If you think about it, almost everything you know comes from other people. Even when you “check the facts” what that usually means is “see what other people say”. If you trace your knowledge back to observations in the world, it’s a huge graph of you trusting people who trust other people who trust other people.

Understanding the world is a social process. This is important because I don’t think the tension of weird ideas can be resolved at an individual level. You’ve got finite time to investigate crackpot theories. But fortunately, you don’t need to resolve all questions yourself. We just need to follow habits that lead to us collectively identifying good ideas and discarding bad ones.