In some cases actually yes. At best listening to the “experts” will give you a false sense of certainty, at worst the “experts” really are being worse than random. At least the laymen may have local knowledge “experts” lack.
Edit: Also it depends on the layman, as you yourself observed here.
In some cases actually yes. [laymen will have more accurate beliefs than experts]
In some cases, maybe, but you have not named names so I remain skeptical, and in some of the cases I would expect you or people like you to produce, I would still disagree.
I will give a specific example which I hope establishes the general form of my argument on this topic (that however warped or incorrect one believes the expert or academic consensus or elites to be, that the general layman beliefs in the general population are even more outdated, partial, warped, or ill-informed; the average person is… well, average, and one would think things like Snopes.com would caution against too high a belief in the accuracy of hoi polloi’s beliefs), and if I’m lucky it’ll both be a convincing demonstration and also one of the examples you would have picked if pressed for specifics.
Take IQ; my impression is that you would cheerfully cite IQ-related topics as a great example of how the experts are systematically worse than random, but my own impression is actually the opposite: laymen are more likely to get IQ completely wrong by claiming it is meaningless or arbitrary or irrelevant or less important than ‘emotional intelligence’ or something, even though these are all things that the experts accept, even the hardcare environmentalist types. An example of this was the Nisbett et al consensus summary published a year or two ago, or Gottfredson’s consensus summary published in response to The Bell Curve back in the ’90s; in between the endless material on possible environmental interventions, misleadingly optimistic discussion of dual n-back, downplaying of genetics results etc, you will find that they accept all the basic facts of IQ that most laymen reject like it being repeatable, general, highly predictive of all sorts of life outcomes, not generally trainable!
Specifically, look at the Bell Curve response, “Mainstream Science on Intelligence”. Here is what Gottfredson had to say about public beliefs on IQ, discussing what motivated her to organize it:
The controversy over The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) was at its height in the fall of 1994. Many critics attacked the book for supposedly relying on outdated, pseudoscientific notions of intelligence. In criticizing the book, many critics promoted false and highly misleading views about the scientific study of intelligence. Public miseducation on the topic is hardly new (Snyderman & Rothman, 1987, 1988), but never before had it been so angry and extreme...It is obviously not the case that there is no disagreement about these important issues or that scientific truth is a matter of majority rule. A significant minority of the experts who were contacted disagreed in part or in whole with the statement, and many of the signers would have written the statement somewhat differently. Rather, the lesson here is that what have often been caricatured in the public press as discredited, fringe ideas actually represent the solid scientific center in the serious study of intelligence. As Snyderman and Rothman’s (1988) survey of IQ experts and journalists revealed, the media, among others, have been turning the truth on its head.
Or better yet, look at the points enumerated in the statement and try to imagine how shocked most people would be to learn that there is no serious controversy about the claims made and that their lay beliefs are considered, by psychologists and psychometricians and social scientists, to be about as scientific as Creationism:
Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings-“catching on,” “ making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do.
‘Sure, professor! But I knew a kid who was great at math and had no idea what was going on. You keep thinking that.’ ‘But but but—“multiple intelligences”!’
2. Intelligence, so defined, can be measured, and intelligence tests measure it well. They are among the most accurate (in technical terms, reliable and valid) of all psychological tests and assessments.
“My niece spent all summer cramming for the SAT and her score went up 200 points! Tests are tests, anyone, like an Asian, can just grind to improve their scores. You must be very naive to think such things.”
3. While there are different types of intelligence tests, they all measure the same intelligence. Some use words or numbers and require specific cultural knowledge (like vocabulary). Other do not, and instead use shapes or designs and require knowledge of only simple, universal concepts (many/few, open/closed, up/down).
“Everyone knows tests are biased against minorities, like that IQ test that asked about yachts! Besides, all they measure is book learning.”
4. …Few are either very bright or very dull: About 3% of Americans score above IQ 130 (often considered the threshold for “giftedness”), with about the same percentage below IQ 70 (IQ 70-75 often being considered the threshold for mental retardation).
“Everyone I know seems pretty smart, and are you seriously claiming at least 3% of the population is retarded? I don’t know any retards at all!”
5. Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S. Rather, IQ scores predict equally accurately for all such Americans, regardless of race and social class. Individuals who do not understand English well can be given either a nonverbal test or one in their native language.
‘You say they’re not biased, but they obviously are, and besides, look at Africa—the IQ tests say the average IQ there is like in the 70s, which you just said implied that they were retarded. How can an entire continent be retarded? You are a bad person who should feel bad, and your beliefs obviously wrong.’
6. The brain processes underlying intelligence are still little understood. Current research looks, for example, at speed of neural transmission, glucose (energy) uptake, and electrical activity of the brain.
