It's not a shortcut. It's the only way to form opinions outside of your expertise fields, because you simply don't have the time to personally research everythi

It's not a shortcut. It's the only way to form opinions outside of your expertise fields, because you simply don't have the time to personally research everything. That's why it's very important to have a healthy dose of skepticism when receiving info from people who we trust, because we chose the gatekeepers based on our opinions which implicitly selects for our own biases. For example I don't actually know that the election wasn't stolen. It's an opinion that I hold due to choosing to trust a specific gatekeeper (main stream media) and a lack of hard evidence from the other side. If hard evidence were to be presented, the I would have to reexamine my beliefs even if they go against everything I believed in previously.