I wrote a separate comment about this, that using your language can be summarized as: I think the distribution of ignorance is decreasing, and I think interactions across that distribution are also decreasing, and I think that's a problem for society.
You nailed one of the biggest concerns I have in the face of that, which is that we all have an equal say in how our society is ruled, despite clearly not being equally equipped to make good decisions. Of course, all the alternatives to that method of governance seem to be worse, so...
But it's the former metric that I care about.
The average person gets through their day, and that's great. I don't interact with them about that. It does not affect me one way or the other.
Their opinions about "abstract ideas and far-off events" do affect me. That's clearest every couple of years, when they vote (or fail to). In between, the results of their opinion are imposed upon me by literal force. The government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and those elections determine what is "legitimate". Just the threat of violence is sufficient to drastically affect my life.
I don't expect people to be experts. Democracy rests on the proposition that reality puts a thumb on the scale. If ignorance is randomly distributed, and the experts mostly agree, then you'll get the right choice most of the time regardless.
That's a pretty nifty proposition. It means that nobody has to designate who the experts are, which is fraught. But that presumption of ignorance being randomly distributed is dubious. People can easily become convinced of very bad ideas, and there are no good options for dealing with that.