no, i don’t think that the “common man’s position has to be abandoned”. In fact, i think that people should be allowed to believe that the earth is flat. For 99% of people, that is what they can observe in their daily lives, and it’s the simplest model that “gets the job done” (i.e. navigates the person through their daily lifes). You only need to know that the earth is a globe if you’re doing international trade, geopolitics, or spaceflight (or weather prediction, for some reason). For every other application, it does not matter.