I could make a manifesto about being the greatest person to have ever lived. People are not going to believe it just because there doesn’t exist a counter-manifesto about me.
For example, thinking about the movie 300(2006) required some knowledge of how aristocratic Sparta actually works. It's basically a fascist movie glorifying the brutality of Spartan warriors with no question on its actual efficacy as a fighting force(unremarkable). I recommend this essay on why Sparta sucks.[1]
1. https://aeon.co/essays/who-are-the-leaders-in-our-heads-and-...
The mistake is thinking that you can just "think for yourself" without possessing knowledge.
I think people who avoid scams, cults, and pseudoscience largely does it through general knowledge and heuristics, not by thinking hard.
This is clearly a mistake since EVERYONE THINKS FOR THEMSELVES WITHOUT BEING SPOON-FED IT.
A person needs to be socialized enough to develop language. As long as you’re more human-sociable than a chimpanzee-raised jungle child, that base is covered. You don’t need much more beyond that in order to “think”.
> I think people who avoid scams, cults, and pseudoscience largely does it through general knowledge and heuristics, not by thinking hard.
Everyone has built-in heuristics. Why do you think “rationalists” complain about “cognitive biases” so much? We need heuristics to survive. Something which we did prior to Prussian-inspired schooling.
What do you think happens when people work the land? When people cook, plant, tend animals, build their own tools to make more tools with, do handcrafts? They experiment and learn. They pass along knowledge.
I recommend picking up an Eric Sloane book if you're interested in that. He wrote a lot about not the middle ages in Europe, but how people lived in the pre-electrified rural US.
Of course you won’t be convinced either way so there is no point pursuing this.
[1] The mind is not like a vessel that you fill up with knowledge and facts.
It's inaccurate to think of Prussian school as a system of conformity. Rather that's the opposite intention.[1]