So, one more litany, hopefully someone else finds it as useful.
It's an understatement that humility is not a common virtue in online discussions, even, or especially when it's most needed.
I'll start with my own recent example. I thought up a clear and obvious objection to one of the assertions in Eliezer's critique of the FAI effort compared with the Pascal's Wager and started writing a witty reply. ...And then I stopped. In large part because I had just gone through the same situation, but on the other side, dealing with some of the comments to my post about time-turners and General Relativity by those who know next to nothing about General Relativity. It was irritating, yet here I was, falling into the same trap. And not for the first time, far from it. The following is the resulting thought process, distilled to one paragraph.
I have not spent 10,000+ hours thinking about this topic in a professional, all-out, do-the-impossible way. I probably have not spent even one hour seriously thinking about it. I probably do not have the prerequisites required to do so. I probably don't even know what prerequisites are required to think about this topic productively. In short, there are almost guaranteed to exist unknown unknowns which are bound to trip up a novice like me. The odds that I find a clever argument contradicting someone who works on this topic for a living, just by reading one or two popular explanations of it are minuscule. So if I think up such an argument, the odds of it being both new and correct are heavily stacked against me. It is true that they are non-zero, and there are popular examples of non-experts finding flaws in an established theory where there is a consensus among the experts. Some of them might even be true stories. No, Einstein was not one of these non-experts, and even if he were, I am not Einstein.
And so on. So I came up with the following, rather unpolished mantra:
If I think up what seems like an obvious objection, I will resist assuming that I have found a Weaksauce Weakness in the experts' logic. Instead I may ask politely whether my argument is a valid one, and if not, where the flaw lies.
If you think it useful, feel free to improve the wording.
Next up: The Litany of the Déformation professionnelle.
One of the most robust findings in studies of expertise is that unless the expertise is in callibration itself (eg. gambling) experts are systematically overconfident. In particular they overestimate the relevence of their expertise to things that are not central to their actual professional or academic practice. For example a neurobiologist with no training in information theory may tend to place inordinate trust in their intuition "it is theoretically impossible to recover information from that brain" without realising how different that question is from the fact that they actually do know, "it isn't possible for us to repair that brain to functioning condition in place".
In the case of the time turner thread that motivates this post we have an example of believing that some knowledge of General Relativity is sufficient to make one an expert at solving engineering problems in a counterfactual physical reality rather than merely being necessary. The most insightful comments in that thread don't do anything to challenge the impossibility of mass altering time turner implications. In fact, the point is taken for granted as trivially true and they put the actual (im)practical implications thereof into perspective.
This.
Expertise is not integrated instantaneously across fields, and to the extent one field relies on another, it can be making basic mistakes corrected elsewhere decades ago.