BTw, I do agree with his post, and it was very cognizant and coherent. I see an important distinction in his last few lines:
"We can't possibly personally reproduce all scientific and technological discoveries, let alone follow the entire history of a science including all its false leads and attempts, while thinking in historically unclear initial concepts as they developed. No one can live that long. That does not make all knowledge "second hand" in the sense of a Peter Keating who believes because someone else said it, or "they say", or he "read it somewhere".

Much is reported as fact, only to hear the infamous lines "sources said" or "an anonymous source" and that leads me to ignore all the information, as I believe that says "unreliable".

Accepting ewvs statement, then by assembling various pieces of data (events) and coming to a conclusion of something happening, which must be happening to correlate the events, is that not valid?

For instance, several cases last Sunday of churches being burned, so we can either claim a bunch of independent people just happened to decide to do the same thing on the same day, OR somehow it was coordinated. Is this a valid result?

The end result of the Collectivism Ayn warned us against is this current socialistic Progressivism that will destroy Capitalism, if we don't wake up.

Most liberals do not understand that science is never forever, its truths are what current facts support. It is constantly in flux. However, we also have to ask of teh source of conclusions, a bit about history, and econoomics of who presents scientific "facts.", as to how reliabale they are. We must use logic and doubt first what we are told, until we take responsibility to check out the above. example, if Fauci put $3 million via NIAID, our monty, into the Chinese lab which created COVIIED19, then told Trump not to close the border, as all was ell. Should we not ask what he expected to gain when the virus was released, and how it impacted what he told us? Same with AOC, no science background, just a penchant for palgerism and stealing and renaming Agenda 21. Why when we paid milions into UN to support it, would we suddenly pay trillions, because pon us, while both are full of lie.>

Couple of typos, but seems ok.

To ascertain what could be first or second-hand knowledge additional research is needed usually via the internet. That into some problems, there you have to be selective. Let's say that I'm researching about late 19th early 20th-century electrical storage devices, Google Scholar is one place for published scientific-engineering papers. I belong to a Spaceship group on FaceBook some members will post their concepts of interstellar ships with an explanation of the propulsion system, I will research any scientific hypothesis to validate what the member has posted. I will repost adding comments from those websites, in particular, the Casimir Effect as a theoretical FTL drive. Mechanical systems are pretty much straight forward with new mechanisms complementing or replacing the old types. Learning new systems in that realm is a must. I love history which changes with each new discovery or written document turning up. that requires some research. The learning never stops.