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Comment by brenfrow | Hacker News Reader

> you need to win the argument about how to think like a rational adult

I was watching the flat earther special on netflix last night and I was thinking, that although its ridiculous to believe in these things, society needs people who are distrustful and challenge science/popular consensus etc... thats also part of being a rational adult.

I use to believe fat was bad for me, I need orthotics for my feet, babies need to be bottle fed in sleep in a separate crib, I need to be on all sorts of medications instead of eating healthy etc... but thats just because I was butt owned by what societies consensus was.

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I watched the same documentary. They go beyond skepticism into the denial of evidence before their very eyes.

They made a big to-do about purchasing a highly accurate gyroscope to be able to prove their assertions about the flatness of the world.

When their experiment blew up in their faces and confirmed everything they thought to be false, they simply moved on saying [to paraphrase]: we won't stop until we find proof that we're right. Then they followed through a number of other failed experiments (failed in their parlance == proving their theories wrong).

These are not skeptics, as it were. Now a mind that explored these experiments and changed their mind based on the evidence, sure. That said—they're mostly harmless.

That's not what these books were doing, though. They were actively promoting some pretty unhealthy, potentially very dangerous, methods on helpless children.

Pretty clear line to me there.

I totally agree with this. You should question if the world is actually a sphere (most people don't), but once your gyroscope says its not you should move on.

And we used to think Newton knew everything there was to know about gravity until Einstein proposed a new theory.

In the marketplace of ideas, some are going to be really, really bad, just like products. But over time they go out of business, just like the idea of witch trials or human sacrifice to appease the gods. It's just that for those of us that don't agree it seems to take forever because we already know it's a bad idea -- what's taking them so long?

The real problem is not the bad ideas themselves, but that when people think they know how to pick the good ideas from the bad ones and are OK silencing the bad ideas with force instead of debate. See: Galileo.

Society needs skeptics, this is true. But they need to be skeptics who value rational thinking, the scientific method, and peer-reviewed research.

It adds no value to society for someone to say "I don't trust the experts who have spent their lives studying this subject, and also I refuse to take the time to become an expert myself so that my opinion is an informed one."

Challenge science and popular consensus all you want, but do it with evidence and research, not with scare tactics and appeals to bias.

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