I don't necessarily mean to agree that the Earth is flat.
But maybe if you think that we don't know all the answers and finding out things we don't know is fun, you could find common ground even with flat-earthers.
Probably 99% of humanity has one element of common ground: we all want to be happy.
So start from there and work outwards. How does believing the Earth is flat make them happier? As you discover the answer to that (one of which is certainly community as the OP points out), maybe there's other shared common ground.
This could apply to almost anything. Even racists want to be happy. They think that they'll be more happy by holding people different from themselves back, but likely part of this is they hold a relative sense of success (are they better off than their neighbors) than an absolute sense (are they better off than they could be). Maybe compare those two pictures of success, and show that even if someone different from them gets successful by getting a good education and curing cancer, they will directly benefit by not needing to worry about cancer.
And connection matters a lot too. Pretty much every instance I've seen of racists dropping their racism was a direct result of direct interactions with people they demonized that they realized they had more in common with than they'd believed (and in some cases more than their racist buddies).
To me the saddest part of the movie was the cross cuts between the science meetup and the flat-earth meetup. Those two groups would actually have got along pretty well, if they focused on shared passion for the unknown and not their differences.
Besides - with everything we are learning about how consensus across entangled observers may be deterministic of the resulting reality (quantum Darwinism, which is supported by recent experiments but not yet proven), perhaps flat-earthers, by abandoning recognition of a shared consensus of the rest of the world, have in fact created a mostly overlapping Venn-diagram sort of pocket reality where the Earth being flat is as real as the notion it is not for the rest of us. And if we adopt that belief we can enter into that reality, and if they adopt the scientific method's application to their premise they'd necessitate returning to ours (perhaps the scientific method is exactly that - a process to evaluate disparate realities and converge to a norm).
In fact, maybe that's what cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias really are -- a desire to stabilize our version of reality by way of consensus. Almost like a psychological gravity both of an equal but unobservable entanglement.
So it stands to reason the only way to get a fringe reality to reconnect with the rest of the herd is to start from consensus and work to re-entangle the detached observations from there.
"Observation" in quantum mechanics is not "people looking at stuff" though.
Here is a good video on quantum misconceptions [1]. Just ignore the part about the boxes. "Nobody understands the Alice and Bob analogy" (Richard Feynman)
I don't necessarily mean to agree that the Earth is flat.
But maybe if you think that we don't know all the answers and finding out things we don't know is fun, you could find common ground even with flat-earthers.
Probably 99% of humanity has one element of common ground: we all want to be happy.
So start from there and work outwards. How does believing the Earth is flat make them happier? As you discover the answer to that (one of which is certainly community as the OP points out), maybe there's other shared common ground.
This could apply to almost anything. Even racists want to be happy. They think that they'll be more happy by holding people different from themselves back, but likely part of this is they hold a relative sense of success (are they better off than their neighbors) than an absolute sense (are they better off than they could be). Maybe compare those two pictures of success, and show that even if someone different from them gets successful by getting a good education and curing cancer, they will directly benefit by not needing to worry about cancer.
And connection matters a lot too. Pretty much every instance I've seen of racists dropping their racism was a direct result of direct interactions with people they demonized that they realized they had more in common with than they'd believed (and in some cases more than their racist buddies).
To me the saddest part of the movie was the cross cuts between the science meetup and the flat-earth meetup. Those two groups would actually have got along pretty well, if they focused on shared passion for the unknown and not their differences.
Besides - with everything we are learning about how consensus across entangled observers may be deterministic of the resulting reality (quantum Darwinism, which is supported by recent experiments but not yet proven), perhaps flat-earthers, by abandoning recognition of a shared consensus of the rest of the world, have in fact created a mostly overlapping Venn-diagram sort of pocket reality where the Earth being flat is as real as the notion it is not for the rest of us. And if we adopt that belief we can enter into that reality, and if they adopt the scientific method's application to their premise they'd necessitate returning to ours (perhaps the scientific method is exactly that - a process to evaluate disparate realities and converge to a norm).
In fact, maybe that's what cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias really are -- a desire to stabilize our version of reality by way of consensus. Almost like a psychological gravity both of an equal but unobservable entanglement.
So it stands to reason the only way to get a fringe reality to reconnect with the rest of the herd is to start from consensus and work to re-entangle the detached observations from there.