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.