Our society has come to equate contrarian thought with independent thought, but the aren't the same thing. Worse we've simultaneously stopped training young minds to think properly.
Telling someone to think for themselves without first teaching them HOW to do that, doesn't just halt progress it puts it into retreat.
We need to start teaching young people to trust those who know more than they do, and how to tell who those people are. Further, we should teach them how to reason before we admonish them to do it for themselves.
Until we manage those two things we will be a society that distrusts everything we can't understand, and understands very little.
Also. The part on being good at identifying the right experts is interesting...
Absolutely not.
Along the same lines, most current western sci-fi I am aware of (mostly mainstream) is dystopian. Black mirror the show is a good example, also considered intellectual by many. I feel this tendency is even stronger in Europe than in the US, at least when I visit.
In contrast, China is somehow more optimistic. Consider AI right now. Some recent poll shows Chinese people are far more optimistic or positive about AI than western people, an interesting perspective considering their own government has made computer vision surveillance and face recognition far more widespread than it is in the west.
Do these kinds of popular sentiment matter for our collective decision making? are they a needed precaution to ensure things keep getting better? or do they create self-defeating collective behaviors? wdyt.