this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Humanities & Cultures
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I live my life by facts and evidence and I am not reliant solely on my own experiential evidence.
If I come across something that seems to contradict what I believe to be a fact, I research it (to the best of my ability) to see if it’s just me who is wrong.
Of course, I am human, and fallable, and my emotions certainly can get in the way. But I try to be aware of them so I can put them into perspective.
Beyond that, I would need specific examples to address, as I’ve never had any experience that I can recall which contradicted anything already explained by science.
But what in the cases where you are not equipped or educated enough to perform the research properly?
This is especially relevant in the field of medicine and nutrition as we have so much more to learn about biology and chemistry and those are subjects almost no layman has the resources or knowledge to study. .
The example I gave to the original top of this thread was the keto diet.
If you found that by eating very few carbs you lost significantly more weight WITHOUT reducing your caloric intake, would you have the biological and chemical knowledge to research this in a meaningful way?
Yet you would have had the physical experience of losing the weight, you would KNOW it works because it worked for you.
That's the beauty of science, I don't have to experience something to believe it to be factual, and if I experience something that I don't understand, I can work to find out without having to immediately believe something is objectively factual or not. I'm okay with not knowing until I find out. That's the problem with religionists, they require answers but substitute superstition and "faith" in place of actual provable fact. The point of science is the endless pursuit of objective discovery and fact.
All this to say, I do not buy into the premise that I must make a belief in something just because I experience it.
That’s where you learn to leverage experts and their findings. No one can learn every field themselves, but what I can learn is how to spot fake experts and fake reviews regardless of field, which helps direct that.