A view is gaining ground in public debates across many fields: “If you haven’t experienced it yourself, don’t talk about it.” At first glance, that sounds reasonable. After all, it is tiresome to listen to people prescribe solutions without ever engaging with practice or bearing the consequences of their advice.

Yet this reflex is quickly becoming something else: a shortcut that categorically excludes academics and other intellectuals, dismisses conclusions reached through careful reasoning as illegitimate from the outset, and recognizes no form of learning beyond trial and error. The debate shifts from substance to identity. Instead of assessing the validity of arguments, people judge the biography of the speaker. But knowledge does not come from a single source. Experience matters, yet experience alone is neither a license to be right nor a certificate of truth. Academic knowledge matters too, but an academic title does not automatically generate truth.

My point is not to belittle experience. The friction of operations, the weight of risk, and the psychology of uncertainty cannot be learned directly from the pages of a book. But experience has limits. Someone who has experienced one form of a phenomenon cannot thereby know all its forms. Experience is usually embedded in particular circumstances: its sample is narrow, it suffers from selection bias, and it is vulnerable to retrospective storytelling. Saying “I tried it, and it worked—or failed” often means that it worked or failed in my particular context. Treating experience as absolute therefore turns a local event into a supposed universal law. Social learning requires the opposite: testing individual stories against a plurality of cases.

This is where intellectual work becomes valuable: comparing cases, identifying mechanisms, and making explicit the conditions under which a result holds—when and where it applies. Good theory challenges romantic generalization. Good research calibrates individual experience.

Academia is hardly innocent in this regard, however. Some academics present their personal opinions as science and impose them on students or even society in a condescending manner. They make categorical judgments as though methods, evidence, and boundary conditions did not exist. By claiming to speak in the name of science, they treat objections to their views as illegitimate before they are even made. Such behavior deepens practitioners’ skepticism and fuels anti-intellectual resentment. Science is a method, not a title. And opinions, whoever holds them, are not automatically findings or knowledge.

The issue, then, is not a battle between experience and theory. It is the standard to which a claim must be held. Whoever makes a claim should state its basis, define its scope, explain its boundary conditions, and not conceal who will bear its costs. Experience protects theory from romanticism; theory protects experience from overgeneralization. When that balance is achieved, we need neither the crude exclusion of theory and thought nor arrogant attempts to dominate others in the name of science. Less sloganizing, more serious debate.