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Any Count could do it: Asking and Checking.

 "The only way we can begin to try to understand anything better is by asking+checking."



If that statement is true, then you might think that it might be widely accepted, that, say, asking+checking practice for stidents might be eagerly accepted with open arms. 

You would be wrong.

Traditionally, no culture, no education system, makes any formal effort to encouage, practice, test, or grade asking+checking.

The reason for this is very simple: any unjust power structure must inhibit communication, to a lesser or greater extent, in order to protect itself.

Consequently, what we end up accepting is a world where understanding things better has no common currency, so that questions people should naturally have been asking in their schooldays bubble up years later. And because we lack practice with questions, just asking one and getting an explanation that is novel can be a profoundly moving experience :

"What if the moon landing was a hoax?"

The following is my answer to the question How do you instantly shut down a "the moon landing was faked" debate? on the website Quora:


Don’t debate. Don’t attempt to convince or persuade.

Don’t offer your own descriptions and explanations of the event in question.

Instead, ask them these 10 questions:

(All questions are: According to NASA)

  1. What was the first Apollo mission in space?
  2. What was the first Apollo mission to orbit the Moon?
  3. What happened to Apollo 12 shortly after liftoff?
  4. How many Apollo missions landed on the moon?
  5. How many men claimed to have walked on the Moon?
  6. What did Van Allen say about the danger to astronauts from the radiation belts named after him?
  7. Why can’t we see stars in the sky during the day, like at night?
  8. Why can’t the far side of the Moon ever be observed from Earth?
  9. What is the distance from the Earth to the Moon?
  10. When Armstrong and Aldrin were on the Moon, what space-ship event could they have witnessed at Mare Crisium?

Predictably and inevitably, they will not be able to answer these questions.

At which point, it seems fair to say:

You don’t know what NASA is claiming, so you certainly can’t say NASA is wrong.

To be clear, these events, that you clearly know fuck all about, you’re saying these events never happened?

The point here I think is worth emphasising:　people denying the Apollo landings have no clear idea of what it is they are denying. It is as though a stranger were to tell me they had visited the top of Mt Fuji and I were to immediately deny it because: it's a volcano!

All understanding is basically

 information→idea,

so, it follows that:

better information→better idea, 

and the only way to begin to try to understand if information is better or not is by asking+checking.

 

In that spirit then, you are free to take the information here and connect it to the idea of: a big load of rubbish.

But, to check, you would be doing that without askIng+checking, wouldn't you?


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