No it doesn’t. People are claiming to be experts on giant pumpkin growing on the internet too when in reality they’re 13 year old boys who have never grown a dandelion much less an Atlantic Giant.
You may phhttt that off, but in the community of giant vegetable growers, expertise is highly sought after. EVERYONE wants bragging rights and to be a record holder of the biggest pumpkin, or at least break 1000 lbs. And it’s easy for the social media savvy to pretend they know what they’re talking about on the internet.
I’d argue that these YouTube doctors you think are such a problem are much easier to spot. You’ll bring up Atlas, but I would point out that everyone but Trump and his mindless moron militias rolled their eyes at his interpretation of herd immunity. The basic biology class required to get a high school diploma made that obvious.
There is no verification of credentials on the internet, therefore it’s up to internet consumers to determine these things. Mindful people do scrutinize claims, especially coming from the internet given its anonymous nature. Those who don’t are just being intellectually indolent.
A quick search will easily verify that Jill Biden earned a doctorate degree in education, which university it came from, when, and her defended dissertation which you can still get a copy of fairly easily.
Her proper title is Doctor. She’s earned it. People choosing to call her by her proper title is not even proof of hubris on her part. This criticism is making an assumption that she is insisting on it when in reality people may just be giving her the honorific outside professional arenas out of respect for the work and her as a person. Given that her work is in increasing accessibility to higher education for people who otherwise wouldn’t have it, that’s likely. That work is incredibly meaningful to the lives of people it affects. Perhaps more so than medical doctors who have a history of exploitation of many groups. Just saying.
It’s also kind of stupid to reserve the degree recognition for those who obtain it in the field of medicine or STEM over all others. The degree itself, denotes rigorous study as far as academia can take a student. From here on out, your work is to add to and advance the field, rather than be a general worker in it. Talk about hubris! What makes one arena more important than another? To whom exactly? It didn’t go unnoticed that the proposed divide allows male dominated fields to retain the title while female dominated ones like education are downgraded. Conveniently.
That’s the point too, regardless of how you dress it up under an attempt to call out pretentions of overly inflated egos, or problems with social media and people being too lazy to authenticate what they put in their brains.
Nor does his ultimate “point" excuse the condescending, dismissive, misogynistic tone of the article. No. He and the WSJ deserve whatever call-outs they get.
