This article is not a defense of flat earthers, it's an explanation for why they exist (that the educational system failed to teach them critical thinking).
Even then, I still do not think that's really it. Flat earthers are proof that some people will just obstinately believe in complete and utter horseshit. I've seen dozens of flat earth videos. These people do not listen to reason; they didn't reason themselves into the position and you cannot reason them out of it. The flat earthers doing the "experiments" keep coming up with reasons to keep on believing, even when their experiments are so blinkered and janky they show either nothing at all or that they are, in fact, wrong. (I recommend "Behind the Curve" to see some of these people in action.) Some might just get bored and move on to something else, but mark my words, some people are just seriously stupid[1] and will keep right on believing absurd crap to their graves, on faith alone. The universe will keep smacking them in the face with being wrong, but they'll only get angrier. Hopefully they get tired before they get dangerous.
[1] I mean something specific about stupid. Not just wrong, not just ignorant, but actively and self-assuredly wrong, often to their own detriment. Beware stupid people in large numbers.
I think Dan Olson (Foldable Human) nailed the real problem.
> Flat Earthers are not otherwise-empty vessels who believe one kooky thing. They believe that thing because it suits their purposes. [...] it says something they already believe about the nature of the social world. Flat Earth is a thing people want to believe because if it were true it would be irrefutable proof of everything else they believe.
It's also worth pointing out there's a ton of talk without requisite risk. Put no-vaxers in a hospital with their check book on the line if wrong ie pay a patient's med bills. Get flat earthers to pay for a satellite to take pictures on their dime. I'll bet a large percentage will walk from the challenge or suddenly get serious when they have real downside risk. Talking crap on tv or YouTube is what? Protected first amendment rights. Nothing more.
Assuming everyone should make medical decisions based purely on individual or even shared monetary grounds is a type of "flat earth" thinking of it's own.
It attempts to fit a pre-conceived view onto the world, that "no-vaxers" must be dumb the same way "flat-earthers" are and this helps you rationalize away digital content you personally disagree with without having to engage with it.
Nah. I'm saying put your money where your mouth is. If that's too adult of a proposition, shut up. Now, while I can't make people shut up, my consolation prize is that talk is nothing but cheap symbolism. Deal with it. I mean, good lord: flat earther's and no-vax people want respect. But, honey, for what? Talking crap on tv or Youtube? I don't think so.
The payment wasn't an argument that money is the only valid objective in decision-making. OP used it to illustrate that these believes are weakly held, "virtue signaling" for a crowd with different virtues, so to speak.
I believe unvaccinated people seeking medical treatment from the same "elitist establishment" they had nothing but scorn for is a somewhat more obvious demonstration of the same principle.
It’s like when James Randi famously offered $1 million to anyone who could prove supernatural or paranormal ability [1]. Shockingly: nobody claimed the prize.
They aren't weakly held, as evidenced by the large number of people who refuse to take them even when they are being fired, prevented from leaving their country or excluded from all public events.
The analogy is actually flawed for a different reason: it simply sets up a one way bias. If you want to force people to put a price on their beliefs, get rid of all the subsidies for vaccines and all the liability for the manufacturers. Make people pay for their own shots and then allow those who get injured to sue the manufacturers for damages.
Well, we could do that but actually we don't have to. We already know what the outcome is: the outcome is there are no COVID vaccine manufacturers at all, because complete legal immunity to damage claims was a mandatory criteria for them to sign contracts with governments. Liability allowed = no vaccines.
So the market spoke already, and it seems to suggest the opposite of what's being implied above.
> I believe unvaccinated people seeking medical treatment from the same "elitist establishment" they had nothing but scorn for is a somewhat more obvious demonstration of the same principle.
Many people, whether anti-vax or not, would like to be able to receive medical advice and treatment from a person of their own choosing. But this is illegal, at least in most places HN commenters are likely to be found. So "seeking medical treatment from the same 'elitist establishment'" is nothing more than "seeking medical treatment, legally".
This is a nonsequitur dragging in unrelated politics, the original point is: the bulk of anti-vaxxers would not commit to a world where they are isolated and left to die if they catch COVID for all the "it's just a flu" talk. I don't agree with GP on wishing it was a thing, but this is bad arguing
I think this is missing the point, that there is no risk for the individual to denying COVID or vaccinations (or a round earth) because as a society we have decided not to deny medical treatment, punish lowering heard immunity (except when we do, i.e. longexisting vaccination mandates) and deny flight tickets for this virtue signaling respectively. I don't agree with GP that we should, but your point is weirdly defensive of anti-vax beliefs as well: the beliefs (not the people) are not worth engaging with, just like the ramblings of GPT1 aren't worth pondering as oracles for the purpose of stock price picking, there's nothing there to learn (engaging with the people is different)
> missing the point, that there is no risk for the individual to denying COVID or vaccinations
I would argue that there is no subjectively felt risk.
It isn't that we as society decided to care for these people when they fall ill. They nonetheless have a higher risk of dying from an infection with Sars-CoV-2. The risk is there - they just do not feel it, because the felt risk of some wonky chip implant or other imagined side effects feels bigger.
These people have over time constructed a world view for themselves (with lots of help from YouTube, Facebook and other places to find "inspiration" for said world view) that is not only constructed around this one fear.
To me esp. these COVID deniers feel (and I have no data to back that up) like they are grasping for straws of (felt) control in a world they feel is out of their control. They say: I do not let the state vax me. Because now they are in control of at least something. Then they need to make the fact go away that they just handed the control over to a virus. So the nearly logical next step is to either not believe the virus is real, or to believe it doesn't hit you or believe, if it hits you your immune system is fit enough to deal with it, because it isn't as dangerous as the big bad state wants you to believe.
It is a rabbit hole to go down - one fear/believe/feeling out of control leading to the next piece of the puzzle in your new world view were you are in control.
And the politicians doing the exact opposite thing that scientists recommend as well as science (by definition) not being able to provide 100% certainty and easy answers (because well life isn't made up of easy answers) are not equipped to make these people feel in control (because they are not - nobody is).
So I feel (as said - I have no data) the problem lies deeper. Either (some) humans just want/need easy answers or we as a society have not learned to teach ourselves from early on, that there are no certainties and control is a myth and how to deal with greys and uncertainty.
On the other hand - if one actually looks at the numbers, these people may seem loud and a big mass on said (social) platforms (probably amplified by the algorithms) but are a very tiny minority in reality.
> I think this is missing the point, that there is no risk for the individual to denying COVID or vaccinations (or a round earth)
One of the reasons I got vaccinated (despite having a fear of needles) is the fact my mother has COPD and I want to protect her. One could argue that's a selfish reason, ie. I want my children to know one of their grandmother (their grandfathers, including my father, having passed away before they knew them).
That's my personal reasoning, I also want to get out of this crisis and I don't wish it upon anyone to lose a loved one. Its a matter of compassion. I believe -perhaps naively- we all have someone to lose, one way or another. Though it may seem support for COVID-19 regulations is dwindling across the globe (and it is), the group who's firmly against is and remains an active, relatively small amount of loudmouths.
If you follow the above narrative, there's an understandable urge to that in order to defeat the problem, we can convince people to follow the COVID-19 regulations, to get vaccinated, etc. But what happens is that people double down within the cult-esque echo chamber. And such echo chamber is there in both examples (antivax and flat earth). So the urge, while understandable, we must abstain from, as its like 'energy put into a black hole'.
Funny little story: Back when I still had Facebook, I joined a Facebook group called Flat Earth Society ('we have members all around the globe'), thinking it was actually a joke, like I'd call 'The Illuminatus Trilogy'. I took me while (Poe's Law) till I figured these people actually weren't joking; they were dead serious. Its like someone who makes a terrible joke with bad taste, until you realize at some point, that they're serious about it. E.g. they really wanna eat a human being, not just jokingly.
> ...but your point is weirdly defensive of anti-vax beliefs as well...
If this is accepted as an appropriate way of dealing with no-vaxers then the entire intellectual edifice of state-sponsored healthcare is at risk. You'll probably see some superficially surprising positions where (1) anti-vaccers are human scum willingly endangering us all and (2) it is necessary that we offer them high quality medical treatment. Note that it is a reasonable and consistent worldview, although probably not the intuitive one to someone who doesn't hold it.
I'm all for the idea, personally. People should pay their own medical costs. But it isn't a universally tolerable solution for how to handle the vaccine resistant (especially in the medical community, I assume).
I don't know if I'm fully parsing this, but there are more solutions (in my eyes, better solutions) to putting skin into the game than denying treatment or putting monetary burden for the treatment on those who refuse to vaccinate against all evidence: denial of licenses, vaccine mandates, charging those that violate quarantine and social distancing measures and then infect people with reckless endangerment...none of these are morally easy or popular, but this is a delicate issue where not doing anything is not a neutral position either.
The "no-vaxers" pay with their lives, self-valued at ~$10M USD. If the death rate is 1% then the expected value is $100K. Seems fairly pricey already. I'm not sure lack of skin in the game accounts for dodgy personal beliefs.
I'm not sure this holds because humans in general are pretty bad at reasoning about low-probability, high-magnitude events. People will deal with a ~1% chance of $10M very differently to a guaranteed $100k. (To be clear, I also don't believe that "lack of skin in the game" totally accounts for faith in conspiracy theories.)
People will deal with a ~1% chance of $10M very differently to a guaranteed $100k.
Money is a very bad medium to talk about probability and human reasoning because doing so supposes that all dollars are worth the same when in reality they are anything but. Your last dollar is more valuable than your hundredth dollar which is more valuable than your thousandth dollar which is far more valuable than your millionth dollar. Giving someone ten million dollars does not make a hundred times as much difference to their lives as giving them one hundred thousand.
I was actually typing something like this in addition to what I already wrote, but I didn't think it was totally applicable in the context of the GP's statement. For the vast majority of folks an unexpected bill of $100k and an unexpected bill of $10M are likely to be equally ruinous.
People are extremely bad at making decisions involving small probabilities. Plus, of course, the same people tend not to believe the data on deaths. There are even stories of people using their last breaths to again state that they do not believe viruses (or this virus, specifically) exists.
Would you be equally happy if you were sick enough to be hospitalized as you are when you're healthy? If not, that's a cost. I doubt the out-of-pocket medical costs are the most important part of this decision.
You guys are missing the point. The point is that people who are anti vax clearly have skin in the game by any measure. The point is not impacted by these little details, so don't go off in some flamewar here
The point has wooshed over your head and flown into orbit. The original context was having skin (perceived or not) in the game and if it would always impact behavior. I'm not trying to convince anti vaxers of anything, just observing human behavior in general.
The people who refuse (or elect out of) vaccinations I've spoken to don't agree on that 1 % number. Or they think the vaccinations cause greater damage, meaning abstention is still a net positive.
Framing it as them knowingly sacrificing the equivalent of $100 k for no good reason ("belief!") is dishonest to the complexity of the problem.
I don't think that's actually true. If the reported numbers are correct, the number of deaths in the US was around 250k when the vaccine became available and now it's 700k. That's 450k more after the vaccine despite being widely available for a bit over a year.
There's also a lot of gymnastics involved in order to count all these covid deaths, and a constant withholding of actual absolute death counts.
Most serious illnesses will compromise the immune system. A compromised immune system will make you more vulnerable to any infection. So the most common and most spread infection will then also naturally be the most common one to trigger death.
If someone has aids, which is a decease that compromises the immune system, and then dies from pneumonia. Did they die from pneumonia or aids?
Yes, the assigned cause question a problem. And add to that the concept of "excess" deaths being a more telling figure than the causality number. So looking at a model of past deaths you can predict future deaths (roughly) and so assume the excess to that prediction is caused by COVID-19. The problem with that is researchers are saying that up to a third of those deaths could be being caused by health care displacement, not the virus directly. i.e. a trauma patient can't make it into the ICU because it's full of COVID patients.
The statistics are a total mess in my opinion and any being professed with any exactitude should be taken with a grain of salt.
The math is fuzzy since there were several months where even though the vaccine was technically available, you couldn’t just go get it at will. It’s unavoidable, though, that the deaths after will be higher than deaths before the vaccines were available, because one of those is an unbounded range.
A year ago today on MLK day it was only available to those 75 and older. The vaccine in the US has not been available to the general public for a year! Healthcare providers yes, general public no.
An unfortunate portion of people really give up everything to conspiratorial thinking, and losing it all actually makes them cling even more intensely because they literally have nothing else. So I don't think it'll work the way you think it will.
People don't become flat earthers because they actually believe the earth is flat. They start by realizing that there's something wrong with the current established systems in the world which is a fact. We're living with corrupt politicians, needless wars, starving kids, crumbling democracies, etc. In the search for a scapegoat for these problems they come across the flat earth "theory" and explain away all those problems through this lens ("If they are keeping this a secret then what else are they keeping from us? How else is the establishment trying to control us?")
The "feeling of wrongness of the world" can also be rooted in other problems to which they find a reality denying escape mechanism. In Germany, many sovereign citizens (Reichsbürger) have legal or financial problems (taxes and debt), so deciding to be the king or president of your house and garden empire seems like a valid opportunity to deny all those pesky demands.
As much as I find sovereign citizens ridiculous, I do have to admit that it feels wrong that simply by being born in a place we're automatically forced to obey countless rules and laws we had no say in. None of us were consulted or gave our consent before being made subject to it all. If I decide the system I was born into violates my freedoms or that participation in it would be immoral I don't have much choice. I can't even leave my country and move somewhere with rules and laws that I find more agreeable without first clearing it with the government (They control the borders, we need passports which cost money and the application for one can be rejected for many reasons).
It's strange to think about society in those terms. Being trapped here, being forced to obey under threat of some very inhumane punishments. It does seem fundamentally unfair. While I think most of us just come to terms with it (especially since nobody has come up with a better option for a successful and functional society) I can get why some folks would feel a desire to assert their independence and freedoms. Sadly, the sovereign citizen crowd has decided to come up with some pretty insane ways to cope with the situation. I can still laugh at them, but not without also acknowledging that one injustice I and everyone I've ever met are stuck living with.
I'll happily just keep with society and deal with the indignities it forces on me, but for those who can't or won't it'd be nice if there were a lot more unowned and empty places on the planet people could go to on their own if they really wanted to "opt out" and not play by anyone else's rules. Maybe once we have space travel...
Indeed, it is near impossible to escape the rule of the nation state. It would require you to bootstrap from zero in a place where no one else rules. Those places are no longer found on earth. And once the Musk colonizes Mars, space won't be the place for freedom either - look at the Expanse series for an example on how "free" the people are who try to setup their space homestead. Perhaps a Star Trek society can offer this "freedom" again. But then, to paraphrase Life of Brian: what has ultimate freedom from society ever done for us?
It looks like sovereign citizens want to have their cake and eat it too: not to pay taxes, but travel the roads build with the same taxes. Not to pay for medical insurance, but being able to get the best treatment from the cursed oppressive state.
Exactly. And then in their own way, some more… stupid than others, they try to recreate their own science from observation. That they’re stuck with phenomenology is no surprise - that’s more or less how all human beings have seen the world before the 1600s. Just meaning, if you look around, the world appears flat! It’s a natural default, rather than a conspiracy theory.
So if all that’s true, then who are we fooling: the real issue is the lack of ability to educate. You can blame stupidity and give up but that’s not a path forward.
To me the strangest bit is the idea that scientists are the authorities? What!? I wish!
Not just 1600 - it was fairly common knowledge since antiquity. In 300 BCE, we knew not only that the Earth is round, but also roughly its radius. Moon's distance and radius was estimated about 100 years later. Sun-Earth distance was also (incorrectly) estimated about the same time, but with enough precision to know it's much further and bigger than the Moon.
