If a physicist were to spend two hours trying to explain to me how they knew that the earth was flat, I’d expect to come away from that conversation with a better understanding of the physical world or the social construction of physics knowledge, which would better help me navigate my life, even if I ended up wronger on the bottom-line answer—because that’s how epistemically persuasive explanations work, they have to show an ability to win bets either more often or with less computational cost than alternative hypotheses.
If a physicist were to spend two hours trying to explain to me how they knew that the earth was flat, I’d expect to come away from that conversation with a better understanding of the physical world or the social construction of physics knowledge, which would better help me navigate my life, even if I ended up wronger on the bottom-line answer—because that’s how epistemically persuasive explanations work, they have to show an ability to win bets either more often or with less computational cost than alternative hypotheses.