My seatbelt rule for judgment
I see your Chesterton's fence and raise a Gell-Mann amnesia. Yes, the phenomenon in the article is real, but the opposite is also true. Many times I have seen something, thought it is silly, wrong, or could be done better, but I reserved judgement because I didn't know much about the subject. And then in the end, I was right.Be it some technical choice at work that had obvious flaws. Or when we were renovating our house and as a layperson I noticed a serious problem the experts didn't see. Or when I was reading about poststructuralism, or critical theory at university. I had a feeling it was just a lot of word games around a couple important ideas - then I put in the work and read books and went to courses, and yupp, that was basically true.Looking at it from the other side, as an expert on some topics, I know there are a lot of things we do that are not justified by the "subject matter" but we just do them because we have always been doing them, or because a pointy haired boss decided so. Or we have operational blindness and can't notice the flaws anymore.