Navigator Theory

Navigator Theory is a test for when someone’s beliefs stop being private eccentricity and start becoming my problem. People believe wrong things all the time. I believe wrong things all the time. Most of the time that is just the background radiation of being human. It does not matter very much if someone has a weird model of the world in a domain where they are not touching anything load-bearing. But suppose I am a passenger on an ocean-going ship in the 1800s. If the navigator believes the Earth is flat, I care. I do not care because I need everyone around me to have identical metaphysics. I care because the navigator’s job is to translate reality into route decisions. Latitude, longitude, stars, currents, maps, horizons: the whole role exists at the boundary between belief and consequence. If the person’s map of the world is broken in exactly the domain where they are steering us, their belief is no longer merely personal. A flat-earth poet? Fine. A flat-earth navigator? No. That…