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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.

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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.

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