Perhaps add London to the title so people can see that there is a London meetup by glancing and not only after they've visited the thread?

I'm planning on coming too. It will be my first less wrong meetup, anything I need to know beforehand?

I wish I could see a doctor-statistician. Or at least a doctor who understood statistics.

Hmm ... quality, really. One of the functions of Discussion is posts that aren't ready for main. That's what I meant, that this post is good enough for that.

Do you have enough karma now to move it to main? If so you should. Or maybe a moderator can.

For the most part, my response to recommendation 1 is: this won't be much use. It is hard enough remembering "the bottom line" without also remembering the source or evidence. Most fact-learning occasions call instead for a snap judgment on the quality of the source or evidence, followed by accepting or rejecting or setting some quasi-probabilistic attitude toward the information, and then spending no more mental energy on the evidence. In those cases, the evidence is usually soon forgotten. So, most fact-recalling occasions are not going to reveal my reason for the alleged fact.

Obviously there are exceptions. If the information is controversial and I intend to share it, then I'll try remembering the source. Or better, bookmarking a link or taking notes.

I can't imagine having such database in a human mind. For every fact you would have to remember who told you about it (sometimes multiple people) and maybe also when they told it etc., so for each fact you would need something like a Wikipedia "talk page".

A difficulty is that it can often be hard to identify why we believe something - either we've forgotten how we came to believe it, or we believe it because or the accumulation of lots of small pieces of information that are hard to summarize.

This should be on main.

First occurrence:

When John says "My map has a bridge at grid reference 234567", I should add a note to my map saying "John's map has a bridge at grid reference 234567"

Second occurrence:

I should add a note to my map saying "John has the following note on his map: 'I believe there is a bridge at grid reference 234567'".

Was this slight difference intentional (one has you add a note that there is a bridge on his map; the second has you add a note that he has a note that he believes there is a bridge)?

What happens too often is that we directly add "The sky is green" to our beliefs.

Maybe. I wonder if too often we get out our eraser and immediately start trying to erase on their map.