… and while the original is talking of opinions, it… for some reason… caused me to wonder about the question in the title:
What % of things do we know because we were told to us by someone else?
Imho, it’s a fucking lot. Discounting the things I know about the specific people and animals in my life, it’s difficult for me to come up with any branch of knowledge where I learned most of it by direct observation and experience.
How do you count reading about something, like reading a wikipedia page a subject, or learning about some issue from one of those old newspaper things? Is that observation or being told?
Imho, I would consider ‘reading’ as ‘being told’, of course. It wasn’t information which was directly learned, someone had to communicate it to me. If I hear it in my ear, or ‘hear’ it in my mind, I’m still being told something by someone else.
And how about things that we know in multiple ways? I was told that the oven gets hot, and I also felt the heat myself. Does that count as something “I know that was told to me by someone else”?
In my daughter’s experience, yes, the ‘oven is hot’ is something we told her prior to her getting close to a hot oven, her being a toddler and all that. Whether she understood what was meant by ‘hot’ until she actually felt a hot oven, I don’t know. But we definitely warned our kid of potential dangers prior to her exposure to them.
Being able to learn from others (and to store and transfer complex and abstract ideas through speech) is what separates us from animals. It is what allowed our ancestors to develop culture, including tool use and protective clothing, and spread across the globe, prospering in a myriad of different environments.
Being able to store information through writing, allowing us to learn from others who are separated from us both spatially and temporally, is a huge part of how much division of labor we can do, and this specialization is responsible for modern society.
So I agree we know the vast majority of what we know through reading or being taught rather than direct observation. This is the only way for a 20 year old to be a productive member of society. Or even a 60 year old. A lifetime of direct observation would not be sufficient to understand our society well enough to be a scientist or an engineer or an accountant.
Well, a lot depends on what it means to “know” something. If somebody tells me something, and I act on what they told me and find out for myself that they were right, can I be said to know the thing they told me before, or only after, I tested it for myself?
Not only “the things we know” but also the overwhelming majority of our opinions and viewpoints are things we first encountered by hearing them from someone else. We aren’t mindless sponges that don’t make any contributions individually, but our individual contributions (and our originality) is a vastly smaller proportion of what happens in our minds than we tend to think they are. Essentially, we are conscious in the plural, the thoughts of our species taking place in long waves, with individuals holding and processing and passing along those ongoing patterns. We’re more like neurons in an thinking-network than the separately cognitive, separately opinionated folks we tend to conceptualize ourselves as.
I’d WAG that about 80% of things I know were told to me by someone else, but about 80% of opinions that I hold are mine. For instance, growing up as a kid, I really, really liked airplanes and American football. Neither of those interests were shared by my family in the least at the time. Hardly anyone around me cared about those two subjects. So the passion was mine. But I’d have had no way to know how fast an airplane flew, how lift works, what the speed of sound is, what a touchdown and first down are, what pass interference is, etc. unless I had a book to read or someone to tell me.
IMHO, almost everything I know I learned from someone or somewhere else. The only exceptions are the pieces of mathematical research that I produced myself. And even there, with one single exception, everything was gotten by taking something someone else had done and extending it, modifying it in some way, or just applying it more widely. I did once have one totally new thing. Just once.
It depends on what sort of things you think are things that “we know”. For instance, I know the location of most of the objects in my dwelling, and only maybe a few out of the hundreds of unique items I know the location of are due simply to having been told they are there. I also know what a large variety of foods taste like, and would be generally unable to learn much of that from reading about it, at least to the same sort of detail. The same can be said of all the sensory experiences we have made.
A great deal of what has made it difficult to make robots able to perform many of the things that humans do instinctively is that we have many years of sensory perceptions and experiments into how our movements affect the environment before we’re really thought of to be able to safely interact with the world independently. That is due to having been programmed genetically to be nearly a blank slate upon exiting the wound, completely helpless and still a long ways to go to develop mentally, whereas plenty of animals are capable of walking immediately upon birth. We have a ton of internalized information about what it takes to move each of our body parts, and there’s no way we can ever explain that to others - everyone has to learn it on their own. When you contrast this with having to tell a computer exactly how it is supposed to move, and exactly how one goes about processing visual stimuli, and so forth, it’s evident that there’s a huge compendium of knowledge unique to each individual that they cannot get through any method other than personal experience, although it is almost all of the kind of information like “I know what an orange tastes like.”
Certainly most cultural and technological information (how do I successfully grow oranges?) that has allowed us to develop a modern society is predicated on being able to pass down information, and has such a long history that people are predisposed to believe authority on pieces of information that they cannot possibly have obtained on their own, such that it certainly seems that the vast majority of information that we think of as useful information in our lives is going to be learned from something other than personal experience. But I say that if one considers just how many things one knows that one takes for granted simply because they learned it at such a young age that it doesn’t even seem like knowledge per se, that we learn a much larger percentage of the things we know due to our own experiences.
99.99%. There’s a Covid epidemic. That light in the sky is the Sun. My neighbor’s name is Paul. Milk costs $2.99 a gallon. Little Rock is the capital of Arkansas. Lincoln had a beard.
When I was a boy, my evil dad told me never to believe anything a lawyer tells me. I heard the same thing about sleeping dogs and politicians. Eventually, I learned these things were inaccurate. I also figured out that people I trusted had told me things that weren’t true. In many cases, those trusted people believed the “facts” they told me. It became tougher to sort the apparent wheat from the apparent chaff.
If you hoped I was leading up to a real answer, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I have become more skeptical over time.
There are few things I learned independently, but there are a number of subjects on which I’ve been told conflicting information and I’ve had to decide what to believe. I guess in at least some cases, my decision-making process was based on things people told me…
There is a huge difference between what you accept; and what you believe. If a guy you just met in a bar says his father had a wooden leg, you just accept that, without ever caring if is true. Belief, though, is your appraisal of the things that DO have relevance to your life or your overall sense if reality. Before you believe something, you put it through some kind of a mininal test of veracity.
As said above, a lot we know from others. But that knowledge is, in a lot of instances, supported by other evidence, either because we hear it from multiple persons or from personal experience, reasoning etc.
Like: always look left and right before crossing a street to avoid being run. over by a car. Undoubtedly I’ve been told so by my parents, but from independent reasoning and experiencing some near misses, I am convinced that this is true. I’ve got no personal experience that being run over is going to injure you, but this is also not purely based on hearsay.
In sum, a lot of knowledge is hearsay (testimony, they call it in epistemology), but it also has to fit in the whole body of your experience and beliefs (i.e. coherence).
