>How are we to parse all this information? Do any of these people know what they are talking about? And if anyone does, how can we know which ones to listen to? The research of Dunning and Kruger may well tell us there is no way to figure out the answers to any of these questions.
Yikes, that's a stretch. Dunning and Kruger's work tells us nothing about our ability to assess others' competence; just our ability to assess our own. This idea of trying to apply that to arrive at "how do we know which experts to listen to?" is really reaching.
It's turtles all the way down. Incompetence includes over-estimating our ability to evaluate experts (e.g. acting upon or ignoring legal advice from web forums).
Yikes, that's a stretch. Dunning and Kruger's work tells us nothing about our ability to assess others' competence; just our ability to assess our own. This idea of trying to apply that to arrive at "how do we know which experts to listen to?" is really reaching.