When I was a kid, I thought that doing sit-ups and crunches would remove fat from my gut area. Like most people, I followed what seemed like logic. But at some point, I had to admit I was incorrect, follow the science and accept reality.

I have recently been puzzling over the question: “What determines the beliefs we abandon and why do we choose to hold onto incorrect ideas?”

Believe it or not, there are still people who swear by spot-reduction methods to shrink fat. They do specific ab exercises and wear any number of apparatuses around their abdominal section to cause it to shrink (it doesn’t), all because they refuse to let go of the belief that they can spot-reduce body fat.

I really started asking myself the puzzling question after I learned about a 2018 documentary “Behind the Curve.” In it, flat-Earth crusaders are followed as they attempt a scientific experiment to finally prove the Earth isn’t round.

Bob Knodel, and other flat-Earthers, pooled their money and spent $20,000 on the experiment. They purchased a laser gyroscope in hopes of using the high-precision instrument to prove the Earth doesn’t rotate. Instead, they saw a neatly measured 15-degree shift every hour (which exactly matches the rate of rotation of the planet), and they were perplexed.

Impervious to facts, they forged ahead with a reconfiguring (they simply changed the numbers while using the same equation) and continued to prove themselves wrong.

Bob and his friends refused to accept the results.

Guess what? Every experiment regarding the round Earth — when done correctly — reveals a round Earth. It’s just that simple.

We can all laugh about such things, and it makes for good coffee talk; but, that unwillingness to accept empirically proven facts can be dangerous.

Let’s just say there’s a NASA engineer, and they are very talented and good at what they do. But they refuse to accept that they’re using an incorrect mathematical formula in their work. They stand on their flawed assertion and run with it anyway, and that action leads to a failed launch that ends multiple lives.

That engineer is entitled to their beliefs. We are all entitled to be as wrong as we want to be. But, when that wrongness affects the lives of others, it can be detrimental to all of us.

I don’t know if I’m just more aware of it in my advancing age, or if it’s just more prevalent now; but there are so many people who refuse to accept facts and double down on their incorrect beliefs. I have personally witnessed multiple people confronted with undeniable video and audio proof about something/someone, only to see them either refuse to accept what they saw/heard or to see them move the goalposts and do mental gymnastics to justify things in their own mind.

So, how do you determine what you leave behind? What is the threshold for accepting correct information and moving on from incorrect belief?

It would be nice if we lived in a world where magic and Santa Claus existed; but reality is unavoidable and numbers don’t lie. I think we should help each other and accept reality. We can move forward from there.