>So what do we do? From where can we possibly derive knowledge?
We all have brains capable of thinking. The idea is to examine objective facts as best one can, this means yes overcoming personal bias, which can be difficult and assessing things from a variety of sources.
Personally, I find, if you can't find an objective source, about the best thing you can do is listen to the extreme voices and assume truth likely lies somewhere between them, whatever that truth may be.
>I would assert that, collectively, we have a vested interest in determining what's knowable about the material world. We have a tradition of allowing particularly well suited people to spend the majority of their waking lives in the detailed study of difficult to understand phenomena.
We have a vested interest in figuring out what is untrue in the world, it's the only thing we as a species are truly capable of doing and what the scientific method is based on. Silencing dissenting opinions has never worked well at that, compounding observation and evidence does.
>We have experts, in other words.
No, we have people who have spent a lot of time doing one thing, those people are often times extremely knowledgable and correct many times, but they're still human with the same fallibilities and humanness as the rest of us.
>We have a political process that encourages the cultivation of experts and even has rules allowing for personal consequences for when experts and politicians breach ethical standards.
That comes down to the same thing that plagues a lot of science reporting and other things and is a logical fallacy called an appeal to authority.
A 'so called expert' is never correct over logic and facts. This may come down to an education, knowledge issue, I dunno.
>Is it here where we disagree? Should there, indeed, be no ethical standards to which we hold out experts?
>Asking honestly, bc I don't follow your argument. Maybe I'm completely off base.
Yes, but, a person posting videos on youtube isn't a expert just because they post things on youtube.
It's fairly easy to post a video on youtube. The issue of people assuming every video posted on youtube or every word someone says on the internet, is the word of an expert is something that again I think comes down to a lack of proper education on such things as psychology, marketing, written communications other things at maybe a younger age.
We live in a world where it's possible for anyone to say anything publicly. Censorship is not the solution to the problems that arise from that.
Every person has a brain, everyone's capable of being taught critical thinking. The world seems to push subservience, acquiescencing blindly to the authority of experts and assuming the average person has the intelligence of a child instead.