[timr]

Cached judgments of merit? Give the strained engineering metaphors a rest. This has nothing to do with caching, and has everything to do with filtering out bad information.

For any sufficiently complicated subject, your average person lacks the knowledge, experience or intelligence to weigh arguments solely on their merits. It isn't popular to say here to a bunch of opinionated techies, but credentials are a way of bypassing limitations in our own knowledge.

Said another way: there are subjects that must be learned through experience. I am more inclined to believe the opinions of a World Bank economist than I am to believe the comments of JoeThePlumber123456 in some online libertarian forum.