Everyone is an idiot

Philosophy

“Influencers” such as celebrities, entrepreneurs, political parties and other people and organisations with large audiences have an immense impact on the opinion of the masses. Numerous people have great faith in these entities. It does not help that people are pushed even further into their respective direction of opinion with the recommendation engines that are ruling the dominating sites of the internet, generating so called echo chambers. While there is nothing wrong with agreeing with a group or individual, you should never see your “followees” as infallible. This will restrict your thoughts and stunt your growth. At the same time, just because someone said something idiotic doesn’t mean they are an idiot, because everyone says stupid things.

Take Elon Musk for example, clearly a very intelligent individual, but he does sometimes say things that are entirely wrong. Take this tweet for instance. In the tweet he states that the average length of a tweet is only 100 bytes of text. This is wrong due to several reasons. Firstly, he is ignoring Unicode characters which consume more memory than ASCII. Secondly, the headers/metadata is nothing that could be neglected, take a look at the twitter API documentation (and additionally there is likely more info that is only for twitter’s own use). Finally, the images and…