>If we lived in a world where everyone, or even where most people, behaved reasonably
If we're not living in a world where most people behave reasonably then the Chinese got it right and censored LLMs and kids scissors it is. I do have a pretty naturalistic view on this, in the sense that you always get the LLM you deserve. You can either do your own thinking or you'll have someone else do it for you, but you can't hold the position that we're all sheeple and deserve to be free-thinkers at the same time.
So it's always a skill issue, you can only start to critically think yourself, enlightenment is as the quote goes freeing yourself from your own self induced tutelage.
The fact that the background reality is annoying to your preferred systems doesn't make it not true, though. "Doing your own research" is practically a cliche at this point, and it doesn't mean anything good.
The fact is that even highly intelligent people are not smart enough to avoid deliberate disinformation efforts by actors with a thousand times their resources. Not reliably. You might avoid 90% of them, but if there's a hundred such efforts on at a time, you're still gonna end up being super wrong about ten things. You detect the Nigerian prince phone call, but you don't detect the CFO deepfake on your Zoom call, that kind of thing.
When you say it's a "skill issue", I think you're basically expecting a skill bar that is beyond human capability. It's like saying the fact that you can get shot is a "skill issue" because in principle you could dodge every bullet like you're in the Matrix - yeah, but you're not actually able to do that!
> but you can't hold the position that we're all sheeple and deserve to be free-thinkers at the same time.
I don't. I believe it's mostly the first one. I don't know what other conclusion I can possibly take from everything that has happened in the history of the internet - including having fallen rather badly for disinformation myself a couple of times in the past.
You should be a freethinker when it comes to areas where you have unique expertise: your specific vocation or field of study, your unique exposure to certain things (say, small subgroups you happen to be in the intersection of), and your own direct life experiences (do you feel good today? are the people you know struggling?). Everywhere else, you should bet on institutions that have otherwise proved to earn your trust (by generally matching your expectations within the areas where you do have expertise or making observably correct past predictions).
If we're not living in a world where most people behave reasonably then the Chinese got it right and censored LLMs and kids scissors it is. I do have a pretty naturalistic view on this, in the sense that you always get the LLM you deserve. You can either do your own thinking or you'll have someone else do it for you, but you can't hold the position that we're all sheeple and deserve to be free-thinkers at the same time.
So it's always a skill issue, you can only start to critically think yourself, enlightenment is as the quote goes freeing yourself from your own self induced tutelage.