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Offline Tom Bishop

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The Danger of Belief
« on: September 03, 2018, 04:08:46 PM »
There was a brilliantly crafted segment from the from the TV Show Friends which creates some philosophical reflections on what it means to be a skeptic and a believer, which I believe pertains directly to this subject matter. Runtime: 4m45s



Who won the argument? Was it the skeptic, or was it the believer? More importantly -- who was the skeptic and who was the believer?
« Last Edit: September 03, 2018, 04:15:59 PM by Tom Bishop »

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Offline Bobby Shafto

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The Importance of Context
« Reply #1 on: September 03, 2018, 04:28:21 PM »
Right about the time I first became aware of the rise in flat earthism, I saw this clip used an illustration for an article about "reasoning with a flat earther":

http://theconversation.com/how-to-reason-with-flat-earthers-it-may-not-help-though-95160.

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Offline AATW

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Re: The Importance of Context
« Reply #2 on: September 04, 2018, 09:21:45 PM »
Right about the time I first became aware of the rise in flat earthism, I saw this clip used an illustration for an article about "reasoning with a flat earther":

http://theconversation.com/how-to-reason-with-flat-earthers-it-may-not-help-though-95160.
I read the same thing - a while after I joined this place.
It's interesting because in theory it's correct to say that - unless you're an astronaut - you don't know the earth is a globe. I guess you could go further and claim the astronauts are being fooled too and are really in an elaborate simulation - although the more common FE claim is they are all "in on it".
Ultimately it comes down to how do you "know" anything? What is the difference between "thinking" something and "knowing" it? Really the only difference is your own perception of how certain you are. If you say you "think" something it implies you are not certain, if you say you "know" something then you are certain.
But that means you can "know" something which isn't true - you may be absolutely certain about something but that doesn't mean you're correct.

In real life no-one goes around with the attitude that we don't really know anything and we must verify everything for ourselves. FE people may claim to, but if they did then they'd never get out of bed in the morning without testing that the floor would bear their weight - sure, it did yesterday but how do we know a load of termites haven't eaten away at it overnight? Actually they only apply this logic to FE, they have to because there is such a huge mountain of evidence backing a globe earth the only way of rationalising that we could all be mistaken is to go down the "we don't really know anything for certain" route.

For the earth to be flat thousands of years of science has to be wrong, the entire global space industry must be fraudulent, satellite TV, GPS and all kinds of other technology which relies on satellites must really work some other way. Is it possible? I guess by the strictest definition of the word it is, but you could extend that argument to pretty much anything. It's an extraordinary claim though which requires extraordinary evidence and despite being on here for a while now I've yet to see any.
Tom: "Claiming incredulity is a pretty bad argument. Calling it "insane" or "ridiculous" is not a good argument at all."

TFES Wiki Occam's Razor page, by Tom: "What's the simplest explanation; that NASA has successfully designed and invented never before seen rocket technologies from scratch which can accelerate 100 tons of matter to an escape velocity of 7 miles per second"

Re: The Danger of Belief
« Reply #3 on: September 07, 2018, 08:03:09 PM »
I am not much into soaps, but that is a beauty, who won the argument ?
Well, is it about winning, or is it not about challenge your indoctrination ?

Let us say, if the theory evolution is faulty, and this nothing exploding and creating everything is wrong, then what happened ?
It is a pretty big tree going down, and we can start all over recreating everything, sound good to me !