Cherry Picking Experts and Appeal to Authority

Out of millions of people with an advanced degree, we can find someone, somewhere, who believes a crackpot proposition, including flat-Earth. Citing these very few experts to “prove” the crackpot proposition and ignoring the much larger body of experts who disagree is the fallacy of cherry-picking and appeal to authority.

The scientific consensus is determined by the collective position of the community of scientists in a specific field of study, not just by a few individuals.

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Humans Are Social Beings and Science is a Social Process

Humans are social beings. We depend on each other; not everything we need to do can be done by ourselves. We do not produce every food we eat every day, and the same applies to practically every other aspects of our lives.

We often hear flat-Earthers ask if we have researched by ourselves all the things we claim. If we have not researched it by ourselves but only rely on information from third-party, then —according to them— we should not accept the information. It is merely their way to undermine society, and disconnect us from the rest of society.

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Confirmation Bias

Humans have cognitive biases that can affect our judgments. One of these cognitive biases is the confirmation bias. Because of the confirmation bias, we tend to seek the information confirming our preexisting beliefs.

Confirmation bias is a fact of life, and all humans have it. Confirmation bias can result in different subjective opinion from a different subject. A characteristic of any pseudoscience —like the concept of flat-Earth— is that they don’t try to minimize the confirmation bias, but they actually encourage it.

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