(Another reason to marvel at the intertwined nature of many of the great philosophical questions.)

Human beings are good knowledge-gathering machines on their own; but groups of humans working in teams, even more so - because there's a greater likelihood of someone striking upon the truth, and the possibility of better error correction from multiple sources.

The solution to a problem cannot be known until it is discovered. All purported knowledge is essentially conjecture in search of the unknown, and never leaves the status of conjecture, even if it's true. Knowledge has no backchannel, no intrinsic connection to, or co-variance with, the reality it models. We punt <possible-ways-the-world-is>, and we test them; and the last conjecture standing, the conjecture against which we've exhausted our quiver of questions, is simply all we have left to go with until something better comes along: and we call that knowledge, until something better comes along.

The best discovery process globally (systemically) is therefore to allow (not force, but allow, get out of the way of) maximal freedom of thought and speech locally; that way you get the maximum number of possible propositions floating around, and the maximum possible "try outs" of different critiques floating around too. Many can think up more tests than one.

The best way to get a thinking population like this is to train them (and especially, and in-depth, their thought-leaders - both teachers and students at universities) to make up their own minds on the basis of informed investigation, and then to give them the liberty (freedom from shutdown or harassment) to hold their own model of the world in their own head, as conjectured by themselves (whether the model is the result of a critical process or not - since that's not something we can know legislate for), and to express it to whoever cares to listen.

To do that, we present people with a bunch of ideas seriatim, and we get them to ironman those ideas, argue for them, even if they're not naturally congenial, even if they're a bit emotionally disturbing. Confronting any question from different points of view, from different ideological angles and proposing lots of different possible solutions, allows each individual to gradually tailor their own world model, and the more world models we have collectively, the more likely we are to "catch" reality because one of those conjectures happens to be right. Liberty also, generally speaking, allows models that do fit to rise in popularity (most especially in pragmatic affairs, where some rubber hits some road; and of course it should be found in philosophy and political thought, but unfortunately it isn't always, because of the remoteness of consequences of holding a stupid abstract idea).

(Note: There are limits on speech of course: incitement, slander, defamation, imminent threat of violence, etc. - those are where harm, actual harm, not hurt feefees, issues from someone's speech, and that harm can be observed and quantified by third parties.

(Also: all the above process is also subject to the "team building" (or division of labour) among humans mentioned above in paragraph 1, naturally occurring primarily along sexually-differentiated lines, family, clan, ethnic and racial lines - in some mixture dependent on the natural inclinations of the people - and secondarily along the lines of elective affinity: friendship, collegial feeling, professional integrity, etc.. We shape ourselves into functional teams as the result of a historical process, on the basis of our identities, as given to us by our parents, our instincts and natural inclinations, and our culture.)