> If you develop the skill of judging information by its merit rather than source..
Did you read example #1? I'm not talking about some piece of code from an LLM that you can verify or some political opinion that you can take with a grain of salt, but information that you can only gain and/or judge through expertise:
If you're not a physicist yourself, you can't judge "information by its merit" on specific physics topics, because you don't have a solid baseline.
Similarly, in growing plants, each plant has its own peculiarities, and only people experienced in growing it can tell you anything useful - it's knowledge accumulated by trial and error. Not knowledge that your "great discerning mind" can assess on its own. Even a botanist can't tell you the ideal growing conditions of a plant that they've never studied before.