this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
370 points (96.5% liked)

Not The Onion

11929 readers
3 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from...
  2. ...credible sources, with...
  3. ...their original headlines, that...
  4. ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

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.