Earlier quoted context omitted.
You were a scientist so you have the power to understand. For the general population the choice is between the voodoo man, or a professor. I prefer people to choose to blindly believe the professor (which carries a risk) than the voodoo man (which is always crap)
In many countries you can study Homeopathy in the university. Is that a professor you should trust? Do you remember peak ivermectin? There were many articles published by real medical doctors in real journals. Is that a professor you should trust? (I read a few of the articles. Most of them were just awful, and I was ignoring the non statistically significant ones.) The list of food that babies can not eat before the…
> In many countries you can study Homeopathy in the university. Is that a professor you should trust?
Absolutely not. In order to be a homoeopath, at least in France, you have to study medicine. Then some of the graduates who apparently were mostly partying when studying go for that and this is why I always double-check what my MD prescribes. She is really great but I have a limited trust in everything.
But see, I have a PhD in physics and I have been running the skeptics branch at my university. So again I am special.
> The list of food that babies can not eat before they are one year old changes from country to country, and even from one medical doctor to another. Find a few friends abroad and compare.
My children were raise in three countries (one in Asia, two in Europe). I've seen that but these are nutritionists - a branch of "science" that is at least laughable. A friend of mine who is a tenured professor in nutrition, when she was doing her PhD, asked me to review the statistics. I could not - it was such rubbish, and she was such a good friend that I told her to find somebody else or just give up - the people who will be reading her thesis are as clueless as she was regarding statistics.
> What if a military expert tells you that a normal looking truck is a secret mobile factory of weapons of mass destruction? Should you invade?
If I had to make the decision? I would ask several of them and then yes, invade. Are you able to tell the difference between a MIS-45 X and a normal truck? I cannot (and made up the name).
> What about cold fusion, aka low energy nuclear reactions
Cold fusion popped up, and then disappeared when more people started to test it. I was studying at the time this happened and I think it went on foe a month or so. And then nothing - exactly because the scientific community called bluff.
> At one point people must choose the expert to follow.
As you see I agree with most of you points (and I guess you have a scientific background because of the (very good) examples you gave. But I do not see your point.
You need to give a simple rule for the general population. Between choosing the scientific community that sometimes fail and the bozos in pseudoscience I say - blindly trust science.