Does anyone else get the feeling most (non-fiction, especially scientific) literature, journalism, and writing in general is inadequately substantiated bullshit that relies more on the reader's blind trust to believe the claims being made based on the writer's merit rather than their explanation of evidence? Of course it'll always take some level of trust, as the reader more often than not hasn't directly experienced the phenomenon, occurrence, or supposed truism being expounded (to be pedantic, I'd argue it requires trust in your senses and eventually your memory to believe even things you *have* directly experienced), but it seems too many authors trying to present an argument just write some random stuff down, cite a few "reputable" sources which may or may not have explained the claim any better than they did, and give half-assed elaborations of their propositions that try to explain why they fit in to a realistic worldview rather than actually show the reader the data or record that substantiates their claim. I mean, when was the last time you read a news article that didn't say something along the lines of "X happened because I said it did, and the media is always right" or "according to some arbitrary source or another, X appears to be the case"? I'll give a pardon for certain philosophical literature, as the subject tends to be more about making speculative rational arguments instead of empirically verifiable ones.
We can't trust authors claims based solely on their widely regarded merit or lack thereof. Hitler was the most highly regarded person by people of all fields in Germany for a while, but that doesn't mean he was correct about anything...probably, at least, that's what everybody keeps telling me.
(You may notice I hypocritically haven't provided so much as a single anecdote to support my claims here. That's because this post isn't worth shit)
