Why does someone believe you when you say there are 4 billion stars, but check when you say the paint is wet?

Question: Why does someone believe you when you say there are 4 billion stars, but check when you say the paint is wet?
- Keywords:
  belief,
  billion,
  paint,
  psychology,
  star,
  wet,
  wet paint
Asked by anisahkhan to Indi, Jarv, John, Ken, Vicky on 16 Mar 2012.
- Vicky Young answered on 15 Mar 2012:
  
  Probably because they can check that the paint is wet…. no one wants to count 4billion stars!!
- Ken Dutton-Regester answered on 16 Mar 2012:
  
  … and no one wants to sit down on a chair with wet paint. Not a good look 🙂
- Jarvist Moore Frost answered on 16 Mar 2012:
  
  One person has very briefly checked to see whether the paint is wet, and as an observation is so easy for you to do, you may as well! Counting up the stars is a very difficult thing to do, but you know that lots of different people have worked on it & they have all come to these fairly similar conclusions.
  
  Its a very important issue in science – to some extent you have to take people’s word for it (or at least critically assess other people’s evidence + conclusions), otherwise you’d be there forever recreating every single observation + experiment!
  
  For instance, I don’t have time to check that atoms really do exist, but every bit of evidence I’ve ever seen confirms their existence rather than disproves it, so I’m fairly certain…

Question: Why does someone believe you when you say there are 4 billion stars, but check when you say the paint is wet?