I completely agree with @TraderJoe that the vast majority of what we know is by accepting the word of someone else. I am a physicist, I have never measured the magnitude of the repulsion between electrons, I have never verified that there were excess electrons on two pieces of foil that repelled each other (where I viewed repulsion but had to take on faith that it was due to electrons). I have never measured time dilation, or the bend of light around a planet and seen it was consistent with special relativity. I have measured many superconducting devices and run lots of computer programs that I have written, but in no case did I “understand” all of the measuring equipment or the computer I was running on.
Talk about economies of scale, virtually EVERYTHING I know (except for some math I guess, and is that really “something?”) I know because I believe somebody else who told me the answer.
Robin Hanson recently talked about the Bayesian requirement to take in to account the opinions of other Bayesians who have more information than you do. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/07/finding-our-beliefs.html
I completely agree with @TraderJoe that the vast majority of what we know is by accepting the word of someone else. I am a physicist, I have never measured the magnitude of the repulsion between electrons, I have never verified that there were excess electrons on two pieces of foil that repelled each other (where I viewed repulsion but had to take on faith that it was due to electrons). I have never measured time dilation, or the bend of light around a planet and seen it was consistent with special relativity. I have measured many superconducting devices and run lots of computer programs that I have written, but in no case did I “understand” all of the measuring equipment or the computer I was running on.
Talk about economies of scale, virtually EVERYTHING I know (except for some math I guess, and is that really “something?”) I know because I believe somebody else who told me the answer.