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Bobby Danforth's picture

Well,

I would be cautious in which examples you use to advance your point - the idea that man didn't walk on the moon does nothing to contribute to science, nor does it seem to have affected whether or not your teacher was right about other things or helpful to you. (It certainly could have.) Sometimes a person is just plain wrong and their being wrong is not helpful even indirectly!

There is a difference between disagreement founded in different perception of an identical* body of information and the sort of disagreement that Matt Taibbi invokes in The Great Derangement. Moon conspiracies, global warming denial, intelligent design, and countless other ideologies are caged in the budding off of a separate reality with its own fragmented body of fact. They are interesting and useful in a sociological sense, in a conversational sense, but they do not contribute to science simply because they disagree with the prevailing consensus.

*and here I mean to within some margin, obviously no two people will have entirely identical collections of information

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