cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21782844
Tru
It is if I can trust you. The reality is i can’t. So if you have claims and its important for you to ensure i understand or accept your input then you better be able to back it up or I won’t.
If you were ‘there’ then prove that.
There are a lot of scenarios where it is just not important to have acceptance or agreement from the other party so it’s not like this is a universal rule. But if you have to rely on ‘trust me’ then you have to accept that some people simply wont.
It’s just too easy to lie about them. They allegedly had primary sources for “They are eating the dogs”.
Trusting your common sense to filter these just doesn’t work, asking for a better source is never wrong.
The key phrase for primary sources is “trust, but verify”. That means listening to the primary source, and then do the legwork yourself to verify. Verify doesn’t mean asking the primary source for a source, it means figuring it out for yourself. A claim like “they’re eating the pets” gets readily debunked as soon as you start looking for evidence.
That approach may work for journalism and such, with a single person collecting primary sources and verifying them before writing an article. However, it does not work on the internet.
Instead of one person verifying the claim and adding further sources in an article, every single reader would have to do it. And anyone using the internet would have to do so hundreds of times every day. Nobody does that. It only makes sense to shift the burden of further proof onto the primary source or disregard it.
My brother frequently demands a source when I tell an anecdote, then misuses Hitchen’s Razor to accuse me of making the anecdote up. This would be understandable if it was as a pics or it didn’t happen response to something outlandish, but it’s usually for something entirely mundane that was barely interesting enough to mention in the first place.
