> "to show that it is possible for large groups of people to hold false beliefs" The claim from the article is not about their beliefs, it is about their activ

> "to show that it is possible for large groups of people to hold false beliefs" The claim from the article is not about their beliefs, it is about their activity. If a million people say that one can live many different lifestyles from a tent but those people actually live in suburban houses, they can potentially all be wrong. If a million people actually do live in tents while living many different lifestyles, QED, it is demonstrated - they aren't holding false beliefs, full stop. It's not a belief anymore, it's a fact. The fact that they are doing it shows it can be done at all, and the large numbers show it's not an extreme claim that only one or two weirdo obsessives could contort themselves enough to use, it's general enough for millions to do over many lifestyles. > "Everyone is doing it" is absolutely no indication that "it" is a good idea. It is too; "When in Rome" is advice because whatever the Romans are doing, it isn't killing them or getting them into fights or mugged or annoying someone powerful. If you don't have any reason to do otherwise, eating what the Romans eat, drinking what they drink, behaving how they behave, is a far far better starting point than almost any other. As a guest in someone's house, trying behave how the homeowners behave is a good idea; 90+% of starting points will be worse, most things you could try to eat will make you ill or kill you, most of the world's thousands of programming languages are toys or niche domain systems or wildly outdated or proprietary and gone out of business. The ones millions of people use? Pretty good idea to use one of those, unless you have very good reasons for doing otherwise.