Comment by ordu

> You're assuming that there is a qualified specialist in the area in question.

This is a necessary assumption, because you cannot be a specialist in the most fields. You can probably be a specialist in one narrow field, if you spend your life to become one.

> So even in this hardest of hard sciences, "seek help of a qualified specialist" doesn't actually work well as a strategy.

In my experience it works. The trick is to talk with the specialist, to lay out your understanding of the problem to them, to get their critique, fix your understanding and then do several iterations of this. If you really need to be sure that your understanding is adequate for the task ahead of you, you could try to talk with several specialists.

And in overall I have the same feeling of black-and-white worldview on your part. Trying to guess what is different between you and me I come to this:

Truth is not Real, it is Ideal. You cannot reach it. Any understanding is Real, so it is not ideal, it is not perfect. Any prediction is probabilistic. There is Reality itself and there is my limited understanding of it, and there is a vast ocean of information on how others understand Reality. This ocean of information is not the Ideal understanding either. So the crucial skill is to learn how to drink from the ocean a couple of gulps that will be enough for my current task. And it is not just my preference how to deal with the ocean, it is the only viable way to deal with it, because I cannot drink all the ocean. I can't even drink it faster than it gets new information, so even if I had infinite time to drink it, I would be able to bottom it up.