No longer my profession, but Era is hilariously ignorant regarding what the U.S. military does and how it actually works.
Yeah, it is pretty weird, but it's fascinating at the same time the types of attitudes and misconceptions people have.
On the flip side, one thing I've learned over the years is that people in varying professions make a lot of rationalizations or hand-wave away a lot of things, especially when you move from areas of fact to analysis & opinion.
It's one thing to say, "You're factually wrong about this, here is the actual fact." But I've found that how people interpret and extrapolate those facts tend be to just as colored by bias and personal opinions as anyone else. They're more informed, but two people in the same profession with the same information often come to differing conclusions more times than they admit.
In my field, I talk to a lot of different people across all races, classes, genders, geographic areas, industries, and professions. I'll talk to cops and they'll tell you about all the training they receive, and their procedures, and all of it -- and it all sounds completely reasonable and they genuinely believe what they're telling you. But then I see how they treat black people and there's an obvious disconnect between what they see and believe and reality.
Or I'll talk to someone who works in a place that's under fire, say a coal-fired power plant (or a natural gas plant in California), and they all will tell you how safe everything is, and how the dangers are overblown, and they have a pile of facts, data, and charts to support what they're telling you. And it all sounds reasonable. And then I'll visit a "green" company and they'll tell you that those guys are full of shit and their solution is just as good, if not better, than "legacy" approaches. Obviously, people are operating within their own bias bubbles and interpreting facts and data through their own perceptual filters, so you usually have to find an open-minded engineer who'll plainly lay out the pros and cons of each approach, so you can have a good understanding of everything involved.
Or I'll talk to an engineer in a facility and they'll describe a machine or process they designed and the problem it solves, and then later talk to a mechanic who works on that system who'll tell me it's a piece of shit that causes more problems than it solves. And both will tell you that the other one doesn't know what they're talking about, even though both intimately know that machine, just from different points of view and drawing wildly different conclusions based on their own personal knowledge, experience, and inherent biases.
And you run into these things over and over again everywhere you go, and eventually my takeaway is that what you think you know largely depends on your role and experience, which may be more limited than you want to admit or are even aware of. This isn't to wave away people who make factually false statements, and then cling to those beliefs when corrected by a competent person. That's obviously its own thing and driven more by ideology or some weird personal crusade than anything normal.
But from what I've seen, people tend to operate in a bubble as far as their profession is concerned (specifically, their role within that field) and make as many faulty assumptions and draw as many poor conclusions as anyone else without realizing it.
You'll have city and other municipal workers tell you about all of the procedures and penalties in place to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse...and yet, I always find fraud, waste, and abuse. Right now, I could bid on a program and win it, because I know the people involved and they know the tricks and loopholes to get around certain restrictions. That's corruption on a very small scale, but it's everywhere and at all levels. It's just an example of the trust and benefit of the doubt given by workers in one part of the machine to the machine as a whole. They assume their personal experience is universal, or have enough experience to make an extrapolation that often doesn't hold up under scrutiny.
And this doesn't even get into the people who believe that their path to "success" is superior, simply because it was theirs. Or that one thing is better than another just because they prefer it (though they'll come up with very reasonable sounding rationalizations supposedly drawn from their professional experience).
At the end of the day, the people that I've come across who I would consider to be experts in their field/profession are those who've spent a number of years in different roles, at different places, at differing levels of responsibility, and have both strategic and on-the-ground knowledge. When it comes to Era, if someone presents themselves as knowledgeable in an area, I would accept what they say when it comes to actual facts within their expertise, but consider any conclusions or analysis that they've drawn to be limited (unless proven otherwise), though obviously more valuable/insightful than someone who's never operated within that field.
