> Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a situation from first principles and make money off the 'experts', especially in the stock market.
> Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. This whole website is supposed to be a testament to that!
Even granting that these statements are accurate (which plenty of sibling comments are willing to dispute) I don't think these statements suggest that "Stay in your lane" is bad advice.
Why? It's a question of distributions. For any given task/field there are a lot more laypeople than experts. Consider the following simple model where we quantify some arbitrary ability score. If lay people's scores are normally distributed with a low mean and expert's scores are normally distributed with a high mean we can still see the best lay person beating all the experts simply because there are so many more of them.
"You don't know more than the 'experts'" is good advice for almost everyone even if there are counterexamples.
There's a separate problem I think you're trying to point at where in some fields credentials don't correlate as well with expertise as one would hope. But even if credentials are an imperfect proxy for expertise, they are probably better than just trusting your gut in the absence of any expertise of your own.
> Pretty much the only field which hasn't been embarrassed by an outsider of late is physics, [...]
This seems an idiosyncratic take on the current state of science to me. I've seen plenty of examples of a field being embarrassed by insiders (e.g. the replication crisis of psychology) or seen great results from experts who were not particularly recognized by the system as set up (see Yitang Zhang's work on the twin prime conjecture). What I don't think I've seen is a field's dogma being overthrown by a complete outsider. For the sake of my own calibration, I'd welcome any examples of this.
> Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. This whole website is supposed to be a testament to that!
Even granting that these statements are accurate (which plenty of sibling comments are willing to dispute) I don't think these statements suggest that "Stay in your lane" is bad advice.
Why? It's a question of distributions. For any given task/field there are a lot more laypeople than experts. Consider the following simple model where we quantify some arbitrary ability score. If lay people's scores are normally distributed with a low mean and expert's scores are normally distributed with a high mean we can still see the best lay person beating all the experts simply because there are so many more of them.
"You don't know more than the 'experts'" is good advice for almost everyone even if there are counterexamples.
There's a separate problem I think you're trying to point at where in some fields credentials don't correlate as well with expertise as one would hope. But even if credentials are an imperfect proxy for expertise, they are probably better than just trusting your gut in the absence of any expertise of your own.
> Pretty much the only field which hasn't been embarrassed by an outsider of late is physics, [...]
This seems an idiosyncratic take on the current state of science to me. I've seen plenty of examples of a field being embarrassed by insiders (e.g. the replication crisis of psychology) or seen great results from experts who were not particularly recognized by the system as set up (see Yitang Zhang's work on the twin prime conjecture). What I don't think I've seen is a field's dogma being overthrown by a complete outsider. For the sake of my own calibration, I'd welcome any examples of this.