Who Knows

The easiest way to prove a hypothesis is to present it to people who already believe its truth.

This is a more difficult thing for me to remember than it should be, I think. It's easy for me to be skeptical of those things that strike me as completely wonky or suspiciously convenient. But those are not the things that I need to be actively skeptical of; I'm already inclined to not take them at face value. Instead, the things that seem just "right enough" are the ones that need to spend some time investigating, before taking them to be true.

The tricky part of this, outside of simply finding the time that would be required to do all the research, is understanding myself to not have a sufficient grasp of the world around me to understand what is and is not rational to subscribe to a belief in. To be sure, I'm not convinced that this is a reasonable way to go about things, even given my general level of skepticism. Expecting the unexpected is more difficult than is let on, and so understanding that the fact that my view of the world has turned out to be fairly workable thus far doesn't mean that it will continue to be so takes more effort than I commonly plan for. And the payoff is limited. The reason why people are capable of such a diversity of beliefs about the world is that most of them make no difference; the ones that do, there tends to be broad agreement on precisely because of the impact that it makes. Most of the random things that people present to me that turn out to be false when I research them are completely unimportant. My life would not be materially different if I had been instead inclined to take them at face value.

And I suspect that this is the biggest obstacle in anyone's search for truths about the world; most of them are simply unimportant, and this means that they lack any sort of feedback mechanism.