> BUT, I don't know that any system that does not treat them as such is any better.
In all of the civilized world, people are assumed to not be knowledgable about a myriad of problem domains such that only licensed professional can exercises certain classes of judgement.
You are not considered to be rational enough to determine what kind of chemotherapy you get, just to name an example of all sorts of prescription medicines.
You are not assumed knowledgeable about architecting a building, a car, investing, or all licensed occupations where it turns out that bad opinions can kill people by the millions.
So no, effectively we assume by default that people are mostly dumb and dangerous and we raise high bars of qualification for anything in society where there is a potential for huge damage from bad decisions.
...but your examples are completely unrelated to the conversation we're having here. Censoring content to millions of people is in no way similar to requiring a dentist to be properly trained and licensed.
All are examples of social assumptions that people are not qualified enough to evaluate evidence at face value without a substantial background in specialized knowledge.
If you claim that there's voting fraud and it turns out I'm not knowledgeable enough to evaluate that claim at face value, as a society we have a problem, just like a lot of the misinformation that leads to the voting public to support policies for erroneous reasons.
That's pretty much the basis for representative democracies (disregarding whether they're effective at it or not): choosing experts who have the time and inclination to decide policies that you would otherwise not be able to evaluate effectively on your own.
Edit: to cite a clear example: climate science is not a field where laymen can make useful opinions, although it's a field where anyone with a high-school level education can follow the reasoning behind the conclusions reached by the experts. And yet we have a political party that attempts to deny and politicize this topic without even a hint of qualifications to do so, and nonexperts believing that their opinions are useful, or a reflection of reality.
In all of the civilized world, people are assumed to not be knowledgable about a myriad of problem domains such that only licensed professional can exercises certain classes of judgement.
You are not considered to be rational enough to determine what kind of chemotherapy you get, just to name an example of all sorts of prescription medicines.
You are not assumed knowledgeable about architecting a building, a car, investing, or all licensed occupations where it turns out that bad opinions can kill people by the millions.
So no, effectively we assume by default that people are mostly dumb and dangerous and we raise high bars of qualification for anything in society where there is a potential for huge damage from bad decisions.