> Generally, science is not built on trusting others, it's built on being skeptical. It is actually built on probability. That is the most important thing mis

> Generally, science is not built on trusting others, it's built on being skeptical. It is actually built on probability. That is the most important thing missing from a lot of discourse, imho. Modeling reality is a lot of "this is very probably true/false" rather than "this is true/false", but everyday communication is almost exclusively in the latter form. Authority/expert status is just a heuristic used to guess the probability of what is presented by that authority, but proper communication about what is presented should include indications of that probability. This is however so uncommon that almost everybody thinks of ideas in a binary way, leading to distrust, tribalism and antagonism. Compare "eggs are bad for you" with "eggs are probably bad for you". If a year later the same authority states the opposite trust disappears rapidly if it was stated as absolutely as in the former case. A lot of overly confident communication by authorities in the Covid-19 days in an effort to improve compliance caused massive distrust, I'm sure. Something to try in your own life is to include probabilities when you state something. How sure are you of what you're saying? Having to think about this quickly leads to the intellectual humility you mention. It also antagonizes people less, because you're inevitably going to leave more room for opposing views.