Hacker News Reader

I'm not disagreeing with your conclusion. All I'm saying is that I'm just parroting these things without actually verifying them - and so are you. If flat Earth gets you all excited, I can also explain the concept with Pythagoras' theorem.

I never did a formal proof of it, yet I just use it because it works and I'm pretty sure it's true. Someone else proved it and I'm just parroting that without ever even having bothered to read the proof.

View on HN

I’m disagreeing that I am just parroting things. Parroting is mindlessly repeating something. I don’t claim that all my thoughts are original but some are at least independent and self derived.

We have 2500 years of epistemology. Individual humans can reach knowledge to various degrees. It’s not a binary state of knowing or not knowing.

Take the Pythagoras example then. How is it different from parroting if you never even read and understood the proof? And alright, parroting might be a negative word and you could want to use a fancy word saying you're following heuristics instead. But it doesn't change that you maintain and propagate knowledge that you have not personally verified in a rigorous sense.

There are examples of things written in school books that were just plain wrong because no one bothered to properly verify it. We all settle for "good enough" most of the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com