In 2014, The Washington Post polled Americans on whether the United States should resort to military intervention in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The United States and Russia are former Cold War rivals, each possessing hundreds of nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles. A military conflict in central Europe, right on the border of Russia, threatens to trigger World War III, with catastrophic consequences. But only one in six Americans - and one in four college graduates - could locate Ukraine on a world map. Ukraine is the largest country located entirely in Europe, but the average respondent still lives a full 1,800 miles away. It's easy to fail the map test. More troubling is the fact that this lack of knowledge did not prevent the respondents from expressing some rather pointed opinions on the subject. I'll even put it more precisely: not only did the public express strong opinions, but the degree of support for military intervention in Ukraine was directly proportional to the respondents' level of ignorance about it. In other words, people who believed that Ukraine was in Latin America or Australia were most enthusiastic about the use of military force by the United States. T. Nicholls, "The Death of Expertise."

In 2014, The Washington Post polled Americans on whether the United States should resort to military intervention in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The United States and Russia are former Cold War rivals, each possessing hundreds of nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles. A military conflict in central Europe, right on the border of Russia, threatens to trigger World War III, with catastrophic consequences. But only one in six Americans - and one in four college graduates - could locate Ukraine on a world map. Ukraine is the largest country located entirely in Europe, but the average respondent still lives a full 1,800 miles away. It's easy to fail the map test. More troubling is the fact that this lack of knowledge did not prevent the respondents from expressing some rather pointed opinions on the subject. I'll even put it more precisely: not only did the public express strong opinions, but the degree of support for military intervention in Ukraine was directly proportional to the respondents' level of ignorance about it. In other words, people who believed that Ukraine was in Latin America or Australia were most enthusiastic about the use of military force by the United States. T. Nicholls, "The Death of Expertise."