It is, actually. It doesn't scale once you start talking about too many things at once. There's so much time one can spend reading. At some point, you just have to trust the experts (whoever you consider those to be) on many things.
Please explain exactly how your current device is displaying this page, and please no handwaving like "a key is pressed" or "a dns record is served", we need this down to the electron level.
That was overly sarcastic for hn, but the point was that there is not a single human alive who can explain everything they do. At some point you are going to hit an assumption that you have not personally verified
I have reasonable models for how my machine works, verified by my knowledge of physics and engineering which I have sought to acquire even though it is not my field of study. More to the point, if someone makes a claim about the electrical engineering in my device, I have some basis for evaluating whether that is true or false.
E.g. if you claim that the NSA is listening into every single thing that is said on everybody's phones and watches, I would know that not to be true from bandwidth and battery arguments. Selectively, sure, but I could tell if it was happening 24/7 to my device in some sort of dragnet surveillance.
I feel like you have drawn a line in the sand and said , "This is the proper amount of knowledge to have, anything more than it is wasteful and anything less is ignorant".
How did you verify your physics and engineering knowledge? Did you run hundreds of thousands of experiments to verify every single law and property of physics? At some point you are reaching a piece of data you learned from someone else and did not verify or that is an assumption because it's currently unknown how to explain or takes too much effort to verify while living your life.
On top of that, the OP was talking about how it was impossible to verify _everything_ in our lives nowadays. You mentioned nothing about biology or chemistry. How do you know your diet is the proper one? Are you sure about every chemical you interact with and how it affects you? Do you properly understand copyright and other IP law when you make a YouTube video using someone else's work? Did you get the right permits to put up that shed on your land that complies with the regulations from the 7 different layers of polity that cover you? Life is far too complicated to understand every facet and it only gets worse as we realize things are more complicated than we previously thought
> At some point, you just have to trust the experts (whoever you consider those to be) on many things.
That's extremely dangerous IMO. If you have a populace that is not literate or engaged, you end up with a slave society. Just see the rise of the concept of a "thought leader" [1]. It's quite scary when you see the implications such a concept will have for society.
To repeat, it's not physically possible to judge every single thing. It doesn't matter if you're literate and engaged - there's just not enough time, even if you were to spend every hour you have on this. And most people have jobs etc.
This is simply not true. Once literate it often takes a minimal amount of effort — back of the envelope calculation or google search— to do a first pass test of the veracity of a source.
You're still relying on another party when you do a Google search, hell if you want to get crazy about it, you are relying that you were correctly taught literacy and that when you read a word, the meaning it has for you is the same meaning the author attributed to that word. It's not guaranteed
It is possible, but I wouldn't put too much confidence in conclusions I've arrived at through application of the Razor on the field I know little about.
An interesting concept to that effect is that of "epistemic learned helplessness"
Basically, if you're not an expert in some field, then for any given argument, arguments of either side can be made to sound equally convincing to you, so - unless you have time to become an expert in every domain you encounter - your best bet is to accept the general scientific consensus on the topic.
(If anything, Occam's Razor is very useful to determine who is arguing for the generic scientific consensus, and who is arguing out of political reasons, or fear driven by ignorance.)