You've done a phd. Why on earth would you believe that someone, even an expert in the broad field, would know more about a particular topic than someone who specializes in that area is research?

Do you think Yann knows 100X more about every area of ML then everyone else, or is it just fairness, accountability, and transparency that he happens to be more knowledgeable in than arguably a founder of the subfield?

It's pretty simple: he did made ML work before almost anybody else did, and kept working on during the deep network explosion, and is now running Facebook AI, which has to deal with these sorts of problems with practical solutions on a daily basis, with billions of users. That sort of daily experience counts so much that I would I would place him in the "knows 100X about every area of ML" (excluding rare subfields).

It's rare but I have encountered people outside my field who knew more than I did about my field, because of their daily experiences over decades, or their raw intelligence. Yann seems to have both.

So are you suggesting that Yann has more expertise on what you're working on now (which I know, and would consider to be an ML subfield in the same vein as Timnit's), and therefore would defer to his expertise when he says things that show nothing more than an undergraduate level of the topic?

Because I'm only a dilettante in the AI ethics space (and admittedly ML as a whole), and I can describe the flaws in Yann's reasoning. Blind deference of that level isn't rational.

I've argued with Yann about my field (we share a friend on facebook) and in that case, he did turn out to be technically correct.

I don't agree with your assessment of his "Reasoning".