no, i don’t think that the “common man’s position has to be abandoned”. In fact, i think that people should be allowed to believe that the earth is flat. For 99% of people, that is what they can observe in their daily lives, and it’s the simplest model that “gets the job done” (i.e. navigates the person through their daily lifes). You only need to know that the earth is a globe if you’re doing international trade, geopolitics, or spaceflight (or weather prediction, for some reason). For every other application, it does not matter.
I upvote because I strongly disagree.
The better educated and informed the populace, the better and more informed their decisions will be as well as their ability to articulate the how and why of those decisions.
If you can’t even agree on objective reality, then there’s no way a coherent discourse can ever be achieved.
The fact that the earth is round vs flat doesn’t really matter in everyday life, that is true. But it shows a lack of critical thinking and a lack of desire for knowledge. That’s the problem. We should encourage critical thinking and encourage understanding how the world works.
Reminds me of the final scene in that “beyond the curve” documentary on the flat earth series. Thus group designs their own experiment. They run their experiment. They get the exact result they stated would prove the world was curved. Their response? “something must be wrong with our equipment”. Thinking like that is the issue. You can have a theory but when tested and proven false you should disregard that theory. If other people share knowledge which proves your theory wrong you should disregard that theory.
Maybe not in a street sweepers every day life, but in mine it definitely does. Network speeds would be vastly different on a flat earth map.
Granted. A lot of stuff would be different or break if the earth was flat. Op’s point was it was a good enough approximation. I was saying that might be true in some cases but it also shows a lack of critical thinking and that’s the major issue.
Flat Earth isn’t the “common man’s” position. Only about 10% of people think that, as far as I can tell from poll results. The bottom 10%.
The “common man” doesn’t mean the worst, stupidest man in existence.
The 10% that are younger than 3 years old? Right?
Mentally, yes.
Yeah, no, nothig common about that position. That is very much the bottom 3% take.
Jesus Christ…
I hope this opinion remains unpopular until it is held by no one.
Not sure if this is specifically about flat earth or the general ‘common mans position’ whatever that may be. But the premise of ‘simplest is best’ and ‘just get the job done’ are not good ones.
That’s the reason I don’t shit in my pants. Is it more complex to have to consider personal hygiene and social coherence even though most days that doesn’t matter at all? Yep, but that extra complexity enables more of a fulfilling life.
And secondly, the issue with people having bat shit stupid world views, is that they end up having an influence on society as a whole and making everything worse.
Just dump everything in the river, it washes away all the bad chemicals, it gets the job done. But those elitist scientists spout nonsense about ecosystems and entangled webs of life. Why do I need to know about that??
if you shit in your pants, it does indeed not “get the job done” to navigate you through your daily life (with somewhat acceptable quality of life). so it is not the simplest model that gets the job done.
same for the river. if you poison it, you end up poisoning yourself because that poison ends up in your food and drinking water, eventually. so it does indeed not get the job done. and that’s what disqualifies it.
That ‘eventually’ is exactly what I meant when I said it ends up having a bad effect on society. By your logic, flat earth is indeed not getting the job done, because eventually it will lead to satellites not working, undersea network cables being drastically too short, planes crashing, etc etc
yeah i’m well aware that not every person can have that viewpoint. see my original post.
Talk with your mouth full Bite the hand that feeds you Bite off more than you can chew What can you do? Dare to be stupid Take some wooden nickels Look for Mr. Goodbar Get your mojo working now I'll show you how: You can dare to be stupid You can turn the other cheek You can just give up the ship You can eat a bunch of sushi then forget to leave a tip Dare to be stupid Come on and dare to be stupid It's so easy to do (Dare to be stupid) We're all waiting for you Let's goKeeping people uneducated makes it easier for scammers of all kind to abuse them. But is there an other aim at this bad education?
It absolutely matters
You make a good point. Wanna do a double Dutch rudder?
