this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
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The Deprogram
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this sounds like an actual marxist interpretation of the cited effect. my concern with things like the "dunning-kruger effect" and similar theories is that they ultimately serve to reinforce the bourgeois notion that people (specifically exploited classes) are just too stupid to understand reality or anything in it. "gell-mann amnesia" takes a basic premise of the theory of knowledge, namely that we can't all be experts on everything due to the extreme complexity of reality, and uses it to pose human nature as being fundamentally irrational. if we approached everything that we didn't know with the skepticism it fully deserved, we would become completely nonfunctional. i hope it is obvious why this is significantly reactionary.
after all, there are plenty of experts that have deep knowledge about their fields that are fundamentally incorrect about the topics for which they have expertise. "gell-mann amnesia" implies that only those with expertise should be trusted for topics with which you don't personally have expertise. but, what about bourgeois economists, historians, psychologists, and the like? we all believe we are fundamentally more correct than them, even though i'm sure they would have plenty of specific arguments for why we're wrong, derived from their expertise. theories such as these serve to support the status quo; skepticism is never devoid of ideology. as you mentioned, the correct usage of skepticism is through the lens of a marxist class analysis: what are the material interests behind the information i'm consuming, and how do those conflict with whether or not they may be truthful? this allows one to be skeptical and critical of both entertainment posing as education, but also bourgeois experts.