It is indeed strange that so many people in the US ignore the advice of experts. I suspect is that because they've never encountered experts in real life or they aren't aware that other people can be experts.
It is as if they live a life where everyone else seems as intelligent as they believe themselves to be. The Dunning–Kruger effect.
But this of course cannot be true, because they spend their Sundays listening to a pastor for hours. Surely that pastor is an expert at something.
Perhaps they have a simplistic model of expertise. The people who they listen to are the same people who know everything. Pastors appear to know as much as mechanics and plumbers. Trump appears to be a genius.
But why is it that intelligent people know that there are other people in this world who have specialized expertise? They might not necessarily be as smart as yourself, but they do know more about something than you do.
What is it about the lack of intelligence that people cannot recognize expertise elsewhere outside their adopted hierarchies?
Why is it that they reserve their trust only to people they might know and not people who have credentials? What is the root of distrust?
I think we have to go back to Peirce's classifications of signs to understand this. Peirce classified signs as icons, indexes and symbols. Intelligent people have learned the skills to create new indexes.
In contrast, lesser skilled people only see icons and symbols. But they are unable to connect the dots to see how icons become symbols. They do not know what their symbols mean.
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