Responding to your first paragraph.
If you came to the same conclusion as the mainstream on every issue, it almost certainly means you're incapable of independent thought. Not just one issue.
If you came to the same conclusion as the mainstream on every issue, it almost certainly means you're incapable of independent thought. Not just one issue.
First off, these are not mutually exclusive stances. Both you and GP can be right at the same time.
Second, I'd leave it at "well-crafted" and omit the claim that they are falsehoods. Whether they are true or false is the source of endless debate, which is rather the point.
Having said that, my experience is that while you say is often true (I'd argue about "almost certainly"), it's even more true when you find someone who almost entirely espouses mainstream views. They don't believe what they do because they spent much time musing over it and studying it. They believe it because they bought into a prevailing narrative without much thought.
And I'm arguing that this is the most rational thing to do in most cases. If you are outside your field, you should just accept the mainstream position unless you have devoted a great deal of (well-spent) time to the study of the topic. For any given matter of fact there is only one truth and unlimited falsehoods, and many of the falsehoods will have well-crafted arguments supporting them with lots of adherents. Its possible one of those could be the mainstream view but I believe that over time truths become mainstream.
Local maxima and global maxima may not align. In any system assembled from smaller systems and interacting with variable components no one truth may cover all outcomes.
Also this neglects that when it comes to profit motivations, there are intests that will sell a mainstream view that is categorically false for their own financial gain.
For simple things, yes. For most debated things in society, no. Or at least, not in any knowable fashion. Whether a single payer system is better than a private insurance system is not something you'll ever reduce to a fact, because of the sheer number of variables, and even more importantly, because the notion of "better" is nebulous.
And as someone else has already commented, mainstream opinions on the same topic can differ widely from society to society (healthcare, public vs private services, etc). As someone who has lived in fairly disparate societies, that alone is reason enough for me not to put too high a value on mainstream positions in any society, since I know that if I did, I will often be "wrong".
And then there is the reality that there have always been mainstream views that conflict with science.
Not to take away from your wider point. Yes, I agree that one needs to have fairly good analytical abilities, and the average person often goes wrong when straying from the mainstream because it's easy to fall into "local" logical traps. However, I do think that at times one recognizes the mainstream to be one of those logical traps. In my experience, both elegant and simple ideas have a way of gaining hold in society - particularly in philosophy (think Kant's Categorical Imperative, or the Golden Rule), but reality rarely yields to simplicity and elegance.
I've never met this straw man. Please present one so I can try to understand.
Also, I'd love for you to define mainstream which is such a fluid term as to be useless.
There are also many people that go to the extremist views because they want to be different. They are guided by the mainstream and choose a different side, just so they can feel like a rebel. I don't really consider this independent thought.
Seemingly binary choices like abortion always have the third option of not caring. But again that’s the headline stance policy deals with complexity. If someone feels very late term abortion is an abomination but the morning after pill is fine they need to define where that border exists. The extreme end is something like banning condom usage. Side issues like aborting for genetic issues or birth defects further split the issue.
Taxes are about as far from a binary issue as it gets. Unless you abolish government they need to collect some money, so the real question is exactly how much money they want to collect and from whom. Hand all the different numbers to every American and there is a reasonable chance none of them would pick the same budget as was past last year.
The only reason that the person before you didn't include this view is because its outside of their overton window.
Anyway, take 10 issues that fall on exactly 2 sides, and you should never meet two people that agree with them all.
Actually, this right here is a stellar example of how political concerns and the vying of organizations for power warps the way we think about nuanced concepts on a fundamental level. It ends up the detailed, even-handed treatments make for poor slogans.