It’s simplistic to divide possible strategies into “go with your personal judgment” and “go with modal / plurality expert opinion.” You can, for example, mostly do the latter except on issues you’ve studied carefully and seem to have strong reasons for embracing the minority view on. There’s also different degrees of certainty you can have. Often, I think the right think to do is to weakly incline towards the modal / plurality view.
I’d be even less inclined to go with personal judgment than you stake out here.
Even if I study something carefully and evenhandedly and am generally smart, you shouldn’t take my view on subject X to be on epistemic par with the central-measure expert on subject X (who is also generally smart but will have studied a subject a lot more than me). If there was a weak plurarity of experts on one view, but I was dissenting, you would still think the best bet would be to go with the plurality of experts, despite my carefully studied dissent.
So what changes, taking the outside view, if the well-studied amateur dissent happens to be your own?
It’s simplistic to divide possible strategies into “go with your personal judgment” and “go with modal / plurality expert opinion.” You can, for example, mostly do the latter except on issues you’ve studied carefully and seem to have strong reasons for embracing the minority view on. There’s also different degrees of certainty you can have. Often, I think the right think to do is to weakly incline towards the modal / plurality view.
I’d be even less inclined to go with personal judgment than you stake out here.
Even if I study something carefully and evenhandedly and am generally smart, you shouldn’t take my view on subject X to be on epistemic par with the central-measure expert on subject X (who is also generally smart but will have studied a subject a lot more than me). If there was a weak plurarity of experts on one view, but I was dissenting, you would still think the best bet would be to go with the plurality of experts, despite my carefully studied dissent.
So what changes, taking the outside view, if the well-studied amateur dissent happens to be your own?
That sounds suspiciously like “So who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?”