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Comment by RagnarD | Hacker News Reader

"You’re basis for truth often relies on authority of your source."

No. This is such a common logical error that it has an old name: Argumentum ad Verecundiam (often shortened to Verecundiam, or Appeal to Authority in English.) Saying "I know this because authority X said so" - you don't know it at all. It has the epistemological status of outright faith.

What counts is the connection of statements to reality and their logical integrated cohesion as a whole. And that's regardless of the source.

Experts/Authorities are neither automatically right or wrong. No honest expert or authority ever demands that their statements be taken on faith. If they actually know what they're talking about, their statements can be logically defended and tied to reality. This is the standard that everyone should be held to.

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When you can personally verify all the facts about biology, physics, and distant places that you rely on to make decisions every day, then you can throw stones about arguments from authority. The rest of us use a little bit of faith.

You can trim that down quite a lot by assuming things aren't magic and use some minimal trust. If people say that cars are designed using newtonian physics, and you see your car is working, then you can say you have tested newtonian physics even if you don't understand the calculations.

Basically you test what you have and trust the description of the implementation. If it works you can trust the whole chain. This is of course not 100%, but it is about as reliable as it can get for an individual.

What you shouldn't do is assume that stuff that aren't 100% for sure are equally bad.

It's quite easy to test this very assumption against chaos theory in a controlled environment and demonstrate why a system involving a complex chain of dependencies is increasingly unpredictable down the chain.

As an uninformed consumer at or the bottom of the chain, you cannot trust that an interface that works today, will work tomorrow, for you do not have access to all of the chaotic variables which constrain the interface.

This is exactly why the appeal to authority is such a useful heuristic: when it comes to physics, I trust the man who teaches the engineers that car companies employ to make cars - because I can see cars work every day, so at the end of the chain there must exist a person who has fundamental insights about how the world works.

So while I can't prove something is right by appeal to authority, it's a very practical way for me to swift though the unbounded mass of claims and information that I couldn't possibly verify or prove in my lifetime, not even to a 19th century level of scientific knowledge.

For example, I saw an onion cell once at a school microscope, but I have never seen a bacteria. So as far as I can independently prove, I live in times before the germ theory of disease - but that doesn't mean I shouldn't trust my doctor when he recommends vaccines and antibiotics. The entire antivaxx movement is just an attempt to challenge the medical authority by people who are not intellectually equipped to verify the scientific claims.

"Minimal trust" is still distinctly non-zero, which is my point. GP was trying to tell us we should get to zero, which is obviously not feasible.

Too much reductionism can be a dangerous thing. This is pretty much the Sophist argument and it is not enough to build a scientific foundation on.

No, you don't need to personally verify all facts. But you need to be able to observe several indepedent validations. Yes, somewhere you have to take someone's word for fact, but multiple independent observations is a close approximation to the perfect scientific method. Related to that is the fact that science is not a democracy, and these observations have to be weighed against how they fit in our generally accepted worldview. Theory is more than just facts.

Every little detail of science has to be questioned, just not by everyone personally. Where that limit for healthy skepticism is drawn is not something can answer logically, but we can recognize if it is completely wrong.

Yes, balance is needed. But you're not really disputing my thesis, either.

There continue to be no shortcuts to truth.

People compare the laws of physics to unproven sociological hypothesis way too much. Yes I'm using the word law to exaggerate my point.

It's perfectly okay to stay agnostic on things you don't know about. It's always okay to say "I don't know." If you were forced to take a position on something you don't know about yourself, then looking to relevant authorities may be a decent enough plan, but who's forcing you to take positions on things?

Everything boils down to faith eventually, though. Even trusting the evidence of your senses is a kind of faith.

So the logical error isn't an epistemological error in all cases - you can see it as someone trying to minimize some distance metric they are operating on between Reality As It Is and Reality As I Know It by making a single hop to someone who, it is believed, has already done a lot of work investigating the ground claims.

This was the conclusion of René Descartes and the meaning behind "I think, therefore I am". It was the only safe conclusion he could come to after a deep series of introspection.

Once he got there, he systematically built up a new framework of thought and reasoning, and we got modern science and philosophy from it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito%2C_ergo_sum?wprov=sfla1

This was one of my complaints in college. You're taught a ton of things from a position of authority, but you never get a full explanation of how those things were discovered of how you could prove them yourself.

