Well I think jferguson’s idea is more unlikely than just your everyday “stuff we thought we know about the world is wrong, in a way that we’d strongly expect to make it look very different than it does, so in addition to that, it would need a whole lot of other tweaks to make it still look mostly the way it does look to us now”. I may be overconfident regarding homeopathy but my sense is the idea is underspecified enough that it could be true without rendering false as many fundamental and important scientific theories as this variety of flat-earth does. If jfergusons’s idea was right we wouldn’t have gravity as we know it. Somehow the Earth is accelerating no force is specified in the comment I don’t know if we’re getting rid of Newton/thermodynamics or if there is a giant rocket on the dark side of the earth. I don’t even understand how basic things like the length of southern hemisphere plane flight would be explained. Every time I think about it for two seconds I think of more things that don’t make sense about it.
So yes ‘stuff we know about the earth is wrong’ but enough stuff that I’d say homeopathy is more probable. But it isn’t just ‘stuff is wrong’. If physics is wrong in the way the comment implies lots of things could be true with the world, the earth could be an octagon with a mysterious force pushing down on us, whatever. But the comment picks out a specific option in all that probability space. When you say precisely what the ‘clever tweaks’ are the possibility you are right gets much smaller. This is especially the case when those clever tweaks involve a massive and despite his second comment basically unmotivated conspiracy.
Well I think jferguson’s idea is more unlikely than just your everyday “stuff we thought we know about the world is wrong, in a way that we’d strongly expect to make it look very different than it does, so in addition to that, it would need a whole lot of other tweaks to make it still look mostly the way it does look to us now”. I may be overconfident regarding homeopathy but my sense is the idea is underspecified enough that it could be true without rendering false as many fundamental and important scientific theories as this variety of flat-earth does. If jfergusons’s idea was right we wouldn’t have gravity as we know it. Somehow the Earth is accelerating no force is specified in the comment I don’t know if we’re getting rid of Newton/thermodynamics or if there is a giant rocket on the dark side of the earth. I don’t even understand how basic things like the length of southern hemisphere plane flight would be explained. Every time I think about it for two seconds I think of more things that don’t make sense about it.
So yes ‘stuff we know about the earth is wrong’ but enough stuff that I’d say homeopathy is more probable. But it isn’t just ‘stuff is wrong’. If physics is wrong in the way the comment implies lots of things could be true with the world, the earth could be an octagon with a mysterious force pushing down on us, whatever. But the comment picks out a specific option in all that probability space. When you say precisely what the ‘clever tweaks’ are the possibility you are right gets much smaller. This is especially the case when those clever tweaks involve a massive and despite his second comment basically unmotivated conspiracy.