Most of us just want to fit in, and believe what everybody believes.

Coming to your beliefs this way is not actually intelligent. We don’t do it consciously. It’s just tribalism or herding instinct or whatever.

So if everybody agrees with you then that’s a pretty good sign that you are wrong.

  • socsa@piefed.social
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    2 days ago

    People who don’t understand science don’t get this. When science changes it doesn’t mean the previous ideas were “wrong” - it usually just means that the framework and the data it is built around was incomplete or imprecise. That’s the entire premise of empiricism, and why there are differences between how theory, fact and axiom are handled.

    Far too many people believe that the history of overturned consensus suggests that modern consensus is also “wrong” when it was the empiricist framework which discovered both “truths” in the first place.