4 ms·

The "fake" moon landings is an interesting example; although the number of direct eye-witnesses is tiny, there are thousands of scientists and engineers at NASA

The "fake" moon landings is an interesting example; although the number of direct eye-witnesses is tiny, there are thousands of scientists and engineers at NASA that will queue-up to testify they really happened, and nobody who actually knows anything will deny it. But the affirmers are all people in white lab-coats, and many people automatically distrust anyone in a white lab-coat. No "ordinary people" went to the moon and witnessed it themselves. I believe you could pick out the lunar lander from Earth, using a BIG telescope, as a small dot. But no amateur stargazer could do that. So all the affirmative testimony comes from a group of people who were all working for the same team. So if you don't trust that team, there's no reliable evidence against the CT. (There's no evidence for it either; but if you don't trust the people who know, then to doubt seems rational)

wongarsu 5y ago
Yes, the level of evidence kind of depends on your world-view. I would have said that the fact that both the US and the USSR both claimed it happened, with the USSR seemingly only losing from that, is already strongly in support of the moon landing being real. But some people divide the world differently, to them it's politicians and mainstream media, and scientists employed by them, who are making that claim, which makes that group look much less diverse. I imagine you could just as easily make a study "people who look at fewer partitions of datasets reach wrong conclusions more often". Just as you can sample more fish from a lake and see if there's a pattern in their color, you can try to look at more perspectives and see if there's a pattern one way or the other.