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Comment by bhaak | Hacker News Reader

Your drive to verify must be very low then. There are hundreds of small logic reasonings or even experiments with which you can easily prove that a flat earth model is at least very complicated or even impossible.

Explaining Moon phases gets very complicated in any flat earth model. With binoculars you can see the shadows of craters on the moon's terminator. Or the phases of Venus whereas Mars doesn't have any.

Timezones are ridiculously hard to explain on a flat earth.

A proper theory must explain all of them and no flat earth model can do that. A round Earth OTOH easily does.

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None of that is an actual verification of round (or kinda potato shaped) Earth. You are just choosing to not think too deeply about it, essentially parroting things, just like I am.

Disproving flat Earth does not verify round Earth, after all. And all your listed refutations of flat Earth do not really disprove anything, either. They might, if you do the actual work, but you did not, choosing to just parrot someone that did put in the work.

Which was my point. It is much easier to speak vaguely and reference things than it is to actual prove something rigorously.

Disproving flat Earth doesn't logically prove round Earth, sure. But that's not how empirical reasoning works. If one model explains a bunch of observations naturally while another needs increasingly elaborate patches, that's evidence in favor of the first model.

There's a difference between "I haven't verified this myself" and "there is no good reason to believe this." You're conflating the two.

But then I've given you a few examples of thought and actual experiments that are very easy to do. That's the opposite of parroting as you can use your own mind to ponder those. But you seem to want to be ignorant, claiming that two theoretical models are equally bad just because you don't want to consider their properties for a second.

I'm not disagreeing with your conclusion. All I'm saying is that I'm just parroting these things without actually verifying them - and so are you. If flat Earth gets you all excited, I can also explain the concept with Pythagoras' theorem.

I never did a formal proof of it, yet I just use it because it works and I'm pretty sure it's true. Someone else proved it and I'm just parroting that without ever even having bothered to read the proof.

I’m disagreeing that I am just parroting things. Parroting is mindlessly repeating something. I don’t claim that all my thoughts are original but some are at least independent and self derived.

We have 2500 years of epistemology. Individual humans can reach knowledge to various degrees. It’s not a binary state of knowing or not knowing.

Take the Pythagoras example then. How is it different from parroting if you never even read and understood the proof? And alright, parroting might be a negative word and you could want to use a fancy word saying you're following heuristics instead. But it doesn't change that you maintain and propagate knowledge that you have not personally verified in a rigorous sense.

There are examples of things written in school books that were just plain wrong because no one bothered to properly verify it. We all settle for "good enough" most of the time.

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