Honestly, I’m not trying to troll you at all. We all come across people who believe crazy stuff, but if you genuinely want to persuade people, recognise where they’re coming from.

I have some important questions for you if you honestly believe that your belief system was arrived at by the empirical process:

Firstly, think about that rather bold claim and compare it with how many things you believe are true and how much rigorous empiricism you’ve engaged with yourself, personally. (You can’t count any times when you just trusted someone else who claimed it by appeal to authority, a well-known logical fallacy, because that would be both a social source of belief and literally illogical.)

Secondly, what counts as correct science and what counts as bogus science, and by what means is that decided? What process decides which information goes where? Who makes the decisions and why are they the ones who do?

Thirdly, how do you, personally find out about that stuff? How many journals do you read regularly? How many things written by the people who saw the evidence did you ever actually read? Who wrote the things you did and do read, and why do you believe them?

Claiming that I don’t also apply logic and scientific thinking to analyze my own beliefs is also petty rage-bait, as if epistemology hasn’t also existed for a very long time.

I’m honestly very skeptical of how much self reflection you put into how you know what you know given that my claim that pretty much everyone comes to their beliefs about the world through social interactions (rather than via experiment and direct evidence) is so new to you that it made you angry. Yes, epistemology has been around a long time, but you simply can’t have studied Philosophy of Science and be flabbergasted by what I’m suggesting. It’s another example of you trusting someone else and believing their conclusions without going into it all on detail and questioning it for yourself. Before you get cross about that too, please read the next paragraph.

No one can read it all. No one can repeat even a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny fraction of the experiments. You can’t be an expert in all branches of science and philosophy even if you tried. You can’t even begin to read it all. So you take it on trust. This isn’t bad. It’s sensible. It’s how you were (correctly) brought up - trust what your teachers tell you about science, because your parents, who you trusted implicitly before you even walked through the door of preschool, brought you up that way, because they believed those sources of belief before you did.

If the New York Times claimed that some professors at Cornell had found a tweak of relativity that removed the need for a theory of dark matter or dark energy because it matches the observed mass and expansion of the universe, and that the new theory also removed the inconsistency between relativity and quantum mechanics, you would likely believe it, especially if other papers ran with the same story and clever people you know told you more details having read a write up in the New Scientist magazine.

And yet by the same process, we knew that Pons and Fleishman had attained nuclear fusion in the lab. How did we subsequently know that it was bogus? By the same social process. Hundreds of millions of people changed their beliefs about the world twice. A handful of people did something empirical.

None of this is bad. But don’t assume that an appeal to examine evidence that you haven’t investigated yourself is going to convince a sceptic. They think they’re being more rigorous than you. They weren’t brought up to believe teachers or they weren’t brought up to trust “scientists”. You won’t convince them with the same appeals to scientific authority that work on you.

This would have been even more obvious in the age of sail.

I bet it would!