I have a story I've never told told about the of hubris of ignorance. My own.
It was ~2001, I was a preteen playing Starsiege Tribes. And somebody accused someone else of using auto-aim.
I lambasted them, saying the bandwidth and processing required to analyze video for that to work was impossible. That external input could never respond in real-time to make that possible.
Of course, it wasn't~impossible~. My mental model of how to accomplish that was ingestion of a video signal, instead of hooking into the program and sending weapon signals at the precise address of the user's character.
I was completely utterly wrong. But it was joyful to be so.
I remember how viscerally confident I felt typing those messages, bathed in the superiority of my cognition and knowledge in comparison to theirs. I thought I knew. Under the central bridge of the map "Raindance."
But I didn't. I was a child talking outside their remit. I wouldn't understand for years.
And in the most pleasurable debate moments of my life, especially earlier in my 20's, dunking on the idiots – I felt an ascendent joy.
While being wrong.
Because absolute confidence is often simply opium for fools. And conditional knowledge is doubtful guessing to the dense.
> I was a child talking outside their remit.
I agree with everything but this, for two reasons: being a child is a very discriminatory proxy[1] for competence and the concept of remit that a person has is something that promotes appeals to authority and so seems to go against the message of the rest of your post.
[1] in the meaning of "its usage in some cases causes bad social effects, even if the correlation it relies on exists"
