No disagreement with the main thrust of your comment, it's a very good one and imo goes to the heart of the seemingly intractable divide between the logician's approach to truth and that of damn near everyone else - which tends to leave the logician reasoning into the void, doing not a bit of good for anyone.
However I myself would probably label the statement "Bob is an idiot" (or perhaps less abrasively, "Bob has often been wrong in the past in easily verifiable ways") not as evidence that he's wrong per se, but as a signal, possibly a rather strong signal, that he is likely also incorrect in the current matter.
A minor semantic quibble, but in my own experience I've found that conceiving of it as such helps frame the situation as a "sensor fusion of individually unreliable data sources" type of problem, as opposed to one of "collecting experimental results in a logbook and deriving conclusions from them."
The latter of which can lead pretty seamlessly to a towering edifice of belief built upon some ultimately pretty shaky foundations. Ask me how I know ;)
However I myself would probably label the statement "Bob is an idiot" (or perhaps less abrasively, "Bob has often been wrong in the past in easily verifiable ways") not as evidence that he's wrong per se, but as a signal, possibly a rather strong signal, that he is likely also incorrect in the current matter.
A minor semantic quibble, but in my own experience I've found that conceiving of it as such helps frame the situation as a "sensor fusion of individually unreliable data sources" type of problem, as opposed to one of "collecting experimental results in a logbook and deriving conclusions from them."
The latter of which can lead pretty seamlessly to a towering edifice of belief built upon some ultimately pretty shaky foundations. Ask me how I know ;)