I wish more people understood this - that most (all?) people are missing the required years of knowledge and understanding of nuance to be able to judge an idea

I wish more people understood this - that most (all?) people are missing the required years of knowledge and understanding of nuance to be able to judge an idea "on its merits", particularly scientific/technological ideas. Trusting expert consensus - while certainly not perfect - is the only logical (and relatively safe) way forward. What's of even more concern to me is the prevalence of this in the HN crowd - ostensibly a bunch of very intelligent people with expert knowledge in their respective fields and who thus understand what goes into actually understanding something...