(by smart contract, if I’m not mistaken)

No investigation, no right to speak and all that.

You don’t sound very confident on the details. I do appreciate the explanation and I am not trying to be snarky or dismissive here. But if you are trying to hold people to a standard of no investigation, no right to speak, I would expect a little more than this for being the one who has done investigation.

Here is part of the quote:

You can’t solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and its past history! When you have investigated the problem thoroughly, you will know how to solve it. Conclusions invariably come after investigation, and not before. Only a blockhead cudgels his brains on his own, or together with a group, to “find solution” or “evolve an idea” without making any investigation. It must be stressed that this cannot possibly lead to any effective solution or any good idea. In other words, he is bound to arrive at a wrong solution and a wrong idea.

There are not a few comrades doing inspection work, as well as guerrilla leaders and cadres newly in office, who like to make political pronouncements the moment they arrive at a place and who strut about, criticizing this and condemning that when they have only seen the surface of things or minor details. Such purely subjective nonsensical talk is indeed detestable. These people are bound to make a mess of things, lose the confidence of the masses and prove incapable of solving any problem at all.

The full thing can be found here for discussion: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_11.htm

My takeaway as relevant to this is that it’s more about people who hypothesize and invent wildly from nothing and resist going among the masses to learn what they need and how it can be done rather than being about people who are skeptical in the year 2024 in encountering anonymous claims made to them about technology on the internet.

I’ve been in situations before of having investigated something quite a bit and facing stubbornness from people who haven’t. I can empathize on that level. It’s frustrating when you’ve done the work to learn and people act like their knowledge is equal to yours in spite of having spent little to no time on it at all. But I think there is a line we can cross where it’s going to sound like we’re saying “turn your brain off and take my word for it” instead of “let’s educate the masses so they are better informed.”

In this context, for example, how are we defining what “within reason” is for skepticism? Skepticism is more or less a kind of wariness. I’m having trouble working out where you’d draw the line for reasonable or unreasonable skepticism if we’re starting from the premise that the whole reason a person is being skeptical is because they lack the information to confidently draw a conclusion.

I don’t ask a detailed reply here, just consider it as food for thought and if you want to dig into it, you’re welcome to of course.