Uncertainty
Jun. 9th, 2019 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unspeakablehorrorNo matter how much I like and agree with someone, I'm not willing to accept their statements about anyone or anything as irrefutable fact or to believe that they don't make mistakes or have errors in judgment. While I certainly don't have the time to independently verify everthing I'm told (and I'm sure no one else does either), I try to distinguish between what I have verified myself to be true vs information I've accepted as likely to be true because someone I think is reasonably trustworthy has said it. Because even if people exist who would never lie to me (seems a little extreme to be likely but I don't see why it would be impossible either), sometime's they're just going to be wrong.
There's also levels of verification. Like, for example, 'has references' is an extremely minimal level of verification because:
*Do the references say what the person says they do? Have I read them in their entirety to verify this? Even if the person uses a quote and I find the quote in the very first sentence, I won't know if it was taken out of context if I don't read the rest of the document.
*Are they primary or secondary sources? A person who directly observed something documenting it reduces the amount of misinterpretation or distortion that can occur between you and them.
*What kind of biases do the references have?
*What qualifications does the person writing this reference have to make assertions about this topic?
*And so on.
That's a lot of questions. What I'm saying is that there's just a lot of uncertainty in the world and not enough time to dispel it all, but it's good to sometimes make an effort to evaluate certain things on this deeper level, and to accept that there are some things we just don't know. Like instead of trying to feel more certain, it might be better to think about what we can do to better manage the inherently large amount of uncertainty in life.
There's also levels of verification. Like, for example, 'has references' is an extremely minimal level of verification because:
*Do the references say what the person says they do? Have I read them in their entirety to verify this? Even if the person uses a quote and I find the quote in the very first sentence, I won't know if it was taken out of context if I don't read the rest of the document.
*Are they primary or secondary sources? A person who directly observed something documenting it reduces the amount of misinterpretation or distortion that can occur between you and them.
*What kind of biases do the references have?
*What qualifications does the person writing this reference have to make assertions about this topic?
*And so on.
That's a lot of questions. What I'm saying is that there's just a lot of uncertainty in the world and not enough time to dispel it all, but it's good to sometimes make an effort to evaluate certain things on this deeper level, and to accept that there are some things we just don't know. Like instead of trying to feel more certain, it might be better to think about what we can do to better manage the inherently large amount of uncertainty in life.