[tempestn]

I don't actually think that's quite right. Doing your own research into subjects where you're not an expert, at least for most people I think, is just as likely to lead you astray as listening to non-experts. (Most conspiracy theorists do a great deal of research.) I think the real key skill is differentiating between trustworthy and untrustworthy sources of information (on any given subject), and learning to logically estimate probabilities when multiple trustworthy sources differ.

It's just not feasible to follow the proofs of everything back to first principles for yourself, so at some point you need to trust an authority, at least to form a prior. The key is doing that in a logical manner.