Because it is easier to express opinions than to supply facts and information. Facts and information are hard to obtain. Everyone can have an opinion or parrot hearsay.
IMO, it’s easy to sort out. 
I once loaned a how to book on a specific topic to someone. The very next morning he spent a long time lecturing me on the concept, as if he was an expert. Eventually I had to remind him that I loaned him the book, AFTER I read it and practiced the concepts.
I’ve posted this recent news article elsewhere, but it bears repeating here:
http://www.houstonpress.com/arts/no-it-s-not-your-opinion-you-re-just-wrong-updated-7611752
That’s true. Actual knowledge, based on rigorous evaluation and experience is even harder.
People like to pass on things they heard or saw, but, let’s face it, many of the things “lightly” discussed on forums like this are by nature general and what I’ve noticed is that people have no idea where the knowledge begins and ends.
The ability of people to maintain their opinions after being presented with concrete evidence that they are wrong is even more baffling. For some strange reason, once they are sold on something, people are motivated to turn away from evidence to the contrary and will continue to spout their false opinions, twisting themselves into logical and verbal knots to explain why the evidence isn’t really evidence. Frustrating.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
This is called the backfire effect. I find this fascinating. You often see this with climate change.
Full disclosure, I’ve caught myself doing this too.
In my expert opinion, if a woman ever hints she may be slightly in the wrong about anything, she is simply saying “I am 100% right, as always, but I am going to defer dealing with your insubordination until later”.
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The ability of people to maintain their opinions after being presented with concrete evidence that they are wrong is even more baffling. For some strange reason, once they are sold on something, people are motivated to turn away from evidence to the contrary and will continue to spout their false opinions, twisting themselves into logical and verbal knots to explain why the evidence isn’t really evidence. Frustrating.
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When people have spent a lot of emotional energy defending a position they’re not going to be open to “back-pedaling”. That’s why it’s not a good idea to really “argue” with someone because they’re going to get all emotional and not only will that interfere with rational thinking, but their “core” would get shaken up too much.
You don’t know what you don’t know.
@BunsenBurner - What’s a Holiday Express?
I should know, I guess I could pretend to know, but we’re all friends here so I’ll admit that I don’t know!
So they can get get mega thousands of posts and hang around long after their kids are no longer in college? And it gives them something to do during waking hours?
@Greenwich lol…that’s a reference to commercials by Holiday Inn which imply that those who stay at their Holiday Inn Express Hotels are able to achieve and know great things.
Yeah, but the first thing you should know is that you don’t know.
@mom2collegekids - how funny and awful! It reminds me of the old “coffee achievers” commercials from the 80’s.
Just lurking.
Most people don’t understand scientific research and what the results mean, the concrete evidence. It doesn’t matter what the author says once the press or interest group has taken some paper and ran with it.
The 1 in 5 study of rape in college is a perfect example. The study was done at two universities. It was never meant to be applied to all universities per the author of the study but numerous people here use the study as concrete evidence.
http://time.com/3633903/campus-rape-1-in-5-sexual-assault-setting-record-straight/
Third paragraph from Time article by the authors of the study.
“First and foremost, the 1-in-5 statistic is not a nationally representative estimate of the prevalence of sexual assault, and we have never presented it as being representative of anything other than the population of senior undergraduate women at the two universities where data were collected—two large public universities, one in the South and one in the Midwest.”
Definitions of scientific terms and basic research methods are part of the problem.
If I could try a more technical response, this is a subject that fascinates scientists, academics, etc. There are many avenues of exploration. As in:
- Do ignorant people realize they're ignorant? Sometimes yes. People can be shockingly accurate about how little they know. But does that "self-knowledge" affect the intensity of the opinions they hold? Evidence is the opposite, that even if you know you don't know much you tend to hold your opinions more firmly. (You can see I love odd sentence constructions. I think I read too much Gertrude Stein.) So even if you know you don't know you still think you know. Rigidity increases as you spend time having your opinions confirmed by others as ignorant as you who seek out sources that tell them they're right.
- Do knowledgeable people realize they're ignorant about other topics? Mixed evidence. The indication is not so much; they understand there are levels of technical detail but the evidence is more that well-informed people tend to think they understand how this or that works even if they really don't. In this case, they extend their knowledge inappropriately. Good news is they tend to be easier to convince. Bad news is they tend to be relatively unopen to being convinced; many won't take the time, don't care to listen, etc. about new evidence. (I fell into this many years ago when I realized I had closed my mind about climate change. I was told off by a climate researcher and the criticism hit home: I really didn't know what I was talking about. I've always tried to research whatever I find myself thinking about, but good research means challenging whether you are wrong, not merely looking for confirmation. Lots of relatively intelligent people like me fall into the "confirmation bias" trap.)
