Take, for example, an electronics or hardware project. The majority is a bunch of experienced engineers who will tell you that your project will take years based on their own experience with an earlier project. What they neglect to account for is that their earlier project took years because of the state of the art at the time. They're taking experience that applies to the era of NAND flash and board bring-up and applying it to the era of eMMC and main-line Linux drivers. So while their estimate is very conservative, it is also very wrong and you should take it with a grain of salt.

Any judgement that relies on some external context, like the industry state of the art, can no longer be trusted in a different context.

The hardest part of talking with experts is to make sure they answer the same question as you want answered.

"How quickly can we get something that more or less works for a demo?" is very different from "When will this be ready for mass production?" They can't read your mind and often to consider context you are not even aware of.

There is also a bit on the what question are people answering, aspect. How long will it take to take pretty much any electronic product to production? Quite a while. How long would it take you to build a prototype that you can play with? Probably not long at all.

The majority are not wrong by definition but the fallacy is that you cannot assume that the majority are right.

As far as knowledge is concerned, was Newton right for a period until we learned about quantum mechanics or was he always wrong? Was he always right but only within limits that he couldn't know in advance?

Apologies for the philosophy but this is the real complexity of an article about avoiding harm by doing various "good practice" stuff!

“He who knows he is a fool is not the biggest fool; he who knows he is confused is not in the worst confusion. The man in the worst confusion will end his life without ever getting straightened out; the biggest fool will end his life without ever seeing the light. If three men are traveling along and one is confused, they will still get where they are going - because confusion is in the minority. But if two of them are confused, then they can walk until they are exhausted and never get anywhere - because confusion is in the majority.” ― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

I don't know if I would agree that the majority can't be wrong by definition. I just find it an odd and strong claim. I suspect I misunderstand the point.

What is the claim "the majority are wrong/don't have the solution" meant to support? If I just emphasized on the "wrong" instead of "don't have the solution", apologies.

For Newton, he was always wrong based on his equations abilities to predict everything. He was just closer than many before that point such that it was undetectable for a long time.

Which is my point in asking. If folks are correct in their predictive and application based metrics, it is somewhat silly to belabor them being "wrong" in some absolute sense.

Not sure anyone is still following here. For a fun example of an entire field being wrong, look into the history of the causes of ulcers.

I wonder if we will ever know everything about how matter works or if it will be a long series of people who are merely less wrong.