3 ms·

You shouldn't base your opinions on trust.

• dahart 2y ago
  That’s a nice platitude, but completely impractical. Try to really count the number of things you know first-hand, like really truly know because you were there and you’ve also controlled for alternative explanations. Be honest. Also think hard about the number of things you believe to be true but haven’t verified yourself. My list of truths I know first-hand isn’t very big, I don’t know first-hand how an airplane or computer works (even though I design software and hardware), I don’t know first-hand that people landed on the moon, and I don’t know first hand anything about national politics. Pretty much everything we do is based on belief and things other people tell us (which includes stories we read or watch on video). I don’t know it for a fact, but I believe that most people have about the same level of first-hand knowledge as me, that most people know very few truths, and the majority of how we function day-to-day is based on beliefs that we haven’t and won’t take the time to prove. This is perhaps a generalization of Brandolini’s Law. [1] I briefly looked for whether there’s a broader and less negative version of this that applies to all information and not just misinformation, and didn’t find it yet. But if you think about it, it’s true that the amount of energy needed to know something is true first-hand is far, far higher (way more than an order of magnitude) than the amount of energy needed to use that information effectively. We basically don’t have the option to spend all of our time verifying the truthfulness of every opinion we have, or nothing at all would get done. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law