Usually, I believe in thinking for myself but that doesn't implicitly say what I am thinking about for myself. There is an assumption I make which is that I am not the only intelligent/sensible person in the universe. I'd like to believe that if I over many years gained expertise on something, sought to increase my knowledge, thought deeply about how to do that thing better and had demonstrable success myself or at instructing others then I'd know better after I did those things than I did when I started.

My assumption is also that I'm not the only person capable of doing this and if I can determine that someone has had demonstrable success, it's a product of a successful method. It's probably been improved over time throughout that person's life as they became more knowledgeable and poured more time into it. Depending on their level of success, this isn't just what I would be if I spent years trying to come up with what they have, it's much better than that as it makes sense that it's unlikely I'll be one of the best at whatever I set my mind to, life isn't that easy.

I recognise a need for introspection at an interpretative level, I recognise that after achieving a certain level of competence, which you know you have by showing good results, that you can start to deviate from just listening to experts.

The main objective of a critical thinker should be to learn to accurately determine who they should be listening to. What can be accomplished using logic, theories, interpretations and your own thoughts is not remotely comparable to what has already been achieved by others who are willing to share their results. If there can be an expert then besides finding the right expert and applying correctly their advice, you may have to do certain things like prioritising resources and some other small things but trying to figure out how to do it yourself is either recreational or a mistake.

There is much need for interpretative introspection, deciding what you want and how you intend to get it. After that though, the only thinking you should be doing is "how can I best achieve correctly following and accomplishing in this method which has had success?" Hoping to become someone worthy of actually formulating their own ideas, which might be valuable to themselves and others.

Do you agree? To what extent do you think people are doing this? And do you believe there are exceptions to what I've said?