I think it is simpler then that. He wants to believe the world is flat for some reason, so suggestions how he could satisfy that concern will have minimal impact. Pretty strange we have yet to see pictures of the edge or stories of anyone falling off, but perhaps the Lizard people overlords that rule us all according to the doctor that Trump touts are the reason we cannot get such evidence.

You are obviously unfamiliar with the canon: NASA zealously guards the edge so that nobody learns the truf. Don't ask the exact mechanics of how this works, it's complicated stuff. There might be big, beautiful mirrors involved.

How did they guard it before there was NASA?

I am just happy that the Trump administration is embracing Lizard People - that was long overdue!

You're asking way too many questions. You must be one of "them".

The most amazing thing to me about the discussion re Flat Earth, if you engage a true believer is when you ask them to explain "why?" What is the benefit to creating and maintaining this massive conspiracy?

You explain the scale of the required conspiracy, that every airline and pilot is 'faking east, west routes that travel to a same destination (Leaving NYC and heading to China via West and over Hawaii, or heading East over Dubai) and they explain one set of the planes are "doubling back... and how could you tell once in sitting in a plane")...but why?

Why would airlines spend extra money to maintain a lie that costs them money?

It's baffling.

https://youtu.be/f-ppBtuc_wQ

Really need much more of Sagan.

The fox news brain exhibits a fair few of the same dubious "qualities". One such "quality" that I have noticed, is that as a collective they assume that if they don't know something, then it must be universally unknown or even unknowable. You see it a lot with Trump.

Yup.

The great intellectual dilemma.


"If i do not have the intelligence to understand what you are telling me, can it really be considered PROOF."

Put you on a rocketship and give you an orbit before blasting you into the sun.


[edit: by "sun" I mean the philosophy forum where you can discus how we can actually know anything.]

haha ya, i just touched on that in my prior post before seeing yours.

The 'if you cannot explain it to me in a way I can understand it then it must not be true'.

OMG, i had to just google that to see if it was real, and it is. FLOL.

Perfectly encapsulates the last few posts and why America is in so much trouble now in trying to deal with a pandemic which requires extreme adherence to science, data and the experts.

Coupled with the fact that you are by and large dealing with a group of uninterested laymans. Having neither the capacity or the inclination really puts you on the back foot from the get go. The final nail in the coffin being blind acceptance of the fox news line as gospel, and it's no wonder the US is in the state it is at the moment.

Plenty of right wing herp-derpery to work with without having to make it up.




Edit: timestamp doesn't seem to be working, starts around 1:40

On a formal level, science is largely uninterested in proving something. Proof is for logic and math, an abstract tool to tell you if a piece of logic or an equation is true. You use inside scientific models, but you don't really prove the theories themselves.

Science is generally more interested in evidence (observation, experiment, simulation, experience) that supports something, usually under the assumption that whatever model it is your are supporting is temporary. There does exist scientific realists who argues that science demonstrates reality, but truth be told these are more typically found in philosophy faculties than science faculties. Most academics / scientists / researchers I have met are fairly aware that they are working with models.

Of course, if science was dealing in absolutes, it wouldn't be needed beyond its initial models and theories.

As for uncertainty "we don't really know A" arguments. No model or theory survives philosophical skepticism. There is always a piece of the puzzle you do not know. My response to people who argue that this means "you can't know that science theory A is a good one" is to ask them to go jump off a tall cliff and report back to me what they found. Sure, at some fundamental level we might not exactly what gravity is, but falling off cliffs is still uncomfortable (at least for a short while).

And of course, arguing "We can't know anything for sure, therefore A" is a ludicrous proposal. It's common though, there is plenty of stuff out there that rely on such an argument. You see it plenty in anti-vax, flat earth, climate change denial and other conspiracy-type theories.

Nit point, since this is a nitty discussion, but even in math and logic, proofs don’t actually tell you something is true. They simply tell you a mechanical procedure exists to spit out the equation you were trying to prove using only the allowed inference rules and axioms. To claim that this means that the equation is true requires the deductive system you are using to be consistent/sound. Consistent because who cares if your system proves Fermat's last theorem is true if it also proves it is false and soundness because who cares if your system proves FLT true if your system is capable of proving false things. In general, there is no convincing way in math to prove a sufficiently powerful deductive system consistent/sound. So to say I’ve proved X, therefore X is true has hidden philosophical assumptions even in basic logic.

Great, now I have to stop using one of my go-to phrases.

I was going to nit as well. Not to disagree with what was posited but to ask if 'math' and 'logic' are not the testing arms of science?

Republican Louie Gohmert who refuses to wear a mask in Congress says he might have gotten COVID-19 from wearing a face mask the few times no one has ever seen him wear a mask.

Ladies and gentlemen, THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Dude, he's only anti-mask because Black people protested police violence while wearing masks, and health professionals said that was still permissible.

lol

If this "let's hear everyone out because everyone has a valid contribution to make" culture continues much longer, we'll be "hearing everyone out" while the last human corpse is decaying from whatever extinction event happened to come upon our species first.

Some people and opinions are objectively stupid and deserve no air time. Failing to recognise this is part of the reason why we're in this pickle in the first place. If we fail to learn our lesson from this, we deserve everything we get.

Millennia ago, the Greeks came up with some basic laws of logic and reason to make sense of the world around us. It's about time we started rightly denigrating and shaming those members of our species who refuse to put them to use.

Two men arrested after violently attacking Trader Joe's employees who asked them to wear masks in the store

Yikes

'A chain is only as strong as its weakest link' and 'a society that is only as strong as its dumbest citizens' is going to cause a great cleansing in America.

And unfortunately it may not be the dumbest who end up dying off. They may survive to be the next round of leaders.

So maybe they are not so dumb after all.