Trust and Evidence
A wise teacher once told a group of confused, exhausted people — worn out from hearing one confident voice after another, each contradicting the last — not to accept something as true just because of where it came from. He named ten specific sources — each a different way a claim can feel true without actually being true:
1 You’ve heard it repeated often. Repetition isn’t evidence. A claim said a thousand times is still just repeated, not tested.
2 It’s tradition — this is how it’s always been done. Longevity tells you something survived, not that it works. Harmful practices have outlasted better alternatives plenty of times, simply because no one questioned them.
3 You heard it secondhand, from someone it happened to. A story that feels true and a story that is true aren’t the same thing. Secondhand accounts lose accuracy at every retelling.
4 It’s written in an official or authoritative text. Being written down settles nothing about whether it’s still accurate — only that someone once believed it enough to record it.
5 It seems logical when you reason it through. Logic only guarantees your conclusion follows from your assumptions. If the assumption was wrong, a perfectly reasoned argument still lands somewhere false.
6 It’s treated as a basic, self-evident principle. Something being a starting point doesn’t mean it was ever actually checked. Most “obvious” premises were simply never argued with.
7 It sounds sensible — it’s just common sense. Plausible-sounding explanations are the easiest kind to get wrong, because “makes sense” was never a requirement for “is true.”
8 You’ve turned it over in your mind and you’re convinced. How long you’ve believed something has no bearing on whether it’s correct. Confidence and accuracy are different things.
9 The person saying it seems capable or credentialed. Being good at one thing doesn’t make someone right about everything. Competence doesn’t transfer automatically.
10 It came from someone you respect, defer to, or call your teacher. Respect is a reason to listen closely. It was never meant to be a reason to stop asking whether something is actually true.
None of the ten make a claim false. They just don’t make it true either — and that’s the distinction most of us lose track of, especially after we’ve tried everything else and just want an answer.
He offered something else instead: when you try it yourself, does it hold up? Does it ease suffering or add to it? Do people who’ve genuinely lived with it — not just heard about it — find that it works?
— Kalama Sutta
Held up for 2,600 years by the very test it describes. That’s the test we try to apply to everything on this platform.