- But research tends to have a harder time trying to explain fixations. Why do some intelligent people get fixated on vaccines? On climate change denial (as opposed to critical evaluation of actual research)? An approach has been to look at fixations where motive appears clear: denial of evolution leading to utterly absurd claims about entropy and mathematics which these people, many intelligent, would otherwise treat as the grade school level mistakes they are. But where does that go? Why are people fixated on this sports team? Or that star? Or that drug? Or guns? But that leads to why are some people foot fetishists? Why do people have this or that kink? There are tons of studies but I'd say statisticians cast a doubtful eye on all of them: low power (not a big sample size), small effects (magnified by how the data is modeled to achieve "significance" for publication), lack of logical relation (model design issues), actual poor maths (it happens a lot).
- These are clearly deeply rooted human issues, but one approach to understand how they develop is to look at animals, particularly pets. We all know that our pets have quirks and these go beyond "this is my favorite sleeping spot". Why would a cat or dog or bird develop a set of these behaviors that repeat over and over versus this other set of behaviors? Why do we have to train them into or out of behaviors? Looking at young kids is another path: from the earliest ages, kids have tendencies that go beyond traits. But all this stuff can't really say why; they're more looking for examples and offering opinions. Some gets directly into genetic research - you can alter this gene in this insect and see this behavior - but we don't do that in people and there is intense argument about the extent to which genetic behavior claims are over-blown.
On a personal note, I deal with fixations in my life all the time. A personal fixation of mine is that I explore fixations and move on, so a fetish of mine is to keep drawing associations and lines that link things and then testing those. I think I came on this naturally but I realized many years ago I have a need to find new evidence to evaluate. But I work out a lot and see “arms guys” every day who are so overdone in the upper body I have to wonder what they see in the mirror. And I know athletes/gamers who are totally fixated on their sport, whether that’s cycling or chess or something video - and I wonder about the link between fixation and achievement, meaning it must have value because the two seem linked and yet there are also substantial negatives because so few people succeed at their fixations. I deal nearly every day with fixations about Jews and Israel - which must be the single largest country in the entire world given the attention paid to it - both among the Jewish community (which is why I can’t escape this) and from the mix of, well, I won’t say more about the people outside that community. In this fixation, what I see is an extraordinary amount of vaccine-like advocacy which makes me think that goal, the ends, defines the context in which everything, every supporting or counter-fact, every supporting or counter-argument is given weight. We all deal with fixations - in ourselves and in others and in our pets - every single day so it’s no surprise we run into it on the internet. (Can’t resist an example: I talked to some SodaStream protestors outside a Wegmans. I asked why they were protesting given that SodaStream was moving to near Beersheba in Israel and was told that the industrial park was Bedouin land, etc., etc. I asked if they meant the one where Harvard is co-located with Ben Gurion University? (It is, btw, and is meant to attract Bedouin students. Also a medical complex for the Bedouin city nearby.) Didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. Intelligent people whose advocacy meant they were completely closed to information that didn’t fit.)
One does not need to know anything about the subject to have an opinion about it. On the other hand, one might know a lot about subject and do not care to have an opinion about it. The knowledge and the opinion has nothing to do with each other. And again, this is MY opinion, but I really do not care is you happen to think differently, you are entitled to you own opinion. And another point, if I want my H. to do something, I really do not care if his opinion about it is different from mine. I still want him to do it, unless he convinces me that what I am asking is NOT possible to do at all, but it does not happen often. Again, at work, my opinion might be totally different from my supervisor’s opinion about the options that we should be pursuing in respect to some project. I will NOT try to change my supervisor’s opinion about it, I will do what I am told. If I happened to be correct, then my supervisor will learn from her mistake, just as simple as that.
What I am trying to say is that the difference in opinions sometime (or more often than not) is totally IRRELEVANT, has no consequences on the actions taken.
Again, all of the above is JUST MY OPINION which does not have to be the same as anybody who would read my post.
How true! And the beauty is that it usually only takes a couple of sentences of the shared opinion to understand that the writer truly does not know anything about the subject.
By the way, do you know how brewers identify their barrels without effort. The empty ones make the most noise when rolled around.