Except that caveat that knowledge is a subset of belief.
That’s wrong. Belief and knowledge are different and distinct. When you know, and know how you know, and can demonstrate what you know and how you know it, you do not require belief. Belief is poison in regards to knowledge. It is the bias we seek to remove in scientific/objective study.
If you don't believe something to be true, you cannot know it to be true.
Also wrong, unless you are playing pedantic semantical games with the word truth - in which case it is TECHNICALLY correct. Objective reality doesn’t care what you believe and is not impacted in any way by it. Verifying possibility (to become actual knowledge, if not “truth”) is mired by belief. If you do not validate and confirm something to be true (out here, in reality!), you cannot truly know it is! You can merely/arbitrarily believe it, and this is the problem!
Baseless beliefs and rejection of science/paranoid rejection of "authority" is what has gotten us into this mess or rejecting reality.
Partially correct. The rejection of abject appeal to authority is simply logical and prudent, and adherence to such folly is very much a “baseless belief” devoid of the context history provides.
For most people it took quite little time.
They were simply told it in school and believed it.
So you do recognize the problem with conditioning by rote under the guise of education (and abject appeal to authority) after all! It is all too simple to fool a child; like taking candy from a baby. However globe mythology doesn’t end with your first lesson, it becomes solidified and ingrained over years of repetition. A parrot (or parroting child) may know to repeat the proper sounds to receive a reward (or avoid punishment) but the belief in those words comes later.
They are also the ones who it is easiest to con into thinking Earth is flat.
Or more precisely, con them into BELIEVING; yes, I agree. That which can be accepted with little to no evidence (the required arbitrary rote/repetition we spoke of) can be discarded or replaced just as easily.
But with actual photos from space, that is a lot harder now.
And did you validate that? Or simply believe what you see on tv?
But some actually understand the evidence for a RE, and some have even obtained some of that evidence themselves. They are the hard ones to con.
This is the process by which many flat earth researchers are born. You begin with critically evaluating those evidences (created to fool children, and really only effective at doing so) , likely for the first time in your life, and the unvalidated assumptions required to interpret those evidences as “proof” of the worlds shape. None of them bare further scrutiny, as I and many others have discovered through earnest research. That does not, of course, establish the world’s true shape - there is only the one way to do that.
which for the RE means it will curve around Earth.
In your belief, yes. In reality, no. Level is always horizontal and flat, and there is only confirmation of this fact (the law of hydrostatics is one description of it). You ought to notice, recognize, and accept that you have no contradictory data to refute that fact.
This is what is repeatedly observed, such as with water obscuring the base of a distant object, even though both the observer and the distant are above water.
That is an optical illusion chiefly caused by refraction, but it serves as “proof” to many indoctrinated.
It is also repeatedly observed to curve at the small scale, rather than be magically flat like FEers claim.
Surface tension is real, yes. But at rest, water’s surface only has the one shape - flat, level, and horizontal (barring irrelevant meniscus effects which are an accepted caveat which do not conform in any way to the globe models requirements).
Instead, the best they can get is that observations at a relatively small scale, such as in a sink or a pool, where the curvature is far too small to be measured, they find that it is consistent with both a FE and a RE.
Or rather they COULD be consistent with an RE, however no such “curve-a-level” has ever been measured and it is silly to expect it to be one day in the future. You also have to discard the long distance (miles) observations and measurements of waters surface at rest which are flatly incompatible with RE and show that the law of hydrostatics does not alter on any scale tested (which is WHY it is a law, and has been for centuries). There is only one way to refute such natural law, and it is conspicuously lacking - from you and everyone else.
And what magical properties would that be which magically makes water flat even though it is observed to curve?
I endeavor to keep magic (and faith/belief) out of knowledge, especially scientific. There are many conceptions as to why which are all seemingly valid. One is water’s inability to support shear stress, another is the isostatic nature of gas pressure, yet another is the demonstrable behavior of all fluids (wether in the presence of significant gas pressure or not). It has never been observed (I.e. measured) to curve - ever. It has ONLY ever been measured NOT to curve at rest under natural conditions (again, barring the irrelevant non sequitur of minuscule surface tension artifacts), and this is extremely significant to any empiricist worth their salt.
Perhaps you should try coming into this being as openminded as possible, rather than continuing to repeat the same false assertion that water will magically be flat, including at the scale of the globe, which is substantiated by nothing, and refuted by simple observations.
Practice what you preach! The magic that you believe in, where unmeasured things serve as proof and optical illusions serve as measurement is getting in your way of objectively evaluating what is being said.