this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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Can someone buy him a telescope or something? Damn, you can actually see space and planets with your own eyes if you don't believe it....
You can see something, but that doesn't mean it's "space" and "planets".
Look, he's wrong, and the flat earth conspiracies are stupid. But, it's not like the flat earth conspiracies can be debunked that easily. They have explanations of what you can see in a telescope.
The real problem is that life requires that life requires a chain of trust. You trust your parents growing up, then your teachers, the media, political leaders, religious leaders, friends, co-workers, whatever. Their knowledge is mostly based on their trusting various people in their lives, and so-on. Sure, I've seen images of the earth from space, but I have to trust that that's what they really are, not elaborate fakes. I've never been to South America, but I have to trust that it exists. I have been to Europe, but I wasn't personally flying the plane, so I have to trust that it wasn't some elaborate plan to convince me that that continent exists.
A lot of trust in institutions has broken down lately. Sometimes that's a good thing. If you look at WWI propaganda posters, they seem ridiculous. It's good that governments can't so easily convince their people to jump into a war. On the other hand, this is the result. People stop trusting experts, and start trusting random dudes on the Internet who make a good video.
I mean if you can't believe that looking through a mirror and lens, and seeing the rings of Saturn can't convince you it's there... well we have words for that: delusional and psychotic. And people used to get hospitalized for it.
It can convince you that something's there, but that doesn't mean it's a planet. You believe it's a planet because of what you were taught in school, and maybe that all the things you were taught were consistent and reinforced each-other so it made sense. To the ancient Romans, it was a god, and we still celebrate that god at christmas (a.k.a. saturnalia). What you can see using a telescope is a circle-shaped thing with ring-shaped things around it. But, to decide that's a planet means trusting that that object is in fact multiple times the size of the entire planet earth and more than a billion km away. What have you personally done to verify that the mass of Saturn is actually accurate? Are you just trusting what you were taught, or have you actually verified those claims?
Homosexuality used to be considered a psychiatric disorder, so I wouldn't go by what people used to get hospitalized for. That's just another example of how common knowledge, or "things everyone believes to be true" can change over time.
As I said, we can't verify everything ourselves. We have to trust other people, and while it's good to question what we think we know, we can't question everything all the time.