Ask Lemmy

Depends on the source and the weight of the claim. My fattest friend tells me the new Italian place slaps? Fact. The smartest person I know tells me there's a newly discovered planet? Worth looking into if it comes from them, but I'm skeptical.

This is exactly how science works. It self corrects as new information becomes available.

It varies widely depending on a combination of whether it impacts me directly, whether it contradicts or is inconsistent with information I have already accepted as fact, and the source. The source includes being reliable and if the fact could be something that serves the source's self interest as that would require corroboration.

Until recently, if NASA tells me their current data shows that black holes exist at the center of a galaxy I take their word for it. They have been consistently reliable for decades and their entire mission is about increasing knowledge and sharing it with the entire world. With recent administrative changes I am more skeptical and wouldn't trust something that contradicts prior scientific discoveries without corroboration from an external agency like the European Space Agency. I would take the ESA at their word currently.

If a for profit company says anything I want corroboration from a neutral 3rd party. They have too much incentive to lie or mislead to be trusted on their own.

Something from a stranger that fits into prior knowledge might be accepted at face value or I might double check some other source. Depends on how important it is to me and whether believing that would lead to any obvious negative outcome. I will probably also double check if it is interesting enough to want to check, and I'll use skepticism as an excuse.

That covers actual factual stuff that could possibly be corroborated by a third party. Facts like the Earth orbits the sun or Puerto Rico is a US territory type stuff.

Then there are other things that can be factual but difficult to determine and that is a combination of experience and current knowledge, plus whether believing it would be a benefit or negative. If someone tells me the ice isn't thick enough based on their judgement I will treat it as a fact and not go out on it unless I had some reason not to believe them. If they told me apples were found to be unhealthy I would check other sources.

when science backs it up.

really depends on the source and if it makes sense in the first place.

A couple kilobites, minimum.

It depends. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

At least 4.

Reading it once on social media

Hume had something like the wise apportion their confidence to the evidence, and Carl Sagan's extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence can apply. So if those are true the quality and type of data is going to depend on the claim of fact (friend says they bought a dog vs a dragon), and the amount of evidence depends on the claim and your general standard of evidence. If you're lowering or raising your standards for a specific claim that's usually going to mean there's a bias for or against it.

tl;dr 42 pieces of data

It honestly depends more on the source to me. I'd like to claim to rely on data but life is short and there is no way I can verify even a fraction of all the truths I have come to accept.

A sufficient amount

I'll colloquially use the word "fact" for extremely well supported claims, but in my head the only actual "facts" are mathematical derivations. Evidence supports the veracity of a claim, and a claim with a lot of evidence gets a tentative place in my world model, but any of those claims can be refuted by sufficient counter-evidence

I'm not sure how I would even quantify this.

But I could qualify this: having a consensus across multiple trusted sources.

Facts are hard to confirm, bullshit tends to reveal itself.

So I have try not to cling to tightly to any given "fact", in case new evidence arrives.

That said, is can be surprisingly easy to navigate many parts of life simply by avoiding confirmed bullshit.

is it a fun fact that impacts nothing? i'll accept it as fact immediately and without question

is it a fact that has some weight to it? i'll probably double check and if i find a reliable source that also claims it to be fact i'll accept it (if i'm reading about it from a reliable source i will accept it immediately)

is it a fact that contradicts my current beliefs/understanding of the world? i'll do some research on it, check if there's any recent articles like "that thing you thought was right? is not!", and depending on the nature of the fact think about why it's been debunked and how that changed my perception on the world

I have a model of everything. Everything I am, my understanding of the world, it all fits together like a web. New ideas fit by their relationship to what I already know - maybe I'm missing nodes to fit it in and I can't accept it

If it fits the model well, I'll tentatively accept it without any evidence. If it conflicts with my model, I'll need enough proof to outweigh the parts it conflicts with. It has to be enough to displace the past evidence