Columbus was being dissuaded from his voyage because people correctly calculated his supplies will run out way before he reaches Indies west-wards
Well sure but that's exactly my point - anybody with some education. It wasn't until around the 1600s, being generous (really the 1800s), that it even started to become common knowledge or taught in schools (or that the western world even had wide-spread education at all). The default, uneducated assumption is that the earth is flat and there must be water above the dome that is the sky, because it rains - this is what I meant by "phenomenology" - they're just describing the phenomena of the earth - which is after all a natural place for human beings to start out if not educated.
So the "earth is flat" is almost not a conspiracy, it's just a lack of education. "Someone is fooling us into thinking the earth is round" is the conspiracy part.
That's just a general statement of people who feel disenfranchised.
People are smart enough to know when they're being "lied"* to by the tv/teacher. Especially when the reply is "it just is stop asking"...
These same people are unfortunately often not driven enough, and/or in a position where they're able to disentangle the fact that "all of this _evidence_" on the internet, (which is deliberately written at an overly accessible level vs actual science) is ultimately incoherent nonsense.
Unfortunately on topics like this, the answer from science and describing reality is actually quite complex and requires time and effort to understand the details and implications.
*A lie of omission, or failing to acknowledge "I don't know" and replying with only solid certainty of "I've been told by someone" is akin to teaching from the bible and offers nothing toward scientific literacy.
(Deliberately drawing a line between this and theological debates)
This is with all easily disproven conspiracy theories. Yes, there are many stupid people that believe these things because they saw a video and it was a simple explanation that appealed to them or because someone they like said it once, but some of the flat earthers are smart.
Heck, I have seen some pretty outlandish comments on hacker news that aren’t much better and I assume everyone here is smarter than I am.
People believe things for emotional reasons. People often, for example, find religion after the death of a loved one. People also want to believe what others in their community believe, so belief can take hold easily once seeded into a community.
This feels right. And the curvature of the Earth is the perfect balance of abstract and bikesheddable. Something you can have strong intuitions about that aren't easy to disprove.
There's a superb interview[1] with Neal Stephenson that was published just yesterday about this kind of human behavior.
Here's a quote from Neal:
"Another thing I’ve been reading recently is “The Fixation of Belief” by an American philosopher named Charles Sanders Peirce. He was writing in the 1870s, and he goes through a list of four methods that people use to decide what they’re going to believe. The first one is called the method of tenacity, which means you decide what you’re going to believe and you stick to it regardless of logic or evidence.
...
The next method is called the method of authority, where you agree with other people that you’re all going to believe what some authority figure tells you to believe. That’s probably most common throughout history. The third method is called the a priori method, and the idea is, let’s be reasonable and try to come up with ways to believe things that sound reasonable to us. Which sounds great, but if it’s not grounded in any fact-checking methodology, then you end up just agreeing to believe things by consensus — which may be totally wrong. The fourth method is the scientific method. It basically consists of accepting the fact that you might be wrong, and since you might be wrong, you need some way for judging the truth of statements and changing your mind when you’ve got solid evidence to the contrary. What you’re seeing in the Baroque Cycle is the transition from Method No. 3 to No. 4. You’ve got all these people having what seem like reasoned, logical arguments, but a lot of them are just tripping. So a few come in, like Hooke and Newton, and begin using actual experiments and get us going down the road toward the rational world of the Enlightenment. But what we’ve got now is almost everybody using Method 1, 2 or 3. We’ve got a lot of authoritarians who can’t be swayed by logic or evidence, but we’ve also got a lot of a priori people who want to be reasonable and think of themselves as smarter and more rational than the authoritarians but are going on the basis of their feelings — what they wish were true — and both of them hate the scientific rationalists, who are very few in number. That’s kind of my Peircian analysis of where things stand right now."
Belief is a keyword here. Most of "spherical earthers", alas, also believe what they are told. They happened to pick the right set of beliefs - kudos to them - but there's no critical thinking whatsoever.
We watched some time ago a why-do-we-think-earth-is-flat movie with friends and I asked: okay, so what's wrong with their explanation? For an extra credit: how a layman like me can check what is the shape of the earth?
And suddenly it turns out that these questions are a bit harder than it seems.
But here's the problem with this logic; I've never been presented with any credible arguments that suggest Earth is not round, and in fact have been able to use this knowledge of Earth's roundness to understand and accurately predict facts in my real life on a semi-regular basis.
* When I see my flight plan, I understand why it's curved.
* When I see clouds that a radar says should be a certain distance away, I understand what makes me able to see them.
* Where weather is moving, how it's moving, and why certain weather patterns even exist at all.
* When I see a landmass on water I can accurately guess how far away it is, and I can understand why moving even a small amount upwards lets me see so much more (and why it was such an advantage on ships to have a vantage point only 20 to 30 feet up in the air).
* How stars move in the night sky is predictable.
* Why the "north" star exists and is accurate as a directional indicator.
* Where constellations are, and how they're different depending on what latitude I'm currently observing the night sky from.
* The fact that tides exist, and how they work.
* I understand how and what satellites are, when I can see them, and I can predict when I'm going to lose signal from them given certain circumstances.
* Every other planet I've observed is round. The moon is round. The sun is round.
None of this works if Earth isn't round, and that's just off the top of my head. The point here is that so many things stop making sense if you don't accept the fact that the Earth is round, and so you're constantly failing to predict or understand a whole host of problems that, yes, do come up in my daily life.
This isn't about "happening to pick the right set of beliefs", it's about matching what you're told with what you're observing and noting a singular and profound consistency across disciplines, uniformly converging on one single, basic fact; the Earth is round.
The problem is these can all be refuted without too much trouble:
1) Flight plans only look curved because you are using a map projection that assumes a spherical globe. If you use the right flat earth map you will find that flight paths follow straight lines.
2) Clouds and distances still exist in a flat earth and the clouds float above the earth. This is why they are detectable by radar.
3) Weather patterns exist on the flat earth because the sun moves across it and heats it unevenly.
4) An ant on a perfectly flat desk can also see much more from an elevated vantage point. Are you claiming desks are also spherical?
5) No one is claiming the stars nor the flat earth is stationary. Both can rotate around various axes and the resulting movement can be predicted.
6) The north star sits slightly above the plane of the flat earth and far to the north so that it appears north from any vantage point on the earth. This is just because of its distance.
7) The constellations differ depending on latitude because of the refraction of the atmosphere. This bends the light rays.
8) Tides are caused by the pull of the moon as it traverses above the flat earth and attracts the water in the ocean.
9) The other planets are also flat and only appear round because they are tidally locked with respect to the earth.
This is a good comment, because it illustrates exactly what I'm talking about w/r/t predictability. If what you've written here can help you accurately predict the answers to questions you don't know, then you might be onto something.
However, there is no predictive value in any of what you've written here, so while they may be, to some, "refutations", they are not in any way useful.
If there were actually any flat earthers who cared about reason, because of the lack of predictive value (not to mention the contradictory/unprovable nature of what you've written here), they would not remain flat earthers for very long.
Yes, I believe it was Feynman that said something along those lines: Anyone with an imagination can come up with an idea about how the world is. The extreme difficulty is in ensuring it is consistent with everything that has been seen before.
Flat earthers care about firsthand observation more than reason. Reason is simply defeated by relying on false facts aka “believing”. This is why that crazy rocket dude ended up dead in the Nevada Desert last year, he was literally trying to see for himself what the shape of the Earth is.
I -believe- the earth is round. But the intellectual honesty I’ve taken from The flat earthers tells me I have delegated my source of truth on that topic to others whom I am trusting to relay the truth. Maybe one day I’ll get into orbit and see for myself. With my own eyes. But that is beside the point of what I learned from them. I learned any time I outsource what I think is true to third parties, there is a risk of me believing a lie. Because people lie sometimes. And sometimes they draw conclusions based on assumptions and conjecture. My thought process is non-binary or more honestly, tri-state. I have true, false, and I have not observed that to be either true or false.
But I haven't delegated my source of truth! I have done first hand observation!
1. I regularly do video conferences with friends and colleagues on other continents; I can see if its light or dark in their windows. I have personally verified that some of my friends and colleagues and their places exist.
2. I have seen many ships disappear behind the horizon, and I have seen mountains disappear behind the horizon from ships; I have verified the accuracy of Vesselfinder (by comparing transits through lines in Vesselfinder with what I can see) and checked that it is at the expected distance. (I was curious about the delay.)
3. I have watched the ISS (once even trailed by the ATV) and it was right where HeavensAbove said it would be. And 90 minutes later I did it again. I have personally verified the basic math behind circular orbits.
4. I have experienced changing radio band propagation conditions consistent with a day/night cycle that is different in different places. Such as grayline DX, which is good propagation along the day/night line. Which implies the day/night line is real. And based on the reports I received I know it matches the map. I have built some transmitters and receivers myself.
5. I have flown between continents, been jetlagged and changed my clock's time (or maybe changing my wristwatches time is changing the sun and causing the jetlag?). I have watched the entire flight through windows, so I know I traveled very far.
6. I have seen the motion behind Foucault's pendulum over enough time (I've been to the museum long enough to verify that the pendulum plane rotates as expected, and I saw nobody messing with it in any obvious way.) We also did the same experiment in school. In school, we did the math for the Coriolis force, and talked about how it comes up as a significant factor in unexpected places (e.g. railway). Someone would talk.
7. I've observed the direction of the toilet swirl, and whirlpools in lakes.
8. I've experienced tide levels and swum with/against tide currents (sometimes even in the same place). I have also seen the moon in the sky and I think if it would be inconsistent someone would've noticed by now.
9. I've seen the shape of day/light boundary on the moon. Now that's the moon, but that one's clearly spherical, which is one data point.
10. I had a trusted fried, but he's got a PhD in astrophysics now, so he must be in on it and we cannot be friends anymore. /s
And I'm just some nerd, I haven't done too many experiments. I'm sure I could still extend the list, but of course there's no point since neither of us believe in the flat earth "theory".
There's no intellectual honesty in coming up with fake experiments like flat earthers do (if they even go to the trouble).
Before 2020, I thought flat earth like conspiracies were harmless fun (and I still think that a significant number of flat earthers are just having fun), and maybe they are. But after spending several hundred hours "discussing" many conspiracy theories (people I know and care about started believing very outlandish ones, like chemtrails and 5G causing covid) the last two years, and first hand witnessing intellectual incompentence (complete math illiteracy down to calculating a percentage, complete rejection of the concept of mathematical proofs, zero concept of scale e.g. of organizations and communities, complete refusal to read original research, insisting on "reading between the lines" to interpret texts claims made in texts into the opposite) I have come to see conspiracy theories and fake or un-intellectuality (is that a word?) as very dangerous (the "can cause death" type of danger).
If you care to actually look into it, you'll find that flat-earthers have accounted for most/all of these. I'm not a flat-earther, but it's worth looking into before stating things that "obviously can't be accounted for with a flat earth.
1: There are time zones in the flat earth model. The earth is a flat disc with antarctica (or is it the north pole?) at the center, and the sun moves around it in a circle, so the places opposite the sun are in nighttime
2: Believe it or not, flat-earthers believe light only travels so far, which is why things disappear "over the horizon"
4: I don't actually understand this one, but I suspect they'd handwave and talk about the same point in (1)
5: Same as (1)
I don't think flat-earthers have accounted for Foucalt's pendulum however.
"If you care to actually look into it, you'll find that flat-earthers have accounted for most/all of these. I'm not a flat-earther, but it's worth looking into before stating things that "obviously can't be accounted for with a flat earth."
That does not match my experience. I did looked into it and I found no consistent model of a flat earth. Lots and lots of words and sometimes even with consistent logic at times - but build upon completely false assumptions and flawed logic and therefore worthless. (you can proof anything, if your basic assumptions are made up)
"I don't think flat-earthers have accounted for Foucalt's pendulum however. "
And some of them tried and believe they did, but only when ignoring other facts and used twisted logic.
Like some parent poster had said - it is not about proof, but way more about ideology.
Otherwise they could very easily have a real proof, by sending up a weatherballoon, or organise a boat trip to the end of the world. But since they always refuse to do so (I challenged quite some with that concept) or even really think about it - they likely suspect inside that they are wrong, but rather not confirm for real, because then they would have to abolish a lot of their other ideology like chemtrails etc.
I usually propose a rather simple, albeit not cheap, experiment for this.
1. Find a sufficiently large "shallow" body of water.
2. Build a number a number of masts/poles in a straight line, all with an identical height over the water.
Now when standing at the shore and looking at the masts I predicts one of two things.
a. you can see all masts in their entirety with a telescope, or
b. you can see less and less of the masts the further away they are.
There are actual places with power lines that satisfy this requirement. For b. you can use high school math to reason about the curvature needed to explain the results. There is no such sound logic (to my knowledge) explaining this for a flat surface.
I haven't done the experiment, but this brings it back to trusting scientists (light bends just above the water, but doesn't 4m above the water). I would need to do additional experiments to understand the refraction.
A wise man in ancient time did this by comparing shadows in different places. Can't remember his name though. But he was quite close with his calculations. It doesn't need to be expensive. Just wait for noon. Then hop in a car/bus/train/whatever and do the same at the same time next day somewhere else. It helps if the shadow-casting thing is the same height.
The simplified method works by considering two cities along the same meridian and measuring both the distance between them and the difference in angles of the shadows cast by the sun on a vertical rod (a gnomon) in each city at noon on the summer solstice. The two cities used were Alexandria and Syene (modern Aswan), and the distance between the cities was measured by professional bematists.[16] A geometric calculation reveals that the circumference of the Earth is the distance between the two cities divided by the difference in shadow angles expressed as a fraction of one turn.
Here's Philip Morrison showing how to do a similar experiment, from the 1980s TV series "The Ring of Truth". https://youtu.be/yRY2SkMTafc?t=567
They found a road that was almost due north and south (US 183 from Bassett, NE to 370 miles south in Coldwater, KS). They measured the elevation of Antares at its zenith one night, then again the next. From that they get the change in latitude. Combined with odometer data and some estimates for wiggles, and end with a result about 5% larger than the best-known solution.
Their measuring instrument was a Ryder van dubbed "The Van of Eratosthenes."
How do you you know that light travels in straight lines? Maybe it travels in curved lines! In fact, that's how mirages form.
(A good response to this, of course, is to ask for a model for how much the light curves. A vague description is not a predictive, scientifically-testable model, unless it's a very wrong description.)
Now you are shifting the goal posts. From the difference between a sphere and a plane assuming light travels in straight lines to questioning whether light travels in straight lines to begin with.
How do you you know that light travels in straight lines? Maybe it travels in curved lines!
You turn on a light source and look at how the light spreads. Light does not - besides a tiny bit of diffraction - bend into the shadow area behind obstacles.
In fact, that's how mirages form.
You obviously have to perform your experiments under control conditions, so pick a time and place with negligible variation in index of refraction of the atmosphere. Or measure and account for it.
I don't know that I am; you were the one to bring up the implicit “light travels in straight lines” assumption with your claim about ants on a flat table. Obviously if I think the earth is flat, I don't believe that.
> Light does not - besides a tiny bit of diffraction - bend into the shadow area behind obstacles.
It depends how much distance you give the light. Shadows are noticeably blurry if your hand is close to the light source.
> You obviously have to perform your experiments under control conditions, so pick a time and place with negligible variation in index of refraction of the atmosphere.
You're never going to get a situation where the air temperature is consistent enough for this; it varies by height (as does pressure). And, again, unless you can show me that “index of refraction” is a thing that applies to air, I'm not going to believe something as ludicrous as Snell's Law. (After all, isn't the speed of light a constant? The whole derivation rests on the assumption that it varies depending on the medium!)
I don't know that I am; you were the one to bring up the implicit “light travels in straight lines” assumption with your claim about ants on a flat table.
