On Dec 19, 2007, at 10:59 AM, Charlie Coleman wrote:
> So overall, IMO, no, you can't implicitly "trust" any of them. All
> have
> biases. And all have a primary goal to "make money". Sometimes they
> may
> actually rise above these conflicting interests, but they will
> trump the
> truth in some cases.
This is starting to sound like the pointless debates in Epistemology
101 classes. Of course, you can never be sure about *anything*; I
can't even be sure that what you're saying is true, or whether it's
even you saying it, or whether you understand a concept the same way
I do, blah, blah, blah.
Whenever you gather information, it rarely lines up perfectly. In
experiments, data usually comes scattered, and you use regression
techniques to separate the phenomenon being studied from the
measurement variations. Very often a particular instrument
consistently gives results that don't jibe with the rest; you either
re-calibrate it or discard it.
Gathering information about events in the world is very much the
same process. If you use enough sources, you tend to get a bunch of
data that indicates one general interpretation, with a few outliers
that need explaining. When the same sources consistently create these
outliers with the same divergent pattern, *then* you can feel safe
discarding that source and focusing on those that typically return
information close to the actual truth.
-- Ed Leafe
-- http://leafe.com
-- http://dabodev.com
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