Do you know it’s compulsory you know how to tell a scholar apart from a fool? It’s a very necessary skill to have if you don’t want to be a fool in today’s world!

You see, these days, many ignoramuses are pretending to be scholars, and their guises are so effective that they have managed to deceive much of the world about their true condition.

With the proliferation of democracy in most part of the world, total freedom of speech and an unregulated media and internet, it has become increasingly easy for any ignoramus to be heard, noticed and gather followers.

A large part of the world still suffers from mass illiteracy, so it is naturally easy to deceive a lot of the world if you are educated, smooth, and have easy access to the media – a quality many of those we look up to in the society as leaders and models, including politicians, easily possess.

From politicians to business moguls and even ordinary Youtubers, there is an army of ignoramuses pretending to be erudite of specialized knowledge out there today. And a great number of innocent people have fallen for them.

The effect of this may not be immediately noticeable, but it’s more than likely that as their army of followers increase, so will the proliferation of half-baked ideas and pseudo-intellectualism around the world.

Knowledge itself is a kind of trusteeship, and we tend to quickly trust our affairs with people that have deep genuine knowledge about them. A doctor is a knowledgeable person in the field of medicine and human diseases, and a pilot is a person knowledgeable about aviation. We’ll rather trust them handling our health issues and air travel respectively than anyone else.

Yet, people that have no grounded knowledge have become tutors and guide of sensitive knowledge today. How about people without any form of scientific medical education claiming they can treat ailments and diseases with all sort of contraptions? They call it “alternative therapy.” Thousands of them are only a Google search away.

In that field of medicine especially, formerly abandoned and discredited procedures like homeopathy and chromotheraphy are being revived on the internet, and millions are reaching out to their practitioners genuinely expecting to find a cure! The problem abounds in other fields too and is getting more visible day by day.

There isn’t a more urgent time to separate the true scholars from the fakes!

Here are ten ways for you to tell a true scholar apart from a pretentious fool:

 1. True Scholars Speak Little but Make a Lot of Sense   

People who are genuinely knowledgeable tend to communicate a  lot of information using comparatively fewer words than those who are not.

While they can easily write tomes on their field of specialty, they are usually not very extravagant with words when speaking about it, and yet, they make a lot of sense with their shortened speeches.

This is one of the manifestation of true knowledge – the ability to explain what you know beautifully while using only a few numbers of words!

This kind of ability can be noticed at all levels of knowledge. Have you noticed how some of your grade school teachers have been able to explain a whole module of your textbook to you using only a few words? How some university professors and statesmen can easily explain/repudiate lengthy matters of public policy easily with only a few sentences? That arises from their real in-depth knowledge of it.

By contrast, ignoramuses often speak much, write little and still fail to communicate any tangible idea! And this is because the little knowledge they have of it has been overstretched! The ignoramuses do not understand deeply the subject upon which they are pretending to be a scholar.

Being talkative, repetitive, obscure, confusing, contradictory or patronizing in speech is the hallmark of the ignoramuses.

Case in point: Most speeches of President Abraham Lincoln are rarely long. In fact, his world-famous Gettysburg Address and Emancipation Proclamation are only 272^[1] and 719^[2] words long respectively. Yet, they are considered one of the clearest exposition of their respective subject matters till today. They are both delivered in the 1860s.

 2. True Scholars Can Make Complex Concepts Seem Simple

You will appreciate true scholarliness if you are ever required to learn quantum physics. It is regarded as one of the most difficult fields in physics.

Yet, as difficult as it is for most people (especially laymen) to understand the processes in quantum physics,  true scholars of this field can make it seems like A, B, C.

Personally, I have been able to compare amateur publications discussing quantum physics (mainly from the Physics students editorial board in my university) with what is obtainable in standard textbooks written by masters in that field (I read an excerpt of Feynmann’s) and I found a wide gulf of difference between the way the same idea is communicated by each group!

While the one written by students felt labored and strained, the excerpts I have read from the scholarly textbooks on the subject were smooth and “knotless.”

What I discovered is that true scholars of most fields are usually able to simplify complex concepts for their audience. However, the ignoramuses pretending to be scholars usually hide under verbosity and excessive use of technical terms to mask their ignorance of the concept itself.  I often observe this on radio shows that feature traveling salesmen of alternative therapy drugs; lacking formal training in medicine, the salesman usually wanted to sound like respectable medical doctors by peppering their speech with inappropriate medical terms at best. They end up sounding ridiculous.

