Back in the day when our ancestors live in a village, knowledge of a given person was that of themselves and selected people they trusted. If your village was ~150 ppl, over the course of your life you knew that Uncle So-and-so was prone to exaggerating, cousin One was very trustworthy, etc. — no problem there.
It was different though when a stranger would come over the mountain saying there’s a great tiger in the woods. Was she trying to warn you? Was he trying to keep you out of the forest where super yummy food was growing?
Nowadays, our choices are complicated by the fact that most (probably anywhere from 60% to 80%) of our knowledge addition sources are not in our physical proximity. We still get to grow our village to same ~150 ppl but most of them are online/TV presence. We don’t really have a good feel for why and how exactly trustworthy they are.
And most of the time we do not follow the framework of “falsifiable = good knowledge” (finding that black swan), instead we are happy to see more and more of white swans (which in our mind increases the degree of verification of the knowledge, while instead it just piles up similar data points — without reaching the end/real verification).
So, you have ppl hooked up on certain TV channels trusting them to upload info into their head directly w/o any checking because their new set of facts is pretty much like those of yesterday, which is yay, must be truth.