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There is no alternative to 1) or 2).

You either have to follow consensus of the experts, or, to go contrary to consensus, you must understand the consensus well enough to be one of the experts.

Down any other road lies pop-sci nonsense. It's incredibly easy to be a wrong contrarian, when you don't actually understand what you are attacking.

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I think you're missing option 3, which is to avoid drawing a conclusion either way - assume that there's no definite answer, and that the experts' expertise is too narrow to support using their consensus outside small studies on college students buying and selling chocolate bars.

In this case I'm happy to conclude that it's not clear if people do systematically make poor judgements on important issues due to an in-built "loss aversion" heuristic.

What you call popsci nonsense is the way most of the people on this planet live. Making decisions based on the available data and living with the fact that we may be wrong. Nerds are a special class, and not better nor worse.

They are absolutely better at things they are experts on.

You don't hire a plumber to do a colonoscopy.

Not better or worse in terms of value as human beings

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