For instance, we can look at jury trials, and notice that they are notoriously wildly unreliable in practice. That suggests that, relative to the cognition of a median-ish human, there must exist situations in which one lawyer can point out the problem in another’s logic/evidence, and the the median-ish human will not be able verify it.
This is something of a tangent, but juries’ unreliability does not particularly suggest that conclusion to me. I immediately see three possible reasons for juries to be unreliable:
The courts may not reliably communicate to juries the criteria by which they are supposed to decide the case
The jurors may decide to ignore the official criteria and do something else instead
The jurors may know the official criteria and make a sincere attempt to follow them, but fail in some way
You’re supposing that the third reason dominates. I haven’t made a serious study of how juries work in practice, but my priors say the third reason is probably the least significant, so this is not very convincing to me.
(I also note that you’d need to claim that juries are inconsistent relative to the lawyers’ arguments, not merely inconsistent relative to the factual details of the case, and it’s not at all obvious to me that juries’ reputation for unreliability is actually controlled in that way.)
This is something of a tangent, but juries’ unreliability does not particularly suggest that conclusion to me. I immediately see three possible reasons for juries to be unreliable:
The courts may not reliably communicate to juries the criteria by which they are supposed to decide the case
The jurors may decide to ignore the official criteria and do something else instead
The jurors may know the official criteria and make a sincere attempt to follow them, but fail in some way
You’re supposing that the third reason dominates. I haven’t made a serious study of how juries work in practice, but my priors say the third reason is probably the least significant, so this is not very convincing to me.
(I also note that you’d need to claim that juries are inconsistent relative to the lawyers’ arguments, not merely inconsistent relative to the factual details of the case, and it’s not at all obvious to me that juries’ reputation for unreliability is actually controlled in that way.)