“That means all a non-expert needs to do is look at the data on expert opinion and if there’s no strong majority agreement, they should feel pretty comfortable ignoring the experts when they feel it’s necessary to do so.”
If experts are divided on a yes-no question, you may have a sizable chance of being right if you go with the minority view. But that does not mean that the strategy of going with your personal judgment will outperform the strategy of going with modal or plurality expert opinion (or systematically transformed opinion).
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 means all a non-expert needs to do is look at the data on expert opinion and if there’s no strong majority agreement, they should feel pretty comfortable ignoring the experts when they feel it’s necessary to do so.”
If experts are divided on a yes-no question, you may have a sizable chance of being right if you go with the minority view. But that does not mean that the strategy of going with your personal judgment will outperform the strategy of going with modal or plurality expert opinion (or systematically transformed opinion).
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?”