<p>Damn, you’re right. Everything we know is just a shadow on a wall.</p>
<p>Illusory superiority isn’t proof of subjective bias. It’s a result of it. And saying “oh, everything is subjective so whatever you say is null” is a poor way to go about thinking. You might as well walk around trying to convince everyone that we’re all part of a giant sentient calculating machine built by aliens to find the universal question, which is always a possibility, just not one which we can currently determine and therefore not something we’re all that concerned with because, at the moment, there is no reason to believe this is how it is. Of course, the assumption is that what we observe (not necessarily through our senses, but rather through hypothesizing and experiments) is the best we’ve got, and if we can prove that our analysis lines up with our observations and that we can now predict this behavior to a rigorous level of accuracy, then we can assume it’s true, at least until we learn something else that either adds on or takes away from it.</p>
<p>There are a few other psychological findings that prove other ways humans fool themselves, either knowingly and willingly or subconsciously. endfieldacademy brought up the use of consensus as a way of establishing facts, but studies (I’ll look for them later if anyone asks) have shown that individuals are easily manipulated by group thought, whether consciously (to promote group dynamics) or unconsciously (groups tend to follow through with one idea instead of offering competing alternatives). Not to mention that many people simply don’t have the expertise to determine whether something is “true” (I will use true to mean rigorously proven) or not. </p>
<p>The scientific method exists to form a model and “explain” - to the best of our abilities and resources - observed and theoretical phenomena. Of course, ideas like “the existence of gravity is subjective” is false (it’s also nonsensical - the word “subjectivity” doesn’t exactly apply here) because the theory has been studied numerous times. The scientific method is dependent on the continual reexamination of theories to compensate for advancements in understanding, and so what we understand as gravity has recently been redefined under general relativity. We can say that general relativity is “objectively” true, based on our current data, because there was an acceptable level of rigor involved in determining it. Theories aren’t just pulled out of our asses. But that’s something you already probably know.</p>
<p>If you want to talk about personal intellect, I think finding the merit of a person’s level of competence is far more useful, especially competence when measured for a certain very specific field. For example, someone’s mastery of calculus at a certain level can be easily determined through a series of exams - it doesn’t matter how he or she went about getting this mastery, or how easily a higher level of mastery can be obtained, only that the mastery being measured is there. </p>
<p>I just hashed this together as quickly as I can, but I’ll get back to this some time later.</p>