Common sense tells us the Earth is flat

Dubay repeatedly sites "Common Sense" as a way of "proving" that the Earth is flat, believing common sense can be the basis of all correct reasoning.  It isn't. 

Common sense is less a way to understand the world, than a way to survive without having to understand it.

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."

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.

• 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.  If you do the math a spherical Earth describes our experience of gravity perfectly.

For a more practical example of how relying on common sense as indicated by your senses can lead you to misinterpret the truth, see the videos below.

You don’t need to be a simpleton to have your senses and your common sense mislead you.  You just need to be human.  Be thankful that you have your intelligence to help you figure out what is actually going on.

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."

121. Common sense tells us the Earth is flat and stationary and the Sun and Moon are the same size and distance

"When you observe the Sun and Moon you see two equally-sized equidistant circles tracing similar paths at similar speeds around a flat, stationary Earth. The “experts” at NASA, however, claim your common sense every day experience is false on all counts! To begin with, they say the Earth is not flat but a big ball; not stationary but spinning around 19 miles per second; they say the Sun does not revolve around the Earth as it appears, but Earth revolves around the Sun; the Moon, on the other hand, does revolve around the Earth, though not East to West as it appears, rather West to East; and the Sun is actually 400 times larger than the Moon and 400 times farther away! You can clearly see they are the same size and distance, you can see the Earth is flat, you can feel the Earth is stationary, but according to the gospel of modern astronomy, you are wrong and a simpleton worthy of endless ridicule if you dare to trust your own eyes and experience."

129. Common sense tells us that the Earth cannot be moving around erratically as science maintains

"To quote William Carpenter, “Why, in the name of common sense, should observers have to fix their telescopes on solid stone bases so that they should not move a hair's breadth, if the Earth on which they fix them moves at the rate of nineteen miles in a second? Indeed, to believe that ‘six thousand million million million tons’ is rolling, surging, flying, darting on through space for ever with a velocity compared with which a shot from a cannon is a very slow coach, with such unerring accuracy that a telescope fixed on granite pillars in an observatory will not enable a lynx-eyed astronomer to detect a variation in its onward motion of the thousandth part of a hair's breadth is to conceive a miracle compared with which all the miracles on record put together would sink into utter insignificance. Since we can, (in middle north latitudes), see the North Star, on looking out of a window that faces it - and out of the very same corner of the very same pane of glass in the very same window - all the year round, it is proof enough for any man in his senses that we have made no motion at all and that the Earth is not a globe.”"

147. The Sun and Moon appearing the same size is too much of a coincidence

"The ball-Earth model claims the Sun is precisely 400 times larger than the Moon and 400 times further away from Earth making them “falsely” appear exactly the same size. Once again, the ball model asks us to accept as coincidence something that cannot be explained other than by natural design. The Sun and the Moon occupy the same amount of space in the sky and have been measured with sextants to be of equal size and equal distance, so claiming otherwise is against our eyes, experience, experiments and common sense."

193. The idea that the Earth is a spinning ball orbiting the Sun does not match our daily experience

"No child or un-indoctrinated man in their right-mind would ever conclude or even conceive given to their own devices, based on their own personal observations, that the Earth was a spinning ball revolving around the Sun! Such imaginative theories nowhere present in anyone’s daily experience require and have required massive amounts of constant propaganda to uphold the illusion."