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I'm under the impression that brilliant minds tend to come with eccentricity attached. Part of being brilliant (or at least intelligent) is the awareness that m

I'm under the impression that brilliant minds tend to come with eccentricity attached. Part of being brilliant (or at least intelligent) is the awareness that much of what we take as fact isn't. For example, it used to be a "fact" that an imbalance of humors caused all diseases. The corollary is that when you believe something people think is silly, like that faeries exist, they may be wrong. This is particularly tricky with beliefs like this one which are technically impossible to empirically disprove.

s-shellfish 8y ago
It's honestly easier to just create a bucket labeled 'beliefs' and make your own mental model of keeping track of which things are beliefs and which things are actual fact. You can still pull things out of the bucket and put things into it. It's just easier to manage that way, because you might have to deal with some statements that go from being empirically disproven to proven to disproven to proven and so on and so forth for a long time. Just a consequence of too much information and a brain that can't handle all of it independently. Being able to trust others in their understanding is helpful but it's probably not going to help you sleep at night trying to figure out what you know and what you don't.
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