[kafkaesque]

This is a great point. When I was studying philosophy in university, an extremely common roadblock to moving the discussion forward was that people (professor and students) were philosophizing about specialized topics that they themselves were not well informed on or held no expertise in. I think this is the problem with philosophy adding practical value to people's lives in general. We seek answers to questions that require specialized knowledge in areas in which we don't have sufficient knowledge in.

The discussions that were more fruitful were the ones where the professor asked if there was someone who majored in that specific subject in the class, and that person would be used as an expert to speak to whatever thing we were questioning, and since it was philosophy, we would question everything.

[nonameiguess]

Stephen Hawking actually wrote about the importance of physicists finding a theory of everything so physics could stop moving so quickly. Our scientific understanding of the universe has advanced and changed so rapidly since the early 20th century that no layperson without extremely specialized training has any hope of grasping the current state of it. This includes philosophers and public intellectuals, but even just average people on Hacker News who have no idea how wrong they are just because they aren't keeping up with new developments. If we could slow down the rate at which new developments happen, maybe there'd be some hope of regular people catching up to it. We could learn a canonical, comprehensive model in primary school, and what we learned would still be current and accurate decades later when we're armchairing all of the narrow technical experts in our blogs and discussion boards.

This isn't even just about laypeople versus physicists. Lee Smolin has written about string theory becoming a crisis in physics because 1) it takes so long to understand any of it mathematically, that by the time anyone has done so, sunk cost fallacy precludes them from ever giving it up, and 2) other physicists responsible for peer review also don't understand the math, but don't want to admit it, so they'll let near anything through to publication even when it's probably nonsense.