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Comment by itsalwaysthem | Hacker News Reader

Flat Earth is a distraction or a way to ridicule any counter-narrative to anything scientific.

When a cosmologist says that a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc with absolute certainty despite nobody being able to go there and witness any of it (look how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance), then you can always just say “what are you a Flat Earther” and easily discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence.

Any idea you want the public to oppose, you can create and market an adjacent thing, like Trump. You can throw all the ideas you want to oppose in the Trump bucket and if anyone supports it it’s probably because they’re a Trump supporter right?

See you’re very very easily programmed, like clockwork.

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> a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc

Yeah, because this is high-school curriculum.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/resources/lesson-plan/using-lig...

> with absolute certainty

It is taught that the scientific method provides evidence, not certainty, in middle school science curriculum.

> It is taught that the scientific method provides evidence, not certainty, in middle school science curriculum.

FWIW, this fact isn't taught properly or normies are somehow unable to process it.

There's this popular dismissal of tech people, saying that "they think in 0s and 1s, but world is shades of gray", but in reality, it's almost everyone else that thinks in 0s and 1s - STEM people and people in/into similar fields (like medicine) are usually forced to understand nuance due to nature of their interests/occupation, but everyone else seems to operate in purely binary mode, and what's worse, whether something is true and false isn't even correlated much with objective reality, and mostly with one's personal feelings about how things should be.

(Now, to be an equal opportunity cynic, in my experience, the concept of categories and taxonomies being arbitrary - invented and assigned by people, and judged by their usefulness, as opposed to being inherent facts of nature that are discovered - seems to be hard for even STEM people to process, for some reason, at least based on my observations and the number of conversations I had about this with all kinds of people.)

What is a "normie"?

I do not know what you mean about "how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance".

Since when I was very young and until now the amount of information about Pluto has continuously increased, so now we know much more about it.

For example now we know that Pluto is practically a double planet, having a relatively very large satellite. This was not known when I was a child, e.g. at the time of the first NASA Moon missions.

However, I do not remember anything wrong. Many things that have been learned recently were previously unknown, not wrong.

If you refer to the fact that Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, that is also a case of information previously unknown, not wrong.

This planetary reclassification was not the first.

When Ceres was discovered in 1801, it was considered the 7th planet, after the 5 planets known in antiquity and Uranus that was discovered a few years earlier. (The chemical elements uranium and cerium, which were discovered soon after the planets, were named so after the new planets, as their discovery impressed a lot the people of those times.)

However, soon after Ceres a great number of other bodies were discovered in the same region and it was understood that Ceres is not a single planet, but a member of the asteroid belt.

Exactly the same thing happened with Pluto, but because of its distance, more years have passed until a great number of bodies have been discovered beyond Neptune and it became understood that Pluto is just one of them, i.e. a member of the Kuiper belt, so it was reclassified, exactly like Ceres.

> ...discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence.

Something unfortunate about our media environment is that science news is a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary. These issues you're flagging, a lack of evidence and overstated certainty - they're an artifact of the reporting process. If you work your way back to the original sources, there will be a heck of a lot of evidence and it will carry error bars (so the certainty is precisely & appropriately stated). There's bad or even fraudulent papers out there but there's a huge amount of good science being done by honest researchers who are just as concerned as you are about the quality of the evidence and the degree of certainty.

Eg, there really is a compelling explanation of how we can know the composition of a gas giant light-years away, and it isn't invented out of thin air, it's been 100+ year process of understanding spectroscopy and cosmology, building better telescopes, etc. It's the culmination of generations of scientists pushing the field forward millimeter by millimeter.

Your argument is against large generalizations and straw man arguments, and to prove it, you.. use a generalization and straw man argument?

Do you believe in Antarctica?

Correct. This guy gets it. All other replies can be disregarded.

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