For all that I make a big effort to expand and refine my perspective, and try to keep ego at bay as a conflict of interest, in the end I don't know whether I overvalue or undervalue my own observations. It feels like both. And ultimately, value tends to be subjective, so both answers could be valid.
Accuracy isn't everything: I could spend my whole life accurately copying out the 1s and 0s of a reality TV episode by hand. Even with perfect accuracy, that would be a waste of a life (in my opinion, but come on). Accuracy isn't everything, and a big chunk of value is subjective. But lots of value is transferable.
This is probably too much navel-gazing for most people. And it's exactly where I think, "Is there a point to the thought? Could it lead anywhere useful, actionable?" It feels like an unsolvable maze. A dead end.
You can ask other people, listen to feedback. You have to. But other people are in the same quandary. Accuracy can be very costly, difficult to attain and difficult to verify after that. Value is certainly subjective but there's enough overlap that we can start to believe some value is real, isn't just in our heads. So we make some effort at accuracy where we perceive it's valuable, through our own instincts and reasons and the feedback we hear and the money and other material rewards available. It's all a patchwork.
But because it's complicated, there are many places we can go wrong. We often won't even know it. When the problem is difficult enough, you don't even know whether you're solving it or not. You're in the dark and in the silence, not only for your shot, but also for most or all the time after.
I told you this was getting too omphaloskeptic (a fun word for "navel-gazing") for most people. Sometimes the worst answer in the world is "It's complicated, it depends," even though that's the best answer we can give.
I'm talking about what the Serenity Prayer talks about, "and the wisdom to know the difference." We do wisdom a disservice, and ourselves and our fellows, when we portray wisdom as easier and simpler than it really is. Wisdom is not equally available to all at all times. False identicality is a misuse of equality. If we conclude that political equality implies we all have the same strengths and weaknesses, the same a priori capacities exactly, then we run logic backwards into that brick wall at high speed. We cannot ordain that every individual is in wisdom identical. We cannot treat everyone as if they begin at the same beginning and only deviate by their own fully informed choices, or else by the malicious and unfair incursions of others. That is inaccurate and its "value" is a slow-acting poison, a loose thread unravelling the fabric.
We do not begin the same, we are not the same in the middle, and we do not end the same. We are only the same, apparently, before conception and after death. Never while we experience are we the same as anyone else.
We have enormous amounts in common. And I don't mean to try to isolate anyone from our senses of unity and shared humanity. But I hope you already knew I wasn't dismissing any of that. I was simply pointing out the obvious, because it's relevant.
We are often similar but never the same. The pieces that are identical - individual highly conserved genes for example - diverge enormously, still, once in context. The same string of nucleotides means something else in a different cell, or in a cell that's in a different mood. Multiply that by tens of thousands, millions, billions of pieces, or trillions or more, depending on what building blocks you use and how close two need to be to be called "same."
The best we can do is apply all our senses and improve them as well as we can.
