Gloominary wrote:Maybe. Or perhaps, as I suspect, you just outsource your knowledge more haphazardly, less consistently.
I'm not sure what you mean by "I'm an expert in what's right for me," but I think I disagree. If you suddenly had slurred speech and a limp, you wouldn't walk into the ER insisting on your diagnosis and how they are going to treat you.
You say "opinion," why not say "expertise?" That is a more accurate word, and reveals the absurdity of your statement.
Grassroots sources of into are better in some ways than top-down sources, we've already covered this.
Sometimes I go the doctor, sometimes I don't, sometimes I take their advice, sometimes I don't.
Under extraordinary circumstances, if I feel like I'm dying, I may place my life in their hands, I'm in no condition to take care myself if I'm dying, someone has to take care of me and it may as well be them.
So doctors having expertise in your life sounds better to you?
Some additions: there are minority expert postions. IOW scientists and medical professionals who present an alternative position. There is always the option to look at the arguments these people put forward. Sometimes, for example, the alternative experts make statements that are denied or omitted by the mainstream experts. This can be quite damning. Sometimes the alternative experts include whistleblower who have inside information.
To this expert testimony and evidence one can also look at other information: possible motivations of the mainstream experts, habitual paradigmatic errors by the experts, how whistleblowers and other alternative viewpoints are treated.
Then there can be investigations into what the official story is.
No alternative expert, for example, told me that one should wonder why they are using RNA tech in the new vaccines. Many of them presented potential risks or what they thought were certain risks. Some certainly said it was experimental.
But it was must me mulling that raised the issue, for myself: why take an experimental approach when one has less time to test? (I am sure others did, but I was not reaction to them.) Now this isn't damning, but it is a valid question and real concern. Why not use a traditional tech, since the very industry producing vaccines has said the traditional vaccines are very effective, they are experts in making, storing and testing them, and also have much much more evidence about mid to long term side effects.
One does not have to be a genius or merely trust intuition (though intuition deserves its own thread nearly on issues like this),.
One can question expert opinion as a layperson.
Just as laypeople have effected excellent skeptical campaigns against things like the incredibly high numbers of psychotropic prescriptions, including with children; the connectoins between the FDA's dietary reccomendations and the make up of the leadership at the FDA and how this all contrasts with alternative health suggestions related to diet; cellphone use buy children leads to social problems. Yes, other experts were working on these issue, but grass roots people who though something was going wrong with these issues, either in their own lives or locally raised objections to what they were repeatedly told was the scientific consensus opinion.
