Why on earth would you assume any lay audience would have an up-to-date knowledge of the state of research in any given field in which they are not a working researcher?
I'm assuming that hackers that expect things like benchmarks for software performance claims who are then also skeptical enough to point out microbenchmarks aren't meaningful to be more skeptical than the average person. I don't have up-to-date knowledge about back pain or other medical topics but I know enough to be skeptical of certain claims and to ignore anecdotes.
Yes but that doesn't really justify the expectation of your original comment. It's pretty unreasonable to expect any group of laymen to have up-to-date knowledge of current research in any field outside of their own.
