> [Y]ou can’t trust anything except that what you can personally reproduce.
Do you believe that matter is composed of atoms, or that stars are distant suns, or that black holes exist, or that the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s? Have you reproduced any of those observations?
Personally I don't really want to be confined to my own humble means. I'm just not that smart, life is much richer when I can learn from others. I'd rather stand on the shoulders of giants and inherit a body of knowledge from my society, accepting that it contains flaws and even outright lies that I will need to do my best to discard.
There's a lot of space between blindly accepting all peer reviewed research and rejecting science altogether.
> Do you believe that matter is composed of atoms, or that stars are distant suns, or that black holes exist, or that the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s?
Not particularly. I don’t actively disbelieve them either. But whether or not any of those are true has zero measurable impact on my life, so it is of no consequence.
I do however believe that exciting electricity in a periodic manner will cause a wave to emit that travels “really fucking fast” and can be received by a similar device a great distance away.
And that such excitations can be received by antennae I have constructed which communicate with satellites in a precise manner that can allow me to locate myself on a coordinate plane. And that those calculations depend on the speed of light being as you say. So sure, it is likely to be as you say. Or at least isomorphic to that, for my purposes.
How has your blind acceptance of these various other non-observed phenomena benefited you?
I reject that my acceptance is "blind," just because I haven't taken spectrograms of distant stars and verified that they are composed of the same stuff as our sun doesn't mean I haven't engaged critically with the idea and evaluated it on merits. Honestly I am irked to be told that I need to be more humble about what I do and don't know by someone willing to immediately jump to conclusions about me, and I feel it undermines your point.
Engaging with and understanding the world does routinely enrich my life, yes. I've seen a lot of really beautiful things because I've known what to look for out what is surprising or out of place, and I've known those things by being educated about the world.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Is there some blaringly obvious life changing impact of holding faith in the common astronomer’s view of black holes / stars / etc that I am missing?
Do you believe that matter is composed of atoms, or that stars are distant suns, or that black holes exist, or that the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s? Have you reproduced any of those observations?
Personally I don't really want to be confined to my own humble means. I'm just not that smart, life is much richer when I can learn from others. I'd rather stand on the shoulders of giants and inherit a body of knowledge from my society, accepting that it contains flaws and even outright lies that I will need to do my best to discard.
There's a lot of space between blindly accepting all peer reviewed research and rejecting science altogether.