Okay it was all fucking mental, but it was crazy how much shit he said that was also verifiably true. It's just the extrapolations of the data that go to some weird places.

Case in point with the nasa shit, he's probably wrong but I mean can you think of some universe where the US has a backup apollo team because they were worried about fuck ups and wanted to broadcast that shit instead? Yes. Did it happen that way? Probably not.

And the one that made my head spin was that the teague dude was actually a real person that was a mission communications coordinator at nasa. I linked it up somewhere on this thread but that was really surprising to me that it was a real person and not made up. And this is from the nasa gov website not some rando blog. Again, doesn't mean any of what he said was true but there is such a lot of circumstantial shit that is creepy as fuck with these things.

I also think much like Scott Adams, that for non experts, proven facts are sufficiently indistinguishable from confirmation bias.

I mean we as people do all sorts of mental shortcuts because we don't want to look at first hand derivations or principles. We often fall into the trap of arguing from authority because it's easier to namedrop a dude that is seen as trustworthy in a field than it is to explain in a coherent and clear way the argument of why something works.

It's like the global warming models. I am sufficiently content to about a 75% probability the inferences made by scientists on anthropogenic climate change is correct. About 75% because while I'm familiar with scientific and statistical models I'm not a climate scientist.

But then in the social sciences and peer review world you have the reproducibility crisis which is a big fucking deal (results taken to be fact because they were repeatedly found to be correct... Actually weren't correct and it's because no one tested any of the shit enough and just assumed it was right because the papers said that it was right)

Then on top of that you have the influence of funding and research grants and how that often influences how results are published.

Science is unique in that theory of the scientific method is that a minority and can overturn a majority opinion so long as it has more evidence going for it and the results can be repeated.

Well when it comes to politically or culturally, societal or sexually sensitive topics the science and rigors of process go out the window.

This is a long way of saying good luck trying to differentiate between confirmation fallacy and provable facts as a non expert in any of the topics. We end up just deferring to clever sounding people we trust. Few want to look into primary research, citation ranking or reading up on something from first principles rather than the condensed or repackaged versions.