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billswift comments on Recommended reading: George Orwell on knowledge from authority - Less Wrong
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I can't think of a single conclusive piece of evidence - but thinking the earth is NOT round would require conspiracy thinking sufficient to make the "we never landed on the moon" nuts and homeopathists look rational.
Here are 3 to start:
1) Maps work in long range air and marine navigation
2) Satellite orbital information
3) Theory of gravitational "rounding" (I can't remember the correct technical name off-hand).
Remember, this was written in 1946, well before space exploration began.
I've always found the various pictures and movies of Earth from space to be pretty convincing as well.
Have you actually employed any of this? Surely there could be an alternate explanation for the satellites. And I'd say your average man-on-the-street probably wouldn't need an entire conspiracy to think the Earth is actually round. Or flat. Or some other shape that it isn't.
As someone who works at a company that makes satellite receivers and processes huge amounts of incoming satellite data every day... and actually uses the Earth's major and minor axes in calculations every day... I'd like to hear your alternate explanation :-)
That said, I can (though with some difficulty) imagine conspiracies or honest errors afflicting other textbook facts, like the precise distance to the Sun.
I was more speaking of the average sort of person, who's barely literate and works with their hands. It depends entirely on what sort of direct evidence the person's been exposed to. If it's merely that GPS works or that their TV uses satellites, there could be a myriad different explanations of how these things work that would probably sound less like gibberish than the real one.
Except for studying marine navigation in my live on boat/ocean settlement phase back in my teens and twenties, no. But I was more suggesting that there are thousands of people (possibly millions) - pilots, navigators, amateur astronomers - who regularly use the first two. If they were off even a little, lots of somebodies would have noticed and they would have been corrected for the proper shape of the earth.