113. Common sense tells us the Earth cannot be a sphere
"The idea that people are standing, ships are sailing and planes are flying upside down on certain parts of Earth while others tilted at 90 degrees and all other impossible angles is complete absurdity. The idea that a man digging a hole straight down could eventually reach sky on the other side is ludicrous. Common sense tells every free-thinking person correctly that there truly is an “up” and “down” in nature, unlike the “everything is relative” rhetoric of the Newtonian/Einsteinian paradigm."
Dubay seems to believe that common sense is the basis of all correct reasoning. It isn't.
In Dubay's mind, if some complex scientific procedure comes out with conclusions that “defy common sense”, then the science must be wrong.
When he doesn’t understand the science or doesn’t want to understand it, but can’t find good reasons for not accepting it, he is forced to promote the common sense explanation. This is just an attempt to distract you from delving deeper into the science and priming you to ignore the scientific conclusions.
The big problem with this is that common sense is often wrong.
Common sense relies on the vague notion of obviousness. But many things are “obviously” not obvious.
Yes ... people standing at different latitudes DO experience down in different directions.
Yes ... gravity IS strong enough to hold the oceans to the surface of the spherical Earth etc. etc.
By contrast on a flat Earth someone standing far south would feel gravity pulling them mostly sideways towards the middle of the disk ... which is of course the reason that flat earthers have to deny that Gravity exists.
Perhaps if flat Earthers would start relying on people with "common sense" to administer medical treatment instead of appropriately educated professionals this whole flat Earth nonsense could resolve itself within a few decades.
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Dubay seems to believe that common sense is the basis of all correct reasoning. It isn't.
Definition of Common sense
“Sound practical judgement that is independent of specialised knowledge, training, or the like.”
From http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/29/the-myth-of-common-sense-why-the-social-world-is-less-obvious-than-it-seems/
"Common sense ... is extremely good at making the world seem sensible, quickly classifying believable information as old news, rejecting explanations that don’t coincide with experience, and ignoring counterfactuals. Viewed this way, common sense starts to seem less like a way to understand the world, than a way to survive without having to understand it.
That may have been a perfectly fine design for most of evolutionary history, where humans lived in small groups and could safely ignore most of what was going on in the world. But increasingly the problems of the modern world—distributions of wealth, sustainable development, public health—require us to understand cause and effect in complex systems, with consequences unfolding over years or decades. And for these kinds of problems, there’s no reason to believe that common sense is much of a guide at all."
When he doesn’t understand the science or doesn’t want to understand it, but can’t find good reasons for not accepting it, he is forced to promote the common sense explanation. This is just an attempt to distract you from delving deeper into the science and priming you to ignore the scientific conclusions.
The big problem with this is that common sense is often wrong.
Common sense relies on the vague notion of obviousness. But many things are “obviously” not obvious.
- Common sense might tell you that heavy things fall faster than light ones but you’d be wrong.
- Common sense doesn’t predict that you can melt ice by throwing salt onto it. All of our modern computer technology depends on the operation of quantum mechanics, currently the most un-obvious part of science.
- Gravity is not obvious, but that does not mean that it is not true. Scientists have a very good understanding of gravity through centuries of experimentation not only for object as large as the Earth, but also for much smaller objects in the lab.
Yes ... people standing at different latitudes DO experience down in different directions.
Yes ... gravity IS strong enough to hold the oceans to the surface of the spherical Earth etc. etc.
By contrast on a flat Earth someone standing far south would feel gravity pulling them mostly sideways towards the middle of the disk ... which is of course the reason that flat earthers have to deny that Gravity exists.
Perhaps if flat Earthers would start relying on people with "common sense" to administer medical treatment instead of appropriately educated professionals this whole flat Earth nonsense could resolve itself within a few decades.
< Prev 111-120 Next >
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