The first and last points are flawed, though.
Several people are telling you a story, and they’re all slightly different versions of supposedly the same story.
Sometimes the issues are like “We should ban books” vs “We shouldn’t ban books”. They’re not slightly different so much as opposites. For something like “income tax should stop at 40% vs 80%” sure, but a lot of what’s on the table now is not that nuanced.
Which leads me to
You don’t really know any of them personally, hence have no predisposition for trusting the story of one over that of the others or even know for sure that at least on of the stories is the true (i.e. they could all be lying to you).
This implies that information and truth is unknowable. That you can’t open up wikipedia, click through to sources, read a book. You shouldn’t have to go solely on “does their body language seem confident?”. This is supposed to be the information age!
But I guess a lot of people cannot read well, and certainly don’t know how to determine what’s a good source and what’s not. I’ve seen people just go by some youtube video some nobody made and… oh, I see the problem. If you assume everyone and everything is just as credible as anything else, even some pseudonymous youtube video, knowing anything becomes dubious. Maybe this is why you have “Four dozen studies from nineteen universities have shown human activity is contributing to climate change” -> “well, CoolDog420 on their youtube channel said it’s just because the sun is having PMS, and I like his videos.”
That assumption that all things are equally credible is really bad. In college I took an intro to journalism course as an elective, and one of our first assignments was to go through a list of sources and determine which ones were good and which were not. Some were partisan think tanks, some were actually satire, some were real. It was a good exercise. Some students got taken in by all of it, and I think benefited from the professor walking them through how to investigate.
This is probably all downstream from under-investing (or outright sabotaging) public education.
I don’t know how to fix this.
