I've pointed before to this very good review of Philip Tetlock's book, Expert Political Judgment. The review describes the results of Tetlock's experiments evaluating expert predictions in the field of international politics, where they did very poorly. On average the experts did about as well as random predictions and were badly outperformed by simple statistical extrapolations.

Even after going over the many ways the experts failed in detail, and even though the review is titled "Everybody’s An Expert", the reviewer concludes, "But the best lesson of Tetlock’s book may be the one that he seems most reluctant to draw: Think for yourself."

Does that make sense, though? Think for yourself? If you've just read an entire book describing how poorly people did who thought for themselves and had a lot more knowledge than you do, is it really likely that you will do better to think for yourself? This advice looks like the same kind of flaw Eliezer describes here, the failure to generalize from knowledge of others' failures to appreciation of your own.