‘It doesn’t seem that hard to me. Everyone knows the average person uses only 5% of their brain, so to get smarter you just need to use more of it!’
I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. (All of these are real arguments I have seen in the past either online or in person, if you were wondering.) If you go point by point, this rebuttal is itself pretty shocking stuff; it’s extremely shocking for any liberals, of course, (who are a nontrivial fraction of that population which we call “laymen”) but given the anti-intellectualism rampant in conservative circles outside the marginal communities interested in IQ like HBD, I believe the claims will also come as a shock there too. What Paul Krugman once said of intellectuals can apply to laymen more so, since they aren’t acquainted with the topic in any detail:
There is nothing that plays worse in our culture than seeming to be the stodgy defender of old ideas, no matter how true those ideas may be. Luckily, at this point the orthodoxy of the academic economists is very much a minority position among intellectuals in general; one can seem to be a courageous maverick, boldly challenging the powers that be, by reciting the contents of a standard textbook. It has worked for me!
That depends on the field in question. There are a lot of fields full of “experts” whose predictions are notoriously unreliable.
As opposed to the laymen in those fields?
In some cases actually yes. At best listening to the “experts” will give you a false sense of certainty, at worst the “experts” really are being worse than random. At least the laymen may have local knowledge “experts” lack.
Edit: Also it depends on the layman, as you yourself observed here.
In some cases, maybe, but you have not named names so I remain skeptical, and in some of the cases I would expect you or people like you to produce, I would still disagree.
I will give a specific example which I hope establishes the general form of my argument on this topic (that however warped or incorrect one believes the expert or academic consensus or elites to be, that the general layman beliefs in the general population are even more outdated, partial, warped, or ill-informed; the average person is… well, average, and one would think things like Snopes.com would caution against too high a belief in the accuracy of hoi polloi’s beliefs), and if I’m lucky it’ll both be a convincing demonstration and also one of the examples you would have picked if pressed for specifics.
Take IQ; my impression is that you would cheerfully cite IQ-related topics as a great example of how the experts are systematically worse than random, but my own impression is actually the opposite: laymen are more likely to get IQ completely wrong by claiming it is meaningless or arbitrary or irrelevant or less important than ‘emotional intelligence’ or something, even though these are all things that the experts accept, even the hardcare environmentalist types. An example of this was the Nisbett et al consensus summary published a year or two ago, or Gottfredson’s consensus summary published in response to The Bell Curve back in the ’90s; in between the endless material on possible environmental interventions, misleadingly optimistic discussion of dual n-back, downplaying of genetics results etc, you will find that they accept all the basic facts of IQ that most laymen reject like it being repeatable, general, highly predictive of all sorts of life outcomes, not generally trainable!
Specifically, look at the Bell Curve response, “Mainstream Science on Intelligence”. Here is what Gottfredson had to say about public beliefs on IQ, discussing what motivated her to organize it:
Or better yet, look at the points enumerated in the statement and try to imagine how shocked most people would be to learn that there is no serious controversy about the claims made and that their lay beliefs are considered, by psychologists and psychometricians and social scientists, to be about as scientific as Creationism:
‘Sure, professor! But I knew a kid who was great at math and had no idea what was going on. You keep thinking that.’ ‘But but but—“multiple intelligences”!’
“My niece spent all summer cramming for the SAT and her score went up 200 points! Tests are tests, anyone, like an Asian, can just grind to improve their scores. You must be very naive to think such things.”
“Everyone knows tests are biased against minorities, like that IQ test that asked about yachts! Besides, all they measure is book learning.”
“Everyone I know seems pretty smart, and are you seriously claiming at least 3% of the population is retarded? I don’t know any retards at all!”
‘You say they’re not biased, but they obviously are, and besides, look at Africa—the IQ tests say the average IQ there is like in the 70s, which you just said implied that they were retarded. How can an entire continent be retarded? You are a bad person who should feel bad, and your beliefs obviously wrong.’
‘It doesn’t seem that hard to me. Everyone knows the average person uses only 5% of their brain, so to get smarter you just need to use more of it!’
I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. (All of these are real arguments I have seen in the past either online or in person, if you were wondering.) If you go point by point, this rebuttal is itself pretty shocking stuff; it’s extremely shocking for any liberals, of course, (who are a nontrivial fraction of that population which we call “laymen”) but given the anti-intellectualism rampant in conservative circles outside the marginal communities interested in IQ like HBD, I believe the claims will also come as a shock there too. What Paul Krugman once said of intellectuals can apply to laymen more so, since they aren’t acquainted with the topic in any detail:
An example of the nearly universal belief in the general public, from the GSS: http://humanvarieties.org/?attachment_id=1691