Hal Finney finds thinking for himself to be an unreliable way to find truth.

One of the problems that interests me is how best to learn the truth in controversial matters. . .

One is to simply go along with what your peers believe. . .

Another is to try to study the issue and become familiar with the arguments pro and con in some depth, and then to use your own judgment to determine the truth . . .

Oversimplifying, I'd say that ordinary people use the first method, and smart people use the second method, but neither strikes me as very reliable on topics of controversy. . .

Another method which I have found reasonably successful for certain matters is to try to learn the scientific consensus. . .

It can reasonably be questioned whether this method is justified, whether scientific understanding can properly be viewed as an approximation to the truth. My answer is that science has made clear and explicit progress in its understanding of reality over the past few centuries, so they must be doing something right. Science certainly has its own biases, but more than most institutions it offers incentives to overcome those biases and rewards those who find better truths. Ultimately its track record speaks for itself.

Over my lifetime I have known some very smart people who have held some very unusual beliefs, which they reached by applying the second method above, thinking for themselves. This experience, along with further study of the pervasive nature of human biases, has made me skeptical of the value of this practice. I am still looking for improved ways to get at the truth without having to resort to thinking for myself. That approach amounts to an admission of failure, as far as I am concerned.

The mistake in this is to confuse the good and improving results of the scientific method over time with a particular issue at a given moment. It is one thing to have confidence that science is self correcting over time, and another to conclude that present scientific beliefs are true. One could conclude that present scientific beliefs are certainly false, and that over time science itself will reveal this.

When truth is the goal then reliance on consensus is abdication, a go-along to get-along approach favored by fashion victims. It isn't scientific.

For subjects that I know fairly well it is perfectly clear that scientists are lost in the wilderness. It isn't that they don't have deep and useful understandings of some things, it is that they know a great deal about very little. They may know all about a certain butterfly, but have no clues how that butterfly fits into the world. They know trees, not forests.

Rather than avoiding thinking, get better at it. The unusual and often mistaken beliefs of smart people who have been thinking for themselves that Finney notes don't discredit thinking as a process or method any more than incorrect scientific results discredit the scientific method. Over time both processes yield better results than alternatives. Scientists and thinkers may be wrong on a given issue, but science and thinking aren't to blame.