Claiming to be "Educated" generally indicates Ignorance

[joesixpack]

This thread about a mother killing her child by choosing herbs, homeopathy, and woo over antibiotics, and several facebook arguments I've been in recently have got me thinking a lot about the nature of people's beliefs regarding alternative medicine. I found, serendipitously, an excellent blog post addressing this very thing.

The claim of being “educated” about a health topic is the surest sign of ignorance

Here are a couple of excerpts;

When a lay person claims to be “educated” about health, she certainly doesn’t mean that she went to medical school, has hands on training caring for individuals with the condition, or is familiar with the specialist literature. So what does she mean? When a layperson proudly claims to be “educated” about a health topic she means that she has adopted a cultural construction of “education” that has little if anything to do with actual knowledge of the topic...

When advocates of vaccine rejection or natural childbirth claim to be “educated,” they are not talking about actual scientific knowledge. Indeed, the scientific data is generally ignored. The claim of being “educated” on vaccine rejection or childbirth simply stands for a refusal to agree with health professionals and refusal to trust them.

The author of this blog quotes from an article "Trusting Blindly can be the biggest risk of all" (Hobson-West, Sociology of Health & Illness Vol. 29 No. 2 2007, pp. 198–215) available here in pdf

"Clear dichotomies are constructed between blind faith and active resistance and uncritical following and critical thinking. Non-vaccinators or those who question aspects of vaccination policy are not described in terms of class, gender, location or politics, but are ‘free thinkers’ who have escaped from the disempowerment that is seen to characterise vaccination…"​

This characterization of vaccine rejectionists or natural childbirth advocates can be unpacked even further; not surprisingly, vaccine rejectionists and natural childbirth advocates are portrayed as laudatory and other parents are denigrated...

"...instead of good and bad parent categories being a function of compliance or non-compliance with vaccination advice … the good parent becomes one who spends the time to become informed and educated about vaccination… … [vaccine rejectionists] construct trust in others as passive and the easy option. Rather than trust in experts, the alternative scenario is of a parent who becomes the expert themselves, through a difficult process of personal education and empowerment…"
​

...So vaccine rejectionism, like natural childbirth, is about the mother and how she would like to see herself, not about vaccines and not about children. In the socially constructed world of vaccine rejectionists, parents are divided into those (inferior) people who are passive and blindly trust authority figures and (superior) rejectionists who are “educated” and “empowered” by taking “personal responsibility”.

The entire blog is worth reading. I am making an effort to slog through the article she quotes.

 

[PGH]

I've noticed it time and time again from people pitching any number of different woo nonsense. "You need to educate yourself on the facts."

In the next sentence they link you to the Youtube clip that they got their degree from.

 

[joesixpack]

I've noticed it time and time again from people pitching any number of different woo nonsense. "You need to educate yourself on the facts."

In the next sentence they link you to the Youtube clip that they got their degree from.

If not Youtube, then some stupid blog written by someone equally "educated" or even a HuffPo article.

But I'm guilty of that as well, except that I generally don't use youtube, I use some scholarly article, or maybe wikipedia in a pinch.

It's funny because the whole "debating on the internet" has been on my mind quite a bit lately. It's frustrating to see people simply become more entrenched in their opinions when you point out to them the flaws in whatever woo they're spouting. The very act of challenging their beliefs seems to make them hold more firmly to it.

It's really worse with anti-vaxxers because their self-image is tied to their self delusion about their level of knowledge/intelligence. You've basically got to convince them that they're both ignorant and wrong without hurting their (probably very fragile) ego.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Dunning-Kruger is more ubiquitous than gravity.

 

[joesixpack]

This is only tangentially related (at best) to Dunning-Kruger. The two linked articles are discussing a sociological aspect of these phenomena, not simply the individual psychology behind it. It appears more complicated than just D-K alone. There is a social element which reinforces these beliefs.