discern opinions from facts then, sure, I can see that you've got a massive problem, in that, to you, everything looks like a personal opinion. And, yes, in the realm of personal opinions, I'd fully agree that no-one's opinion inherently outranks anyone else's.
Indeed, that is, itself, a scientific principle. The Royal Society's motto is "Nullius in verba" - meaning "on the words of no-one" or, in modern parlance, "take nobody's word for it". The essence of that motto being that reality is the only "authority" and empirical experiment determines what the reality is.
But the reality is reality. Facts are facts. You cannot ever "override" them with anyone's personal opinions.
The point is that folks with PhDs usually are reporting what the facts are (mind you, not always - so, you know, when Stephen Hawking was commenting on AI, he was not an AI expert, so that was just a personal opinion - though he was a smart cookie, so it's not an entirely uninformed opinion. But it's not a fact, it's just what he personally thought about it).
So, by all means, you can be tired of hearing the experts report the facts. But you can't be tired of the facts. You can't ignore or overrule or outrank reality - that's just not how existence works.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
