> facts are rarely indisputable Almost all major facts that people disagree on are, essentially, indisputable. It is indisputable that: - The Earth is round

> facts are rarely indisputable Almost all major facts that people disagree on are, essentially, indisputable. It is indisputable that: - The Earth is round - The Earth is at least millions of years old - Evolution occurs - Vaccines generally work - Politicians are not secretly lizard people - Humans walked on the moon These things are all extremely clear and obvious to anyone with a healthy mental model of how the world works. They are all interconnected with tons of evidence from a huge range of disciplines; any one of them being wrong requires a mind-bogglingly huge amount of commonplace and easily verifiable evidence to be flat-out wrong. It's actually very hard (if not impossible) to be self-consistent without being true. How many made-up stories have plot holes? Essentially all of them. Statements that are backed up with thousands or millions of data points and shown (through simple, followable, verifiable logic) to be consistent with the rest of our understanding of how the universe works can essentially be called "facts". Again, this is the vast majority of things people disagree on. > The vast majority of facts we have to build our worldview on are not directly confirmable without huge amounts of personal effort Only if you're persnickety about what exactly "directly confirmable" means. For some definition, literally nothing is "directly confirmable". It's actually extremely easy to confirm most facts that people actually dispute in a political debate. > we have to choose who to believe based on a complex web of tribalism, perceived history, social cues, emotional intelligence, and priors that have served us well Do you have a list of individual humans you have chosen to believe, and you ignore everything else? I don't think you do. I think you have a complex mental model of how the universe works and you constantly try to fit new ideas and concepts into it and see how well they fit. If you're good at it, you keep that new idea quarantined for a long time while you search your mental model in-depth for anything that might dispute that new fact, and then you arrange a contest of ideas where you seek out other information to clarify the situation. Based on the outcome of that contest, you update your mental model appropriately, making an effort to flag pieces of information that may not fit for further review in the future. People who don't do this have chosen not to. They've decided that they don't care about their relationship with truth. And any time we talk about these people, someone comes along with their false equivalency and claims everyone is that way. No. Some of us have decided to care about truth.