Your post is most helpful, even on first listening. (I temporarily gave up on attempting to read it and ha ZoomText read it to me.) For one thing, you don't follow a pratice common on lbo of quoting the weakest sentence in a post & writing, not an argument, but a bumptuous set of quips on it. You've offered a reasonably comprehensive response to my major argumentns (or what can be reasonably assumed to be my major arguments). In this first reply, I'm going to focus on a few fragments of your post, but that is only as a first response. I'll try to get to larger parts of your argument as I get a better grasp on it.
You write: ". . . but you - the person who advocates for, and provides clear evidence of your knowledge about, the capacity of non-experts to learn technical fields "remarkably" quickly and with depth - would seem to be the last person I'd expect to be making this argument."
And a bit later you write: "non-experts in pretty much any field can become well-versed in the science itself whenever driven to self-educate, particularly if they are collectively self-educating."
The key words here (my emphasis) are, "experts in pretty much any field CAN become well-versed in the science." I don't think you had to confine this claim to "experts," but could extend it to the general public. Probably the bulk of high-school grads COULD "become well-versed in the science" - IF they wantd to, IF they then made the effort, and if necessary sought ut the help, to achieve this understanding. What are the preconditons for making such an effort, whether by a litereature ph.d or a high-school graduate? My essential claim is that the precondition is accepting on faith the Authority of Sceince. And that fundamental Faith has to be proof against repeated discoveries that this or that scientific "truth" was no longer truth. In some ways that Faith is harder to maintain than much religious faith. I became a "Marxist" before I had read any arguments for Marxism whatever. I had (through varius processes) reached the conclusion that there was something fundamentally wrong about the relations of the U.S. to the rest of the world (Vietnam, Dominican Rpublic), and as far as I knew it was mostly Marxists who had been opposing that wrongness for half a century or so. I began my reading of Marxist or semi-Marxist wrtings one the assumption that that was where Truth was to be foundd. (Northrop Frye observes in the Anatomy of Criticism that the only people who are ever convinced by "Defenses of Poetry" are those who are already well inside the defensive perimieter - i.e. a defense of poetry will convince yu even if you agree with it in advance of eer reading it.)
I'll keep studying your post and return to it.
Carrol