Item — HN Reader

> much of it several dozen or thousands of layers of indirection deep

Assuming we're just talking about information on the internet: What are you reading if the original source is several dozen layers deep? In my experience, it's usually one or two layers deep. If it's more, that's a huge red flag.

1 comments

Let's take a simple claim:

On Earth's surface, acceleration due to gravity is ~9.8m/s^2

I haven't tested this, but here you are reading it.

Did the person who I learned this from test it? I suspect not.

Did the person who they learned it from test it? I suspect not.

...

Did the person who they learned it from test it? I suspect not.

Could anyone test it? Sure! But we don't because we don't have the time to test everything we want to know.

Yes, and our own test could very well be flawed as well. Either way, from my experience there usually isn't that sort of massively long chain to get to the original research, more like a lot of people just citing the same original research.

True of academic research which has built systems and conventions specifically to achieve this, but very very little of what we know — even the most deeply academic among us — originates from “research” in the formal sense at all.

The comment thread above is not about how people should verify scientific claims of fact that are discussed in scientific formats. The comment is about a more general epistemic breakdown, 99.9999999% of which is not and cannot practically be “gotten to the bottom of” by pointing to some “original research.”