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Comment by dojitza1 | Hacker News Reader

You shouldn't trust anybody other than yourself and your ability to recognise scientific consensus. This process is not easy and as goes for most things in life, diversification is key. Basing your research on a single article/book/source is bad, and your confidence that you understand/are knowledgeable about a topic should rise as you do more research.

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> You shouldn't trust anybody other than yourself

Oh, definitely don't trust yourself. Everybody is wrong about almost everything, that includes yourself

Hide under a blanket?

it's the only way

So you’re saying trust nobody, not even yourself. Let me know how that’s working for ya

I'd probably rephrase "trust" to "maintain appropriate confidence intervals on your beliefs"

that being said, there's clearly something to trusting yourself beyond rational levels. How far would Kanye have gotten if not for boundless self belief?

You can also trust individual people and institutions if you follow them for a while and know how they do things.

That’s only slightly marginally better than randomly trusting any well respected source. In the end no single source should ever be viewed as definitive.

On the other hand you can’t spend all that much time researching every individual topic. Which is where the problem comes from, but trick is to hold options lightly.

> That’s only slightly marginally better than randomly trusting any well respected source.

Following someone's work for years is a much stronger signal than just checking their credentials imo.

It feels better, but in terms of actual evidence it’s not. One core issue is everyone makes mistakes, and nobody can research everything. So, the minimum error rate in all human content isn’t that great.

> You shouldn't trust anybody other than yourself

And probably not even that either.

Yourself is the last person you should trust. It’s much easier to detect logical flaws in other people and be critical about what they say.

> ou shouldn't trust anybody other than yourself

This is not good advice.

I’d say find experts that you trust and be aware that these experts may commit mistakes as any other human.

In short: find the experts that make the least mistakes.

Perhaps I should have been more precise (since you ommited a key part of my sentence) in pointing out that any person on their own is probably wrong about a lot of things. Only by taking into consideration a large enough sample of opinions can you begin to formulate your own with sufficient confidence of it being correct. Outsorcing your opinions to an 'expert' is giving up critical thinking.

> You shouldn't trust anybody other than yourself and your ability to recognise scientific consensus.

This is the anti-vaxxer motto, almost. I think I'll pass.

If you are highly intelligent, and recognize your own ignorance, then this works quite well. Anti-vaxxers get it wrong because they lack intellectual humility.

I thought we'd stop using "anti vaxx" as a slur now most of Europe and multiple world leaders have spent the last four months spreading or consuming anti-vaxx propaganda. It's not like that's a fringe position anymore.

> most of Europe and multiple world leaders have spent the last four months spreading or consuming anti-vaxx propaganda.

What? MOST of Europe? When did this happen?

I guess it depends how you define it, but France, Germany, Italy, Denmark etc all have been suspending the AZ vaccine as 'dangerous' although the actual reports of side effects are far less than the claimed danger from COVID. I admit I haven't made a formal list of every country and ticked them off to see if it's literally >50% of countries, but it's certainly >50% of Europe by GDP at this point.

That's still a far cry from "spreading propaganda".

You are correct in that there are fundamental problems with a statement as simple as the one I made. Don't take it at face value though. If you ignore your surroundings and formulate an opinion that is obviously different, I'd argue your ability to recongnise scientific consensus is severely lacking - Distilling it into something like "Don't trust anyone other than the scientific consensus" might be better.

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