[refulgentis]

To me, people are A) out of touch with how degenerate our information environment has gotten B) generally, how little people look into things outside their wheelhouse.

It's not any one individual thing. You can even reframe some (one?) of the factors as Great Democracy Saving.

But they add up to: it is rational to not really trust anything, and people don't mind if you were wrong if you just didn't trust The Man/They, so there's more incentive to not trust, than trust.

Hyperbole from people who should know better doesn't help. Ex. a quite intelligent AI commentator tweeted yesterday, asking why there hasn't been a reckoning for anyone who publicly worried about effects of AI imagery on truth.