I believe you, but from the outside, from the public's perspective it looks like the same thing. You've said as much yourself with your comparison. As a genera

I believe you, but from the outside, from the public's perspective it looks like the same thing. You've said as much yourself with your comparison. As a general heuristic, your interests are aligned with those of your community. Whether this is bad or good depends on context, usually depending on whether you've thought about the issue yourself from first principals and come to your own conclusion. Every field probably has wrongheaded ideas about something. In engineering this alignment may be mostly pragmatic e.g. what works, what doesn't, but in some industries e.g. Hollywood, the Media, anything social, there's a different sort of pragmatism where you're expected to believe in some general themes about the world that need have no basis in reality. Being up to date with these 'stories' e.g. what beliefs about transgender bathrooms a proper person should have, is basically a peacocks tail feathers. It's pointless but shows you're a member of the tribe. You're talking of informed opinion, but again, from the perspective of an outsider, this all looks like the same thing. The tribe can hang together either because it makes sense or because they punish those who are outliers.