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by kobeya 3159 days ago
Speak for yourself. I seem to have no problem verifying my beliefs.
1 comments

Please explain exactly how your current device is displaying this page, and please no handwaving like "a key is pressed" or "a dns record is served", we need this down to the electron level.

That was overly sarcastic for hn, but the point was that there is not a single human alive who can explain everything they do. At some point you are going to hit an assumption that you have not personally verified

I have reasonable models for how my machine works, verified by my knowledge of physics and engineering which I have sought to acquire even though it is not my field of study. More to the point, if someone makes a claim about the electrical engineering in my device, I have some basis for evaluating whether that is true or false.

E.g. if you claim that the NSA is listening into every single thing that is said on everybody's phones and watches, I would know that not to be true from bandwidth and battery arguments. Selectively, sure, but I could tell if it was happening 24/7 to my device in some sort of dragnet surveillance.

I feel like you have drawn a line in the sand and said , "This is the proper amount of knowledge to have, anything more than it is wasteful and anything less is ignorant".

How did you verify your physics and engineering knowledge? Did you run hundreds of thousands of experiments to verify every single law and property of physics? At some point you are reaching a piece of data you learned from someone else and did not verify or that is an assumption because it's currently unknown how to explain or takes too much effort to verify while living your life.

On top of that, the OP was talking about how it was impossible to verify _everything_ in our lives nowadays. You mentioned nothing about biology or chemistry. How do you know your diet is the proper one? Are you sure about every chemical you interact with and how it affects you? Do you properly understand copyright and other IP law when you make a YouTube video using someone else's work? Did you get the right permits to put up that shed on your land that complies with the regulations from the 7 different layers of polity that cover you? Life is far too complicated to understand every facet and it only gets worse as we realize things are more complicated than we previously thought