Sounds like you are maintaining and extending your own frame of reference. I feel like a note that is never read again is not necessarily a wasted effort.
> Is trusting those sources really an acceptable basis for any autonomous individual to proceed?
You yourself are awefully fond of basing elaborate narratives on dubious sources, which is fine, but why then stoop to high-school debate club level gaslighting like "Ultimately, this is an epistemological question - what do we know? And the only things one can say one knows, is stuff you have personally verified.", unless this is satire?
I'm sorry? What elaborate narrative am I based on? What dubious sources?
If you think my point about how you know something is satire, you are mistaken - I am serious.
The problem is that most people are unable to discern what they know from what think they know (aka belief). Because they saw it on a screen or other people say so this. This is NOT knowing. Watching something on a screen only means that you know you saw something on a screen, not that what you saw was faithfully portrayed! You didn't believe Independence Day was real, but you do believe the news, etc is.
No, they don't have such a right, but everyone has the right to call him out publicly. The key point, for me, is that vengeance is evil. Cheaters should be exposed but not destroyed. Go the full mile to get cheaters banned from competitions and make sure that the record is set straight. Make sure that past winnings and glory is returned and nullified, and leave it at that.
I'd argue they absolutely do have that right. A doctor is in a position of immense power and trust, and you need to know that your doctor will be honest if they make mistakes and not try to cover them up. This is a matter of character.
Terry Tao once famously published a result with non-mathematicians Denton et al., and was bombarded by responses (including my own first math paper) showing the result previously published in many different ways in several fields of math. Of all that Tao has accomplished as a Fields medalist and espoused “greatest living mathematician”, this became the most famous single moment of his career.