Well, they could be deranged.
My favorite Nietzsche quote:
“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
You sound like you're being careful, but just make sure you avoid falling into the belief that a layman can examine the evidence of a technical area and decide for himself. This is very common and is completely wrongheaded. A layman simply does not have the body of experience to correctly interpret evidence in technical fields consistently.
I've blogged about this danger a couple times, so here are some excerpts (they may seem a little disjointed as excerpts often do). Not trying to preach, just warn against something people may not have thought about before.
Well, first off the layman is NOT examining the evidence. Take medical research as an example. To look at the raw studies (just getting the data would be a lot of work) he would need a very good working knowledge of statistics to evaluate the results, a well refined understanding of research protocol, as well as a knowledge of the relevant medicine to judge the assumptions of the experimental study. A layman cannot possess this knowledge by definition. If he did, he'd be an expert. That means that a layman claiming to be judging the evidence is actually using other people's interpretations of that evidence. Once you're at that stage, who you choose to interpret facts for you becomes critically important. Depending on your level of knowledge, you may not have the skill set to even make that decision with any certainty and could get someone with an agenda or who is merely off base. They may leave out important facts or just be inaccurate. It is certainly true that minority opinions among a body of experts can prove ultimately correct (every successful theory started out that way), but the overwhelming majority of the time they won't. For a layman to think that he can spot those few times more accurately than the trained professionals who specialize in that field is absurd. It makes an arrogant assumption that the layman's largely uninformed opinion is more valuable, allowing him to dismiss the judgements of others more versed in the subject. You would essentially be arguing that peer review does not apply to your ideas. Since the number of those claiming to be experts in a field is typically large, a layman would most likely wind up shopping around until he found a specialist who supports his own pre-existing biases, even if they weren't especially credible.
What about the implications of all this? Does it mean that a layman is never really entitled to an opinion of his own about technical matters? I guess it depends how you define "technical". If you define it as a complex field that requires a lot of cumulative knowledge, then I guess I'd have to say "yes", laymen can never have a valid independent opinion. The key phrases I've used in this posting are "for himself", "of their own", and "independent". One option is to simply defer to the opinion of the trained community that studies that subject. You can have a very valid opinion as to the state of consensus (and there may not be a strong consensus) within that community, but that is something that's comparatively easy to evaluate. Alternately, the layman could undertake the study required to become an expert. That would give him an equal voice, however, not a definitive one.
If somehow the layman came up with what they believed were important new ideas and didn't want to take the time to become an expert, they could always share their ideas with an existing authority in that area and let them start the peer review process for them. Be wary of any who bypass peer review and market straight to the general public. That's never a good sign and even experts who do that are acting irresponsibly.
I heard an interview with a retired doctor who now runs a
medical fallacy tracking website who has many examples of laymen coming to the wrong conclusion trying to evaluate the evidence themselves. The right method is to find credible experts to evaluate evidence for you. This is why a consensus of trained professionals should carry weight. The lone decrier can be right, but almost always he isn't. With complex issues, the trend is that over time, the evidence grows stronger if there is a real phenomenon. Take ghosts as a counter example: more than 100 years of people looking and the state of the evidence is essentially unchanged. Finding one crank scientist who believes in them doesn't count for a whole lot.
Zeitgeist Movement: Thought provoking
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