This isn't about ideas. It's about data. The quality of data is independent of where it came from, so it actually is equal in that sense.
> You should track down an expert.
Yes, we should refer people to experts more often. Why? Because they have data, not because they have titles or affiliations. Information is what makes them experts, and information can be shared.
To use your term data, with complex topics it isn’t simply having data. One must know which data is relevant to consider for which topic at which point. And even more importantly, one must understand which missing sets of information need to be considered.
There is a reason our society has come to place such a high value on experience and expertise. And it isn’t solely because someone had books of data stored on massive bookshelves. While these bookshelves are important, it is their understanding in the nuances of which books to hunt for answers.
Our new ability to store significantly more of these books and retrieve them more efficiently doesn’t remove our need for someone to use and contextualize the information contained in these books. New tech doesn’t change the fact that expertise matters.
Interestingly enough, we now face a sort of reverse of the problems we’ve faced for centuries: While we used to struggle to find enough information to feed to experts, now we face too much data and not enough experts to properly make use of it.
Again, apologies if my first post wasn’t clarifying enough.
If you're outside a particular area of expertise, the intellectually honest thing to do is to say "I'm not knowledgeable enough to assess these findings" and defer to someone who is. At that point, you're assessing credibility, and affiliation and track record absolutely matter.
Contextualization and positioning are themselves information that an expert can pass on.