The more likely they are wrong.
At least that’s my experience.
I’ve been in rooms full of highly educated scientist and engineers who have spent years studying narrow areas of the field, and it’s amazing how often, “I may be wrong…” prefaces their statements. They’ve studied enough to realize what they don’t know. To realize how much depth, intricacy, and subtlety there is to the problems they work on.
On the other hand, I have some personal experience with people who didn’t graduate high school. They literally yell their ideas at me. They won’t hear others present facts that disagree. They won’t question anything about their own position.
Determining if assumptions, beliefs, and actions are founded in reality is the point of education. It’s questioning correctness. It’s learning all the ways you could be wrong. It’s seeing the depth and details of the world.
However, education is not a level of schooling. It’s a mindset. The extended schooling of those engineers and scientists I mentioned was a product of their educational mindset. They realized there was a lot out there they wanted to learn about, so they extended their time in school.
For some of the people I’m talking about with the enlarged confidence in their ideas, they had a mindset that there was nothing more they could learn from school.
We’re moving into a post truth world. We have misinformation in articles that show people talking who weren’t actually in a video at all. What I’ve written here about educated vs. uneducated mindsets has been known by marketers for a long time. They know who doesn’t question anything, they send them false information that reinforces their beliefs that they then shout to the world spreading it. It creates an asymmetrical problem because those who question it are shot down and they just write the shouters off. The facts aren’t heard. They give up trying to share with someone whose mind isn’t open. Yet, the other side who stands firm keeps converting others due to their volume.
We need more generous people doing the right thing. Making things that help people, not just manipulating them. I think you’re one of those people, what can you do today?
None of this is Right 