Case in point: Richard Feynman (For Quantum Physics), Stephen Hawkings (For Astrophysics) and Carl Sagan (for Astronomy) are great popularisers of science. All three of them were able to popularise their respective field of study and make its knowledge available to the layman with their superb abilities to simplify the complex concepts within their respective field of study. They are legendary in this area.

3. People Love to Hear Them Speak

The two earlier points would justify why people love to hear scholars speak (They Speak Little but Make a Lot of Sense; They Make Complex Concepts Seem Simple).

All the reasons why people may flock to hear experts speak are many, but an important one among them is trust. Once an expert (a scientist perhaps) has established a reputation as a competent authority in his field of study, it is only a matter of time before their speech sessions start drawing crowds.

Often, before a scholar reaches this level, they may have published popular and/or respected publications in their respective fields.

Case in point: Michael Faraday Christmas speeches during his lifetime used to draw an enormous crowd. This wasn’t just sudden. Faraday had priorly published revolutionary papers on the nature of electricity and magnetism.

A similar story is that of Albert Einstein, who rose to worldwide fame after publishing his ideas on relativity. He made speeches to rapturous audiences all around the world.

Frederick Douglass was not an academic scholar, but his autobiography detailing his background as a slave made him a de facto authority on slave life in the antebellum United States. A lot of people usually flock to hear him speak.

4. They Are Meticulous

While being meticulous is not a universal quality for scholars, most of them are usually so.

Most scholars are objective in their thinking and expositions; being objective requires working with cold facts; sifting facts from non-facts requires meticulousness, so it’s no surprise scholars learn to be meticulous in their attention to everything – in their scholarly pursuit, and even in their personal life.

By contrast, crooks pretending to be scholars tend to be careless with facts, they often can’t separate fact from non-facts. In fact, many of them embrace non-facts to gain mob acceptance for whatever idea or objects they are promoting. They are the typical creator and peddler of conspiracy theories!

A real scholar is usually ready to dump any idea if it gets overthrown by a superior idea that is backed by observable facts. This is not so with crooks pretending to be scholars. They will stick to, and promote any idea so long as it in alignment with their personal interests.

Case in point: Nikola Tesla meticulousness in his scientific pursuits and private life is legendary. Some have even post-humously diagnosed him with obsessive compulsive disorder.

Note that Nikola Tesla is one of history’s greatest authority on electromagnetism, and to some extent, radio waves.

5. They Mind the Minutest details          

Whatever real scholars create, it is usually rich in details. This is not so with pretenders to scholarship, who would rather generalize than make separate distinction between elements that make up whatever they create.

Real scholars pay attention to minute details that constitute the whole. Crooks and the ignoramuses just consider the whole, not the parts that make up the whole – this is how their minds work.

Thus, in works by experts, you often find almost all questions answered. In works of novices by contrast, everything is often lumped together to make a hasty point. It often lack any precision, scientific or artistic merit.

Case in point: Rembrandt and Michaelangelo are renowned for the level of details in their artistic works. For both of them, the level of detailing can be extremely high. It’s no surprise both of them are still considered two of the greatest artists that ever lived.

6. Scholars Are Humble

Admittedly, humility is not a common denominator for all scholars. But it has been a quality that has differentiated quality scholars from pseudo-scholars for a long time.

Still, not all “quality” scholars are humble, and not all pseudo-scholars are arrogant. But humility in a scholar is among many signs of authentic scholarship. It is only found in scholars who have seen the limitless bound to knowledge and who recognize they know little out of all there is to know, even despite their prevailing erudition.

For crooks though, their own humility is fake and often exaggerated, and is designed to create a false image for themselves.

The humility of authentic scholars oozes easily from their manner and talks and is natural to their ways. For the pretenders to scholarship though, their humility is only skin deep and is acted, like from a script. When a true scholar talks or write, you will be able to read their humility between the lines, for the crooks though, the humility is only in the prologue and epilogue.

