It varies widely depending on a combination of whether it impacts me directly, whether it contradicts or is inconsistent with information I have already accepted as fact, and the source. The source includes being reliable and if the fact could be something that serves the source’s self interest as that would require corroboration.
Until recently, if NASA tells me their current data shows that black holes exist at the center of a galaxy I take their word for it. They have been consistently reliable for decades and their entire mission is about increasing knowledge and sharing it with the entire world. With recent administrative changes I am more skeptical and wouldn’t trust something that contradicts prior scientific discoveries without corroboration from an external agency like the European Space Agency. I would take the ESA at their word currently.
If a for profit company says anything I want corroboration from a neutral 3rd party. They have too much incentive to lie or mislead to be trusted on their own.
Something from a stranger that fits into prior knowledge might be accepted at face value or I might double check some other source. Depends on how important it is to me and whether believing that would lead to any obvious negative outcome. I will probably also double check if it is interesting enough to want to check, and I’ll use skepticism as an excuse.
That covers actual factual stuff that could possibly be corroborated by a third party. Facts like the Earth orbits the sun or Puerto Rico is a US territory type stuff.
Then there are other things that can be factual but difficult to determine and that is a combination of experience and current knowledge, plus whether believing it would be a benefit or negative. If someone tells me the ice isn’t thick enough based on their judgement I will treat it as a fact and not go out on it unless I had some reason not to believe them. If they told me apples were found to be unhealthy I would check other sources.
Thank you for such a detailed answer.
I have a model of everything. Everything I am, my understanding of the world, it all fits together like a web. New ideas fit by their relationship to what I already know - maybe I’m missing nodes to fit it in and I can’t accept it
If it fits the model well, I’ll tentatively accept it without any evidence. If it conflicts with my model, I’ll need enough proof to outweigh the parts it conflicts with. It has to be enough to displace the past evidence
In practice, this usually works pretty well. I handle new concepts well. But if you feed me something that fits… Well, I’ll believe it until there’s a contradiction
Like my neighbors (as a teen) told me their kid had a predisposition for autism, and the load on his immune system from too many vaccines as once caused him to be nonverbal. That made sense, that’s a coherent interaction of processes I knew a bit about. My parents were there and didn’t challenge it at the time
Then, someone scoffing and walking away at bringing it up made me look it up. It made sense, but the evidence didn’t support it at all. So my mind was changed with seconds of research, because a story is less evidence than a study (it wasn’t until years later that I learned the full story behind that)
On the other hand, today someone with decades more experience on a system was adamant I was wrong about an intermittent bug. I’m still convinced I’m right, but I have no evidence… We spent an hour doing experiments, I realized the experiments couldn’t prove it one way or the other, I explained that and by the end he was convinced.
It’s not the amount of evidence, it’s the quality of it.
I have a model of everything. Everything I am, my understanding of the world, it all fits together like a web. New ideas fit by their relationship to what I already know - maybe I’m missing nodes to fit it in and I can’t accept it
Same, and I would add the clarification that I have a model for when and why people lie, tell the truth, or sincerely make false statements (mistake, having been lied to themselves, changed circumstances, etc.).
So that information comes in through a filter of both the subject matter, the speaker, and my model of the speaker’s own expertise and motivations, and all of those factors mixed together.
So as an example, let’s say my friend tells me that there’s a new Chinese restaurant in town that’s really good. I have to ask myself whether the friend’s taste in Chinese restaurants is reliable (and maybe I build that model based on proxies, like friend’s taste in restaurants in general, and how similar those tastes are with my own). But if it turns out that my friend is actually taking money to promote that restaurant, then the credibility of that recommendation plummets.
(it wasn’t until years later that I learned the full story behind that)
Okay, I can’t be the only one that’s kinda curious about your trainwreck neighbors. Obviously they fell down a conspiracy rabbit hole, but was there more?
Sorry to disappoint, I meant I learned the story behind the myth of vaccines causing autism. They seemed to be pretty good parents, before they moved away their kid was often outside on his bike… He seemed happy and healthy to me.
We had a significant age gap so we never interacted, but he was on the sidewalk frequently and never in the street when I was driving… Take from that what you will
It’s not the amount of evidence, it’s the quality of it.
Quality evidence has an inherent quantity wouldn’t you say?
No? I don’t care if the whole world is wrong, some evidence is strong enough to convince me forever, even if it’s subjective
Quality is all that matters. One incontrovertible fact I can poke and prod myself means more than millions of subjective accounts. Or even all of science - I’ll rearrange my entire model around a new fact if it’s compelling enough
One quality study is enough to convince you of something, even if it has never been reproduced or reviewed?
Sure. If it fills a gap in my model, I don’t need any proof at all. Why would I? It just makes sense. Of course I’m going to tentatively fit it in
And if a study convincingly disproves it, I’ll just as quickly discard the tentative idea. Why wouldn’t I? It made sense, but it didn’t math out.
