> Doing your own research has lead to an incredible advance in public intelligence

The situation is analogous to war reporting. War hasn’t become more brutal (holding scale constant). We just see it more clearly. Similarly, I don’t see evidence we have more morons. They’re just given more attention.

No! we should trust the government and the corporations to guide us to the truth.

Yet there are too many non-experts thinking they "did research" and then go on to ignore medical or political facts. Those people are easily influenced by adversarial misinformation to incite hate and anger for political warfare.