Case in point: The man who solved the Poincare Conjecture, Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman, posted his proof for the almost 100 year old mathematical problem on a public archive (one would expect a formal peer-reviewed journal) and disappear from public attention thereafter. The proof excited and satisfied the scientific world. However, Perelman has expressed a preference not to be disturbed and has declined interviews from journalists afterward. Considering that this mathematical problem is almost 100 years old and is attached with a 1 million dollar prize, the response of Perelman shocked many when he simply stated he was not interested “in money or fame” and he doesn’t “want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.” ^[3]

7. They Can Be Harsh While Guarding The Truth

Authentic scholars don’t tolerate nonsense. They even get more intolerant when balderdash wants to prevail over the truth. History is full of scientists fighting against pseudoscience and its scholars, and scholars of religion fighting against unorthodoxy!

True scholars value knowledge and do everything to guard it against corruption. These true scholars knows what goes into learning, and into creating new knowledge, and so are ready to fight tooth and nail to roll back any potential blemish on what they are guarding (purity of knowledge). It’s no surprise the academic community usually come down hard on any academician that publish studies built on faulty methodology or plagiarism. They value the truth they are guarding and will exert all efforts to safeguard it against corruption.

Probably no group of scholars are more conscious of safeguarding their cannon against corruption than Muslim scholars of hadith (traditions) and Qur’an. Many famous muhaddith (Traditionalists) were known to have memorized hundreds of thousands of Traditions along with their chains of transmission and the biographies of their transmitters. They did this to ensure the traditions they use to pass religious rulings are authentic and have not been corrupted by any known or unknown transmitter.

Case in point: Ibn Taymiyyah was a famous scholar of Islam who rose when Islam have spread beyond Arabia and have been adopted by non-arab peoples, including Mongols. These new converts to Islam brought many of their former pagan practice into their new religion of Islam. Ibn Taymiyyah strenuously rejected all anti-islamic practices gradually creeping into the religion, even up to the point of standing up to the ruler and being imprisoned.

8. They Antagonise With Knowledge, Not Emotions        

All true scholars have this quality. They push their knowledge forward to antagonise their enemies, rather than using emotions.

Pretenders to scholarship on the other hand are fond of using emotions to settle intellectual disputes with their enemies.

Case in point: The enemies of the medieval scholar of Islam, Ibn Taymiyyah, find him impossible to defeat because he is more knowledgeable than all of them. This was a sore point for his enemies, who have realized that they will have to defeat his knowledge first before they can defeat his message. They found this impossible. Ibn Taymiyyah’s message later resonate with the Muslim world because it was based on facts and not emotions.

9. They Are Calm

Calmness is a feature of true scholars. Although a lack of it doesn’t belie anybody’s scholarship.

What I have observed is that calmness naturally grow in people of great erudition. In fact, knowledge seems to instill calmness in people, even in non-scholars.

The more we know, the more we are surer of our beliefs and deeds, and the more unruffled we are by the vicissitudes of life.

Pretenders to scholarship, on the other hand, are usually the opposite of calmness. They may be unnecessarily loud and sentimental, and more eager to appeal to the interest of their admirers rather than being true proponents of what is correct and right.

Case in point: Neil Degrasse Tyson is one of the foremost scholars of astrophysics in the world. I always love the way he calmly tackles issues. When President Trump announces the formation of the US Space Force, a lot of outcries was raised by pseudo-scholars and conspiracy theorists to oppose it. When Mr Tyson was invited on TV to analyze the President’s decision, he calmly explained the rationale and the advantage of having such a force. The calmness in him was in stark contrast to responses by social media pseudo-scholars and hasty bloggers. He won hearts with his calmness, including mine.

10. They Always Want To Learn More

Scholarly people are never satiated with knowledge. They always want to learn more. As for pretenders to scholarship, they stop learning where it pleases them, but assume they have known everything in the world, and act according to that belief. They are the travesty of scholarship!

Case in point: It is you. Your patience to read this article to the end shows you are a proper 21st century Infovore. It shows you are willing to learn more and add to your knowledge, and you are highly interested in knowing how to tell a scholar apart from a fool. We hope you find the article beneficial. Check on us for more like this and thank you for reading!

Reference:

1. The Gettysburg Address – https://www.google.com/url?q=http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/gettysburg/good_cause/transcript.htm&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwj-nojt3L7jAhVOYVAKHdTcDPMQFnoECAsQAg&usg=AOvVaw1c_VBgfPoy_ERiyCPlrcGV (Retrieved 18-7-2019)

2. 719 Words That Changed History –

719 Words That Changed History: The Emancipation Proclamation

(Retrieved 18-7-2019)

3. Grigori Perelman – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman (Retrieved 18-7-2019)