My theory is that there are three ways to "know" something: 1) Socially 2) Intuitively 3) Structurally Each with their own pros and cons. Structurally is m

My theory is that there are three ways to "know" something: 1) Socially 2) Intuitively 3) Structurally Each with their own pros and cons. Structurally is more or less having a mathematical proof of the knowledge. Intuitively is having enough experience with a domain that your gut decisions have a very good probability of being very good. And socially is listening to peer pressure. In defense of peer pressure. Imagine a forest that is absolutely littered with abandoned ancient wells. A person walking through the forest is at constant threat of falling into a hidden well and then dying, never to be seen again. Structurally, we cannot prove or disprove the existence of ancient wells in a forest that were dug out and then forgotten long before our civilization came along. Intuitively it doesn't really matter how much experience you have with the woods. Either you enter the woods and you live or you die. Your first mistake will result in your immediate death, so you can't build up a good intuition through trial and error. But socially, we can tell our kids that the demon bear lives in the woods and it'll eat your brain if you go in there and nobody will ever see you again, so stay out. If you are going to rely not on your intuition OR you ability to reason something out, but you are going to store your knowledge "in the cloud" of society. Then you're going to tend to want reliability. If I google how to spell "peace" because I can't be bothered to remember how to spell it myself, then I'm probably going to start mocking it if it starts returning "pease". People get mocked because the mocker doesn't like that their cognitive cloud storage is acting faulty. Mocking which you'll find stops once many queried "nodes" starts to return the new result instead of just a single one.