They Never Said Columbus Wasn’t Fat

We’re sometimes told that everyone thought the world was flat before Columbus sailed to the New World. This is a fallacy. There was a guy from Greece who discovered that the world was round in 300BCE. He was so accurate that his estimation was only 1% out. Eratosthenes was his name. Mathematics was his profession. I don’t know what his game was. But the Columbus fallacy came out of laziness, being used by Washington Irving as an embellishment in his biography of the 15^th Century explorer maybe as a way to pad the book out and deflect attention away from Columbus’ more genocidal tendencies. But, from there it became adopted by anyone who wanted to make a point about how we should put little weight behind the Argumentum ad Populum – the argument that, just because most people believe something to be true, does not mean it actually is so. My own favourite way to counter anyone who tries to use the ‘a billion Chinese people can’t be wrong’ assertion is to quote Mahatma Gandhi: ‘Error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error just because nobody sees it. Truth stands even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained’. He may not have been able to conjugate the verb ‘to be’ (making him sound a country bumpkin) but I’m sure you’ll agree, it is quite profound nonetheless.