In general, when a position is non-obvious, a single conversation is nowhere near enough time to convince a rational person that it’s very likely to be true.
Oh, the situation is much worse than that. If your claim is empirical, and needs many background claims to even be coherent, then the evidence required may far exceed what any one person could gather. Compare the claim that one gene with a silly name controls the expression of another—consider the amount of evidence needed to justify the jargon in that case.
Oh, the situation is much worse than that. If your claim is empirical, and needs many background claims to even be coherent, then the evidence required may far exceed what any one person could gather. Compare the claim that one gene with a silly name controls the expression of another—consider the amount of evidence needed to justify the jargon in that case.
Yes, it can.
But it’s possible to do much better on in these situations than people usually do, by developing good heuristics for how to weight the beliefs of others who have relevant subject matter knowledge. If you haven’t seen them, see e.g. Vladimir M’s post Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields and Nick Beckstead’s post Common sense as a prior.