> John Carreyrou wasn't an expert on phlebotomy or biochemistry. Roger Lowenstein wasn't an expert on hedge funds or technical finance. Eric Schlosser on nuclear command and control? Nope. Woodward and Bernstein and constitutional law? Not so much!
So, your argument against a rule of thumb - a broad, sweeping heuristic never meant to account for all possibilities, and by definition not to account for outliers - is that outliers exist?
Well, I readily grant you: every rule of thumb, ever, has failed miserably at accounting for outliers.
Seeing as how the post you're addressing was written how to triage the endless flux of books given finite time, I rather think their point was, you know, how best to handle the general case - not the outliers.
Rather like, "I will never read fiction whose cover is a sexy lady in all leather holding a knife and leaning on a motorcycle." It's not only likely, but certain, that that will end up excluding really good fiction. But, playing odds on where to devote my time, it's a better bet to avoid such books than not, given my reading preferences.
And I'm very comfortable with the rule that "non-experts attempting to digest and relate complex topics will tend to (a) not be experts, and thus (b) misunderstand, and (c) relate that misunderstanding to their readers, on average, and certainly are far more likely to than relevant experts." E.g., Malcolm Gladwell, who has an excellent reputation for his writing, just so long as you're not familiar with any of the things he writes about. Or 99% of pop-sci books ever written on the topic of quantum physics.