I would argue that it was implied before I first commented. Without any assumption about the way light moves, you can not answer visibility questions on spheres and desks. The first comment talked about a spherical earth and certainly assumed light behaves as commonly accepted, the response did not question this either. Only after it has been pointed out that the response was not valid, the behavior of light entered the discussion.
It depends how much distance you give the light. Shadows are noticeably blurry if your hand is close to the light source.
Use a point light source or account for the size and shape of your light source.
You're never going to get a situation where the air temperature is consistent enough for this; it varies by height (as does pressure). And, again, unless you can show me that “index of refraction” is a thing that applies to air, I'm not going to believe something as ludicrous as Snell's Law. (After all, isn't the speed of light a constant? The whole derivation rests on the assumption that it varies depending on the medium!)
Make up your mind. Does light move in straight lines or doesn't it? Does a medium influence light traveling through it or doesn't it? If, how? You questioned light moving in straight line, it is beyond me why you would now also question light moving not in straight lines. Or is it just the mechanism that you are questioning? And nobody claims the speed of light is constant, the speed of light in vacuum is constant.
And in order to cut this cat and mouse game short, just present your complete theory of how the world works upfront. There is no point in such a discussion if you keep changing what you believe or say every time an issue is pointed out.
> Without any assumption about the way light moves, you can not answer visibility questions on spheres and desks.
Yeah you can: light moves the way it actually moves in real life: the way you can see with your eyes.
> Make up your mind. Does light move in straight lines or doesn't it?
I was assuming what you said to be true, and showing that it wasn't sufficient to rule out what I was saying.
---
In reality, I understand how light behaves (not quite as simple as “straight lines”, but that's a good enough approximation to explain mirrors). I know that you do, too. You aren't demonstrating that, though; you're just name-dropping facts without showing why they have to be true, why that's the only way the universe can work because if it didn't work that way, observations could be made that cannot actually be made.
I have not got a complete model of “flat earth cosmology” to present you, because I believe such a thing doesn't exist. I did have a consistent, incomplete model in mind when I was writing those comments, though: one where light curves upwards in a manner that causes the surface of a plane to appear spherical. (However, objects on the horizon would be a different size to on a real sphere, which could be used to falsify my model by comparing it with real-world observation.) I wasn't moving the goalposts.
> 9) The other planets are also flat and only appear round because they are tidally locked with respect to the earth.
Much harder to argue for this these days now that amateur telescopes/decent camera optics have become reasonably cheap and cameras too.
Jupiter has a rotation period of only ten hours, so one can easily see it rotate within one night.
The sun takes a bit longer since it has a rotation period of 25-38d (depends on the latitude which is quite interesting) and if there are no sun spots it's kind of hard to tell.
The problem is - explanations for each of these demand different flat earth models. Often several different flat earth model for several cases of one of these points.
For example to make 10 different flight paths over the pole make sense on flat earth you need 10 different flat earth maps contradicting each other. The only way to make all the flight paths make sense is round Earth.
Same with weather, day-night and seasons - you can get some of them with different flat earth models, but these models contradict each other. To get all the daily and yearly patterns at the same time you need round Earth.
As for tides I'd like to see even one good flat earth model where moon is visible in the correct place on the sky at the same time looking from equator, north hemisphere and south hemisphere. Most flat earth models put moon 180 degree away from "center of flat earth" opposite of the sun, which is obviously wrong (cause you can see moon and sun at once in many places).
And there's such problems with each point. But that's not a problem, because flatearthers don't want to have a consistent model of reality, they just want to think The System is out there trying to deceive them. So it's fine having 100 different contradicting models that explain one thing each.
A flat shape is impossible because the gravitational field would be vastly different on a planar body than on a spherical one, as I go further from the center of mass the further I go towards the edge.
And how gravity works can easily be demonstrated in a lab setting.
Flat-earthers already "changed" the physics of light propagation. I guess they would have no troubles bulls*tting their way out of gravity as well because none of them has actually the math/physics/etc basics to prove themselves wrong (what's a lab anyway, a brainwashing tool of the lying elite?).
Can it actually be demonstrated in a lab that gravity non-planar? One interesting explanation I've seen by the flat earthers is that gravity does not exist, instead the flat earth is simply under constant acceleration at 9.8m/s^2.
Yes. Very precise measurements of gravity on Earth have shown that, although it always points to the Earth's center, the force of Earth's gravity varies by latitude a tiny bit[1] (because Earth is a rotating oblate spheroid) and by elevation (because gravity varies by distance between center of masses). Neither of these can be accounted for on an accelerating disk Earth.
The explanations I've seen are akin to a lamp above shining onto a desk. The lamp moves across the plane of the desk and moves closer to the desk as nears Finland and further away as it moves toward Australia.
The path is curved because that's the straight line over the surface of a sphere, and if you project that straight line over to the Earth on a flat screen, it'll look curved.
For those who don't know it, in brief: Put a vertical pole in flat ground at noon and measure the length of the shadow. The next day, drive an hour or two directly north or south and do the same measurement at noon again. With a bit of trigonometry, you can estimate the earth's circumference - or for our purposes, at least prove to yourself that the earth is not flat, as the shadows will be different lengths with the sun in nearly the same position both times.
Of course, there is a separate discussion about whether we should consider light trigonometry within the bounds of what modern laymen should be expected to handle.
As the article also states, the ancients observed that as ships passed below the horizon, the hulls disappeared before the masts - this is also within reach of most laymen.
>For those who don't know it, in brief: Put a vertical pole in flat ground at noon and measure the length of the shadow. The next day, drive an hour or two directly north or south and do the same measurement at noon again. With a bit of trigonometry, you can estimate the earth's circumference - or for our purposes, at least prove to yourself that the earth is not flat, as the shadows will be different lengths with the sun in nearly the same position both times.
Sure, but a flat earther will just argue that the sun is much closer than scientists claim, which explains the difference in shadow length. And again, what's a layman to do?
The best experiment to prove the earth is round that I've thought up involves the Coriolis Effect and a rifle fired at different points both north and south of the equator. Unfortunately that requires international travel with firearms, making it legally difficult to try.
Personally, I like multiple Foucault pendulums as this demonstrates rotation and curvature. I think the part that is missing in everyone's explanation is how to prove it is a sphere and not a hemisphere. Obviously, going to the "edge" would immediately shows this is false. But I think the only way to do this without moving too much is to record lunar eclipses and do the math to figure out that you would eventually see straight edges in an eclipse if the earth was not completely spherical.
Interesting idea! The sun would have to be about 6'000 km away I think. The full moon / new moon / solar eclipse proves that the moon is much closer than the sun. The moon would have to be dangerously close. Then, we know that the moon causes tides, and we can measure them as well on different cities. Being so close, the sun would have to cause tides as well, unless it is very light. It would have to take some time to calculate all that...
The only thing that is missing here is that the different lengths don't matter by themselves. The explanation could be that the rays of the sun are not parallel. Of course, this would put the sun closer than the moon but we are assuming we cannot use extraterrestrial knowledge. To complete the logic, you need to measure in multiple locations and note that the shadows do not change as expected if there was no curvature of the earth.
Totally true. More in general, it is a relatively simple mathematical fact that a sphere without a point is homeomorphic (even conformally!) to a plane. Therefore, it is impossible to prove that the Earth is spherical unless you either do measurements and run numbers (like you propose) or visit every single location of it (including all the seas and both poles; particularly the south pole, which for some reason flat earthers tend to assume it is missing). The only way to do the latter, as far as I can tell, is to be in a sufficiently polar orbit for enough time (or at least have a satellite in orbit), and few people are able to do that (directly, i.e., without trusting somebody else).
It is interesting that is not uncommon for flat earthers to be more "scientific" that many spherical earthers in recognizing that many spherical Earth arguments are not sufficient by themselves. Of course the spherical earthers happen to be right, while the flat earthers then proceed to invent completely implausible theories to support their beliefs, but they deserve some recognition for the first stage.
If you end your sample at N=1, sure, it might seem like “spherical earthers” just happened to pick the right set of beliefs by chance. But if you also consider things like 5G microchips, and chemtrails, and the moon landing, somehow the “spherical earthers” consistently pick the right beliefs.
Sure, there’s no critical thinking for a lot of it, in the same way that I don’t think critically about all the physics and engineering before I step on an airplane. The entire point of living in a society is that you don’t have to do everything yourself — you can outsource a lot of that critical thinking to other people who (are paid to) care more than you. You can just go with the flow and actually have a pretty good track record for believing the right things.
I don't know about flat-earth specifically, but lots of people only believe a few conspiracy theories. There are lot's of "spherical earthers" who believe the moon landing was faked for example. A very large fraction of the US believes in at least one of the major conspiracy theories associated with QAnon (several of which predate QAnon), but a much smaller fraction is actually involved with QAnon.
When you say, "layman like me can check what is the shape of earth?" Like reviewing satellite footage? I mean this seems ridiculously easy, unless you mean like can you prove it from your front yard.
This is slightly beyond what an average layman can do, but it's not terribly hard or expensive to receive images of our globe from NOAA weather satellites [1]. Generally the most costly part is a ~$120 USD antenna. It's a super fun and rewarding project if this is the kind of thing that interests you.
The problem is that then you aren't verifying it yourself, and a flat earther can claim you're just using one of the propaganda sources created by the government.
You can also use the ESA earth observation program, which provides free downloads of earth observation data every ~5 days. Look for Sentinel-2. It still won't prove that earth is round though :).
A flat earther would tell you the "satellite" photos are faked, and could provide you with faked photos of their own.
The question is how you distinguish the two: always go mainstream? Always counter the old-fashioned ways? Trust the best credentialed person? Distrust credentials achieved during brainwashing, go with independent self-taught thinkers? Independently verify every claim, replicating experiments from first principles?
But they can always say anything is faked. They can say that my eyes distort what I see and that math can’t be trusted either.
The only way you could really prove it is to define a set of axioms that you some how convince them to agree to. And then get them to agree to logic. And then construct an experiment using those rules whereby if the Earth is round then they die. And see if they are willing to test it. And if they don’t then you win. And if they do it and die then you also win.
There is a simple experiment to show curvature that was actually done by some flat earthers, and it proved curvature, but then they somehow classified it as an interesting but not conclusive result. Here's the experiment: take 3 wood planks, make a hole at the same eight in each of them. Then put them standing in the soil making sure that all have the same height (meaning that the hole is at the same height for all of them). Now use a laser to have a straight line of light (you can observe by other means that a laser beam is a straight line). If the wooden planks are far enough form each other, the laser will not e able to pass trough all 3 holes, despite them being at the same height from heart's surface. This implies curvature.
That's too prone to terrain irregularities, and I can't imagine that there's a single area of land on earth that's remotely as smooth as the surface of an sphere. Further, even if you assume perfect instrumentation, how would one account for gravity?
> I can't imagine that there's a single area of land on earth that's remotely as smooth as the surface of an sphere
Salar de Uyuni - "As a result, the variation in the surface elevation over the 10,582-square-kilometer (4,086 sq mi) area of Salar de Uyuni is less than 1 meter (3 ft 3 in) normal to the Earth's circumference".
That's less than 1 in 6371000 - pretty smooth, no?
> That's too prone to terrain irregularities
Nah, it's still doable, especially on that^ salt flat - if you have two close holes and a 3rd one 55km away, a flat earth will let you line up the laser through all three with less than 2m of adjustment. By my rough calculations, on a spherical earth, the laser will be ~250m above ground at 55km - pretty obviously proving the hypothesis incorrect, no?
Yeah I think they mean the latter. Satellite footage could be doctored after all, unless you're launched the satellite.
It's not really that hard to estimate the circumference of the earth and prove that it has to be spherical. But most methods I know of require quite a bit of driving, or friends that are far away and can take a measurement at exactly the same time.
I'm not a flat earther but I do want to do my own measurement of the earth's circumference one day for fun.
To be precise, the earth is not spherical. It's unfortunately not even an ellipsoid: I live well above the sea level yet my home is like 20 meters below the surface of the WGS84 reference ellipsoid.
The simplest way I could come up with while discussing the issue with my kids, was to call a grandma on the other side of the globe and ask here when did she have a sunset. It still could mean that the earth is a hemisphere, but at least it's not pancake-style flat.
I think this is right, in the same way that you can't ever really "prove" anything. (Direct proof relies on firsthand experience, and human perception and memory are infamously faulty. QED. Alternately, even the strongest experimental conclusion can be chalked up to the most extreme of coincidences.)
However, to move forward in life, we must accept certain axioms so that we can be effective and productive. (Prove food is nutritious, prove I won't die in the next 5 minutes, prove my parents are benevolent actors, prove my children are actually mine). At some point, you can litigate anything you want, and the real decision is, what hills are you willing to die on. For me, that's determined strongly by impact to my life, and also partly by interest.
What I'm saying is, don't argue that the flat earthers are wrong. Argue that they are useless because what they are arguing about doesn't matter.
You can check the shape of the earth by replicating the early experiments performed by ancient scientists who discovered the earth was spherical in the first place. Detailed and very easy to follow instructions for this also appear on YouTube
Orion isn't directly overhead. In your analogy I'd be drawing a 6 on the wall, and the other person would have to bend over backwards to claim it's a 9.
I mean, I guess they could, but they'd clearly be bending over backwards to make a logical fallacy.
In my example the number need not be directly overhead either. It could be drawn in the middle of a very long room where you and the other person are at opposite ends. You're both looking at it at an angle and both still seeing different numbers, although in a very skewed perspective - I don't know how flat earthers account for perspective and projection in their skydome or whatever.
Well, flat-earthers appearently believe that Australians are all actors paid by NASA to convince everyone the earth is a globe. I'm not going to waste much time listening to them.
The Orion-is-upside-down-here thing was the first time I noticed something that drove it home to me that we live on a sphere.
You do not even need to trust the established science. There are experiments done by flat earth believers which proves that earth is actually not flat at all.
Sometimes when I get in arguments, even as the evidence piles up against me, I find myself digging in further. I get very obstinate and it takes a tremendous step back and exertion of will to say “okay, okay. I’m wrong.” Even then I often find myself tacking on something like “I’m wrong in this scenario. But…” and it really helps if the other side will concede something, anything. It’s a physical feeling of discomfort. I think I fight it pretty well. And I imagine that flat earthers and their ilk are just so deep into that feeling and so incapable of conceding that they never, ever will.
"Thinking in Bets" by Annie Duke describes this. One of the problems we have, societally, is talking in black and white. I'm right or wrong. It is extremely hard for anyone to admit they are wrong. In fact, a good way to push someone more strongly into their belief (regardless of what it is), is to tell them they're wrong.
Her approach was to start using confidence numbers or percentages, and being less black and white.
> "I'm 80% sure the it will be a sunny day tomorrow"
> "You know, I'm not sure about that. Have you considered the vast storm clouds and weather reports about the incoming rain?"
Both of these, by each person, make it easier to take, psychologically. You neither commit to something nor do you tell someone else they are wrong.
There are also synonyms for "wrong" which can soften the blow. For example "inaccurate", as in something like "unfortunately your response to the question is inaccurate because since version 5 that is no longer true."
By doing this I'm making it clear what is wrong, and not using the word "wrong". This separates the person from the statement, and by implication does not make their statement theirs.
Contrast with "you are wrong", which makes the statement personal, and implies the _person_ themself is defective.
A flat-earther has an inaccurate source of information, and has come to a misinformed conclusion, resulting in a unfortunate assessment of the current earth shape. If we start there, and recognize that (to a much lessor degree) we all have blind-spots it helps to engage with them.
But the quote above is true, you cannot rationalise people out of a position they did not rationally get in to.
Let's face it, it is lacking as much on HN as it is on any social media site. That's because it requires a Vulcan-like lack of emotional investment in an opinion or worse, a belief.
Critical thinking requires dissociation, detatchment from the subject, and a lots and lots of research from varied sources. Not just a few websites, but actual focus with the intent to accept an answer that goes against the current opinion or belief.
