Academia - Does Academia.SE welcome answers from laymen who are not active in Academia?

Excellent question! Thank you for taking the time to ask it.

Academia is a subculture. Like almost every other subculture, it has its own social mores and norms. Many of the questions here are asking about those "you have to be there to know it" aspects of academia. To that extent, (in my opinion,) if the question seems to requires knowledge of the field, its probably best to leave those for other academics. What may seem to be good advice from the outside may actually be harmful to those familiar with the culture.

That said, a good chunk of questions more broadly defined as, "is this a good idea?" We've had some very good answers from outsiders to some of those questions^{[citation needed]}, and I would welcome anyone to contribute there.

I have a pet peeve about nonacademics answering questions on this site. But not with all of them; only with those evincing a certain kind of behavior. Namely, what irks me tremendously is those who answer questions about academia but refuse to comment on or acknowledge their lack of academic expertise.

(In fact this is not limited to non-academics. I am just as bothered by e.g. academics who have never left Continent A but answer questions about academia on Continent B without acknowledging -- or even knowing, perhaps? -- that these answers may well be negatively useful.)

If you want to answer a question as an academic outsider, please include in your answer that you are an academic outsider. As others have pointed out, this does not automatically disqualify or discount your answer: for some questions it will actually improve it. But readers deserve to know this information, whatever they do with it.

Just in peeking through your answers on the site so far, although you've gotten a lot of upvotes on some (likely through the HNQ bloat, as others have pointed out), lots of your answers don't answer the actual question, and are more like extended comments on other answers.

Some of this might be because you lack the "insider information" necessary to answer the original question, or it might be just a style in your answering that is outside the normal guidelines for what make good StackExchange answers. Given the topic of this meta post, I'll assume the former:

I think that laypeople who are not part of Academia should not use partial answers to address only parts of questions when they are not prepared to answer the whole question. There may be some questions here that can be answered by anyone, but in most cases those questions either belong on a different stack, or the user answering them may not have sufficient understanding of Academic culture to recognize when an question actually has an academia-unique answer.

As just an example, completely independent from your personal answering history, the role of an academic advisor as both a "boss" and a mentor is completely different from that of a boss in the outside world. Advice for how to deal with a bad boss at work is often completely inappropriate for an academic context, even if the interpersonal problem is the same.