You're right, Brian, in that we don't need to understand everything in order to benefit from things. But there's a difference between being a consumer of something versus having some measure of responsibility for creating it. Engineers study for years in order to become competent to design and build cars and planes, for example. My general point is that we allow people who have no understanding of policy to influence that policy - which is akin to consulting non-engineers on matters of piston-ring alloy composition or vibrational resonance and then implementing whatever the majority mistakenly happened to believe was "best."