A few trusted people.

[Podshell]

I wasn't sure where to post this thread, but seeing as it stemmed from discussion on here I thought it would be worth starting here. It is a general thread really.

What it is is that it concerns knowledge taken from others as opposed to or as well from lessons you have learnt yourself.

I prefer to find out for myself usually, but with some topics/ lessons this could take more than one lifetime, so have learnt to trust a very small amount of experts in certain fields, if I have tested their advice and it works time and again I think it is then a wise step to save me time in having to do it myself.

Is this how you approach gathering knowledge, and if so who have you learnt to put your trust in?

[wstein]

I always consider the source of information. Even if the source is 100% trusted, they can be wrong, make mistakes, there could have been a miscommunication, but most importantly you need to know the context from which they speak to ‘decode’ what they meant. This is not to be confused with inspiration which can trigger insight even if completely wrong, inspiration is not a transfer of information.

Also keep in mind that everyone’s truth is different. What may be true for someone else is not necessarily true for you.

I find it critical to make knowledge my own. Possessing a 100% true fact does not mean it is knowledge for you. In order to incorporate it into my internal view of the world, it needs to be translated it into an internally compatible form. Only then is the knowledge ‘mine’.

I subconsciously track how often a particular person tends to lead me to learning something. I don’t actually care if they are right or truthful or whatever. The goals is to seek knowledge, not to dictate who is worthy to tell me things. Those that often lead me to interesting information, I spend effort to understand what they are telling me. The ones that don’t lead me to information or to information I don’t care about, I don’t bother pondering much on what they say. The effort to extract any useful information is not worth the effort.

You may ask why trust someone that is always wrong? Reliable information is reliable information. An example will clear this up. I knew a guy in college known as ‘Wrong Way Sutton’. If he was riding with you in the car and you asked him which way to turn to get to your destination, he was 99.99% wrong. So in most cases no point to asking. However, if you were lost or very uncertain, you could eliminate one bad choice (turn left, straight, turn right, u-turn) and improve your odds greatly. At a ‘T” intersection with only two likely choices going the other way was the right way. And yes, asking him then going another way would tick him off. In case you are wondering how he ever got home on his own, he swears that when alone he has no problem navigating.

I find that starting with the experience of someone who is right more often than not saves a huge amount of time and in learning something. Sometimes it hard to find such a person who knows what you want to know. So for me the question of who to trust is replaced with: Is it usually more effort to understand what they told me or to figure it out without their assistance?