In 2010 NASA hold a press conference that they made a discovery that supposedly expands the definition of life. Today the consensus among scientists seems to be that the finding is bullshit.
While incompetence is likely the better explanation than malice, it's still a fake.
Myself, I accept that I'm really trusting a network of people and that I can't practically verify almost anything I'm told.
The point is that the network you are trusting was likely wrong about a big discovery that NASA claimed to have made in this decade. Maybe even the biggest claimed discovery of NASA in this decade.
Good point. But my trusting a network of people, or really many (overlapping) networks of people, doesn't mean that I trust every specific claim or theory or piece of information. It just means that I've learned that they're overall trustworthy, or trustworthy to a specific (perhaps even quantifiable) extent, or maybe only trustworthy for certain kinds of claims or theories or information.
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: