Critical judgment of work in any given field has little value unless it comes from someone who is an expert in that field

In most cases, specialists’ opinions in certain field outweigh the judgments from outsiders a lot. However, under special circumstances, non-experts’ ideas should be considered seriously and can bring different viewpoints from totally new aspects.

First and foremost, in any specialized field, only those who have learned the knowledge of it through study or have the background can see its merits and problems and can give useful suggestions either to improve it or to repudiate it. For instance, in fields of pharmaceutical chemistry, the synthesis of any new drug candidate or active compound is complex and delicate, which needs experience to design the practical scheme, do trial experiment and finally scale up and produce large quantities of aim products. Thus, only those experts who have profound knowledge in chemistry, pharmacy and related disciplines can see the flaws of a scheme and point out the problems of carrying out the steps of experiments. And also only those experts can see clearly the intricacy and ingenuity of a specific design and applauds for their colleagues’ success of a bold break-through. People who has no backgrounds of related research fields can be totally confused when encountered the schematic diagram of a synthetic approach. For example, my parents have no idea what I was doing when I was a graduate student doing repetitive experiments in order to obtain a tiny amount of aim compounds. Thus, it is fair to say that experts’ ideas have great value in specialized fields.

But, admittedly, laymen sometimes may contribute surprisingly amazing ideas and solve the problem in an exotic way that specialists may never come up with. There is just an example in case. The manufacturer of toothpaste was trying to boost the sales of its products and the research and development department held a meeting to discuss about the design, production and marketing procedures and tried to find out a way to increase the revenue. The so-called experts racked their brains but could only think from the approach of improving the function or appearance of their products. However, one man who just came in the office to serve the coffee solved the problem in an extremely simple and efficient way: just enlarge the outlet of a toothpaste tube by about 2 millimeters so that consumers would use it up faster than before and have to buy it more frequently. That’s an ingenious idea from an amateur. Thus, the opinions of outsiders should not be neglected sometimes and are as valuable as those of the experts.

To sum up, in most situations where special backgrounds and knowledge are necessary, specialists’ opinions are valued more than outsiders. But amateurs’ ideas cannot be always neglected and sometimes can bring unexpected success.