Some of what you say is true but your overall approach is misguided. The path you’re going leads to authoritarianism. This is bad and is counter to the ideals of critical thinking, science and evidence-based thinking. It’s also been historically very bad for humanity.
Yes, an expert in a field may know the technical aspects and techniques much better than a layman as your dramatic examples demonstrate. However, any decision by any person is more influenced by his or her sense of identity rather than knowledge or expertise. A doctor’s expert decision reflects her belief in medicine and her trust in her medical community (which differs between countries and sometimes strongly so) much more than that doctor’s knowledge of each technical aspect of the decision, its underpinnings and scientific or evidence-based justifications. It must be so because of our very human limitations. It’s especially so in the highly empirical field of medicine.
Our communities are ‘socially sick’, including medical ones, because of greed, because of placing individual success way higher than the needs of the community and because of a lack of a sense of connectedness. Under such conditions, a layman may sometimes arrive at some better societal decisions than expert doctors albeit for the wrong and sometimes weird justifications.
I believe in vaccination and that masks are currently needed. However, corporations are not trustworthy and there is uncertainty in the science. It may be that the concerns of anti-vaxxers have been highly under-estimated. They may be making the right decisions but with justifications that can be very ‘creative’. I don’t think they’re making the right decisions but ridicule is unwarranted.
Yes, I would say that anyone can do research. Experts can do it better, especially in their area of expertise. However, no accumulation of knowledge leads to certainty. A person’s sense of certainty, irrespective of level of knowledge, has more to do with a sense of identity and the need to connect or to distance oneself from a given community.
We must encourage everyone to do research but we must build societies where people’s confidence in their research is tied more to their previous experience in learning rather than to how alienated they are from our sick societies.
