[atoav]

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?

[seanhunter]

Right. For people who don't know the wealth of evidence we are talking about here, the Egyptians left very detailed records including wages of the people working on the pyramids[1], paintings showing the numbers of people needed to move heavy objects and how they lubricated the sand beneath the skids[2] etc

[1] They weren't slaves, they were salaried workers, and there are records of how much they got paid and how many of them there were.

[2] and the numbers check out when you do the standard "block on an inclined rough plane" thing you learn in 1st year mechanics. Check out https://sites.uwm.edu/nosonovs/2017/11/05/about-djehutihotep... where you can clearly see the pains they have gone to in order to ensure the numbers of workers are accurately portrayed

[Biologist123]

Thank you. This was well-written and made a point I think I needed to see set out in this form.

> 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.

On reading this, it struck me how much of the world we engage with on these terms. And how much of the information soup we live in seems designed to persuade us of things being just so.

[atoav]

It being designed is what also should give away that it could also be designed differently.

People who create, be it artists, designers and engineers can sometimes develope that insight from their daily practise. We create, thus we have a deeper than avarage awareness that the world is created and which factors play into it being this way and not a slightly different (better?) variation on the same theme.