This idea of "teaching critical thinking to kids" is valuable, but I think grossly underestimated in difficulty. Especially when parents have a vested interest in NOT raising kids to think this way.
I think critical thinking isn't that hard, unless it comes up against someone's sense of self or value because they've invested a lot in a belief. Maybe Vulcan emotional detachment isn't the answer (it might be even be part of the problem in some circumstances, since Vulcans invest so much sense of worth into their own logic). Rather, I think humility and a sense of wonder and joy about finding things out. Think of kids! When kids are excited to learn they have absolutely no problem finding out what works and what doesn't. They haven't invested their whole egos into something yet. They just got here, after all. We shouldn't be overly critical of kids and expect performance out of them at every turn. It kind of....crushes them little by little.
I wanna be a kid again. It's fun. Instead of "oh man, I f'd up here, I hope no one finds out..." it's "whoops, that didn't work, let's try something else!"
I don't think so; but it does require training. If you graduate with a batchelor's degree, you're supposed to have demonstrated at least some skill in critical reasoning. Secondary school/high school, not so much.
Once you have the skill, it can become a habit; obsessive, even, the "default mode", easier than falling off a log. I find that I increasingly question everthing I'm told. Is this pundit incentivised to lie to me? Does what he's telling me even make sense? What about the things I tell myself? Am I deceiving myself? Do my own beliefs make sense? (Many of them don't, and I've had to make more than one jarring course-correction in my life)
Using a weird pop culture cliché probably hinders you here ?
I would say what needs to be trained is instead emotional investment (this is probably redundant : no investment without at least former emotions ?) into trying to figure out the/a truth. For instance being bothered when some propositions seem to conflict each other.
And at least a bare minimum of investment into your beliefs is kind of required (though I guess that this is already what differentiates them from opinions ?), other way lies insanity.
I heard this story once where someone claimed to know originators of flat earth nonsense were college kids trying to be funny by keeping a straight face claiming something absolutely absurd (the earth is flat) to each other and people around campus and the whole thing started that way eventually spreading to people who weren’t in on the joke.
It really scans. A lot of the crazy far right stuff seems to have originated with 4chan trolls having a laugh and idiots taking them seriously.
It seems to be a pattern for a lot of the troubling thinking of the day: unreasonable information spread for laughs being picked up by people unable to tell the difference and the idea takes on a life of its own eventually building up a class of people who know better figuring out how to make money from it and a class of people who don’t eating it up and spreading it.
I'm convinced that some folks cannot be taught critical thinking skills, some folks I think are just missing the relevant hardware to perform the needed computing, they might be able to get there in a round about way, but not on every topic. Ideological blinders, presuppositions, a bunch of things, get in the way.
See also, the work of Robert Trivers [0] on the evolutionary utility of strategic self-deception. Sometimes we deceive ourselves so we may more effectively deceive others (or more charitably, perhaps to signal in-group loyalty).
Ironically enough, I think this can even take the form of an irrational belief that humans are innately rational, when empirical observation tells us otherwise.
I don't think it's about the computing, but about the entire shift in worldview required to accept that what you perceive to be true isn't necessarily so. This is much more of an emotional issue than a logical or analytical one. It also naturally trends towards Betrand Russell's, "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
It's one thing to state you understand this and another altogether to live it. It's not pleasant. And I find many who even claim to have adopted this sort of worldview are instead just as cocksure of themselves, but instead of meeting other notions with rejection, they meet them with 'compassionate condescension.'
I'd say 99% of folks based on my 50+ years of experience on- and off-line. I think I've only known a handful of people who can think critically about their opinions.
I think causal/critical reasoning is not natural to humans, it has to be learned and can only be applied in limited fields. Humans by nature have survival thinking, not critical thinking. Of course survival depends on taking the correct decisions and that tends to correct some errors in thinking, but not all.
Interesting, the same applies to GPT-3. It just memorizes the surface of things without critical understanding. But that means it's just doing what the average human does, while being compared to the idealized critical thinking human.
I came across this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjYc8h3xt-E) where-by a former flat-earther goes into why they (and formerly, he) believed in the Flat Earth model.
I tend to believe that the "stupidest" beliefs that apparently large percentages of US Citizens have are more a form of rebellious performance art.
Like, if you ask the population if they believe if Trump is currently, secretly, President, some percentage will say they believe it. But I think the actual percentage is far lower; it's just polluted with an ever-growing number of people that are lying about their beliefs just to be obstinate.
Then it becomes like a game of chicken to see how far you can take it, how long can you insist on the belief before you crack. And ultimately at some point the difference doesn't really matter.
(In high school, I started saying "Spiffy!" ironically, and kept saying it, and then there came a point where it didn't matter I meant it ironically, I was just the guy that said "Spiffy!")
He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker.
He claimed he was just pretending to be racist to trigger the social justice warriors, but even if he is telling the truth, Popehat's Law of Goats still applies.
I have absolutely no idea what you're getting at, or what you could possibly mean by that vague statement. What mentality is that, and why would kids act that way? Can you explicitly explain what you mean, and provide some citations, please?
This is closer to my opinion of flat earthers. It pisses people off and that's hilarious so keep saying you believe it. You probably don't believe it but who cares anyway.
I sometimes argue the opposite of what I believe if I'm dealing with someone who's getting way too worked up over it. I kind of like the mental exercise of defending an opinion I don't agree with and the entertainment that goes with it.
Theory: Describing it as performance art could be personally offensive enough to said people that they may stop the activity that has become described as performance art.
Along the lines of "wow, how did you manage to keep a straight face the whole time?"
> (In high school, I started saying "Spiffy!" ironically, and kept saying it, and then there came a point where it didn't matter I meant it ironically, I was just the guy that said "Spiffy!")
I started saying 'ta ta' instead of 'seeya' or 'bye' in an ironic effort to be posh, and then one day I realised that 'ta ta' had become my default goodbye.
Having had this experience of irony becoming reality does make that 'game of chicken' seem like a plausible reality for the greater populace.
> there came a point where it didn't matter I meant it ironically, I was just the guy that said "Spiffy!"
About 10 years ago I was in a clothes shop in London looking at jeans. There were a couple of younger guys, early 20s maybe, looking as well. One of them held up some bright pink jeans and asked his friend "do you think I could get away with wearing these ironically?"
What flashed through my head was "You'll still be the guy wearing pink jeans. If you like pink jeans, buy the pink jeans, wear them and be happy...". Irony is not visible to observers!
i may be misremembering didn't the flat earth movement pretty much spawn from obama invoking a comment about 'the flat earth society' in regards to climate change policy? i always took it as a political middle finger that also happened to attract a few sad true believers who get tracked down for any documentary on the subject.
Stupid performance art is, tautologically, stupidity. So I guess it depends? Flat earth isn't especially harmful, except in undermining trust in science, institutions, and your fellow citizen with absolutely no discernible purpose.
The term for "culture jamming" when it is only disruptive is "trolling".
Science, at its base, is inherently axiomatic. It means that you had to commit to set of certain shared beliefs to derive your logical scientific conclusions. If you commit to different beliefs, you will get different explanations.
After all, you haven't built rocket and didn't fly to space to see it for yourself.
That's a way of thinking about science, but I would argue there are more useful ways. Question-Hypothesis-Experiment is a more useful way of thinking about it if you want to generate new knowledge (do science).
> you had to commit to set of certain shared beliefs to derive your logical scientific conclusions
This is more of a description of math than science.
>This is more of a description of math than science.
But it is description of both (after all, all our science is based on math). But it comes even in more basic forms: with any scientific endeavour you take a lot of things for granted and do not validate them. If you try to validate them, eventually you get stuck (as an exercise, try to devise experiment determining curvature of the Earth from the first principles). On top of that, fundamentally, theories cannot be proven, but only disproven.
All this requires tremendous amount of goodwill and consensus to make any progress. You laugh at flatearthers, but they are just a fringe example of how entire system works. At the edge of physics essentially everyone is in the similar position. Many, if not most, substantial physical advances were done by heretics working against the status quo. Of course, I think flatearthers are wrong, but I would rather have flatearthers than all alternatives from mainline eliminated.
I disagree with this. A great deal of our science is based on math. Physics is certainly extremely mathematical. Building theories in physics is very axiom-based.
But mechanics is not the only kind of science. Much of science is highly empirical. We don't reason out our experiments from first principles. We have some assumptions and we try to address them.
An example of what I mean is the study of microbiology. Of course there are examples of fundamental ideas, like selection pressure, but "axiom" is a term of art that I just wouldn't apply here.
Yep. I like breaking "guess" into 2 distinct parts, though, because finding the right question is generally understood to be the harder and more critical part of the whole thing.
> Flat earthers are proof that some people will just obstinately believe in complete and utter horseshit.
More than "some". I think, by default, we're not protected against mental viruses that travel from mind to mind and get spread by the internet/media. I also think that the ridiculous lies embedded in these mental viruses are a feature, not a bug. I see this pattern everywhere from successful ad campaigns to politicians to conspiracy theories, and so on: the more cognitive dissonance is invoked my the message, the deeper it gets embedded in the "infected" mind. In cases where the falsehood / cognitive dissonance trigger comes equipped with the mechanism of its own spread, it can become the most dangerous and infectious virus. This has happened a few times in human history.
What's the harm in a post-truth society? It's a memetic virus that is spreading. Misinformation was weaponized before flat earth took off. However flat earth is the embodiment of 2 + 2 = 5.
The protests in Germany regularly include all sorts of other conspiracy subcommunities, including the seedy underbelly of it all, anti-semitism, but also 9/11 truthers and weird esoteric believes. Anyone really into astral healing five years ago is busy these days proving viruses don't exist.
Not the person you're replying to, but empirically I'd say that it's pretty accurate. I don't know a single person who's into just one conspiracy theory. It's either none or the whole package.
> Not the person you're replying to, but empirically I'd say that it's pretty accurate.
Empirically, everyone would say that their worldview is accurate, including conspiracy theorists. An interesting question is: who is actually correct (if we were to examine each given situation in detail using strict logic and epistemology)?
> I don't know a single person who's into just one conspiracy theory. It's either none or the whole package.
I know plenty who are into only some - in fact I am one of them, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have.
So who are those people who are only cautious about the COVID-19 vaccine? How should we call them? I am personally cautious of COVID-19 vaccines because of quick time of development, and financial incentives everywhere, but most importantly, because it would poke my immune system which usually results in flare-ups in my case, and I would like to avoid flare-ups. Plus, I very rarely go outside, so I do not pose a risk to anyone, nor am I able to catch it from anyone. That said, I have been quarantined with a COVID-19 positive person for 2 weeks or so. He was asymptomatic, and I had no symptoms at all either, although no clue if I ever got it from him. I am also in a more or less safe age group. Those are my reasons for passing. Sounds fair, or am I a conspiracy theorist? I do not mind vaccines. I got a hepatitis B vaccine a couple of years ago, twice, and I would not mind getting it again if I have to. I got all the other mandatory vaccines, too, when I was a kid. I do not think that it was a mistake.
Sounds like common sense to me. But you can't argue for views like that in polite society - you'll be howled down by a crowd of people who believe the doctrine of "herd immunity" applies to leaky vaccines that wear off after three months.
There's no doubt that such things exist in quantities > 0, but when you say "X is into Y" and X is a large group of people, shall we be concerned about the percentage of group X who are actually into Y?
And if not, then who are we to criticize members of X for being into things for which they do not have supporting evidence?
Look at the thinking on display in this thread - if we abstract it above the object (topic) level, would we not discover that all people think like conspiracy theorists, if perhaps to a lesser degree? Does anyone care whether all the things they believe to be true are actually true?
And, since we have little if any measurements on the matter, what shall we make of the substantial percentage of mainstream beliefs that members of group X are(!) worse than normal people? It is an artifact of people's imaginations, as are the beliefs of members of group X - and, each group laughs at the stupidity of the other, day after day, year after year - an infinite loop.
Imagine if we programmed computers the way we think about the world, what a mess that would be.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I am someone who has watched the spread of covid denialism, anti-vaccination views and the the news media (which features stories such as: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177 ).
It doesn't seem to me to be much of a stretch to state that people who espouse the flat earth theory also espouse other conspiracy-theory views as well. What exactly, if anything, makes that difficult to believe for you?
Because nowadays, anyone gets called a conspiracy theorist if they challenge establishment narratives. You get conflated with them, just like you got conflated with extremists/terrorists if you were antiwar (think invasion of Iraq).
Covid policies are extremely authoritarian but you can only challenge them to require MORE security theater, not less. Else, you're labeled and, as OP said, you're dangerous. Your IDEAS are Dangerous. Just like when reading communist books made you dangerous. Several dictatorships knew it was necessary to disappear such dangerous people with their dangerous thoughts.
Anti intellectualism is at its all time high when it comes to "not questioning 'the science'" (The gov/Big tech/state health institutions/state media)
I still think that critical thinking has an important role here. You say "they didn't reason themselves into the position and you cannot reason them out of it". This is correct and is actually what critical thinking is about: reason about something instead of blindly believe in something. If they were capable of critical thinking, they would have reasoned about it instead of blindingly believe in it. And while they could still reach the wrong conclusion, you could still try and reason them out of it.
Using Occam's razor, I posit that these videos exist because there are too many people watching them; not because there are too many flat earthers out there. I am yet to meet one in person.
My belief is that every flat earther is just out there to be trolling everyone else.
There is absolutely no way anyone can be that blind to reality and making up excuse after another, after all failed and debunked “science” experiments they make.
I used to think that, but no longer. Many of them are true believers in flat earth, and also, are convinced of hundreds of other things that aren't true either.
Sure lots are trolls. But there are lots and lots (majority of the movement) are real believers.
> (that the educational system failed to teach them critical thinking)
I think they ARE thinking critically - about what most people consider established knowledge, what most people don't even consider doubting.
> you cannot reason them out of it.
Just so. I for one can't be reasoned out of thinking the earth is round; I (and I presume you) have these beliefs, and trying to convince us otherwise is pretty much impossible. I wouldn't want to try and argue a flat earther out of their beliefs, because they are set in their beliefs.
The same persistence in face of failure is celebrated in our greatest inventors and scientists. So maybe it's necessary that a part of population has such emotional reasoning, to increase exploration even when there is no clear benefit. Because sometimes the benefit comes much later than the cost of exploration, sometimes the path to discovery is a maze and you only get the prize at the end.
With flat-earthers, anti-5G, anti-vaxxers etc. I have always thought about it like the efficiency-stability tradeoff: From a "survival of the group" perspective, it is usefull risk-spreading to have a small percent of your population act different from everybody else, against the current wisdom. It is of course not the most efficient, but if some unforseen catastrophe happens (e.g. the new 6G update accidentally makes everyone sterile) not everything will collapse and at least a few contrarians might survive.
> Flat earthers are proof that some people will just obstinately believe in complete and utter horseshit
"Flat earth" seems to be an example of an entire class of "big lie" beliefs. The "big lie" idea is that if you tell a big enough lie, with enough elaborate entailments, people will give up on critical appraisal because it becomes such hard work. Apparently a large proportion of QAnon believers are educated high-achievers. These beliefs are not caused by a failure of education.
* Our lizard overlords
* Alien kidnappers
* Area 51
* Illuminati
* Xenu (or almost any organised religion)
> actively and self-assuredly wrong
That is how I like to use the word "ignorant" - these are belief-systems that require active effort to sustain. To go along with them, you have to deliberately close your eyes.
> [1] I mean something specific about stupid. Not just wrong, not just ignorant, but actively and self-assuredly wrong, often to their own detriment. Beware stupid people in large numbers.
They genuinely luck awareness how stupid they are, to what degree, and which contexts. Furthermore, in my speculative and limited observations this people are genuinely insecure and unhappy in sense.
