Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by _gabe_ 1306 days ago
My point was most people do cargo cult and that's bad, no matter what. And the notion that you have to go to space to know the earth is round is flawed, as I tried to illustrate using several examples that didn't necessitate traveling to space to infer that the earth is not flat.

After all, Eratosthenes was able to calculate the circumference of the earth with approximately 0.5% margin of error[0]. Since they didn't have rockets in 250 B.C, it should be clear that there are other empirical methods to test these hypotheses.

To reiterate, cargo culting is always bad. If you don't have a reason for what you believe, then there's a chance your belief is flawed and it would behoove you to research your question and prove to yourself the validity or invalidity of your belief.

[0]: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_geodesy/geo...

1 comments

Yeah I get it. But What I'm saying is that there are many times when nobody can truly prove which whether they're in the cargo cult or the other people are in the cargo cult.

So programming is one such thing. There are stylistic camps everywhere and nobody knows which one is the cargo cult, INCLUDING the neutral camp where people say everything is a tool depending on the context.