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Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

Strongly disagree. Rational people do not feel the need to prove every fact independently for themselves. Instead, they develop a rational system of qualified trust. You don't blindly trust expert consensus, but you do weigh likelihood based on the source. Flat Earthers would be better off if they simply accepted the consensus rather than being mislead into believing they're coming to their own conclusions based on evidence.

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But most people aren't rational and don't prove any fact independently for themselves, or have the capability to do so. They believe in what they're told. They were told god and heaven are real so they believe it. Their scientific beliefs are similarly founded.

My point is that the solution is not to teach people to come to their own conclusions, but rather to determine how much trust is due to various sources of information.

Well people aren't doing that either. Expert opinion is a type of evidence. You still have to be investigating and questioning to apply reasoning to that evidence that can lead to a rational conclusion.

No disagreement there.

I think your point is supported by the number of times you hear people talking about having "faith" in science. This idea that science requires faith is something that confuses and annoys me.

The whole point of science is that it (in general) does not require faith as it provides evidence. There are some aspects of science where the presentation of hypothesis verges on faith, many aspects of cosmology where falsifiable experiment are not possible, but that is a very small part of science.

That's true, however the vast majority of science is sufficiently complex that only another scientist in the field is capable of understanding and evaluating that evidence.

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