Another thing is that people defending a believe don't necessary hold it true deep inside. But it's part of their identity, so they play their role, and defend it.
Once you pick it up, you'll start to notice it for a lot of things: racism/sexism, welcoming immigrants, climate change is a hoax, I'm a busy person, my boss is terrible, I just love to do < hard thing >, capitalism is bad, I'm concerned by the planet...
E.G:
I have a friend who keeps insisting she prefers women, has a lesbian dominated social circle, but mostly have sex with males. She is joining protests for all things hurting migrants, but one was sleeping in a car in our street, and after getting her bike stolen, she decided with no proof he was the culprit and called the cops on him and got him deported.
I know a vegetarian that eats meat when he travels, because nobody can see him.
I had a flatmate who was writing her memoir on the way women were badly treated in India. She eventually dated our Indian other flatmate, and took great care of cleaning his _disgusting_ bedroom and doing his laundry without any reciprocity, for the entire relationship.
I know 2 guys that, if asked, will declare they are for peace and think war lords are a bad thing. I mean, who doesn't ? Both considered working for weapon dealers, one actually accepted, and the main clients are the Emirates.
All those persons are people I love very much: humans are weird creatures, full of contradictions, doing plenty of bad things. I'm sure those flat earthers can be good friends too, maybe even great citizens for some things I'm terrible at.
I'm certainly an asshole competing in several categories, believing idiotic things, pretending to believe others.
I think people who see themselves differently have huge blind spots which help them go on the hate train.
We all suck. Even when taught critical thinking, which I manage to abuse regularly for terrible results.
True, we are not all at the same level on the Gaussian idiocy curve. At least according to ourselves.
Yet, in my experience, education works only if freed from contempt.
So let's have compassion for "stupid people in large numbers."
> These people do not listen to reason; they didn't reason themselves into the position and you cannot reason them out of it. The flat earthers doing the "experiments" keep coming up with reasons to keep on believing, even when their experiments are so blinkered and janky they show either nothing at all or that they are, in fact, wrong.
I’m late to the party here, but I recall reading (or watching) about one flat earther devising a somewhat novel, and actually very solid experiment for determining the roundness of the earth. Unfortunately, they thought their methods or testing apparatuses were flawed when the results indicated that the earth was in fact pretty roundish. They’ll be back with a fresh experiment, no doubt, to confirm their pre-existing notions.
You might be talking about an experiment shown in "Behind the Curve".
The experiment, which consists of shining a laser at a target many meters away. The person holding laser lifts and lowers it. When it is lowered, the point of light on the target disappears, because it is obstructed by the land "in the way", due to the curve of the earth.
The experimenter says "hmmm, that's weird!" and then proceeds to conclude that his ingenious experiment was in fact flawed.
The experiment is flawed and doesn't prove anything either way.
There's no way[1] to know that whatever landscape they tried this on doesn't have a subtle upward curve that might just as easily "prove" the flat earth hypothesis.
It's amusing in the context of that documentary because they do a 180 in real time because of the results they get. But just because the experiment showed the correct result doesn't mean it's well designed.
1. No way that a flat earther wouldn't dismiss, there's no way they'll trust say a USGS survey.
Scientists do this all the time. Scientific paradigm shifts take a generation; you have to wait for the old scientists to retire or die, before new theories can displace old ones.
All things being equal, religion (broadly speaking) has a logical justification: for the vast majority of human history, we were unable to explain just about anything about our condition. Recent history is, as Tevye says, tradition[1].
The fact that we celebrate Christmas in 202X by buying crap on Amazon instead of torturing the infidels suggests that we do indeed get tired before we get dangerous, at least on the long arc of history.
If that was all there was to it, then it wouldn't be a concern. The problem is that people really do believe it and promote it, even though we know a lot better about the world than when these books were written centuries ago.
In Texas, the school board was populated by young earth creationists. Because of the size of the market, they could dictate that textbooks be rewritten, such as adding creationism along side evolution in science classrooms [1]. Religiously-motivated thinking is behind many important laws and denying things like climate change [2]
And in some countries, a particular religious belief is all-controlling and holds political and judicial power as well. Non-believers, homosexuals, and apostates get killed. Women are possessions.
I know the grandparent comment is getting down-voted because it is very broad. It is easy to reflexively downvote the edgy atheist. Of course Christianity (or choose another religion) has good aspects to it. But it isn't just atheists scoffing at what they feel are absurd beliefs: Christians of one flavor laugh at the absurd beliefs of other flavors, believing their own group is the one that got everything right. Biblical literalists get laughed at by other Christians for thinking the world is 6000 years old. Non-Catholics laugh at Catholics for thinking a consecrated Eucharist is not just a symbol of the body of Christ but becomes the actual body of Christ [3]. Mormons consider themselves Christians but many Christians do not think they are. And so on.
I agree with all of this. I'm also not religious; my sole point was to discharge the lazy claim that religions don't have some logical foundation. It's not a very good one in 2021, but ignoring it serves no particular (non-rhetorical) purpose.
Certainly I was being facetious in my comment. I could make a very long list of good things that have come from Christianity and other religions.
Interesting fact that I learned recently. Christianity is the reason we don't marry our cousins, and it is believed that the genetic benefits increased human intelligence by a considerable margin.
>Christianity is the reason we don't marry our cousins
Hmmm... maybe, loosely, in the way that it's the reason we don't murder people either, but there are plenty of non-Christian societies with incest taboo. I would guess most.
> Flat earthers are proof that some people will just obstinately believe in complete and utter horseshit.
As are people who blindly support "democracy" and the subsequent actions that are taken by the people elected (typically re-elected) "by the people". Maybe flat earthers are dumber on a relative scale, but it would be interesting to see how things look on an absolute scale.
> I mean something specific about stupid. Not just wrong, not just ignorant, but actively and self-assuredly wrong, often to their own detriment. Beware stupid people in large numbers.
And more important than their relative intelligence: who causes more harm in the world (say, measured in body count in foreign military adventures)?
Yes. The point is that lower-case-d democrats have done more harm in the world than flat earthers, mostly from being more numerous, even while being less dangerous.
Damage = Dangerousness * Number
Lowercase-d democrats have also done more good in the world than flat-earthers, and caused more change in the world with unclear value.
> As are people who blindly support "democracy" and the subsequent actions that are taken by the people elected (typically re-elected) "by the people".
Very well, I'll bite. What do you propose as an alternative? How does your alternative solve the current issues?
I propose that a grassroots initiative is started with the intent to develop a new system for implementing democracy, the goal being to run in parallel with the current system and then one day replace it.
And since "people are too dumb" for us to adopt direct democracy is a legitimate complaint, it might be a good idea to address that problem simultaneously. Teaching epistemology and logic to the masses would yield massive benefits across the board imho.
> I propose that a grassroots initiative is started with the intent to develop a new system for implementing democracy, the goal being to run in parallel with the current system and then one day replace it.
You backpaddled. So you still want democracy? What you actually want is to organise a coup. A shadow government that one day replaces the official one. You want a coup.
In your initial comment you complained about democracy itself therefore signaling you would prefer a totalitarian regime. Wanting a coup and a totalitarian regimes goes hand in hand.
> Teaching epistemology and logic to the masses would yield massive benefits across the board imho.
Very well, do it!
Maybe then you will realise this last comment is word salad.
> What you actually want is to organise a coup. A shadow government that one day replaces the official one. You want a coup.
coup: a sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government.
Technically, you are dealing with your imagination of what I want - I do not desire this, and no such claim exists in the text that I wrote.
> In your initial comment you complained about democracy itself therefore signaling you would prefer a totalitarian regime. Wanting a coup and a totalitarian regimes goes hand in hand.
Consider carefully this word: "signalling". What does it mean in this context, precisely?
>> Teaching epistemology and logic to the masses would yield massive benefits across the board imho.
> Very well, do it!
How am I doing so far?
> Maybe then you will realise this last comment is word salad.
This sounds like a fun epistemological exercise: do you have the ability to articulate why that comment "is" "word salad"? Do you mean this in a comprehensive sense...it "is" "word salad" to all observers, or do you actually only know that it appears that way (as opposed to "is") to yourself?
1. By backpedalling I mean that at first you said "As are people who blindly support "democracy" and the subsequent actions that are taken by the people elected (typically re-elected) "by the people"." and afterwards you said "develop a new system for implementing democracy". If you claim that people blindly support democracy, you imply that democracy is a bad thing and afterwards. Furthermore, by using "democracy" and "by the people" in scare quotes, you are implying you are not satisfied with election results. Afterwards, you claim you are actually in support of democracy. If you are against representative republics and prefer direct democracy, then say so and don't complain that people blindly support democracy.
2. "grassroots initiative is started with the intent to develop a new system for implementing democracy, the goal being to run in parallel with the current system and then one day replace it" There is no conceivable situation in which a government would accept a paralel government to function. The only plausible way for governance to switch is abruptly, either peacefully (a monarch abdicating, a change following a referendum, etc.) of by force (a coup or a revolution). The notion that a government would create a situation in which all state institutions would answer two masters is absurd. And I believe it shows that you do not understand what a government actually is.
3. I should not have used the word "signaling". I forgot it is a loaded term in English. I meant "implying". And I believe that your initial comment (in which you compare democracy believers with flat earthers in terms of dumbness, you complain about the validity of elections and blame military incursions on them) paints a clear picture. Based on the military adventures part you are referring either to the USA, Russia or China. Since we can rule out China as undemocratic and Rusia as a non-functional pretend-democracy that leaves only the USA. In this case, since you are using the scare quotes with regards to elections, you are implying that you are unhappy that Biden won over Trump. You are implying you believe the election was stolen.
4. "Teaching epistemology and logic to the masses" how are you doing so far? I would say zero progress. I am ridiculing the idea that you find it feasible to propose such a thing. If teaching anything to the masses would have been anywhere close to easy, humanity would not be in the mess it is today. You truly believe you can teach ... TO THE MASSES. Go for it. If you succeed that will earn you at least a Nobel prise. I believe the existence of flat earthers proves the opposite. It is possible to teach many people, but not the masses. Some people are immutable in their determination to not learn.
5. This is what I meant by word salad. You display a lack of understanding about governments and about the ease of teaching people which leads you to propose absurd solutions.
6. If what you want is actually a transition to a direct democracy in which the citizens assume responsibility, that is actually plausible to achieve. But not by creating a shadow government and not through a pie-in-the-sky teaching project.
Seems like someone doesn't like you and I discussing this topic in this way (I'm referring to both of our comments being [flagged]).
Stranger, can you articulate why people shouldn't discuss this aspect of reality? Are there some specific ideas in here that you'd like to keep out of public discourse?
Depending on the exact democracy: better voting methods, more relevant political parties, more independent judiciary, reduced monetary influence, more transparency. That would be admitting that modern liberal, representative democracies have flaws and need some reform.
Nobody "blindly" supports democracy. It happens to be a system with an obvious mechanism for continuous improvement or at least self-correction. It's also empirically quite successful at avoiding war and fostering prosperity.
That's an excellent point. Flat-earthers as a group are an easy target because their 'belief' is essentially harmless and they're a small enough group that they really don't and can't cause any trouble; they're not, and never likely to reach, a critical mass that can alter society's momentum. Their argument also isn't compelling and cannot act as a crutch or focal point of blame for a perceived societal ill.
Racism and xenophobia on the other hand...
On democracy, I really like this quote:
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Democracy gives equal merit to the intelligent, the stupid, and the wilfully ignorant. This is the best we can do?
If you want a somewhat uniquely American critical-thinking-eschewing topic: Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism. That's a land mine I like to step on occasionally to gauge the current sensitivity.
Also: war and economic dominance conducted by democratic countries, decade after decade, whose citizens seem to exist in some sort of a state of hypnosis where they seem fascinated by trivial matters like flat earthers, but have little more than platitudes or "nothing can be done" when it comes to actual harm, which their tax dollars and political complacency support, indefinitely.
Incredibly well said. How trivial the media-selected "outrage of the moment" issues are in comparison to various hideous behaviours that have somehow become accepted by society as normal.
I think the author of the post is on to something. It isn't that he's saying flat earthers have evidence or are saying something reasonable. He's saying that the Western education system teaches people to memorize facts such as the roundness of the Earth without teaching process methodology to derive the roundness of the Earth.
Anyone who begins to question some of the facts they have been indoctrinated to memorize: (1) will not have a methodology for coming to a conclusion, past "hypothesis" and anecdote (2) will not have peers and close contacts who are able to refute the hypothesis, outside just insisting on the fact themselves, which itself isn't credible or scientific.
One claim that the author makes is that this is a flaw in Western education systems. It would seem to me that Western education varies significantly. And I am not familiar enough with other types of education to know what alternatives are working better in different cultural contexts.
I'm very skeptical of any thesis that this phenomenon is about a failure of people to be able to discern fact from non-fact (or "critical-thinking" as it is often characterized). As it misses that the common thread among all these, formerly esoteric and now increasingly mainstream, subcultures. They're about "belonging" and in-group/out-group signaling. It may be true that they're ill-equiped to discern such things, but it's also the case that there are social incentives for them to not want to adhere to facts, self-derived or otherwise.
It's possible, I suppose, that teaching people to discern and derive some domain of facts might coincidentally produce a broader cultural "in-group" of people that value social cohesion with others like them, but underneath it all this is all culture/counter-culture dynamics, not whether or not people have the tools to figure out the curvature of the Earth based on basic science and mathematics.
There still exist religious scientists. Heck, I even know creationists who fully understand how carbon and uranium dating work, and yet they're still creationists. Getting them to abandon their creationism is at a minimum a matter of getting them to be willing to overcome the in-group judgement of their family, their friends, their extended social circles, etc. Unsurprisingly, outside of specific trauma they're not likely to embark on such an upheaval.
People mostly behave like the people they're around. Being shunned or ostracized is (or used to be) an effective mechanism for social cohesion for this category of issue. The trouble at present is that social media makes it much more difficult (for better or worse) for shunning or ostracizing to improve that flavor of cohesion because it allows the universe of the shunned and ostracized to find cohesion amongst themselves, so the local fringe morphs into the global mainstream.
> There still exist religious scientists. Heck, I even know creationists who fully understand how carbon and uranium dating work, and yet they're still creationists.
You can be creationist and believe in carbon dating, fossils, etc. There's no contradiction. There are unanswered questions, such as "Why would a creator create a young planet that looked very, very old?"
But that's not a scientific question, it's philosophical and irrefutable one, and therefore (IMO) it is not a particularly interesting question to get hung up on.
I mostly agree with your point that these kinds of phenomena are not about critical thinking as such.
Though I do think fans of deductive and inductive reasoning tend to entirely overlook other forms of reasoning. For instance, abductive reasoning: what narrative makes the most sense given the options? Also, reputational reasoning: which experts am I going to trust on this?
Abductive reasoning doesn't apply in the case of the shape of the Earth, but reputational reasoning certainly does. At any rate, they help me understand why people make (to me) consterning choices, including in politics, religion, criminal verdicts, investing, and (lately) personal health care.
"Why would a creator create a young planet that looked very, very old?"
That's not quite the right question. God didn't create a universe in a disguise that looks old. God simply created a universe of a certain age. This is perfectly consistent with the bible's creation story. God created humans of a certain age, in adult form. The bible doesn't say God created embryos that then grew up into Adam and Eve. Likewise the Garden was created with what we presume were fully grown trees, complete with tree rings providing evidence of prior years of existence. Trees with a past, which came into existence just now.
Young-earth creationists like to pick and choose which features of the universe are allowed to have been created in place, and which must have been formed by mysterious interim events. For some reason, a lot of them refuse to allow geological features to have been created in place, which forces them to invent absurd explanations that usually involve Noah's flood and a lot of hand waving.
