I've gotten the impression that many people are proud of their ignorance because they feel that the folks who know a field better can't see the forest from the trees and only use their knowledge to construct elaborate rationalizations. It's somewhat similar to the way that an atheist might say "no, I don't know anything about theology's answer to the Problem of Evil and I don't care, they're wrong regardless".
(I must admit that I've sometimes thought like this myself, about some topics.)
It's equivalent to the hypothesis that seeing more evidence is often bad, which is a theme emphasized on LW and in some Abrahamic sects (but only the LW/religious devout take it particularly seriously). Does it show up among normal people as well? In my experience normal people tend to assume that if someone's studied something for a while then that person's opinions are probably worth taking seriously.
Sometimes I run into people that have rather strong opinions on some topic, and it turns out that they are basing them on quite shallow and biased information. They are aware that their knowledge is quite limited compared to mine, and they admit that they don't want to put in the effort needed to learn enough to level the field.
But that's not really a problem. What is bothering me is that, sometimes, that declaration of ignorance is expressed with some kind of pride.
This behaviour is noticeable on other levels too, in politics or in the sciences-humanities culture clash.
I came up with several hypotheses which might account for this:
Do you notice this behaviour too? What do you think causes it?
EDIT: formatting, style, grammar