I'm in the process of reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari for the first time. In it, he writes about how Sapiens' major development over other human species was the ability to believe fiction. For context, he defines fiction as any concept not observable by the senses, and doesn't equate fiction with falsehood. Rather, he seems to mean abstraction.

Assuming this to be the case, our ability to abstract is what is responsible for the creation of things like government, the arts, the sciences, and basically all of our culture and knowledge.

Is it surprising that that ability to abstract could be taken too far among certain groups of people? Conspiracy theory is like a disease, not an inherent trait of humanity.

Or perhaps the fascination with and assumption that AI will solve everything is itself a limited human belief...

Right! I use to think people were logic driven creatures.. until it struck me that that is just something i like to believe.

So they told everyone the earth is a ball and because they told everyone this therefore it is true? Why cant we mock this?