But it's all unnecessary. There's no reason we can't entertain the notion that the universe was created complete and in motion, exactly as it is, at any point in time. And in fact there would be no way to prove it one way or another, just as there would be no way for Adam to prove that the trees in his garden were a hundred days or a hundred years old.
I don't think they're unaware of the questions. In fact, in the half-dozen or so cases I have any direct interaction with I'm certain they're aware of such questions. My point is exactly that they have other forms of incentives and reasoning that cultivate a willingness, or in the worst cases a zealotry, to entertain what their relative out-groups would consider a contradiction simply as open questions that their in-group permits.
I used the example as a representative for the kind of issue involved, not as an exhaustively defensible one. :-)
Principally I think we're in agreement. There seems to be quite a bit of analysis and consideration about what's going on that's through the lens of a kind of "enlightenment" reasoning wherein it's purportedly obvious that the pursuit of facts is intrinsically valuable, and so people not arriving at that value must be that they just don't know how to get there or are being lead astray.
Alternatively, I would suggest that for almost everything that almost everyone deals with in their day-to-day and/or finds reward & incentives for, there's practically no value to facts. Often it's the inverse. "Bullshit" pays. Sometimes socially, sometimes financially, sometimes both. In the case where such "bullshit" has become a subculture of its own, suddenly facts have negative value.
For whatever it's worth, this relates to one of my annoyances with the general startup ecosystem as it exists (to bring it around to HN-esque territory) I've been told (more than once) that the fact I have integrity is going to make my life harder as a founder. It makes it harder to sell. It makes it harder to fundraise. Etc. Those people are absolutely right. Because both selling and fundraising have a built-in incentive toward BS. "Fake it 'til you make it." became a social and financial good, and so people do it. Because if they don't, they automatically start out at a significant disadvantage. My personal bet is that my biasing toward integrity approach pays off in the long-term when the builders, not the brokers, get their cyclical day in the sun again, and in the meantime I can still be square with myself. That said, I very well could be wrong, and I unnecessarily made both the short term and the long term harder than they needed to be.
Not all creationists adamantly believe the earth is literally only 7k years old. That's a very specific subset called "young earth creationists".
I would venture most creationists at the most fundamental level believe the earth, life, evolution, etc. are not accidental occurrences but the calculated result of creative effort. And that basic belief is not incompatible at all with scientific discovery
My response to young earth creationists is, "God worked really hard to make it look like the Earth is billions of years old. Shouldn't we respect His wishes and just go with it?"
Anything that appears to contradict a belief can instead be seen as a test of faith. Some go so far as attribute that challenge of faith to a bad actor like the Devil.
Religion teaches you how to rationalize literally anything, for better or worse. I suspect it wouldn't have evolved as part of human culture if there wasn't a need for it.
Indeed! I expect that it's very useful as a function to avoid the deleterious effects of inescapably embracing the pessimistic version of existentialism.
"Religion: An Evolutionary Pressure To Bother With Any Of It At All" :-)
> Wouldn’t this mean it’s calculated by something that can conveniently ignore both computational complexity and logical completeness
Assuming God has either access to more advanced technology than us or more advanced knowledge, why would that be unreasonable? Something that seems computationally complex now (like factoring primes) might be more manageable with more advanced knowledge/technology. Terraforming, bioengineering, factoring primes, etc. are within the realms of possibility for our civilization, so why not for a more advanced being?
> They're about "belonging" and in-group/out-group signaling. It may be true that they're ill-equiped to discern such things, but it's also the case that there are social incentives for them to not want to adhere to facts, self-derived or otherwise.
I think it’s most evident in cults, but agreed that it’s present in other less intense belief systems as well.
I think this claim of how western education works is rather broad, and really depends where you are.
Where I live (New Zealand), high school questions are graded based in large part on the methodology used and/or how well you demonstrate grasp on the concept. You could get every physics question wrong on an exam, but still get an above average grade if the way you articulated understanding of the topic was very in-depth.
In contrast, I’ve heard that in places in the USA for example (don’t know how regional this is, but even big stuff like the SAT), multiple choice questions are commonplace.
I don’t think I encountered any marked work with more than one or two multiple choice questions, and even then you were still graded on your work not just your mark.
The system I’m used to emphasises clearly understanding of the topic, multiple choice does not. Your marked work was also returned to you, and you could apply to have it re assessed if you felt it wasn’t fair.
> He's saying that the Western education system teaches people to memorize facts such as the roundness of the Earth without teaching process methodology to derive the roundness of the Earth
I dunno about anyone else, but my Western, public-school education taught specific methods of deriving the roundness of the Earth and it's size (and when they had first been historically recorded as being used, as well), repeatedly, as part of all of the history, math, and science curricula.
It also taught the more general methodology of exploring any issue of material fact.
If anything, the public school education I received (US, '90s-'00s) went out of its way to provide this kind of background. Did it sink in for a lot of kids? Probably not. It's really hard to test for that, and if public schools actually tried to hold kids back who didn't truly absorb the material there would be riots.
Education was in NJ, same time period as you, same experience. Teachers made sure to show us how the things we were learning followed from the other things that we knew. I always loved that because it's much easier to remember things when you know how they derive from other concepts.
Same experience, same timeframe in TX. I remember learning about shadows in Egypt vs Greece during the same day of the year and thinking it was really cool. In elementary school even.
I'm not convinced. I am pretty sure I got a better education in specifically how we "know" (historically, anyways, eratosthenes and all that) the Earth was round, by 7th grade in the US (public school, albeit a very good one), and having done equivalent coursework in a school run by the Japanese Embassy, you don't get that knowledge in the same way. Japanese education is much, much more like rote knowledge-learning than conceptual frameworks of thinking.
If you made the opposite argument -- that flat earthers exist because in the US we teach conceptual frameworks and not rote memorization, I would be more persuaded.
I think a lot of people that get wrapped up in flat earth stuff aren't the smartest, and so the problem starts in school when they are taught things like trigonometry, they often have a bad/dismissive attitude towards it (thinking "when would I ever use this in real life") or they just can't do it.
As an example, I have a friend that dropped out of high school relatively early to do a trade, and now he is keen about science and watches many videos on space and the like. One time he was theorising to me about how electricity in a wire makes a magnetic field, and that if you put it near a magnet then it would move. I said, that's what an electric motor is, lol. He probably would have learned that if he did better and stayed in school longer, but he wasn't interested back then.
But at the other end of the spectrum, the first person I really heard about flat earth from happened to be someone I went to highschool with. This was at our 10 year reunion (and was nearly 10 years ago now), and he had gone on to become a geologist, but had recently jumped onto flat earth. So, it's quite mind boggling to think about what was going on in his life that lead to that conclusion.
And 1 more thing about learning, I don't recall any schooling regarding 3D space, like how to think about it, approach it, etc. And then when talking about viewing/measuring space from the perspective of earth, you also have to consider your position on the globe, and how that relates to other objects. Even now I struggle with this aspect, and my job for nearly 20 years has involved 3D modelling on computers (although my work is 3D, it is all "planar" though, which is different to bodies in space).
Western mass education is, if anything, much more tilted toward "learning skills" versus "memorizing facts" than any other education tradition, contemporary or historical. The piece also implicitly rests on the pretty controversial assumption that conspiracist worldviews like Flat Earth are more common among people educated in Western education systems.
He's saying that the Western education system teaches people to memorize facts such as the roundness of the Earth without teaching process methodology to derive the roundness of the Earth.
That's also a claim without much in the way of evidence and plenty of evidence against. The whole rather slight piece is based on this unexamined idea.
Yeah, I certainly remember the Eratosthenes shadow experiment making an appearance. That, and plenty of space footage, because space footage is awesome.
You want to teach the scientific method and skepticism? Fine.
But you have to remember it's extremely laborious for us to do so, especially since these accumulated knowledge exceed anybody's ability to learn it within their lifetime.
I don't think it's a flaw per se to focus on the facts, knowledge, and concept at the expense of scientific thinking, but we all ought to acknowledge that much of our knowledge of the world essentially relied on faith.
You want to teach the scientific method and
skepticism? Fine.
But you have to remember it's extremely laborious
for us to do so, especially since these accumulated
knowledge
I think there's a miscommunication/misunderstanding here; perhaps a language/culture barrier? I'm quite sure that when people refer to "the scientific method" they're talking about this --
It's a method with six steps. It's usually something primary education science teachers spend like, twenty minutes on at the beginning of a school year. It's not laborious.
(For maximum effect, the concept of the scientific method is then of course reinforced throughout the rest of the class, whenever experiments are performed. Assuming classes will be doing these experience anyway, this is not what I would remotely call "laborious")
skepticism
I suppose one could spend a lot of time teaching the history of skepticism, but from a scientific perspective, literally the only relevant bits are the notion that "repeatable, properly-designed experiments" are truly the cornerstone of science. I mean, it's certainly a notion that should suffuse the entire curriculum, but "laborious?"
Deutsch in Beginning of Infinity places the cornerstone at conjecture and criticism leading to Good Explanations: “An explanation that is hard to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for” that are treated as fallible (“Fallibilism The recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying knowledge as true or probable.”). Falliblism to Deutsch is in contrast to:
* Relativism The misconception that statements cannot be objectively true or false, but can be judged only relative to some cultural or other arbitrary standard.
* Instrumentalism The misconception that science cannot describe reality, only predict outcomes of observations.
* Justificationism The misconception that knowledge can be genuine or reliable only if it is justified by some source or criterion.
No, it isn't laborious when the teacher understands the why and wherefore of the scientific method.
I know the Earth is round, because I have observed that when a ship sails away from me, the top portion of the ship is the last to fade over the horizon. When flying, the shadow of the plane has a surrounding glory.
Teaching a single scientific fact based on supporting evidence is easy, teaching every single fact plus it’s associated evidence simply takes longer. Nobody questions that sugar contains C6H12O6, so it’s simply taught as a fact without showing the evidence used to derive it. This can even run into problems when people get taught a bunch on regurgitated nonsense around stuff like how wings work.
In the end people get skeptical around a tiny number of scientific facts like climate change, evolution, and vaccination but they have no problem accepting everything from the MOS hardness scale, echos, buoyancy, etc etc. Why most people object to just those specific things has absolutely nothing to do with evidence, it’s completely part of a wider social phenomenon.
> In the end people get skeptical around a tiny number of scientific facts like climate change, evolution, and vaccination but they have no problem accepting everything from the MOS hardness scale, echos, buoyancy, etc etc.
The Mohs scale is pretty easy to validate, and the exercises typically done when it is taught tend to serve to do that.
Just imaging if people showed similar levels of skepticism around the Mohs scale as the did global warming etc.
The Mohs hardness scale is actually extremely difficult to demonstrate across a full range of natural materials. It’s intuitive that if A scratches B and B scratches C then A should scratch C, but testing a few samples is nowhere near enough to demonstrate across every natural mineral. It’s even more difficult to show this is a stable property that doesn’t very significantly over time.
So, sure a teacher might hand out a few samples and show what the idea is, but that’s little more than hand waving.
> The Mohs hardness scale is actually extremely difficult to demonstrate across a full range of natural materials
Well, sure combinatorial explosion and the difficulty of gathering every possible natural material makes it impractical to show that:
(1) the scale measures a real trait that exhibits the same consistent transitive behavior across all possible combinations of natural materials, and
(2) every natural material with a rating on the scale is correctly rated.
It's relatively easy to establish that the set of standard examplars for the integer ratings consistently show the relative properties the scale is supposed to measure.
Of course, it trivial to then verify the same is true relative to the examplars for any other material with an established rating, or to establish (within the bounds of the ceiling/floor integers) the rating of any material for which one doesn't have a measure and confirm consistency against examplars and any manageable sample of other rated materials.
You confuse your actual collection of knowledge, facts, and conceptual understanding from actual thinking. Actual thinking is hard, confusing, slow, and infinitely more painful.
Your ability to know that the Earth is round is based on facts and knowledge acquired, not thinking from first principle.
The ancient did all the hard work, we just co-opted it.
> Your ability to know that the Earth is round is based on facts and knowledge acquired, not thinking from first principle. The ancient did all the hard work, we just co-opted it.
That's simply made up. There are two examples in my comment. They are not from long dead ancient squabbling scientists of natural philosophy but from my own experience of setting experiments to prove empirically whether the Earth is round or flat.
> we all ought to acknowledge that much of our knowledge of the world essentially relied on faith
Maybe for many people, but this is not a given. I obviously don't have deep knowledge of every discipline, but with an engineering undergraduate degree (20 years ago) I feel like I have strong tools to understand the world around me down to first principles, question what I'm told and situate it within the axioms I firmly believe, and in general apply the scientific method. There is almost nothing they feels like "magic" to me, even if I'm not a specialist. I think it's a question of critical thinking, understanding a bit about the philosophy of science (not the current religious version) and thinking about cause and effect.
I'm prepared to accept we're all living within a simulation, or in some reality constructed by a diety, or some other currently un-testable unknowable thing, but in the world as we perceive it, there is a lot of order that can be understood in general, without having to be a specialist and without requiring faith
But with that thinking society will never progress. If we take everything in the past on faith, then we will stay stuck in those ideas of the past. New ideas often come out of challenging the old ones, especially when that change is revolutionary.
Absolutely some things you may need to take on faith; but you shouldn't base your world view on only taking people in authority's views on faith. The more you use the scientific method, the more you know when you need to use it or not.
But with that thinking society will never progress. If we take everything in the past on faith, then we will stay stuck in those ideas of the past. New ideas often come out of challenging the old ones, especially when that change is revolutionary.
It's not a matter of mindset but the sheer impracticality. As individual, we can only question small parts of humanity's knowledge base.
All the article is suggesting is that we do more than just have people focus on memorizing facts. It isn't asking _everyone_ to understand and prove _everything_. Just that there is more focus on having people understand the why, not just the what.
As a European, the idea that there is such a thing as western education sounds completely foreign and absurd. Based on my personal experience I can see that education systems vary quite a lot from region to region within a country, and even more between states and countries themselves. There is no such thing as a unified western education system (not considering universities here), that sounds like an over broad concept without real meaning that can be used a boogey man for criticism.
Generally speaking when I see “western whatever”, it seems to be a lazy way to express something about the United States, without naming the country.
My high school physics teacher didn't tell us the kinematics equations. He had us perform experiments to find them ourselves. I learned more about science in one week than I had in all the years up to that point.
(We were also allowed to smoke on campus. Those were the days!)
I think Flat Earthers and Pastafarians both provide an excellent service to society: they demonstrate many persons' inability to argue from agreed-upon premises to a widely held belief. I.e., they demonstrate that many of our emperors have no clothes. Unfortunately I'm not seeing this triggering the major educational rethink that I think it warrants.
I could be remembering wrong, but I thought part of their early schtick was to provide evidence for His Great Noodliness using chains of logic similar to what some Christians used in public debates.
Note: I'm not saying that the benefit of Pastafarianism was that it refuted Christianity. Rather, I'm saying that it exposed the weaknesses of some arguments being used to promote Christianity. I think serious Christian apologists would agree that bad arguments for Christianity should be discarded.
If we taught the story of Eratosthenes[0] and his method of measuring / calculating the circumference of the earth, I imagine that would go a long way toward making it “real.” I never heard of him in school. I learned of him as an adult who was already interested in learning about history.
I generally agree with you, but also recognize that most people would probably be better served accepting consensus - even if I’d rather everyone be capable of critical thinking and reason/rationality.
The thing that's interesting about "flat earthers" to me is that they largely do not exist. I've never met one or even know anyone who has met one, but the level of discussion about them is insane. It's blown way out or proportion to the actual number of actual flat earthers (you gotta exclude all the ones that are just doing it for debate and to make stupid videos online).
Ultimately, there's really no flat earthers at any meaningful level.
I’ve never met or even known anyone who has met anyone (as far as I know) who has died of COVID or even been hospitalized from it. Would you suggest I should conclude that there have been no COVID deaths or hospitalizations at any meaningful level?
