> Note that the sentiment is "condescension is not empathy", and empathy is what you need to approach this problem.
I consider that an unproven assertion. A certain amount of empathy is certainly necessary to have a functioning society. But it doesn't seem to be the case that everyone has to be empathetic with everyone, and I don't think humanity has ever been at that or ever will be at that stage.
But even beyond that, "empathy" doesn't mean that you think everyone's opinion is equally right. Sometimes, empathy involves giving people hard truths that they may find hard to accept, but will be better for them long term.
> You then condescend. You are superior, the "general public" is too dumb ("ill-equipped") to "make certain decisions".
It's only condescending if you consider people's inherent worth to be tied to their intelligence or judgement. But that's something I disagree with: people who are right more often than others aren't morally superior, or inherently more worthy, or anything. They're simply right more often and it's therefore rational to listen to them more often.
Also note that I didn't say "dumb", that's your interpretation. Smart people have biases too, and being well- or ill-informed about a topic is not necessarily correlated to intelligence.
The general public is ill-equipped to decide whether P=NP or the Riemann hypothesis are true. That seems hardly controversial (and yet math departments continue to receive "proofs" of these statements from complete amateurs that usually don't even understand the problem correctly).
> How would you know? You simply feel they are ill-informed, but it doesn't mean that they are.
You never know anything, except for the fact that you exist. But that's not a reasonable state of being. At some point you have to start trusting your own judgement, especially when you know that you've done the research. That there are other people who disagree with your judgement doesn't fundamentally change that.
> By assuming (implicitly) that you must be correct, you deny them the agency of figuring things out for themselves: Clearly they cannot have done so, they are simply too wrong.
No, you're misunderstanding me. I don't claim that I'm a priori correct and that anyone who disagrees with me is wrong (if anything, I would consider my opinions to be more or less strong priors). That would indeed be ludicrous. But I do examine the arguments of other people, and in some cases have to come to the conclusion that they're a) factually wrong, or b) their argument doesn't make logical sense.