People who would never think they were capable of comment on, say, nuclear reactor design with an hours study never the less think they're qualified to talk about the health effects of xyz based on about as much.
Much as doctors, who know jack shit about statistical and causal inference, or risk analysis, consider themselves not only qualified to make claims in those domains, but consider their ill informed opinions the Word of God, which it is blasphemy to question.
Probably because it's so very very common and almost always utter bollocks.
I suggest that they're using a poor reference set.
There are plenty of people here who know much more than jack shit about statistical and causal inference, and those have usually been the grounds of the criticism here of the generally accepted medical analysis.
doctors, who know jack shit about statistical and causal inference
For example, what would be inappropriately off topic to post to LessWrong discussion about?
I couldn't find an answer in the FAQ. (Perhaps it'd be worth adding one.) The closest I could find was this:
However "rationality" can be interpreted broadly enough that rational discussion of anything would count, and my experience reading LW is compatible with this interpretation being applied by posters. Indeed my experience seems to suggest that practically everything is on topic; political discussion of certain sorts is frowned upon, but not due to being off topic. People often post about things far removed from the topics of interest. And some of these topics are very broad: it seems that a lot of material about self-improvement is acceptable, for instance.