Just out of curiosity, where do you live?
I live in Italy and four friends of my parents died of COVID, and I met all of them. My parents are in their eighties.
Washington state in the US, which is near the bottom of US states in COVID deaths per capita (133.9 per 100k). Here's a graph [1]. In EU terms, we'd be right between the Netherlands (124.1 per 100k) and Germany (139.3 per 100k) on deaths.
Within most states in the US COVID rates (cases, hospitalizations, and deaths) vary quite a bit from county to county. My particular county has had 98.0 deaths per 100k, which would put us between Israel (90.7 per 100k) and Turkey (102.1 per 100k).
I'm old enough to not have older living relatives (my parents were fairly old when I was born) so that greatly cuts down on the number of living older people I've met leaving probably just former older coworkers that I'm not in contact with and whose deaths I'd probably not hear about.
My current company went full work from home a couple of years before COVID, and I think that everyone who works there is the type whose hobbies and other personal interests are mostly things done at home except for one guy, so it was pretty easy for most of us to largely avoid other people during the phase of the pandemic when vaccines were not available. There is one person who is into outdoors activities like hiking and climbing and camping, but I believe when he does those usually the only other people who are around are his family members.
Most ex-coworkers I'm still friends with would have taken good precautions, and they live and work in areas where the region as a whole took good precautions. I do have one ex-coworker friend who lived in a high COVID/minimal precaution state, and then moved to an even higher COVID/minimal precaution state, but he's in a city and county that takes it more seriously, and was eligible for vaccination early, so he's been fine.
My friends who aren't coworkers or ex-coworkers are mostly people I met in college. They almost all have an excellent understanding of science (the college was Caltech) and will have taking appropriate anti-pandemic measures.
Putting it all together, the result is that I don't know of any friends or acquaintances that had COVID, and if any of their friends did it wasn't a serious enough case for them to mention it to me.
I have had a couple people who came to my house to install or repair things who told me that they had had COVID.
Every time someone has purported to find and interview one, it seems to me their really just trolling everyone. There was a seemingly genuine AMA on reddit of one and he said he really enjoyed arguing with people at parties, but he didn't really believe it.
He was clearly trolling the media. Honestly, some of the sports media are so bad that I don't really blame sports figures from trolling them. It was done in usual Kyrie style, though.
Listened to [1]. Never heard that one, but, to me, that seals the deal that he's trolling. The fact that he wouldn't answer the question "are you trolling?" is the important part, IMO.
I don't see how it seals the deal. If you say something you believe in order to stir up trouble, is that trolling? What about something you half believe, or that you're unsure about, but claim you're sure about?
It seems to me he's unsure whether the earth is round, and unsure about the definition of trolling, and thus doesn't know how to answer. He basically goes along with the interviewer because the interviewer is friendly and charismatic. He sort of wants to answer no, but doesn't want to make his friendly interviewer upset. The interviewer is trying to lead him to say yes, and he navigates it by avoiding the question.
What seals the deal for me is even in his last interview, where he seems genuinely sorry for what he said, he still doesn't say anything along the lines of "it's obviously round, I was just joking", because he doesn't want to say something that goes against his beliefs. Instead he says that if you have those beliefs you shouldn't say them publicly.
I hear you. Look, this is a guessing game. We're trying to figure out what's in the mind of Kyrie.
I will say I think the statement "that goes against his beliefs" is a weird thing to say (not you, him) when we're talking about whether the earth is round. It's not a religion it's science. Science that was settled more than a thousand years ago.
I think Kyrie puts this in terms of "beliefs" so he can push back on people that challenge him. "What, you're attacking my beliefs now??"
We have spent waaaaay too long talk about that fool. Peace.
Did he say it was a joke? He said he said it to get a reaction.[1] People say true things all the time to get a reaction.
Let's look at the timeline[2]:
2017-02-16: He says he believes the Earth is flat.[3]
2017-02-17: He doubles down on it.[3]
2017-09-25: He says he said it to get a reaction. He never uses the word joking. He says he just wants to have an open conversation. "At the end of the day, you're gunna feel and believe what you want to feel, but don't knock my life over it."[1]
2018-06-08: He says he doesn't know whether the earth is round or flat. "I haven’t convinced myself all the way like everything that has been given to us is fake. No. But you also know that a lot of history has been distorted over time."[4]
2018-10-01: He apologizes for saying the earth is flat. He doesn't say he doesn't believe it, just that he's sorry for saying it. He was into conspiracies and went down the rabbit hole and wanted to share it with everyone. But how he thinks "Don't come out and say that stuff, that's for intimate conversations."[5]
He also promoted conspiracies about famous assassinations.[3]
I was part of the Flat Earthers' group in my previous job and used to participate in Flat Earth internet forums.
99.99% of Flat Earthers are internet trolls that succeeded in creating a moral panic similar to Momo or the Blue Whale Challenge. The rest are legitimately insane people that don't normally participate in society.
The thing that worries me about society is the amount of people that believe Flat Earthers are real.
I'm related to one. The whole reason he got into it is the YouTube algorithm recommended him some videos on the subject one day.
He's in that group of people who have been fleeing the tradition platforms[1] that you and I probably frequent because flat earth views tend to overlap with other extreme far-right viewpoints. I bet that's probably why we don't see them around as much.
I must have gone to a pretty great school. We did experiments to prove the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell and we spent an entire 2.5 hour chemistry class on deriving avagrado's number and proving it was correct.
And this was public school in LA county in the 90s.
I see a lot of posts about "I'll bet you never saw/did/learned this in high school!" and almost every time the answer is, "yeah, actually I did". Like we were taught that Colombus massacred the locals, and we were taught that Native American's were treated poorly by European settlers.
So I guess I should be thanking my teachers for doing it right.
I grew up in West Virginia, and I can guarantee that virtually none of my teachers could explain how to derive most of what we were taught from first principles. There were a few very bright stars in my list of teachers, but most were really phoning it in and didn't understand well enough to teach anyone aside from reciting from the teacher's edition of the book.
In my experience (Canadian public school 20 years ago), schools _try_ to teach the scientific method, but I think the effectiveness is highly dependent on the school and teacher.
I did countless science labs throughout school, and they all followed the scientific method: We were given a question, formed a hypothesis, performed experiments, analyzed the results and evaluated the correctness of our hypothesis. But this was never really described as the scientific method, or presented as some general framework you could apply to things in your life. It was just the series of steps you had to follow in science labs.
Now, some kids might be able to bridge the gap between this process and the facts they read in textbooks. When you're presented some fact in biology class, it's because people have followed that same process iteratively to reach that conclusion. But in my experience, bridging that gap was left up to the student. Some kids figured it out, but I'd wager that most didn't.
NJ, high school in the 00's. When we had physics class, the schedule was set up so that once every few days, instead of going to gym class we'd have a double-length physics class for doing experiments. And this was for the normal physics class, not just AP physics. I don't know if they've expanded that lab day to cover other science classes. I think it would have been useful to have that extra time for the year that we did chemistry.
Also have felt the same about those "things they don't teach you" posts. I may have done terribly in history because I suck with remembering names and dates, but I still can say for sure that we were not given a version of US history that made it all look perfect.
I can only give my, "anecdotal", experience with my daughter and her friends that she studies with, who are currently in high school (also here in LA). The emphasis is 100% on memorizing things for the test. There are definitely no labs or experiments, cause Covid. If I asked any of them something deeper, like what were the causes of WW1, no one would be able to explain anything beyond the assassination in Serbia.
Basically everyone who has ever heard 'you never learned in school that Columbus massacred the natives', did learn it in school. The purpose of this isn't to teach you what you didn't know, but to teach you to sneer at the upbringing of the people who still don't.
I’m impressed that you had X-ray diffraction equipment in your high school chemistry lab.
If not, then I’m pretty sure you were making some circular assumptions. The number was a purely theoretical unknown quantity to Avogadro himself, based only on the assumption that a fixed volume of gas should contain the same number of ‘molecules’ regardless of its composition.
Oh and then there’s history. Wow, you honestly believe that just because you were taught the trendy woke parts of history that you got the whole story. I’ll pick an innocuous example. How much do you know about the Salem witch trials, and how much of that was taught from primary source evidence?
It goes beyond a lack of scientific knowledge. To be a flat Earther, you also need to believe there is a vast conspiracy to cover up the fact that the Earth is flat. NASA and other countries' space agencies, astronauts, pilots, astrophysicists, geologists, meteorologists, and anyone whose job requires taking into consideration the spherical nature of the Earth (so: GPS systems engineers, flight guidance software programmers, ballistic weapons systems engineers and operators, and I'm sure many more). They're all in on it for... some reason? They somehow stand to gain from tricking the sheeple into believing the Earth is a globe? And none of these conspirators have defected and blown the whole thing wide open?
It's not like there is roughly equally compelling evidence on both sides and these people just lack the mental tools to determine what is right. People become flat Earthers for the same reasons I believe people fall for many conspiracy theories: it's nice to feel special because you see the truth everyone else is blind to, and it's exciting to think there is a big conspiracy happening for who knows what end.
I used to be scared by the proliferation of conspiracy theories.
I was scared by the chaos and uncertainty, and the by the potentially grim political consequences.
These days I tend to view all this as a relatively painful transitory state, people are inquiring and making mistakes, but we're collectively learning.
Access to information is power, we've been like a child with powerful new toys, but humanity is growing up, in the grand scheme of things it happens quickly.
Generations before us have been much crazier and gullible than we are.
The only problem I see at the moment is the over-reaction of the so-called elite, they are a bit too scared and they are making mistakes that will undermine their credibility and power in the mid and long term.
The elephant in the room people don't want to talk about is declining trust in powerful institutions, whether official or unofficial.
It's easy and very middle class to just say "oh these dumb people believe dumb things" and much harder and less comfortable to consider there's a growing issue with trust and - ultimately - legitimacy.
Not sure why "middle class" got slipped in there as a derisive comment, there's nothing wrong with being a member of the middle class, and certainly nothing intellectually deficient.
It may seem pedantic to call out, but I really don't want to live in a world where "middle class" gets thrown around as this synonym for "unexamined" or "incorrect".
I didn't have health insurance for a long time. I had it growing up through my parents, but there's always this weird sense of "fix yourself, don't waste resources". It may have been a holdout from the scarcity of services my parents grew up with in rural Mexico and Central America.
I got hit with a really bad chronic disease that I've been dealing with for over a decade. It manifests in so many weird, seemingly unrelated ways because it's systemic. As I traversed the world of professional medical treatment, I initially felt the rapture of attention. "Oh my God, doctors are like magic. They are literally just focused on making me feel better!"
As I continued, and initial treatments lost efficacy or side effects became intolerable, my hope became overwhelmed with a feeling of resignation. I was thoroughly convinced that doctors can fix things, and that is the signal everything and everyone in society communicates. "But why am I still fucked up? Why am I on treatment #7? Why am I on procedure #3? Why am I out thousands of dollars and seemingly in the same spot I was when I started all of this?"
I gave up. I stopped going to doctors. I stopped looking to them for answers. In the middle of this year's long resignation, I happened to hear an interview on NPR with a doctor. She said, "I think doctors really need to be more open with the fact that there's things we can't fix. There's things we don't know. Trust disintegrates when people approach us expecting miracles, and we fail to temper those expectations. It's hard to tell someone, 'I am an expert at X but I have no idea how to fix X." That was revelatory to me.
I felt anger when doctors would prescribe me Tylenol or antibiotics or off-label depression medicine. "How the fuck are antibiotics going to fix this?!" I realized that those reactions were because I'm the kind of person that needs to know the chain of logic that leads to a conclusion. I would be so much more amenable to unintuitive treatments if the doctors had taken a second to tell me, "JAMA concluded that a combination of acetaminophen and ibuprofen are as effective as tramadol. In addition, I'm going to prescribe you these OTC's because you're young and you have a high risk of opiate abuse." Oh, that is such sound logic that I'm 100% on board with following your orders.
Since I realized that, I now know what to ask and what to research when being treated. I know what my brain needs to be convinced. I know my mind's extreme hesitance to take information on faith. I gained more compassion for conspiracy theorists and radical subjectivists. Yeah, they filled their brain with bullshit from Facebook, but maybe the authority figures they relied on failed to recognize the frames from which they operate.
I don't know if reading about my experience helps anyone. Ultimately, I realized that "be your own advocate" is a tremendously powerful way to operate. For the most part, authority figures and elites aren't trying to bullshit us into complacency. They have to juggle efficiency and effectiveness, and sometimes our individual pecadillos get lost in the mix. The things societies have achieved are because individuals joined in collective efforts, and flat-out ignoring or rejecting that momentum can lead to unnecessary strife and suffering for us individually.
If you're on HN, you're probably super smart. Try to decode what your brain needs. If your conclusions seem to be in contradiction to the world's signals, maybe slow down and entertain ways of convincing yourself of what the signals are telling you. Your mind is powerful, it can hold contradictory facts. Trust in that.
Most doctors don’t know any of that. They’re just gatekeepers between you and the recommended treatments given the symptoms that they feel like writing down for you.
What were really talking about is epistemology – how do we know what we know.
What the author is saying is that much of what we call science are actually facts that we take on faith.
Middle school science are experiments we can all confirm, like observing protazoa under a microscope, or basic chemistry experiments.
College (and beyond) science delves into things that we have to trust others to perform on our behalf.
90% of western understanding of cosmology, anthropology, physics, molecular biology, etc all rely on us taking others’ observations on faith alone. And many are merely models or theories with no modern observation.
Moreover, the researchers who are making observations, are themselves using complicated apparatus designed by another person, like an electron microscope. The researchers are putting faith that the apparatus is producing an accurate & informative signal.
Your ability to observe and understand the world requires a lot of faith in that system.
Just remember that the entire system is built upon people, who have biases and are vulnerable to groupthink. There have been misunderstandings in the past, which are glamorously called “scientific revolutions”. Even small-scale misunderstandings should remind people to remain intellectually vigilant.
I was listening to a podcast that made a really good point about the varying reliability of different sciences.
In psychology, for example, a theory might have been validated in only a small experiment and fails when replicated.
Meanwhile, something like Maxwell's Laws of electromagnetism are replicated trillions of times a day. Every time your cell phone or wifi works correctly, that is another replication indicating that Maxwell's equations were correct.
When the science becomes engineering and we can build functioning things based on the theories, that is a good indication that they are correct.
Maybe you didn't personally verify that the Earth is round, but the people who built the GPS system used that fact. If the Earth were flat, the GPS wouldn't work. So far, no flat-earthers have built a functioning GPS based on the Earth being flat.
> What the author is saying is that much of what we call science are actually facts that we take on faith
This is true from a practical sense in that most people don't validate scientific assumptions that are widely accepted for themselves. But the reason why we are able to reliably take them on faith is the interesting part to me.
Peer review and the scientific method allow for incentive to "prove each other wrong" as well as to have the ability to replicate (or try to) the results for yourself. When I ask my Catholic friend why he believes the Christian God is real, and he says his evidence is that he feels the holy spirit. I have no way to disprove that and no way to replicate or prove that evidence. Therefore it's not really a reliable way to have faith in that fact.
It's not faith, it's trust, the difference being that trust can be broken and must be earned, faith relies on absolute adherence.
You require zero faith to trust in the scientific community, because you can "spot check" what you learn at any point, if you decide you want to. It takes a lot less effort than you may initially think, to independently verify certain aspects of even complex scientific advancement.
Consider even something as simple as ibuprofen; you're "spot checking" modern medicine when you take it and verify it reduces your fever or lowers your pain.
Or when you make a phone call with your cell phone. You're "spot checking" a whole host of physics just be reliably receiving and sending signals from your cell phone; if any of the theory were wrong, your phone would not work. That's not faith, that's trust, because you have direct evidence of accuracy in what you've been told. It's probably not even worth getting into how much you're "spot checking" science by simply opening up Google Maps and seeing how accurately it determines where you are!
