Agreed. When the GP comment said

> they struggle plenty in their day-to-day lives that they have no bandwidth to form an opinion about or, heck, even _learn about_ such things

It reminded me of Chomsky's anecdote about listening to the radio and hearing random people calling into the station during a sports discussion program and arguing at length with paid experts, suggesting average people are perfectly capable of doing research and building nuanced opinions on complex topics, they just choose to do that for sports/cars/technology/consumption rather than politics. Or rather, are bombarded by marketing until they forget they can choose.

I don't know what Chomsky was listening too but IME talk back radio + sports is anything but nuanced and well reasoned, it's even more emotionally charged and driven by bias (particularly confirmation bias) than normal talk back. Blaming the coach even though there was a good performance with an ordinary team, blaming a key player for a loss because the screwed up at a key moment despite an overall great game, blaming a player for doing nothing despite drawing 2 defenders to let his team run riot, the complete inability to realize that bad games happen.

I'd rather read youtube comments than listen to sports talk back.

I think your observation actually strengthens the parent comment’s point that people are more capable than they realize in researching and holding opinions on the world. Political pundits you see on cable, for instance, have largely the same credibility as the rest of us. What makes them pundits is that they’re paid for their opinion.

Edit: rereading the comments I think you may not have been trying to be contrary at all—my apologies for implying you were.

I do think there's a difference between researching and holding an opinion and researching and holding an opinion that can be used to form accurate predictions about the future. I think that one of the things that's happening to us with social networks and such is that we're realizing that it is not always the case that more and freer information leads to better decisions. People have plenty of time and opportunity to do research now. They do not have the time and opportunity to learn to do good research.

I think in this case the point is that people are capable of doing research and knowing the facts, keeping up with an ever changing topic. Who's the coach, what are the key players, what happened at the last game, who's being transferred where, strengths and weaknesses of teams and individual players, etc.

It may very well be that the conclusions people reach starting from the facts are emotionally charged, but I'd say it's better than how it happens with politics at the moment: people start from ignorance or falsehoods, and then make emotionally charged conclusions based on that.