I think it would be cool if we taught kids how things work along with how they can prove it for themselves. Currently the only field which encourages you to prove things for yourself is maths, and proofs aren't even given that much importance.

Even with softer topics like history, I think it should be essential to include context explaining how we know these things to be true. On what evidence are these beliefs based on? What is the level of epistemic uncertainty of the information we're being given?

> This was one of my complaints in college. You're taught a ton of things from a position of authority, but you never get a full explanation of how those things were discovered of how you could prove them yourself.

Could you give some example of what would you like to prove, from your college curriculum?

Honestly, after reflecting on it I do think that I had more courses cover how to prove things ourselves than I was initially remembering. In particular, my physics and electronics labs were the most thorough.

When I wrote that I was specifically thinking about chemistry. It's really been too long since I last studied the topic, so I can't remember any exact details. I just remember a vague sense of thinking "how did we figure this out in the first place?".

Part of the responsibility definitely falls on me, I should've been more inquisitive when I was younger. Maybe the professors would've been willing to explain if I'd been more self-confident and courageous to visit their office hours to inquire further.

My calc 2 professor would start every new concept by first describing (briefly) how the greeks would have done it with pure geometry, then how classic mathematics came to the solution from a different angle.

Probably the only higher math course I took that I was excited to go to lecture every day.

> never

No, you definitely do eventually. I remember plenty of that stuff from back in my advanced math days (even if I can't remember any of the math itself at this point), like the aha moments showing linear algebra work underpinning the memorization from calculus. It's just way up there in the coursework because the 100- and 200-level classes don't have the time to explain that stuff to 50-plus people and make sure any of them understand any of it.

maths, and proofs aren't even given that much importance

That doesn't match my experience with college at all. I was admittedly a math major and possibly other departments do it differently, but most math courses I took put a lot of emphasis on proving stuff and proofs, and proving stuff was around 50% of the final exam in most courses.

Colleges have 4 years, and most important discoveries took a brilliant person a lifetime of work.

How do you propose we give more detailed explanations and information for proving everything for yourself? Should college last a few hundred years instead of 4?

Did college not teach you how to access and parse through research papers and books? If you want a more full explanation and to prove things for yourself, why didn't you do so? When you were told, from authority, about the american antarctic base, why didn't you prove its existence by taking a boat there (repeated ad-nauseam for each location in the world)

Come on, it's a spectrum. I don't expect everything to build up a careful chain of trust and verification. But I think we can still do better than what the current education ecosystem provides. You're taking the most extreme perspective to a pretty reasonable claim.

Figuring out how to prove everything myself is impractical because I'm not an expert in every subfield. I think experts in various fields can write shortcuts and simple experiments which prove a lot of knowledge. It doesn't have to be perfect.

I just can't tell what you want.

Like, colleges right now provide "shortcuts and simple experiments" to approximate knowledge that was gained with a much more rigorous path. Yet, you decry current college as not showing the full path, as taking shortcuts.

Now, you're saying that yes, we need such shortcuts, it doesn't have to be perfect, and it's a spectrum... all of which I agree with, and seems to be the opposite of what you said above.

What's the fundamental difference between what you describe and what colleges do? Or is it just a matter of execution quality?

> Currently the only field which encourages you to prove things for yourself is maths, and proofs aren't even given that much importance.

Can you prove this assertion with math?

In a lot of cases you cannot check the connection to reality. And things being plausible (or following some "logic") means little to nothing when it comes to being correct.

If it worked that way, the Gallic Wars wouldn't have happened because Caesar's account would be considered "argument from authority".

This is a very confused argument.

Historians know that they can't take written sources at face value. For them, Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars is just another piece of evidence, not a Definite Proof of Everything That Was.

Caesar is not considered an infallible authority, but that has no bearing on the general consensus that Gallic Wars actually took place.

It would be foolish to think the Gallic Wars happened precisely as Caesar wrote because his book was overt self-aggrandizing propaganda intended to boost his standing with the Roman public.

But as to the Gallic Wars happening at all? There is corroborating evidence. Other Romans wrote about it, often to damn it, and they treated the existence of the war as a fact. He brought tons of Gallic slaves back to Rome which would corroborate the most basic facts of the claim (e.g. that there had been wars with Gallic people) to other Romans who weren't there to personally witness it. Furthermore there is modern archeological evidence of battles and massacres which roughly line up with some of what Caesar claimed to have done.

TFA agrees with you, and explains why experts can disappoint.

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