How reliable is a claim based on someone else's ability ?

Exploring Theravāda's connections to other paths - what can we learn from other traditions, religions and philosophies?
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ground
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Re: How reliable is a claim based on someone else's ability ?

Post by ground »

How reliable is a claim based on someone else's ability ?
It may be reliable for the one who claims due to faith but it may not be reliable for another due to not having faith. So it is just faith in someone else's ability in the context of the claim that is decisive.
Without a specific example it is impossible to say anything further because the relationship between "ability" and "claim" cannot be analyzed. Also "ability" is a momentary phenomenon and one cannot infer a general "ability" from one specific instance of "ability" although one instance of "ability" may cause faith/belief.


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chownah
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Re: How reliable is a claim based on someone else's ability ?

Post by chownah »

I have spent a good part of my life trying to determine the reliability of other people's claims and frankly my efforts have not given me much faith that relying on other's claims is a benefit. So what I have done is to work over a period of a couple of decades to change my life so that I am not at the whim of other people's claims. I'm a farmer....but let me tell you that even in something seemingly as simple as farming you get people making claims of all sorts and when it comes to what I have experienced it seems that almost all of these claims are of very little benefit.....the reason being that some of the claims are correct and some are not and there is really no way to know which is which except to rely on direct experience.

My advise is that if something is important in life then go by your own expereince....this requires actually going out and getting the experiences needed for making the judgement and not just passively waiting for knowledge to arrive on its own.
chownah
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Re: How reliable is a claim based on someone else's ability ?

Post by ground »

Just rely on the observable. And once what has been observed cannot be observed anymore you can rely that it has ceased. :smile:

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nameless
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Re: How reliable is a claim based on someone else's ability ?

Post by nameless »

Jhana4 wrote:
morning mist wrote: Many things are still beyond the scope of 'educated and experienced experts' , so if something is not accepted by them doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have an existence. What they claimed didn't exist 100 years ago can be claimed to exist now.
So what highly educated, trained and experienced experts can not detect by science, experiments and logic based on the evidence other people can *know* for themselves, right now? How does that work?
Morning mist talked about 'educated and experienced experts' in quotes, which I take to mean that not all people accepted as educated and experienced experts are actually as such. Morning mist also did not talk about science, experiments and logic; you can't take something that has not been said and use it to argue against the person. Not all 'educated experts' use science, experiments and logic to find facts.

As for 'how does that work', remember that in the past, 'experts' of the time believed the earth was flat, that the sun revolved around the earth, that making human sacrifices would appease the gods etc. We can now know that those things are not true (admittedly due to the work of real experts).

Edit:
Back to the topic.

The opposite claim ( something didn't exist) is not infallible. But it is a complicated topic. For example, in psychology, if you claim that (a process) doesn't exist in human beings, then your colleagues might want to know for example, what sort of population you used in the experiment (you can't properly claim something as fact without an experiment) and if it was biased. So if you used all young people, then they might ask what about older people? If you used all males then they would ask what about females? And there are other aspects such as geographic location, socioeconomical standards etc. It is probably impossible to draw a 'perfect' sample, so the current practice is to use the concept of confidence, if I remember correctly, which states for example that it is 95% likely that the conclusions are reliable. I'm rusty on the details so someone might want to correct me or elaborate.

So if you talk about how reliable the claim "something does not exist" is, it is not reliable. A factual reliable statement would be "something has not been observed to exist under these conditions" for example.
chownah
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Re: How reliable is a claim based on someone else's ability ?

Post by chownah »

A short explanation of confidence as from the above post:
If I had two coins...one is regular coin with one head and one tail...the other is a two headed coin....and if I closed my eyes and picked one not knowing which one it was and want to determine if it is the double headed one...I don't know which cause my eyes were closed and I didn't look and flipped it and it came up heads then how confident am I that I have chosen the two headed coin?. I'm not very confident because even if it was the regular coin there is a 50% chance that it would come up heads....so they say I am only 50% confident that I have chosen the double header. If I flip the same coin again and it comes up heads (now it has been heads twice in a row) how confident am I that I have chosen the double header?....well the chances of a regular coin coming up heads twice in a row is 25% so they say that I am 75% confident that I have chosen the double header. If I flip the same coin yet again it comes up heads ( now its been heads three times in a row) how confident am I that I have chosen the double headed coin?...well the odds of getting heads three times in a row with a regular coin is 12.5% so they say that I am 87.5% confident that I have chosen the double headed coin....
likewise if I get 4 heads in a row the probability of getting this with a regular coin is 6.25% so I am 93.75% confident I have the double header
likewise if I get 5 heads in a row the probabililty of getting this with a regular coin is 3.125% so I am now 96.875% confident that I have chosen the double header........and I am now more than 95% confident. Many experiments require 95% confidence that the results are valid so if at the start I said that I wanted to be 95% sure that I had the double header then I have now achieved that.
Notice that if I kept flipping and kept getting heads then with every flip I would become more confident that I had the double header....but that no matter how many times I flipped and got heads it would not PROVE that I had the double header.....but after say a billion flips most people would assume that it was proven.....but in theory it would not be proven but we would be very extremely confident that we had the double header....
chownah
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