Yes, the experts however are on the internet, not random neighbours. If I listened to neighbours who claimed to be experts I wouldn't be wearing any masks or take any vaxx, but instead I listened to experts on the internet and got the vaxx.

I point to this as one reason our society is the way it is because searching the internet means trying to find anything to determine whatever my passing misunderstanding is is right.

No, you're just a fucking idiot. People who go on the internet not to find the truth but to find arguments to support conclusions they've already reached are just fucking idiots, the internet didn't make them irrational, they were never on board with the truth anyway.

If you can go to a library and just with the card catalogue find books to write a paper on

Why would you do that, instead of going on the internet where all this material is a.) actually available and b.) available for free.

And you bring that kind of rigor to internet research. Then you can likely find good data on the internet but it will require throwing out a lot of crap.

Yes, 99% of everything is crap, but generally speaking it doesn't take long to arrive at something good enough for a layman's approximation of the truth, open source consensus knowledge resources like Wikipedia are usually incredibly accurate, but of course you must check sources.

You do understand this, right? Neighbours are like Facebook, random sample of crackheads and weirdos ready to claim to be experts and die on strange hills, Wikipedia has a bit of a barrier to entry, and you can examine the source (or note the lack thereof) and assign a trust likelihood to that piece of knowledge.

Wikipeia is great but using it is like using ai. You have to sorta know enough about the subject to see if any bs edits have been made.

No you really don't in most cases.

Heck last time I looked up the life of jesus it was full of bad logic and data.

That sounds like you just didn't like the points that were made there.

I'm not an expert, but it is obvious to anyone that research that far back into the past is just grasping at straws so conclusions vary wildly depending on what evidence you accept.

What were the oxygen levels in x year of the precambrian? If you're a dum-dum you might look this up and find a paper with estimates and say that's it, but if you dig deeper, there are more papers with different estimates, you start to understand that stuff way back in the past like that is hard to know with any degree of certainty.

It's not because science is bad or scientists are bad but because it's obviously really hard to know that, and knowing with total precision is actually not really necessary for most things, sure it helps, but if the big bang happened 15 bya and not 13.8 bya like tends to be the understanding now, does it even make that much of a difference? No, it doesn't.

Historians have an incredible system for verifying and piecing together information from accounts and documents which I frankly, do not understand, I do not understand how they have such an incredibly detailed picture of much of anything, and I'm amazed and endlessly impressed by them and their expertise.

It's also not entirely surprising to me in the slightest when things change or some proposed versions of a given story don't match up with established 'canon' or anything like that, neither should you be.

Knowledge is good, but intelligence is important, you must be able to analyse information to understand it.