The worst thing you can do to a stupid person is tell them they should not take things on faith, but that they should personally verify things, because that’s what science and independent thinking are all about.
This is an incredible load of bullshit, because science is not at all about verifying everything yourself. Science is about organizing human knowledge in such a way that everything you deal with in the sphere of science has been verified by multiple people, and most people only verify one or two things personally, while having faith that the rest of the scientific community has been doing their job with the same diligence in the sphere of their personal competence. Essentially, a particle physicist can only verify statistical data obtained from an accelerator, he doesn’t verify that the Earth is round or that there’s a black hole in the center of the galaxy. A geologist only verifies things regarding tectonic plates and their movements, and the nature of the minerals recovered by deep drilling, he doesn’t verify things in the sphere of influence of meteorology. You only specialize in that one thing, and the rest you take on faith. So, basically, if you organize a system in such a way that in every sphere of scientific interest you have multiple scientists peer-reviewing and fact-checking each other, you create what is known in cryptography as the web of trust. You don’t need to personally verify everybody’s PGP key. What you need to do is personally verify PGP keys of the people you personally know. The groups of people overlap, and if you have people A, B and C, and if A can verify B, and B can verify C, A can trust C without being able to personally verify. There’s also the criterion of results, which is probably the most important thing of all because that’s the main difference between hard science and a circlejerk. The criterion of results is when you can produce technology based on your science. It’s when you can use what you know about photography, lithography, chemistry and quantum physics and produce a microprocessor. The fact that it works proves that you know what you’re talking about; without that, it could all be bullshit. One religious fanatic told me, more than a decade ago, that science is unreliable, it’s never the complete truth and certainty (that he, presumably, gets from some bronze age scripture). I told him that science and technology indeed contain a certain degree of unreliability, but I put it this way: you have a screen in front of you, that reliably produces the same picture refreshed some 60 times per second. This picture is not garbled. There might be a dead pixel somewhere on the screen. There might be a difference in backlight illumination in the corners. The computer itself performs millions operations every second in order to display the picture. It is able to connect to the network, get data, process it, display it in client software, you then read it, understand it, reply to it and send it back through the server, and I download it on my side and see the exact same message that you sent. Not a single bit was corrupted, despite all of the supposed unreliability of it all. You don’t see people complaining on forums that they can’t understand the text because it’s garbled, because those computers, they make mistakes every now and then. Actually, it’s all incredibly reliable, it’s so reliable you have air traffic control which uses radars and computers to reliably detect position and speed of multiple aircraft simultaneously, they use the data to predict future and issue specific orders to pilots, and this happens all over the world every day, and every other decade you have an accident due to an air traffic control error. This stuff is so reliable you can use it to make bricks. Yes, there’s some possibility for error, there’s an innate degree of unreliability in there, but you need to understand what it is. My computer is so reliable it works for years on end without any issues, and if there’s an issue, it’s not with the computer, it’s with some program that’s not the greatest, or with the operating system which can be configured to just reboot in order to install updates while I’m in the middle of something. The unreliability is not of the degree where you can’t tell what the red color is supposed to be or where you can’t read the letters because they came out garbled, and the random pixels are just flaring up on the screen like white noise on the old analogue TV sets when the reception is bad. The unreliability is that you don’t always have good base station coverage for your GSM phones, the unreliability is that you sometimes have no mobile data connection because you’re in a canyon and there are no base stations nearby. The unreliability is that out of thousands of planes that fly every day, every year you’ll have several bad accidents. It’s not that it sometimes works and sometimes not. It almost always works perfectly. I’d trust air traffic control more than I’d trust my eyesight, and that’s not because I have poor eyesight or because I’m a gullible person, it’s because they are so incredibly good at what they do, and because they are tested all the time and they reliably deliver the goods. They are not tested by me, but they are, and I believe it all because I’m not a fucking idiot, like those people who would say that the Earth is flat and that you’d believe that too if you actually tested it like they do, and it never crossed their small shallow minds to just go from northern to southern hemisphere and look at the night sky, because the constellations are different, which is an absolute proof that you’re on a sphere. So be wary of those who tell you to go verify things for yourself, because they are usually either stupid or evil or both. Testing things yourself is something that’s so sensitive to sample bias, ignorance and manipulation it’s usually the worst thing you can do. Your best option is actually the PGP system, the web of trust. You need to figure out who is it that reliably knows something, and if you want to learn something, learn it from a person in a web of trust, because that person has been peer reviewed. Maybe you can’t verify him because he’s above your pay grade, but there are people on and above his pay grade who can and do verify him, and if he tells you how something works, this information is of better quality than anything you could come up with using your senses and “common sense”, because let’s face it, if common sense of most people was worth a damn, it wouldn’t take us most of history to figure out formulas for inertia and gravity and to figure that light can be broken into separate wavelength components, and it was mostly done by one guy, because common sense of everyone else wasn’t worth shit.
There are certain things one can and should personally test. I personally test cameras and lenses and see how they behave, because I’m a photographer and I can. I know what to look for when I test them and I know how the equipment works well enough that I can figure out the way lens designers set up the spherical aberration by the way the out-of-focus areas look. That’s because photography is within my sphere of competence and I know what I’m doing. I can also find flaws in other people’s reasoning, because that, too, is within my area of expertise: I’m actually very good at thinking. There are many things I can personally verify, but even more important is that I know the difference between what I can check an what I can trust. I can trust that people at Intel know a thing or two about quantum physics, because if they didn’t, their shit would fail much before the 14nm level of integration and I wouldn’t be able to overclock my CPU to 4.6 GHz. I can trust that people at NASA know calculus and that the Newtonian physics work, because without them we wouldn’t have the communication satellites. I can trust that the Earth is round because if it were flat I’d see the Magellanic Clouds and the Southern Cross from Europe, which I don’t.
What I can’t trust is that people are smart enough to use that mythical “common sense” in order to verify complicated things personally. For instance, it’s quite easy to figure out that there are communication satellites in the sky, which basically proves the entire modern physics if you’re a competent enough thinker to do the necessary reasoning. You buy a satellite dish, point it at a random part of the sky, see what you get on your TV. Then point the dish at the satellite, good reception. Voila, proof that you have a radio transmitter in the sky at a very precise location. Now, think about how it can be there, who put it there and how, and how can one transmit images from a station on Earth, relay them through a satellite in the sky, so that you can pick the signal up and amplify it, and then reproduce it on your TV. But if you don’t know how a TV converts radio waves into RGB pixel intensities and how PAL encoding works, fuck off with that “I’m not a sheep, I’ll verify things” shit. You’re a stupid sheep alright, go back to eating your grass and bleat. Leave verifying to people with functioning brains, and you stick to blind following because that’s actually the safest thing for you to do, because finding someone smarter and following him is the only way for you not to fuck up everything.
