It's correct to say something like "the world is dysfunctional as a system for surfacing truth", and that's kind of like saying the rest of the world is crazy.

On the other, you shouldn't assume "the rest of the world is filled exclusively with incompetent people who lack basic truth-finding skills and that's why they don't agree with me" which is what people usually mean when they say the rest of the world is crazy.

Life has taught me that the vast majority of people out there are in fact average at best.

Competence (let alone extreme competence) is kind of rare actually, and accepting that that is “fine” is part.

That’s why you engineer a car to be driven by a dumb and abusive driver; airplanes are designed to be flown by pilots on their worst days; houses are built with large safety factors; code should be written to handle bugs gracefully. It’s not that anyone is being intentionally malicious, it’s that even competent people sometimes make mistakes so the rest of us should expect to screw up.

For awhile in my life, I was highly competent at what I did. It was awesome - but the altered reality this can engender - the idea that “since I am competent everyone else should be too, I’m just average” has it’s own dangers.

A core point of the article is that the vast majority of the world is filled with incompetent people who lack basic truth-finding skills, but that you shouldn't inform your opinion of your own correctness based on that fact.

Maybe, being exceptionally generous, you could posit that any given individual only is informed enough about some small subset of things that they hold opinions about. But in my experience, "believing you should have good reasons for the beliefs you hold" is a pretty all-or-nothing affair. Some people will have well-thought out justifications for pretty much any belief they hold, more will have no justification for any belief the hold. It's pretty well-correlated with intelligence, which is backed up by studies that have found that more intelligent people are better at coming up with justifications for their actions. It's not unreasonable to assume that carries over to beliefs.

The core takeaway is to ignore the drooling masses that disagree with you (or agree with you!). Their beliefs have no correlation with truth, and thus do not provide additional evidence for nor against a given belief. You should only adjust your priors based on interactions with people who actually know what they're talking about.