There is a too-extreme version of this view that we can simply delegate all knowledge production to a small class of experts and then trust the outcome implicitly, simply based on their status. But I think that would be bad and unsustainable.
A good question is *what* are you trusting, the person or institution or the process they are following? One recipe for a productive and sustainable kind of trust is for everyone to have some foundational first-order beliefs about how the world works *and* how one ought to empirically investigate it. Then we can mostly leave it to specialists to do that work following the process, but generally understand what they are doing. And it means we need to invest in educating everyone to the point of having a foundation to build trust on - ie don't throw out enlightenment thinking entirely, but we certainly don't all need to be polymaths.
There is a too-extreme version of this view that we can simply delegate all knowledge production to a small class of experts and then trust the outcome implicitly, simply based on their status. But I think that would be bad and unsustainable.
A good question is *what* are you trusting, the person or institution or the process they are following? One recipe for a productive and sustainable kind of trust is for everyone to have some foundational first-order beliefs about how the world works *and* how one ought to empirically investigate it. Then we can mostly leave it to specialists to do that work following the process, but generally understand what they are doing. And it means we need to invest in educating everyone to the point of having a foundation to build trust on - ie don't throw out enlightenment thinking entirely, but we certainly don't all need to be polymaths.