But this is all in the context of my model. It’s a big web of corroboration
You can’t convince me global warming isn’t happening, because I’m watching it in real time. No amount of studies are doing to do more than inform the facts of my lived experience… I’m the primary source, I was there
What if you wake up from the Matrix and it turns out the world actually descended into an ice age?
I mean, it’s a silly, kinda extreme scenario, but we’re talking about big picture stuff and you can’t ever convince me would cover it as well.
Oh, that would fit in my model perfectly. Because it’s another world… Obviously. My model isn’t disproven if I wake up in another world, my model is just physically removed from my new world. Universal things still apply until they don’t, but there’s no conflict
If global warming hits 2.5C then flips around to an ice age…I don’t understand it, but it’s happened. My old observations aren’t disproven, new ones disprove the theories around them
Squaring that circle would take effort, but if it’s true it’s true, and truth sometimes takes time to understand
It depends. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
really depends on the source and if it makes sense in the first place.
Reading it once on social media
I think this applies to vastly more of us than are comfortable admitting
is it a fun fact that impacts nothing? i’ll accept it as fact immediately and without question
is it a fact that has some weight to it? i’ll probably double check and if i find a reliable source that also claims it to be fact i’ll accept it (if i’m reading about it from a reliable source i will accept it immediately)
is it a fact that contradicts my current beliefs/understanding of the world? i’ll do some research on it, check if there’s any recent articles like “that thing you thought was right? is not!”, and depending on the nature of the fact think about why it’s been debunked and how that changed my perception on the world
None. I believe everything. Especially the contradictory parts. It’s one of the powers granted to me by my true nature, revealed through the one true Slackmaster, J.R. “Bob” Dobbs.
It takes a lot for me to accept something as fact, but I’m okay with living my life on a combination of likelihoods, reasonable plausibilities, and vibes
Facts are overrated
Basically, if it’s in the Bible, it’s fact. Everything else is entirely made up by the devil.
I’m like 90% sure this is sarcastic, but you never know.
Maybe the person in chat is a troll. May e the person is a die hard fanatic.
We will never know…
Like, i found this youtube channel from the video “mom founf the yaoi”. And now its latest video is about the rapture? Its just morse code, this description, and 2 links in the comments.
As soon as i get home, im yt-dlp this channel to preserve this.
I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about (replied in the wrong place, maybe?), but that is some prime internet weirdness.
Not sure if people on the internet are doing a bit for the funnies, or actually serious with what the believe.
If it’s a really reliable source and sounds plausible, very little. Iran hit a hospital in Israel recently.
If it’s some random person and sounds plausible, probably many repetitions from unrelated people in unrelated contexts, with some time as “word is” after a couple or few mentions. Airport security is theater and misses actual weapons all the time. I guess I should add the caveat that if it’s something easily refuted like “TSA hires out of malls” it gets promoted to fact faster, because of Cunningham’s law.
If it sounds implausible, a lot. Like, it might be a thing I painstakingly confirm or deny over the course of years. Thermodynamics is always explained in a way that has massive gaping logical holes. It obviously empirically works, but a rigorous derivation without any sneaky tricks would probably imply a proof of P!=NP - and it took me years to work my way through enough papers and literature to confirm that.
If it’s a source or type of source with a history of making up the sort of thing they’re saying, infinite - it will be all noise regardless of how much data there is.
Laying it out like this, I clearly put a lot of emphasis on the motivation and past track record of sources. There’s so many things to see and measure, far too many, and there’s also lies and mistakes, so I guess one has to. That’s probably been true since the stone age, and probably drove some human evolution, although it’s intensified quite a lot in recent history.
Note that even facts are still subject to skepticism, discussion and revision. Absolute certainty it it’s own beast and it’s not a universally agreed-on fact that it even exists.
ill tell you this, the amount of data would require for anyone accept a statement or idea as fact is related to their emotional assessment of the idea. See it all the time with trump supporters that think that trump is actually fighting to cut tax on overtime pay simple because he said it on the trail and there no evidence (and they have no evidence) that is happening, on the other hand it would take an infinite amount of evidence that trump took bribes even as he openly appointed Elon after spending millions of dollars.
so its weird that you have to propagandize the facts just to get people anywhere near a reasonable level of skeptism.
but for me I just say anything is valid unless I know how its wrong, which is limbo of acceptance then afterwards it can become a scoreboard where for and against. maybe a source doesn’t 100% line up with a statement, hell even video/audio evidence can be incongruent with a statement (as in its similar to what’s said but doesn’t back up a statement). I think the claim that Floyd overdosed but the video doesn’t show a overdose from opioids, so you’d have to rule out overdose simple because video doesn’t match the description of an overdose.
it wouldn’t take much, generally new information has to be consistent with what I know. the hard part is understanding the new information. no one is randomly disprove gravity or that things have mass, but someone can prove to me how a myth is meant to be interpreted for the intended audience
It’s not so much the amount as the quality.
