this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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The correctness of an idea is totally independent of how many people believe it, and to believe otherwise is to be some dipshit who says "Idiocracy is a documentary!!!" and invoke Hanlon's Razor instead of having actual good, materialist analysis of the world
I don't think they are independent. Most people believe that the sky is blue when the sun is high and objects fall to the ground if they aren't propelled or lighter than air. It is not an accident that they believe correct things, it is from experience and education. Most people have a huge amount of correct information that is held in common in their society along with the myths and superstitions and misconceptions, while that latter category [false beliefs held in common] are usually but not always things that fall outside of their experience.
addendum: they believe things which are almost correct or apparently correct. Heavier objects fall faster is not correct, but it is apparently correct because very light objects fall slower than heavy objects, and this appears to be constant unless you actually check and realize there's a threshold. There's no world outside of eurasia and africa is functionally true if you lack the nautical equipment to reach the americas, but factually wrong. You can't get things too wrong without problems, but there's a decent amount of leeway.
It's a heuristic thing. Denser objects are often* heavier, but it's the density and not the weight that may make them fall faster (not accounting for how aerodynamic a given object is). It can produce incorrect judgements, especially if they attempt to articulate their intuitive knowledge as some precise-yet-abstract law, but in practical circumstances their intuitive knowledge produces the expected result the vast majority of the time, so pragmatically it's reasonable to call it correct.
*Certainly their weight is more noticeable, as is the lack of weight of less-dense objects, so perhaps this is the real source of the skew, a type of selection bias.