I used to be an avid advocate of this notion, but I've become somewhat disillusioned about the idea of encouraging people to think for themselves. The whole Covid vaccine debacle was the latest example of the frustrating truth that "thinking for yourself" just isn't trivial.

People that advocate for it (like me) just wishfully assume that their listeners, if they just try, will reach the same conclusions they did. But that just isn't true. I've met many people that held (what I consider to be) debunked beliefs which they proclaimed to have reached through "doing their own research". In a way these people are harder to sway than those that "just feel it's true". They are armed with research papers, lecturing experts (self proclaimed perhaps), and logical constructs. They hold their ground in an argument.

And perhaps they are not at fault. The truth can be non-intuitive on several levels, and distilling it from truckloads of data, papers, and experts really isn't easy. Take for example the seemingly simple question of whether or not climate change is man-made or not. It is not at all an easy matter for someone to reach their own conclusion about this. Any argument, how ever sound it may seem, may be wrong in some subtle non-intuitive way that would more digging and learning to figure out.

I've come to realize that in this question (and many others) I can't justify trusting my own judgement and the best heuristic I could come up with is "trusting the expert consensus". Sure it can be wrong, but I hold the belief that it tends to self correct eventually, and in many cases (especially when many people need to form an option) it's the best we can do.