view the rest of the comments
No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
Asking that makes the conversation awkward. So that isn't gonna fly. And it's basically beside the point anyway. What we really care about is what the person said.
And people say stuff all the time on Lemmy (reddit, twitter etc). It's an endless river of the stuff.
And it matters because that's 2 completely different levels of truth.
"I TASTED AN ORANGE AND IT'S SOUR" vs "I READ ABOUT THIS GUY WHO TASTED AN ORANGE AND HE SAYS IT'S SOUR"
If we're talking about what somebody said about what somebody said about what somebody said. And we have no way of knowing whether we're talking to the first guy in the chain or the last...
Then the conversation you're having might be way more insane than you think.
Unless they write it clearly like your examples there's no way to know without asking.
Even if they did it personally that's still selection bias and doesn't necessarily change how valid their statement is.
If you just want to know, without further investigation, that's going to be very hard. People say a lot of things, and often aren't clear themselves if it's something they actually know, or just something they've heard. All that's happened is that something interesting / helpful has popped into their mind and they've shared it.
If you are willing to discuss it, but don't want to be rude by asking "do you actually know anthing about this?" you can just ask follow up questions, asking for more info / details. That way people who really know can answer, and people who don't will probably just not answer or say that they just read it somewhere (often they're not trying to deceive, just sharing something interesting they heard about).
But as others have said, just be sceptical of stuff you read, especially on the Internet. Lots of people have first had experience of something and still have unhelpful or strange takes on things. People massively over estimate how representative their experiences are, and if you get two experts in a room they'll pretty soon be disagreeing about something they both know throughly.
You could ask the followup question "So you personally tasted an orange and it was sour?"