I want to highlight every single word of this. Thank you! The next time I deal with a person who thinks research means googling, I'm just going to send them here - whether that's people minimizing my research or aggrandizing their own.

Maybe we should start a hashtag, #IDontKnowEverythingAndNeitherDoYou. Granted, that's a mouthful. Perhaps #IDKEANDY for short. Where we all start confessing the times we've gotten it wrong, the topics we can't wrap out brains around, the gaps in our awareness. We could find out if humility is contagious - we already know hubris is. I'm willing to confess, if it will make others own up to not being omniscient and infallible. If it will make them doublecheck their information, validate their sources, acknowledge the existence of expertise, or anything on that ballpark. I'll even go first.

In my first attempt at a college degree, when I was 22ish, I did an informative speech for class, about my religious identity and the difference between secular and atheist. But I fucked up, and never looked up a word in the topic I thought I already knew the meaning of (not the first or last time). It was so long ago, I couldn't tell you why, but I thought the word agnostic had the same basic definition as non-denominational. And nothing in the research I did do, pointed out my mistake.

I'm still cringing in embarrassment over the end of the speech, where my mistake was pointed out, and I felt like a complete knobhead. And that's is one of the reasons I look up the definitions of words I already know, constantly. Like I said, this wasn't the first time and it won't be the last, that I learned the definition of a word strictly from context, later discovering that my understanding of the definition was either wrong or incomplete.

If there is one thing that will make a dent in all this vilification of education and embrace of uninformed opinions, maybe it's everyone just standing up and admitting that they've overestimated their own knowledge too, and felt like shit for it - that they too, can be a knobhead sometimes.

Hmm, maybe the hashtag should be something more like, #IveBeenAKnobheadToo.