So much of knowledge in everything is just something some guy asserted in a book a few hundred years ago. Most of every field is just a guy saying "I think this

So much of knowledge in everything is just something some guy asserted in a book a few hundred years ago. Most of every field is just a guy saying "I think this because (argument based on rhetoric)", and a hundred years later we still just take that at face value. The only exception is physics, where people realized many hundred years ago that you should probably check these assertions against reality. Aristotle's claim that heavy things fall faster than light things was gospel for a thousand years, despite pretty much anyone being able to do a version of his thought experiment to conclusively disprove it, but nobody did, because it was thought you could just rationally argue your way to an accurate understanding of the world. Physics finally started pushing back against that in like the 1600s, and chemistry did a little too, though mostly by accident, but even psychology, born basically in the 20th century, was still based on whatever rhetorical arguments you put in your book, with that only changing, slowly, nowadays. The idea that we should discount science based on rhetoric vs science based on evidence still isn't a popular one in the lay community. People hate being told that there are things they may never understand, because the human brain is just a really good monkey. There is no evidence in rhetoric, and a more convincing argument should not be considered a more realistic one.