That kind of rhetorical mental gymnastics is quite often what happens when we debate people that have a vested interested against a commonly held and supportabl

That kind of rhetorical mental gymnastics is quite often what happens when we debate people that have a vested interested against a commonly held and supportable belief. The problem I see is that skepticism and contrarianism are commonly conflated with educated, informed criticism by people even well educated and informed in a topic area, but now we have to debate things as fundamental to many other things holding up like the concept of gravity. The implications of a flat earth, for example, are incredibly outrageous and when people want to go to any length to explain away their tightly held and emotionally motivated position it’s not going to turn out to be a very productive conversation whatever topic may be at hand anyway. Most forms of decently productive discourse tend to involve multiple parties going back and forth with observations and some criticism that’s not taken personally at least so some semblance of an agreed, cogent world is formed from the discussion. This really doesn’t work if people don’t have some very basic fundamentals agreed upon sometimes, especially if they are relevant to the topic. Like it doesn’t matter if someone’s a creationist on an accounting application development team but it probably matters a lot as a policymaker for public sector.