Last night I was having an informal conversation with the driver taking me home from the airport.
It started with each of us asking each other what did we do for a living. The driver dropped the line does not everyone have a side job? as I ask the driver about doing lyft.
The conversation jumped from technology to global warming. Then the driver told me about anecdotal experiences that were manifestations of global warming. As we were approaching the place I lived in, the driver told me if you know a little physics then you know that the sun is not getting hotter, just the opposite it is getting colder.
The sentence was connected to how the ozone layer thinning is the one to blame and not that the sun is getting hotter to explain why the summer days are hotter these days compare to our past days.
The conversation left me wondering if the driver had taken some undergraduate nuclear physics classes. But more important to me were two things:
- At which point can I say if I know this topic then I can explain this yada yada. It is enough to know a fact about how something works or do I need to be able to derive the behavior from math?
- How many times have I used the same argument of knowing a fact of how something works so as to claim a point of view in a conversation?
The latter point is the one that brings me the most concern.