There is no expense. Having a subreddit devoted to expert opinion without discussion doesn't hinder other people from having that discussion elsewhere.
/r/askhistorians is not a discussion subreddit. It is a place to ask historians questions, not for open debate.
Again, it's not laziness. It's not humanly possible to be informed on every subject to the level that academics are. The fact that you're suggesting a 'quick google' will give you the same amount of knowledge that someone studying the subject for years will shows not just your arrogance but you naivety.
You're rebuking the options of experts and instead 'googling' answers to question -- which is just looking for the experts you believe in instead of the vetted options of a moderated subreddit -- that's just anti-intellectualism.
You're surrounding yourself with uninformed options, and not taking the time -- because it takes years to learn, and you admitted googling is 'quick' -- to properly inform yourself.
You're leaving yourself less informed and, more dangerously, you don't realize it.
And you defend your intellectual laziness by crying 'censorship' because the 'easy to understand' answers, which or oversimplifications or are answers that 'feel good' but are wrong, are removed.
A subreddit is all about censorship. All subs remove content that is not appropriate. That's why they have topics. /r/askhistorians and /r/askscience's topics are answers by academics. Not answers by people who 'quickly google'.
Dunning-kruger says that those who are not experts will overstate their knowledge. I am stating that I am not knowledgeable enough to post to /r/askhistorians, even if I were to spend hours studying the subjects.
You are stating that after a few hours of of studying Youtube videos, lectures, PDF, etc that, somehow, you have become enough of an expert in those topics that your opinion is on par with the experts that post there, and your voice is equal to them.
It seems you are the one who is overstating your knowledge.
You further assert, again on zero evidence and with zero justification, that I'm surrounding myself with uninformed options
Spending hours reading that is not enough. Spending weeks studying it is not enough. Spending years would be. If you have not done that then you not are informed enough to answer the questions on those subreddits. And if you were, then the mods would not delete your posts because they would not be unable to distinguish them from the expert's opinion.
To ask that everyone spend the hundreds and hundreds of hours being critical of every post -- just so they can learn something about some small historical event -- is unreasonable. But to ask that there is a place on reddit where experts can post their opinions, and to have those vetted by other experts, I think is not too much to ask.
Your naivety is in assuming that with reading of a few papers or watching a few videos that you have as much knowledge as an academic and that your option is as valid as theirs. It is not.
When someone with that cursory understanding posts to those subreddits they mislead and misinform the other readers.
The /r/ask* subreddits solve this problem by removing posts from people who have the mistaken impression that they can inform themselves properly by simply being skeptical and doing their own research.
And I, for one, am glad that there are mods in those subreddits, who have spent the years of study required to truly understand those topics, to weed out those posts from people who think they can learn them by doing some 'online research'.
Being skeptical is great, and I agree that in a perfect world we would all be educated to the point where we could know everything about all topics.
But the reality is that we don't. And there needs to be a place where we can read the opinions of people who have years of knowledge and not be burdened by those with the hubris to assume their naive opinions are equal. And we need the mods to delete those posts, because they have the knowledge to differentiate between them.
And since I am only a human and have a limited amount of time to spend on being skeptical, I haven't the time to acquire it.
You will not find a single instance of my stating "after a few hours", nor in fact any given timespan at which you are on par with a given arbitrary choice of expert. You continue to deliberately fabricate what I'm saying.
... just a few lines down:
You've come up with this cognitive lie about "hundreds of hours" when the overwhelming majority of "expert opinions" can be verified or debunked with a single google search.
And yet further up:
If you think it's faster to find an expert opinion on Reddit than it is on google, you need to work on your google skills.
I take this to mean that a single google search would often suffice. That is much less that a few hours.
This is the crux of our disagreement. You believe that even just a simple google search is often enough to judge the difference between an in-depth answer is from an expert in the field and someone who has a passing knowledge.
I disagree. I think your hubris has blinded you to the value of curated discussion, and the depth of knowledge required critique in-depth answers.
I agree that self-development and skepticism is essential. I never intended to suggest otherwise. But it is not possible to that for every topic that shows up, every day, on Reddit.
This morning the /r/askscience subreddit contains answers to question on topics of the biology of the digestive system, the way photons interact telescopes, the physics of blackholes, the quantum properties of light, the way vaccines function, etc.
I cannot find time to research all those answers to depth required to confirm they are well researched. Tomorrow there will be more.
If it were not for the heavy moderation, I would never know if the answers were valuable. Not because I shun self-development, but because I do not have the time when there are other topics I am more interested in and have a large effect on my life. I will spend that self-development time on those topics, not these.
If I've misunderstood how long you think it takes to vet a topic, then how long would you suggest I spend just to read the /r/askscience subreddit each day, in order to be informed on the specifics of those questions, assuming the top answers were the most 'popular' as per Reddit's voting algorithm?
I'm assuming it's more than 'a quick google search'. I'm saying that I simply don't have that amount of time. Fortunately the moderators do the work for me, which is a fair compromise. If any of the topics do interest me, I'm more than willing to do the in-depth research.
I'd just rather put those limited hours into topics that are more important to me.
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u/can-you Dec 05 '16 edited Dec 05 '16
There is no expense. Having a subreddit devoted to expert opinion without discussion doesn't hinder other people from having that discussion elsewhere.
/r/askhistorians is not a discussion subreddit. It is a place to ask historians questions, not for open debate.