We are getting to where the only people still being duped are exactly the ones you were talking about who are abdicating thinking for themselves.

I sympathize with people who just want to trust the experts and then go on with their lives. In a functional society, trusting the experts would be a good enough heuristic for most people. We can't figure everything out ourselves after all, so the battle is really in figuring out who to trust and what to trust them about.