French scientist's photo of ‘distant star’ was chorizo

If an Astronomer posts something to a bunch of people who know nothing about space and just like cool pictures, why taunt them with how they can't tell a zoomed-in chunk of fat from a sunspot?

It's a lot of pageantry and ethical training to make the appeal to authority more valid, but it will always at its core be appeal to authority.

Appeal to authority is defending/supporting an argument by citing the authority of the person presenting it.

It's not the inclination people have to take at face value information of low-consequence/importance because it's within the field of the speaker's expertise.

Things get less clear-cut if we consider the "one electron universe" theory...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

I would really be interested to know what Steller atomic composition most closely matches that of a sausage.

https://youtu.be/ZP7K9SycELA

I believe string theory deals with what happens at either end

Fine... we'll call it Sparkling Pork Sausage.

On the contrary, I've spent the last 2 years watching "experts" in my own field make absolute fools of themselves, to the point where a number of formerly respected leaders in science and medicine have lost all credibility. The kind of "expert" that would mindlessly re-tweet an obvious picture of a salami as a scientific discovery is giving you prima facie evidence that you should have some level of doubt concerning their judgment.

The general public needs to be more informed of the following two facts:

* Appeals to authority, no matter how credentialed, are not arguments. Always start from the assumption that the "expert" is wrong until you can prove otherwise. If you aren't capable of evaluating the evidence for yourself, don't repeat it.

* You don't know what you don't hear. Even if you have heard from a true "expert", the media will regularly distort or cherry-pick their sources to make whatever sensational claim that drives clicks. So-called "experts" are often pulled from a list of twitter users that are tweeting in support of a reporter's desired headline just prior to deadline, and all other experts' opinions are ignored.

I'll add a bonus:

* Celebrity is a hell of a drug. Even the most credible speaker faces an almost irresistible force to dress up factual claims with opinions. Particularly if they're personally scared / emotional, on one of those horrid cable news panels, or both.

Bottom line: if you don't have training in a discipline, you aren't qualified to judge a claim within it. Treat the whole thing as no different than a television program about celebrity gossip, because that is what it is to you. Don't just blindly trust a quote or a talking head simply because some writer/producer at a news agency told you to trust them.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/pancake-moon--7803900602743385...

But either works, as long as it's a pancake that looks a bit like the moon.

Since the early 1950s NASA had completely public video feeds for just about everything they did. News organizations around the world had access to the feeds, as well as the freedom to send their own cameras and recording equipment. Newsrooms all over the world have footage in their archives of the same launches, from different angles. And their own copies of NASA footage too. How do you fake all that?

If I remember correctly, during the Mercury program one of the splashdowns was so off the mark that it took the Navy a few hours to recover the capsule. The major US news orgs didn't want to deal with it so they broadcast old footage of an on-target recovery but got caught because other orgs showed the real thing.

They effectively shine a light on the limits of each person's ability to justify their beliefs, vs. what beliefs are generally accepted just because nobody challenges them.

I've seen a similar effect in several Christian communities in the U.S. If a Christian is mostly surrounded by other Christians, it's easy to accept lots of beliefs because they're not challenged. But if they end up in an environment where people challenge those beliefs, or if there's a lot at stake for holding wrong beliefs, they tend to scrutinize their beliefs much more carefully. I think, overall, they benefit from pruning down their beliefs to a smaller set of better-justified ones.

So to the extent that flat-earthers help others think more critically, I'm glad they're part of public discourse.

The depth of publicly available information about the Moon landings helps a lot too. Most people have only seen a few minutes of video footage at most, and may conclude that Hollywood could fake that video. But the amount of documentation about even the most minute detail of the Apollo program is staggering. If it were all fake,it would be the greatest most detailed work of science fiction ever created. Seriously, it would put Star Trek/Wars to shame. No fiction has lore with such fractal depth of detail as NASA, not even close. Not even Silmarillion comes close.

An important question to keep in mind when playing this game: was the fake photograph ever a real fake photograph, or is it a fake fake photograph? Sometimes people deliberately construct fake photographs specifically to be debunked as fake, to bolster their claim of the whole thing being fake. e.g. I photoshop a picture of Mount Rushmore on the Moon, claim I got the photo from NASA and say "Look how obviously fake it is! NASA thinks we're utter fools." Except usually it's more subtle than that. They'll take a picture of a desert on earth, adjust the colors to make it look like Mars, then present both the original and the altered alongside each other, claiming the doctored image of an earth desert is purported to be real by NASA. If you can bait somebody into defending the faked image, you can debunk them easily since the whole thing was a setup.