alt Hacker News“Evidence” is often in time overruled by new knowledge and evidence.
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Yes, but the main question is into which direction the arrow of causalality points for the main part:
Does an individual trust their image of the world, because it summarizes the evidence well? Or do they grade all evidence based on the image of the world they want to be true?
In reality it has to be of course always a mixture of the two, even for the most reflected person. We cannot go through our days questioning everything all the time if we want to remain functional, some things we will have to take for granted.
IMO the whole thing keeps boiling down to two questions:
1. Do you want to believe or do you want your world image to accurately represent the world as it is, even if there might be no such thing as objective truth in some cases?
2. Are you aware of the breadth of evidence you have (or the lack thereof)? E.g. when I develope software, I encountered grown, adult people who would talk about computers with superstition, as if it was some angry deity that had to be calmed. Now in their world there absolutely is evidence their rituals worked. But their evidence was based on an entirely wrong world model, where they treated a computer as a person, instead of treating it as a totally predictable automaton. Turns out praying doesn't help resolving a network issue, especially not if you click away the message explaining why it doesn't work without reading it.
The von Däniken question fundamentally boils down to: If you have 1 billion pieces of evidence pointing one way and one piece pointing in the way of a fantastic fantasy novel, do you go with the "boring" 1 billion pieces or do you hyper-fixate on the one piece, build a theory that explains it in the most exciting way and then ignore all points where that theory collides with the 1 billion pieces of evidence?
That’s not an argument against * any * current evidence, only sloppy thinking trying ignore evidence.
What replaces evidence is better evidence, not fairy tales that ignores reality.
And statistically, if you take all knowledge, and look at all the claims that have failed to displace it, you’ll find the vast majority of alternative claims are simply wrong.