On the other hand, why is it a good idea to simply accept what "experts" have to say at face value? Experts were wrong about the housing market, they were wrong about the 2-16 election, they were wrong about the iraq war.
Well-educated people can be wrong, bigoted, and even evil. They can take bad data and apply solid logic to it and get horribly wrong results. Obviously we cannot simply accept the argument that something is true because a smarter person says it when we have a choice.
Learned people recognize that tests of truth exist -- like results. Many of us aware of the now-discredited idea that poverty alone created the climate for crime. It fit the idea that a civilized society rightly sought to alleviate poverty in part because poor people were dangerous and amoral and that as living standards improved, so would the behavior of poor people. Truth be told, people started finding that crime in 'bad neighborhoods' was heavily concentrated in the activities of a few people who did almost all the crime. Attitudes toward offenders changed, and the claim that an offender was a criminal because he was oppressed was no longer accepted.
People aren't crooks because they are oppressed; more likely they are sociopaths who can operate in all social classes, whether destitute people or aristocrats.
Learned people have created tools for determining the truth -- like statistical analysis of data. Maybe if large numbers of car thefts occur around the corner of 8th Street and Maple Avenue, then the problem is that the car thieves hang out around 8th Street and Maple Avenue. But those tools require some learning to use. Gut feelings might be right, but those are best turned into hypotheses that allow conclusions.
Of course nobody can have a model to explain human fickleness. Maybe it is best taht we have no such model.
...Oh, by the way -- the projections that Donald Trump would be a horrible President if elected have proved true.
So to whom do you turn? Folk wisdom?
Knowledge is hardly stagnant. There have been plenty of studies, often quite sophisticated, that have proved terribly wrong -- like astrology, phrenology, and eugenics. Consider astrology: much of the effort in mathematics in antiquity went into the effort of astrologers to make more precise predictions about events. But knowledge advances, and ignorance (and worse, superstition) gets increasingly irrelevant and unreliable.
One thing is certain: I will take science over superstition any day.
