Presumptuousness

It frustrates me when people are presumptuous with their opinions. The particular impetus is the financial bailout.  I was having a discussion about it after the last presidential debate (during which we talked about the candidates avoiding giving direct answers to questions), and a couple of people asked me if I supported the bailout or not.  I told them that I thought some sort of bailout was probably necessary, I didn't have the information to make a good judgment on the specific bailout proposal.  They accused me of avoiding the question.

But many people have very strong opinions about the bailout.  Some of them are justified; for example, libertarians are against government intervention on principle.  But most of them are based on ideas about what the bailout does and what effect it is intended to have.  That itself is a very complicated economic topic, but people go further.  They proclaim that it won't work because of one reason or another.

None of these people are qualified to make those kinds of judgments.  It's part of that "Joe Sixpack" mentality that Sarah Palin embodies: that average people are wise and qualified to take on complex topics, by golly.  This is patently false.  National issues, especially financial ones, are incredibly intricate and take years of study to understand.  This is why there are people who are paid to figure this stuff out.

Arm-chair quarterbacking in inappropriate ways is rampant.  Government is probably number one—the idea of a representative democracy is that you pay people to study the issues and decide because the factors are far too many for the average person to reasonably understand given their free time (not to mention the average level of intelligence).  But that doesn't stop people from asserting their ill-informed opinions strongly.

Is there an answer to this?  A culture of science, perhaps.  Presumptuousness stems from a love of certainty, and science is the antidote to certainty.