I think this article is about laymen's tendency to overestimate their own knowledge of a particular subject (typically every subject), thus resisting the opinion of people with formal (or non) authority.
I, for one, share the author's view on this phenomenon. In my opinion it is a wide spread issue, maybe even pandemic in proportions. When was the last time you heard somebody not having an opinion on a particular subject? Everybody has opinion on everything. In the overwhelming percentage of cases, a very misinformed one. And when an expert comes and tells them how misinformed they are, laymen turn to the dark side and start spewing hatred.
Your example serves only to show that either you didn't understand the article, or you are one of those people. The programming guild seems to have a hell lot of people that state their (misinformed) opinions as facts and participate in big, heated arguments very boldly.
It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect, mentioned and linked by the author. Basically, the less expertise, the more tendency to overestimate one's own knowledge and the worse the ability to accurately identify real experts.
However, there is also a problem of misapplication of D-K. It is not always true (like all generalizations, it fails to give any sound basis for assessment of any particular individual); and it can be a pretext for smuggling other premises.
To try to explain the latter as briefly as possible, suppose there is a consensus of experts on proposition P, and critics C dispute P; then a speaker or writer denounces the criticism as an illustration of D-K, but maybe C are critiquing on the basis of some claim that is not refutable by the proponents' expertise - maybe that they have a conflict of interest, or are talking outside their area or expertise.
I think there's a general misapplication of the Dunning-Kruger effect, too, which can be seen in this article. Most people (like the author) use the Dunning-Kruger effect to mean:
"stupid people don't know they're stupid."
This is true, but not the way the authors meant it to be taken. It was really meant to be addressed as
"maybe I don't know I'm stupid."
... taken that way, I think the author might have written a different article, wondering if he himself might be shutting away criticism.
> Unfortunately, in those places ruled by the smug and complacent, a classic paper has become a weapon. The findings of Dunning and Kruger are being reduced to "Stupid people are so stupid that they don't know they are stupid." Rather bluntly, Dunning himself said, "The presence of the Dunning-Kruger effect, as it’s been come to be called, is that one should pause to worry about one’s own certainty, not the certainty of others."
I, for one, share the author's view on this phenomenon. In my opinion it is a wide spread issue, maybe even pandemic in proportions. When was the last time you heard somebody not having an opinion on a particular subject? Everybody has opinion on everything. In the overwhelming percentage of cases, a very misinformed one. And when an expert comes and tells them how misinformed they are, laymen turn to the dark side and start spewing hatred.
Your example serves only to show that either you didn't understand the article, or you are one of those people. The programming guild seems to have a hell lot of people that state their (misinformed) opinions as facts and participate in big, heated arguments very boldly.