Repelling tigers

Here's another fairy tale: a man saw his neighbour scattering pepper on his garden and asked why. "To repel tigers", "But there are no tigers around here", "That proves it works then".
It's an important issue - how to proceed when you are fairly ignorant but the experts contradict each other? The further we go along the route to self-sufficiency the more important it is to have a good answer to that question. Do we chain ourselves to an ideology - organic, permaculture, biodynamic or anything else - so we are always certain what to do? Or do we pick one expert and follow their advice (if my granddad was still alive I might be very tempted by this option)? Or do I decide that I know best and go stubbornly my own way?

Then I realised I already had an answer to this conundrum. It's an approach I used when planning my homebirths, and then continued to use it for raising the children (which is quite similar to gardening - everyone has an opinion and every opinion is different). This is what I do:

1. listen to all the available advice - from people, books, the internet, the instructions printed on seed packets . . .
2. weigh up all the different options, giving more serious consideration to some and dismissing others quite quickly
3. choose a course of action which seems best to me, but I remember all the options I discarded
4. if it works, I stick with it. If it doesn't work, next time I try something different.

It means I will make some avoidable mistakes. But hopefully I'll only make each one once. I've been accused of pig-headedness (usually by people whose advice I didn't take) , and of thinking I know best. But I start from the assumption that I don't know best, and nor do I know who does know best. So all I can do is take responsibility for my own decisions, and try to learn from my mistakes.