Moderates, who are invested in the status quo, tend to simply not notice problems, and to dismiss radicals for not having well-thought-out solutions. But it’s better to know that a problem exists than to not know – regardless of whether you have a solution at the moment.

This is a bit of a caricature of moderates - moderates who care about the issues may also be more aware of the details of the system, and of how any quick fix somewhere may screw things up somewhere else.

In my eyes, the distinction between experts and non-experts of a particular system (law, the economy, diplomacy, science, education, culture ...) is more important than the distinction between critics and those that accept the status quo. For pretty much any system, chances are there'll be people who think it's fine as it is, and people who think it should change. If all the experts are on one side, chances are it's right. If there are experts on both sides, [i]then[/i] it's them you should be listening to them.

Here I mean "experts" in a broad sense, of those who know about a system, about why it's like it is, about what changes have been tried and which ones would have which consequences. A problem is that often some well-respected "experts" know little about the issue (I just read an article by a French journalist writing about the singularuty, and some people who do know a lot about the system may not be seen as experts by the public. I don't think there's a better word though :P

So, if a "moderate" dismisses a radical who's just saying "something's wrong", it may not only be because he doesn't notice problems - it may be because he considers that the current situation is a carefully balanced compromise, and a feature of most successful compromises is "everybody is unsatisfied, but by the same amount". So someone merely saying he's unsatisfied is normal and expected.

To take a simplified example, imagine a country where people are taxed X%, and the money is directly used for various government services - roads, bridges, schools and hospitals. X was decided by bureaucrats after making a lot of simulations and surveys about what would work best. Of course, there will be people saying the taxes are too high, and people complaining that there aren't enough government services, but that is to be expected, and adds zero new information. What [i]does[/i] add information is understanding the simulations of the bureaucrats, and either finding improvements or finding that some bureaucrats falsified the calculations to get more services near where they lived.