Things are not black and white like that. Someone might be intelligent, and have lots of evidence, but maybe they're trying to deceive you. Alternatively, even very intelligent and very well informed people are sometimes wrong about things that are within their field of expertise. e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomson,_1st_Baron_Kelv... .

This happens even in the exact sciences. Move to a field like economics, and you'll find lots of smart and knowledgeable people who can't even agree on the basic principles.

You're shifting your justification. In the comment I responded to, you argued that it was difficult to determine the appropriate level of knowledge. Not that people are sometimes wrong.

I think you're missing the larger point here. The OP is offering a set of heuristics to determine when one might (unconsciously) be adopting positions for the wrong reasons.

These are not general rules, and offering counterexamples is not relevant. If you were to argue that "no, in general, if you find yourself unmoved by the opinions of disinterested experts, you're probably just more awesome than they are", that would be a real objection.

My point is that the heuristics in the list are so general as to be useless. They fit somewhere in a category between tautology, platitude, and plain old stream-of-consciousness nonsense.