[burnished]

I appreciate the pun.

And sure, I think your view point is fair, but I also think you muddied the top level waters a little because the topic at hand was the ability to reason abstractly past a point of contention and your point seems to be that there are signals where you don’t believe the juice is worth the squeeze. Which, yeah, fair.

To relay a related experience I once listened to this guys MLM pitch. The things that seemed to reach this guy the most were conversation points past ‘is there any indication this works that survives a cursory inspection’, like ‘given that this is good and everyone should do it, what happens to the half of humanity that joins and has no one to recruit?’.

>> The only time I've ever run across this kind of flat earther, all it took was to remind them that one of their family members - sitting right next to them in a permanent state of cringe - circumnavigated the globe in their sailboat.

Side note: glorious