It's so weird how up in arms people get about being called ignorant. Ignorance is not a bad thing in itself. It just means the ignorant person has more to learn.
I imagine it ties into the whole “never admitting you made a mistake” “failure is evil” attitude that moves through most western education systems and through a lot of US culture (I can’t speak so much to western European culture, etc, on this front, I lack the knowledge).
It’s actually fascinating how the treatment of “ignorant” as an insult or a moral failure intersects with the US’s increasing hatred of expertise and intellectual rigour.
After all, intellectual rigour demands acknowledgment and correction of mistakes in earlier hypotheses when faced with new evidence. The willingness of people with expert-level skills in intensely intellectual fields such as sociology have when it comes to integrating new information and improving their understanding of their field actually serves to make them seem less reliable to many people.
It’s fucked up, tbh.
