[m3kw9]

Sometimes you just have to believe in something as you won’t be able to verify it. The quake in Turkey, real or not? Yeah is probably real but no you have not seen it or experienced it, but you know is way too much evidence from different news sources to be fake and no reason to fake it as far as you are concerned.

How about balloons where the US is saying is a spy device but China is saying is for weather and was blown off course? Same idea us you were not there when the ballon was made or you did not see what they recovered. There is lots of incentives for either country to blow this either way, I would just not choose a side till more events that can connect the dots that makes it very unlikely it isn’t real. Again you will never be able to verify but you have to see a mountain of evidence from many sources to gauge likelihood

[klysm]

Epistemology is hard but for some reason it doesn’t seem to be addressed directly frequently.

[somenameforme]

You can usually find "truth" relatively easily by seeing what two opposing sides tend to agree on. Sometimes they'll both be wrong, but more often than not they're probably right. So both the US and China claim there was a Chinese made balloon and the US shot it down. So it's pretty safe to say that's all true. Was it a weather balloon or a spy balloon? This is where the key point is a willingness to accept uncertainty.

But I do not agree on the 'preponderance of sources' argument as a means to finding truth. As a contemporary example, consider the COVID lab leak stuff. You had large numbers of scientists making declarations in journals that it was literally impossible, fact checkers declaring the concept clearly debunked, government calling it dangerous disinformation, the media running endless stories calling anybody who dared even think about a lab leak as little more than crazy conspiracy theorists of the flat earth type, and more.

Until one day, everything changed and the lab leak was perfectly okay to discuss. There was no silver bullet, just a geopolitical recalculation. And it turns out among those scientists were people directly involved COVID related gain of function research. Those journals somehow couldn't discover such an absurd undeclared conflict of interest, even though a simple search or CV reference would tell all. The media suddenly did a hard 180, and you even had mainstream outlets actively mocking how absurdly "obviously true" it was that the virus came from a lab leak.

We live in an era of disinformation being coordinated and deployed at scale, and now human-like text-generation is about to enter the picture. When my logic runs contrary to a million sources - I'm going with myself. If I'm wrong, at least I believed something that I felt seemed like the truth, and could presumably defend. By contrast believing in something that seems false (and increasingly often turns out to be) simply because of a mountain of pressure? That would feel just awful to me.