Just Facebook! LOL

A sufficient amount

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.

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

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.

Logical proof, is it reasonable and do peers agree. That could be a tiny amount of data or a large amount of data. It is specific to the “something”.

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

There are very few pieces of knowledge that I’d consider a fact. Rather, I tend to see those as the best current knowledge that might turn out to be false in the future. The fact of consciousness is among the only things in the entire universe that I see as absolutely being true. Pretty much anything else can just be an illusion.

It depends. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Depends if I agree with it.

I read proper peer reviewed research. I’m usually not a specialist on the subject, so I am unable to properly process any data 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.

None. I believe everything. Especially the contradictory parts. It’s one of the powers granted to me by my true nature, revealed through the one true Slackmaster, J.R. “Bob” Dobbs.

At least 400 kilobyte.

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.