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Kaj_Sotala comments on What do professional philosophers believe, and why? - Less Wrong Discussion
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We actually see this across a lot of fields besides philosophy, and it's not LW-specific. For example, simply adding up a few simple scores does better than experts at predicting job performance.
It's been shown that expertise is only valuable in fields where there is a short enough and frequent enough feedback loop for a person to actually develop expertise -- and there is something coherent to develop the expertise in. Outside of such fields, experts are just blowhards with status.
Given the nature of the field, the prior expectation for philosophers having any genuine expertise at anything except impressing people, should be set quite low. (Much like we should expect expert short-term stock pickers to not be expert at anything besides being lucky.)
Of course, one could argue that LW regulars get even less rapid feedback on these issues than the professional philosophers do. The philosophers at least are frequently forced to debate their ideas with people who disagree, while LW posters mostly discuss these things with each other - that is, with a group that is self-selected for thinking in a similar way. We don't have the kind of diversity of opinion that is exemplified by these survey results.
This seems right to me.
However see my comment above for evidence suggesting that the views of the specialists are those they brought with them to the field (or shifting away from the plurality view), i.e. that the skew of views among specialists is NOT due to such feedback.