Of course, it is good to develop good critical thinking skills, which largely would mean that we need to be able to sort better kinds of information from worse kinds of information, so many statements will have facts, logic (analysis) and conclusions (opinions), so we can question the sources of information in regards to any of those whether they are providing good facts, logic and/or conclusions.. and so when we are new to a topic, we might have more difficulties figuring out if the facts are being described correctly, sometimes, we will have to learn skills to be able to determine if the logic is sound and if they logic leads to the conclusions that are reached.
There is a famous saying "
give a man a fish you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.". Likewise, if we start thinking from our own brain then it might take some time to develop good critical thinking skills but once they are developed they will be with us for life. There is no use of following other advice or signalling group.
Surely, I am not suggesting to NOT follow the advice of others or even to be able to attempt to learn from people of differing perspectives, and some people are very smart in some ways that differ from our own, and sometimes we understand other people and sometimes we do don't.
There should be some lines of progression since when we are younger we are more likely needing more guidance and counseling but some folks advance more quickly than others in terms of their critical thinking skills....
It is also not always easy to know what we know and know what we do not know, and some times it can take thousands of hours to learn about a certain subject, and sometimes people need some very basic skills and experiences to even be able to relate to certain topics, and so there could be some topics in which we are either early in our learning or we are struggling to understand certain aspects of the topic, so we may well be more dependent upon the observations of others, than to form our own opinion.. and whether we have time to study that area or whether our time is well spent to study certain topics can be questions of judgement including that we might not be able to have strong opinions in areas in which we are struggling to understand that topic.
One need time and dedication to validate information that is at his disposal. Since there is lots of information floating around, we need to separate the real one from the garbage.
All this will help in developing skills that can judge whether the logic presented in the source (news) is valid or not. May be in start we get no good results but with time this approach will mature.
That part is true.. There can be some topics that we easily figure out and then other topics that take time, and I have had friends that said that they spent 10s if not hundreds of hours studying aspects of bitcoin, and they say that they still do not understand bitcoin very well, and there can be a lot of reason for confusion, and sometimes, some people have been in bitcoin (and perhaps shitcoins too) for many years, but there still might be some basics that they do not understand very well, and a person brand new to bitcoin might not be able to notice if their mentor is kind of full of shit, and it could take a few years to figure out that they may have outgrown their teacher.. because there are some teachers who are able to teach ONLY so many things to the student, and then the student might know more than the teacher in certain areas due to studying and maybe other characteristics or limitations that any of us might have in terms of our ability to learn past certain kinds of ways that we might think about the world or about certain topics.