The usual counterargument I see offered to that is that sure, it is great if we can impede the spread of some completely stupid belief like flat Earth, but sometimes those things that are crazy by conventional wisdom turn out to be true.

At that point, they usually mention Galileo and maybe some others, and they ask how do we avoid squashing the next Galileo with our measures to limit the spread of flat Earth theories?

The answer is that if flat Earth or whatever is actually correct it will eventually prevail as did Galileo and all the others they cite (and they faced much more severe measures than merely being denied use of their society's equivalent of mass media). It will just take longer as it will have to use slower more personal communication channels.

That's a good thing. Let's say there are dozens of radical theories circulating, and suppose one of them really is the next Galileo type situation, and the rest really are just utterly insane.

If they all have to spread by the slower more personal channels any given person will likely only be exposed to maybe two or three of them. They aren't overwhelmed by them, and that gives them a better chance of figuring out that the stupid ones are in fact stupid. It is usually much more work to refute a theory, even a stupid one, than to come up with it, and the slow spread gives time for the refutations to be developed and put out there.

If they were all on the fast mass audience channels, people get exposed to so many of them that they don't have time to really figure out if they make sense, and (2) even if a good refutation is out it is easy to miss it in all the noise.

Yeah, it is mostly about, vitally speaking, infection rate.

On a side note I would like to remind everyone that Galileo's theories weren't fitting the observations of the world, it was step in right direction but he was also being a dick about it.

It took quite some time for us to develop better lenses, and to use elliptical instead of spherical orbits.

in other words: the answer is that type 1 errors self-correct quickly, but type 2 errors self-correct slowly.

Speed of acceptance may indeed be related to the type of claim, but I think it’s also highly related to the ability to confirm the evidence yourself.

There are many ways to confirm major pieces of evidence for, say, the earth being round. It’s easy enough to do, even without getting into a rocket and seeing the earth’s curvature.

There are many fewer ways to confirm a whole lot of other ideas, though, whether there’s scientific rigor behind the idea’s evidence or not.

For example, I can’t easily confirm the Higgs Boson evidence. But it also doesn’t directly impact my life much, so it’s ok for me to be a little unsure about it and not have first hand evidence.

There are other topics that impact me much more directly than Higgs Boson, and thankfully those things are typically much easier for me to get evidence for. So I think the truth does indeed eventually come to fruition... but when we have vested moneyed interests pushing against the truth? Yikes, that makes things much more difficult.

Yeah, you cannot confirm those yourself - so what do sane people do? they consult the experts.

The Sea of human knowledge is too vast for any single human to traverse it fully.

But here you have people who are anti-experts, who are matched with others with similar sentiment.

And flat-earthers are a very specific example. What about politics, where facts do not matter? Or even objective issues, which got politicized?

The only thing the current social media do, is to entrench beliefs of everyone using them, without regard to what that belief is.