# Should non-practitioners avoid criticising practitioners?

A related question: should practitioners/doers feel free to ignore criticism from non-practitioners?
A possible question for generative AI: What is the criticism from doers toward mere critics?
A somewhat different wording: should mere critics avoid acriticizing doers (dynamos, movers)?

## Non-practitioners should avoid criticizing practitioners
### Pro

* Pro Non-practitioners are all too often incompetent people who do not have the skill to create anything and only know how to raise criticism, all too often misguided criticism.
** Objection "All too often" does not mean "always". There is no doubt there are bad or incompetent critics, possibly too many of them. The motion, while interesting, contains no qualifications, such as "most non-practicioners", "usually", etc.
*** Objection The motion does not state "always" or "in every single case". Absent such explicit quantification, one should perhaps interpret the motion as implicitly stating "generally" or "except in rare cases".
**** Objection Adding the word "generally" is trivial and does not make the motion too long so it should either be there or be taken to be absent.
***** Objection The same is true of "always", "never" and "rarely". It is not clear why the defaulting should be to "always" rather than "generally".
* Pro Expanding on the above, accepting the motion would prevent some of the most incompetent and unintelligent people from causing harm and disrupting productive endeavors.
** Objection But it would also prevent productive and intelligent non-practicioner critics from providing useful input.
* Pro Expanding on the above, practice provides the effect of learning by doing which pure critics lack. There is no replacement for learning by doing.

### Con

* Con By means of example, non-practitioners of astrology should feel free to criticize astrology. Similarly, non-practicioners of homeopathy should feel free to criticize homeopathy. Non-practitioners of C++ programming, including C programmers, should feel free to criticize C++.
** Objection One may address this by broadening the scope of the specialty. Thus, practicing scientists should be allowed to criticize others claiming to have genuine knowledge, including astrologers. And non-homeopathic practitioners of medicine or medical research should feel free to criticize others under that broader umbrella. Programmers (in some language) should be allowed to criticize other programmers (in some language).
* Con Expanding, critics of negative impacts of technology should be free to criticize even if they do not wish to practice the technology.
* Con Expanding, critics of democracy should feel free to criticize it even if they do not want to practice it.
* Con Expanding, critics of slavery need not be practicioners of slavery.
** Objection The above makes it clear that something else is at stake, something not yet clearly articulated. The intent of the motion is obviously different from preventing anti-slavers from criticizing slavers.
*** Objection As long as a clear formulation is missing, the motion should be rejected.
* Con Expanding, critics of politics and politicians, such as journalists and policy analysts, do not need to be politicians to be helpful.
* Con Expanding, wiki administrators should be criticizable by non-administrators.
** Comment Even in this case, critics would do well to ponder that administrators have experience that informs their actions, experience that the critic does not have.
* Con Expanding, state regulators should be able to regulate and raise issues with the activity of practitioners. For instance, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) should be able to criticize/raise issues with aerospace equipment makers even if FAA does not practice the field itself. Another example is U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or its European counterpart.
* Con Expanding, a non-philosopher should be able to criticize the field of philosophy.
* Con A good critic can have talents that practitioners lack, but lack their talents.
* Con There are no non-practicioners; even pure critics are practicioners of something, namely criticism.
** Objection The above is unconvincing: the distinction between a practicioner and a pure critic should be clear enough and should not require a wording modification to the above kind of unhelpful (while perhaps technically correct) argument.
* Con Not being a practitioner does not necessarily mean that you can't have the same or a higher level of knowledge at a specific part of the profession than a practitioner.