That’s the great thing about science.
Things that are considered facts in today’s world can be disproven by new experiments and observations (recreated through experimentation and after adequate peer review).
So for me, it depends on what is being evaluated. 2+2 is a fact. Exact age of the moon might be up for more debate.
2+2 is a fact
In some sense, if every single human thought that 2+2 equaled 5, it would become true
(I’m not smart enough to come up with this lol, got it from Orwell’s 1984)
It doesn’t even require belief.
2+2=5 for sufficiently large values of 2.
While a facetious statement in general, it is factual if those values derive from rounding. Significant Digits must be maintained.
Only if you completely redefine some aspect of the equation. You’d have to define “5” to actually mean “4” or change the meaning of “+” or “=” in some way that changes the operation. 2+2=4 isn’t just an abstract statement, it’s based on the way the physical world works. If you have 2 apples, and then I give you 2 more, you don’t suddenly have 5 apples because we all decided 2+2=5.
Orwell’s meaning in 1984 wasn’t about belief changing the world, it was about the power of brainwashing and how fascism demands obedience.
If you have 2 apples, and then I give you 2 more, you don’t suddenly have 5 apples because we all decided 2+2=5.
No, but some types of addition follow their own rules.
Sometimes 1+1 is 2. One Apple plus one Apple is two apples.
Sometimes 1+1 is 1. Two true statements joined together in conjunction are true.
Sometimes 1+1 is 0. Two 180° rotations is the same as if you didn’t rotate the thing at all.
If you don’t define what kind of addition you’re talking about, then it’s not precise enough to talk through what is or isn’t true.
How is 2 + 2 a fact?
How do you know, through new experiments and observations, that we will never determine the exact age of the moon?
You have 2 apples. I give you 2 more. How many apples do you have? Unless you redefine what the numbers or the operators mean, then you now have 4 apples. That’s a truth that is evident in the world and can be verified. That’s what a fact is.
He didn’t suggest we could never determine the age of the moon. He said that science refines it’s methods and gathers new information, and so we may change our estimate of its age based on new evidence.
Maybe the person who isn’t you that I asked can weight in because I didn’t ask you about your comments context.
I’m not sure how I would even quantify this.
But I could qualify this: having a consensus across multiple trusted sources.
There are very few pieces of knowledge that I’d consider a fact. Rather, I tend to see those as the best current knowledge that might turn out to be false in the future. The fact of consciousness is among the only things in the entire universe that I see as absolutely being true. Pretty much anything else can just be an illusion.
How do you know consciousness is “true” and not also an illusion created by the brain?
Because consciousness is where illusions appear. The unconscious mind can’t experience illusions.
I’m using Thomas Nagel’s definition of consciousness: the fact of experience - that it feels like something to be from a subjective point of view.
Even if we’re living in a simulation and literally everything is fake, what remains undeniable is that it feels like something to be simulated. I’d argue that this is the only thing in the entire universe that cannot be an illusion.
The unconscious mind can’t experience illusions.
How do humans dream?
“Unconsciousness” as a clinical term is different from the absence of consciousness in the philosophical or phenomenological sense.
A sleeping person may appear unconscious to an outside observer, but from the subjective point of view, they’re not - because dreaming feels like something. A better example of what I mean by unconsciousness is general anesthesia. That doesn’t feel like anything. One moment you’re lying in the operating room counting backwards, and the next you’re in the recovery room. There’s no sense of time passing, no dreams, nothing in between - it’s just a gap.
Thomas Nagel explains this idea in What Is It Like to Be a Bat? by saying that if bats are conscious, then trading places with one wouldn’t be like the lights going out - it would feel like something to be a bat. But if you switched places with a rock, it likely wouldn’t feel like anything at all. It would be indistinguishable from dying - because there’s no subjectivity, no point of view, no experience happening.
Some studies on dreams under anesthesia.
What do you disagree with here exactly?
A better example of what I mean by unconsciousness is general anesthesia. That doesn’t feel like anything. One moment you’re lying in the operating room counting backwards, and the next you’re in the recovery room. There’s no sense of time passing, no dreams, nothing in between - it’s just a gap.
I am not disagreeing. I am providing you something that demonstrates the premise you built your idea on is false.
Even if it is an illusion created by the brain, does that make it any less existent?
If you see a mirage of a spring in the desert can you quench your thirst?
The fact that there is word for this experience demonstrates that the experience itself objectively exists, which only serves to prove my point.
Answer the question.
I have absolutely no idea why you are being so weird about this since obviously if the spring does not exist then it cannot be drunk from. However, what you are working bizarrely hard to go out of your way to miss is that, regardless of whether the spring itself exists in objective reality, the experience of seeing it has objective existence.
Phrased in a different way: if you see something that looks like a spring in the desert, then that might not mean that you will be able to drink from it, but you can be certain that, in that moment, you are seeing something that looks like a spring in the desert.
Do Unicorns exist?
