>It’s counter to everything we’ve been teaching the masses up till now, which is to respect authority, because it’s easy to control them that way. Wait, what?

>It’s counter to everything we’ve been teaching the masses up till now, which is to respect authority, because it’s easy to control them that way. Wait, what? I see this sort of opinion expressed a lot here and similar places, but it seems to be entirely the opposite of actual reality, at least in the USA. There has actually been a precipitous drop in respect for experts and authority, and the general teaching has been more towards "trusting one's own feelings" and "everyone's opinion is valuable" and other such "self empowerment". There are remaining reservoirs of trust amongst the public for certain classes of experts, but even then it's common that the public doesn't actually understand what the opinion of those experts is (ie., global warming denialists amongst the public may genuinely think scientific opinion is divided). In modern society what I think what might be strongly helpful for every citizen beyond a base level of knowledge (like probability and statistics, economics and political theory) and their own specific area of expertise is not general "skepticism" so much as more training in thinking about how to evaluate what authorities are trustworthy. It's impossible to move through a world where the total sum of human knowledge is going into or well into a J-curve without extensive use Argument From Authority, which remember is not a logical fallacy so much as the weakest but also most scalable form of argument. Any tech person should be very familiar with this because it's ubiquitous in our field, we have to depend on trust up and down the stack, but that doesn't mean there aren't ways to test that. We use trees and webs of trust, sample verification, transparency, and so forth. That same sort of thinking though applies elsewhere. It's not about "control", respecting good authority is critically important. What's needed is to help people with techniques to figure out what is a "good authority", how to continually reevaluate that as necessary, and how to hold authority to account and how to swap out mistaken or degraded choices with superior ones.