In practice, this usually works pretty well. I handle new concepts well. But if you feed me something that fits... Well, I'll believe it until there's a contradiction

Like my neighbors (as a teen) told me their kid had a predisposition for autism, and the load on his immune system from too many vaccines as once caused him to be nonverbal. That made sense, that's a coherent interaction of processes I knew a bit about. My parents were there and didn't challenge it at the time

Then, someone scoffing and walking away at bringing it up made me look it up. It made sense, but the evidence didn't support it at all. So my mind was changed with seconds of research, because a story is less evidence than a study (it wasn't until years later that I learned the full story behind that)

On the other hand, today someone with decades more experience on a system was adamant I was wrong about an intermittent bug. I'm still convinced I'm right, but I have no evidence... We spent an hour doing experiments, I realized the experiments couldn't prove it one way or the other, I explained that and by the end he was convinced.

It's not the amount of evidence, it's the quality of it.

ill tell you this, the amount of data would require for anyone accept a statement or idea as fact is related to their emotional assessment of the idea. See it all the time with trump supporters that think that trump is actually fighting to cut tax on overtime pay simple because he said it on the trail and there no evidence (and they have no evidence) that is happening, on the other hand it would take an infinite amount of evidence that trump took bribes even as he openly appointed Elon after spending millions of dollars.

so its weird that you have to propagandize the facts just to get people anywhere near a reasonable level of skeptism.

but for me I just say anything is valid unless I know how its wrong, which is limbo of acceptance then afterwards it can become a scoreboard where for and against. maybe a source doesn't 100% line up with a statement, hell even video/audio evidence can be incongruent with a statement (as in its similar to what's said but doesn't back up a statement). I think the claim that Floyd overdosed but the video doesn't show a overdose from opioids, so you'd have to rule out overdose simple because video doesn't match the description of an overdose.

it wouldn't take much, generally new information has to be consistent with what I know. the hard part is understanding the new information. no one is randomly disprove gravity or that things have mass, but someone can prove to me how a myth is meant to be interpreted for the intended audience

It's not so much the amount as the quality.

If it's a really reliable source and sounds plausible, very little. Iran hit a hospital in Israel recently.

If it's some random person and sounds plausible, probably many repetitions from unrelated people in unrelated contexts, with some time as "word is" after a couple or few mentions. Airport security is theater and misses actual weapons all the time. I guess I should add the caveat that if it's something easily refuted like "TSA hires out of malls" it gets promoted to fact faster, because of Cunningham's law.

If it sounds implausible, a lot. Like, it might be a thing I painstakingly confirm or deny over the course of years. Thermodynamics is always explained in a way that has massive gaping logical holes. It obviously empirically works, but a rigorous derivation without any sneaky tricks would probably imply a proof of P!=NP - and it took me years to work my way through enough papers and literature to confirm that.

If it's a source or type of source with a history of making up the sort of thing they're saying, infinite - it will be all noise regardless of how much data there is.

Laying it out like this, I clearly put a lot of emphasis on the motivation and past track record of sources. There's so many things to see and measure, far too many, and there's also lies and mistakes, so I guess one has to. That's probably been true since the stone age, and probably drove some human evolution, although it's intensified quite a lot in recent history.

Note that even facts are still subject to skepticism, discussion and revision. Absolute certainty it it's own beast, and it's not a universally agreed-on fact that it even exists.

When a lot of people who have nothing to do with each other say the same thing.

When people who dedicate their life to this one thing say the same.

When I can come to the same conclusion based on the reasoning behind it

When it is repeatable.

Then I going to accept it as a fact otherwise it is just something someone has said.

Basically, if it's in the Bible, it's fact. Everything else is entirely made up by the devil.

It takes a lot for me to accept something as fact, but I'm okay with living my life on a combination of likelihoods, reasonable plausibilities, and vibes

It isn't quantity. It is the quality and logical reasoning.

Depends if I agree with it.