How do you tell whether I experienced it or only read about it?

I can't even tell if you're a human or a chat bot.

That's a damn good point. It could be chat bots talking to chat bots all the way down and we'd never know the difference.

This is a quality of the kind of knowledge we deal in here. Compared to first-hand experience, it is a lesser quality of knowledge. A trashy knowledge if you will.
- Is it solipsistic in here or is it just me?
Everyone on Lemmy is a bot except you.

Welcome to misinformation on the Internet!

If YOU don't know, and someone is confident in their answer, you can't possibly know if they know for sure or not.

And when someone else who DOES know disagrees, how do you know which one is lying? You don't! You can only go by who SOUNDS more right, and that is often manipulated by what you wanted to believe before the conversation even started!

I imagine language with some new tags.

Tags like "original source" and "number of iterations from original source"

("Iterations" probably isn't the right term. If Bob saw it, then Bob told Sally, then Sally told Frank. Frank has "3rd iteration" knowledge. But what's the better term?)
- Trust me bro, I heard it FIFTH HAND from the source!
- As the other commenter implied, it's first hand/in person, second hand, third hand, etc or primary/secondary/tertiary/quaternary sources
I can't even remember which things I read about and which things I experienced.
- Happens to me sometimes too.
  
  I've literally told a story of something that happened to me, just to have that person say that it happened to THEM and I'm just remembering the time they told me about it.
  
  Or, maybe I just read about that happening. 🤔

Que?

Are you talking about someone who’s deliberately claiming to have experienced something they only read about, or someone who’s genuinely uncertain of their own memories?

I'm talking about any statement about reality. All by itself. With no knowledge about the person who said it.

I think that the guy who saw it and the guy who heard it tenth-hand get equal weight, because we have no way of telling the difference.

So maybe we should have a way to tell the difference.

What do you mean?

I mean if I tell you about the taste of a peanut butter sandwich, how do you tell whether I actually ate a peanut butter sandwich? Or I just read about a peanut butter sandwich??
- https://youtu.be/IlD08Rh6xa8?si=FvN687WPkiX0j8A9
  
  I think this scene nails it.
- I mean presumably you could just ask 'how do you know that?'. But also whats to say you arent just making it up in the first place and have never had peanut butter. Thats why you should be critical of information and find trusted sources.

We don't even know if you even read about it. Unless I have experience of what you're talking about, I can't say you're wrong. Heck, even if I have experience, I don't know that you didn't just have a different experience.

You can find a good source for your claims, or some supporting evidence, or someone else can come along and back you up. I still wouldn't know, given how easily you can fake sources on the internet, so you could still be lying.

At a certain point, you just need to take it on faith.

That much is obvious.

I'd say that the important things are

That we swallow knowledge gained this way pretty much automatically. Like the default is to believe it or react to it, with very little filtering.

That it lacks indicators that might help us filter it. First-hand knowledge and tenth-hand knowledge look exactly the same.

Some Australian and Papua New Guinean Languages have this feature.

Just like spanish marks tense in its verbs, these languages have to alter the form of the verb depending on the level of "firsthandedness" of the thing they describe. Sometimes, this isnt even optional