Right, beliefs of people who have been tracking evidence are themselves a sort of indirect evidence.
This isn’t only the case when someone has official credentials on a topic, and it’s not a binary choice between “trust the expert” and “trust our own thinking”. It’s something that inevitably informs how to engage in discourse in general, and if we fail to track the strength of this indirect evidence then our unexamined judgements often get us stuck in unpleasant and unproductive disagreements—as joked about in that “It’s not about the nail” video.
Track it, and it takes about two lines to form a relationship with a stranger where she’ll ask if it really is just the nail. Or what your take is on her makeup washing off, or whatever
Right, beliefs of people who have been tracking evidence are themselves a sort of indirect evidence.
This isn’t only the case when someone has official credentials on a topic, and it’s not a binary choice between “trust the expert” and “trust our own thinking”. It’s something that inevitably informs how to engage in discourse in general, and if we fail to track the strength of this indirect evidence then our unexamined judgements often get us stuck in unpleasant and unproductive disagreements—as joked about in that “It’s not about the nail” video.
Track it, and it takes about two lines to form a relationship with a stranger where she’ll ask if it really is just the nail. Or what your take is on her makeup washing off, or whatever