I know where the talking about trust comes from, it comes from the theories of knowledge by testimony in epistemology, but as I've tried to convince others in a

I know where the talking about trust comes from, it comes from the theories of knowledge by testimony in epistemology, but as I've tried to convince others in an academic context, these theories might be flawed themselves. Apart from very simple "the cat is on a mat" type of examples, there might be no "knowledge by testimony." For example, contrary to what people sometimes insinuate, you cannot gain genuine knowledge from reading a textbook and simply trusting the source, and I cannot imagine a single instance in my academic life where this would have made sense. Science and philosophy require a skeptical attitude. Trust may play a role but theories of knowledge by testimony overemphasize it. By the same token, nobody needs to trust authorities and institutions. What goes astray in conspracy theories is not trust in testimony per se, but the judgement of one's own abilities and epistemic position versus those of others. People have a natural bias of overestimating their own abilities but with modern media this has gone completely astray; even well-educated people have started to confuse genuine knowledge with knowing where to look up allaged facts. Somebody with a realistic attitude towards their own abilities is able to correctly judge when someone else knows more about a subject matter. This doesn't mean that you have to or should trust that other person, but - if you insist in putting this in terms of trust, which I don't recommend - you need to be able to recognize when you cannot trust your own judgement more than that of others. Losing this ability to evaluate one's own epistemic capacity versus that of others in a subject matter seems to be a rather natural consequence of the liberation of knowledge by the internet. The same phenomenon of misjudging one's own abailities might have existed with owners of the complete volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, only those were extremely rare, already very educated, and it was probably harder to recognize. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I believe that epistemologists are wrong to consider "knowledge by testimony" necessarily based on trust, or at least the role of trust in it is overrated and the phrase "knowledge by testimony" is doubtful to start with. Trust in authorities is not needed, what is needed is a correct judgement of one's own beliefs in relation to those of others, and this requires intellectual humility. If people would conclude from comspiracy theories that they should remain agnostic about certain subject matters and leave those to experts who spent more time delving into them, they would not be a problem at all - they would simply just be what they are, more or less outlandish hypotheses and alternative explanations with a certain lack of publicly verifiable evidence. The problem is that people lack intellectual humility and form very strong beliefs about subject matters they haven't studied in detail. My 2 cents, sorry for the long rant. It is based on substantial disagreement with colleagues about this topic.