system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Should laypeople be agnostic about matters that are still debated by experts?

Many laymen hold beliefs which are very controversial in academia and are still debated (one that comes to mind is the theism vs. atheism debate (technically there is a consensus since most philosophers are atheists. However, most of them don't consider the arguments for or against God and debate other issues) another one that comes in mind is Platonism, if you ask some layperson if 2 exists they'll probably say no).

Laypeople don't have sophisticated defences for their positions, they mostly believe what they find intuitive or were taught to believe. And any reason they give for their position probably has been considered and either rebutted or is still being debated.

So in the absence of expert consensus over p, should laymen be agnostic about p? If so would this mean that most of the globe is irrational for not being agnostic over controversial matters in academia?

I also think we can extend this towards philosophers too. Most philosophers don't consider in very detail whether x is true if x is not part of their field, yet they most probably have an opinion on x.
gpt
Depends on your views about the domain-specificity of evidence from disagreement (and deference norms, which probably follow similar patterns of domain-specificity). You might think that we should hold pretty tightly to expert opinions in fields such as physics, medicine, and (maybe less so) econ, archaeology, ..., but not very much in philosophy, politics, ethics, ... So you might think that we should be agnostic if experts are undecided in the first type of fields, but not the second.

(An interesting question: should experts themselves follow a similar pattern?)