I must repeat; zero percent of western understanding of hard or soft sciences require faith of any kind to be useful.
Naturally we're overindexing on telecom, given the HN audience – where we have practical applications of advanced physics.
But it's less concrete with other "sciences" like evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics. Even cosmology & theoretical physics is taken more on faith than trust. What observations of the multiverse or string theory can we build our trust on?
And medicine , molecular biology have also had mixed results, to the point that many beliefs were taken on faith (e.g. dietary vs blood cholesterol)
My point is don't lump all the "sciences" together in one lot of "the science"– there's a spectrum of observability and corroboration depending on the field.
No beliefs in science must be taken on faith. Some people do out of convenience perhaps, but they don't need to do, and if they decide not to, the path to corroboration is open to them.
The technology we have works. It's developed from R&D that's based on main-stream science. How do I know? The companies that are making it recruit from colleges that teach such science. It's round-about, but that's evidence for me.
Here is a documentary Johnny Harris made (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwJzsE8CvzQ). In the documentary, he concluded (start at 14:55) that "The Flat Earth movement is not totally about the shape of the Earth ... What it does has to do with is been skeptical of big institutions that are probably watching you, that are probably controlling your life, that are probably feeding you bad information to retain power..."
Simply put, it's a trust issue, and not a completely groundless one. You can't fix a trust issue with information produced by the very institutions that they don't trust. This is why Mike Hughes build that rocket, he wants to see it for himself instead of "blindly trust" NASA and "big company/governments".
It's not just education I'm afraid. The trust problem must be resolved first somehow.
Indeed, and what I observed is even one step beyond this, to conclude that it is something like an Internet-propagated cult-like "movement".
My understanding is that cult leaders teach their followers to be prepared for those trying to convince them of anything outside of the leader's teachings. The leader has carefully planned out all "teachings" such that when someone comes along to convince a member to leave the cult's teachings, the member already has a long series of prepared counter-arguments to every rejection of the teaching. No matter how carefully reasoned the rejections may be, the counter-arguments will defeat them, and, critically, the member will view anyone trying to convince them to leave the cult as a mortal enemy trying to harm them.
Apply this to flat-earth and it is why I believe it to be cult-like.
I really wish that someone who studies cults from a psychology perspective would take a very serious look at the flat-earth communities. My personal experience with someone I knew for over a decade was seeing this person felt that everything I thought I knew was actually a clever deception and that I and everyone else is out of touch with reality, and they are the few that have been able to see through the deception. It can make even casual discussion exceptionally difficult.
When I have gone through YouTube videos "debunking" flat-earthers, what I usually see is the person or group making the video are not respectful of all claims being made, even on a scientific basis. For example, in one video a local group of flat-earthers was contacted for performing an experiment to test their theories. An agreement was made as to how to perform the experiment, and one of the items was the experiment must occur before a specific time in the morning. No surprise, the people who put the experiment together didn't show up to the experiment until several hours after the agreed upon time, invalidating the experiment. Of course, they proceeded to perform the experiment at the invalidated time and post a video disproving flat-earth theory, but the result of this is to embolden the flat-earther, because of course the reason for showing up late is to trick everyone into continuing to believe the deception. Nearly always, the people trying to disprove such theories will use this to show how crazy the flat-earthers are, and not see or publicly admit they have made the problem worse with their actions.
Similar results are achieved with science-based videos put out by science or engineering-based YouTube channels, where the person making the video is, frankly, disrespectful to the flat-earthers. This never helps, but it does get the person making the video more than usual views for probably less than usual effort.
Also, a lot of discussion and content will be in regards to the cult leaders. Part of the attraction to the leaders is they are the lone sane ones fighting against the hordes of crazies. Instead, people should ignore the leaders and focus on the members. You can never get a con-man to admit what they are.
It's a pretty nonsensical article to be honest. Experiments to demonstrate that the earth isn't flat, like Foucault's Pendulum happen in plenty of schools, in fact pretty much every physics, biology or chemistry class does plenty of experiments to show kids rudimentary science.
Flat-Earthers can disprove their own flat earth theory in ten minutes if they wanted to with high school science. The reason they don't is because most of them are insane, have like the author a pathological resistance to justified authority (which has its place in science as well), or just want to prey on gullible people which often is pretty lucrative financially.
have like the author a pathological resistance to justified authority
I'm not seeing anything of the sort in this blog post. He merely says that we're not doing a good job of teaching science. We can have a respect for justified authority, and at the same time do a better job demonstrating the foundations of science, rather than simply expecting students to learn by rote memorization.
>He merely says that we're not doing a good job of teaching science
Not true at all. He equates ordinary high school education with 'indoctrination' (more than once), claims that the education system is responsible for producing conspiracy theories (the main point of the article) and asserts that schools do not teach 'real science'.
As for rote memorization, if you want to see actual rote memorization you need to go through a Russian STEM education for gifted kids and a few math competitions. In our Western systems we almost notoriously try to insert 'critical thinking' at every corner. Ironically enough, the Russian system has always produced excellent scientists while we're increasingly falling down the ladder.
If anything we need more, not less rote memorization so people don't suck at 10th grade math. The defining feature of the conspiracy theorist is that he is both too critical and sucks at thinking. A conspiracy theorist is a person who questions everything without having the capacity to ask the right questions.
I don't think they ever claim the education is responsible for producing conspiracy theories. Just that it produces people who are primed to accept lists of "facts" from an authority figure without much critical thinking behind them. Which doesn't create conspiracy theories, but does create an ideal audience for them.
It jives with my own broader observation that most people who are (forgive generalization) "anti-science" have a different basic definition or perspective - whereas I think of "science, yay!" as a method, a way of thinking, an approach to things ; they think of it as "body of knowledge approved / disseminated by The Man". It can enable a starting from point of agreement - you should be skeptical, you should look for proof or consistency. But just because any given theory or hypothesis may be flawed, I have not personally found a better method to discover things. (I await Poppers and Khuns to attack me with appropriate zeal :-)
> most people who are (forgive generalization) "anti-science" [...] think of it as "body of knowledge approved / disseminated by The Man"
I don't think this is unique to anti-science people, but the majority view. Increasingly, the narrative pushed by pro-science factions (whether media, politicians or even academia), are increasingly eroding and morphing "science as a way of thinking" into "authorities who claim to be scientifically oriented". This can be observed in the premature and vigorous pushes for consensus, and silencing of scientists who disagree with some mainstream narrative, and a lack of openness to debate. So I agree with the post that we do have a crisis. Personally, I'm much more concerned with the quality and integrity of actual science than about those on the fringes who reject it.
Flat Earth is true in the most important sense, which is our direct experience. Although we regularly use technology which relies on the standard scientific understanding of the Earth and Solar System, our everyday experience and all our planning is based on a mental model of a flat earth.
When you go for a walk, you act as if the earth is flat. When you plan a journey, you act as if the earth is flat. It is a valid approximation that works.
I think that some of the rise of Flat Earth belief, is a rebellion against being told very strange, abstract and foreign things that directly contradict our everyday experience.
This is the difference between flat earth and flat Earth. Flat Earther's argue the latter, not the former, though they do use the former as "proof" of the latter.
> The main problem is that most of the facts we are taught in school are all just things that were read in a book or told by an authority figure. We don’t come to them from scientific investigations.
I think it’s also a byproduct of having so much information persisted through generations. We want to “wow” students with the new, exciting information and end up skipping over or glossing over the “trivial” stuff that humans figured out a hundred or more years ago, treating it more like something to be memorized rather than discovered.
And if you don’t memorize it (out of inability, or distrust in authority, etc.) then the conclusions might seem unbelievable.
Imagine just seeing the last 10min of a movie, it would seem pretty confusing and unbelievable in many cases. But if you filmed the movie or edited it, it would probably seem pretty realistic and predictable.
It's tricky. In my school system we ran experiments for the basics. Put balls and blocks down Inclines and dragged things over various surfaces and watched things swing for couple of semesters, then "figured out" and calculated results of experiments, until we got results we already knew we were looking for :-). I'm sure those experiments can be done in a fun and educational manner, I just haven't been privy to that. Maybe they come too late in North American system - they should've been done way way earlier in life. I was a total sucker for science but they fell flat even for me. For those who didn't have inherent interest they were even less engaging.
I do agree that accumulated knowledge through generations is a factor. There's so much of it and we are so far removed from its inception and wonder
I recall one "experiment" I had to do in a science class was literally "do the batteries wear out if you leave a flashlight on in a closet overnight".
Turns out yes, they do. What a surprise.
This was in middle school. What lesson this was supposed to impart was unclear, but the lesson it did impart was "your teacher thinks you're a moron who doesn't know how batteries behave." I think maybe a previous experiment hadn't worked properly and my teacher wanted one that definitely would and came up with this idea from scratch.
It's totally possible to do this stuff well- I remember a pulleys-and-weights module another year that I liked- but when it's bad it's pretty bad.
I think expectations we have of an age are indeed part of it.
I started my education in Eastern Europe, and we got Physics and Biology as dedicated subjects in grade 5, with formulas and proofs etc.
So when we did "inclined slope" in Canada in grade twelve, in what was for many their first true "Physics" class (and this was AP!), it did indeed feel like we were about 6-8 years too late.
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To reminisce and meander seemingly pointlessly on a personal anecdote - I remember reading "Ender's Game" when I was 18, and initially thinking "what BS, this guy doesn't know how to write kids, they all sound like adults!".
And then realized... wait... that's exactly what I WAS thinking when I was a "kid". Kids don't think they think "like kids". We all think as humans. We have plans and schemes and wants and concerns and ponderings no matter the age. So whatever good bad and ugly there may be in Ender's Game specifically and Orson Scott Card generally, I like to remind myself as I raise my own two kids now, that we need to give children WAY more credit for capability of thinking than we sometimes do, on this continent in particular.
Excerpt from a text book in Hyderabad in 2006: “Why is a computer called a number cruncher?” “A computer is called a number cruncher because it crunches numbers with its teeth.” Students were expected to write down exactly that answer. This is a particularly crazy example, but my favourite and by no means isolated.
Rote learning is certainly taken to an extreme in the Indian system, though it has been improving a bit over the past couple of decades.
No; it’s much simpler than that: the Indian education system is immature, which often leads to the blind leading the blind, and such stunningly bad errors as this because the writers of the textbook were incompetent.
I’m fairly confident in this case that the writer deliberately made something up because he had heard this expression (an English expression, you’ll note—Telugu and Hindi probably don’t have a direct equivalent), figured it was relevant, but didn’t know the answer and didn’t bother to investigate, because who cares what the answer is anyway? It’s just computers, no one needs to know about them anyway. That English was probably his third language will probably have contributed a bit (he would probably recognise a similar phrase in Telugu of an object he was familiar with as a metaphor), but it won’t have been the most important factor.
Simplifying and not getting into the cultural aspects which are also significant:
Most of the people in the country are uneducated or poorly educated. You need teachers to teach, but there are nowhere near enough qualified ones. Unskilled teachers can’t teach understanding since they lack it themselves, and so they favour rote learning, and textbooks do too. This builds up a lot of inertia, so that it takes several generations to break out of it rather than just one or two as you might hope.
As usual, the poor are especially badly affected by it, since they’re much less likely to get a competent teacher.
English-medium teaching also comes into the equation as a double-edged sword, having advantages and disadvantages that I won’t get into.
> figured it was relevant, but didn’t know the answer and didn’t bother to investigate, because who cares what the answer is anyway? It’s just computers, no one needs to know about them anyway. That English was probably his third language will probably have contributed a bit (he would probably recognise a similar phrase in Telugu of an object he was familiar with as a metaphor), but it won’t have been the most important factor.
Why not just get textbooks from the US then? If they are going to teach in English anyways, someone already went through the trouble of writing those.
Importing textbooks or syllabi from another country doesn’t work well, because there’s a lot of culture that goes into such things, far more than you probably realise, and Indian culture is very different from such as British, Australian, Canadian and American. For some subjects it will work better than others, but it’s a total non-starter as a general strategy even from a technical aspect, quite apart from the politics that would render it quite untenable (especially with India’s nationalism and comparatively recent independence from the British).
Even so, there are some places where foreign culture has unduly influenced the textbooks; for example, the Class III and IV Social Studies textbooks go over the seasons, and teach as fact the four season model with snow and all, which is only suitable for temperate or subarctic climates (and doesn’t always have snow); it’s wildly inappropriate in Hyderabad and India at large, which have a radically different, monsoony sequence, reckoned in 3, 4 or 6 seasons. And none of the kids have ever seen snow, Hyderabad’s record low being 6°C.
I would also note that getting incompetent teachers only capable of rote-based teaching to use syllabi or textbooks designed for understanding-based teaching will be a disaster.
I was educated in the 1970s. My physics, chemistry and biology classes didn't verify every single thing that's taught but we did do experiments that verified directly quite a bit of it (including ordinary and AP classes). Has this changed? I can google that AP biology still does labs.
Agreed. Most decent teachers in school incorporate some experimentation or explanation of "How do we know that...?" They often discuss who is crediting with a discovery, with an explain how the person made the discovery. But unless you delve deep into a particular field, the amount of facts students need to learn will far outweigh the ability to explain how we came to learn each and every fact.
Since my school days I always thought Theory of Knowledge was the most important and underrated class. That's where you talk about the scientific method and how we discover facts. Somehow it was only worth a tiny portion of the international baccalaureate.
Basically this essay is correct. Science is taught the wrong way. It should all be a mix of history (of thought) and experiments that guided that thinking. Something like that Bill Bryson book, a brief history of everything. Instead of telling kids the end result, tell them how we got there. Basically, follow the method that you say you use. If you understand science, you know the end result is tentative anyway.
Speaking of everything, there's probably too much content as well. Too many insignificant details that people have to cram, and that they'll never need to know, and if they do, it won't take them long to find. People need to know the large movements, not lots of specific reactions and equations.
The content is also missing a rather important ingredient: what are the open questions in each field? Why turbulence? Teaching kids that we don't know everything is an antidote to science denial, however strange that may sound. The objection people have to science is often that it's arrogant.
It’s actually ironic but the author claims the problem is that we don’t teach science, when in reality their complaint is that we don’t teach the history of science. They just don’t seem to realize it.
And they are probably right. We should maybe teach less science/math concepts, and spend more time discussing how those concepts were created. What were the motivations of the people who came up with these concepts. How a certain individual came up with 1 concept and that was refined by another, etc to the point we got what we have today.
The true problem is that we don’t have enough social science about science/math.
"...
This is why I think scientists should take flat earthers’ philosophical problem seriously. It’s a problem that any scientifically advanced society must address. It is not possible for each and every one of us to redo all experiments in the history of science. It therefore becomes increasingly important that scientists provide evidence for how science works, so that people who cannot follow the research itself can instead rely on evidence that the system produces correct and useful descriptions of nature. "
i have a different take. i'm very glad flat earthers exist. in general i would hope the population of people who believe an idea be proportional to the probability of its truth. so even the wildest ideas should have some modicum of support. consider a world without this. i would imagine it would necessarily have to be thought-policed. i believe this is how we should frame this discussion.
what i think is the issue is that we have a broadcasting machine (social media, news, etc) that works on sensationalism. so you are always hearing about fringe ideas and given no signaling to the size of the population that supports it.
The one thing I don't get about Flat Earthers is who benefits from promoting a globe? I haven't see a conspiracy theory that didn't have someone benefiting from the conspiracy. Who exactly benefits / profits off people believing in a globe instead of a flatland? The motivation escapes me.
I am not a flat earther. I think the strongest answer I can give for a directly, logically related possible beneficiary is those who espouse a worldview dominated by impersonal forces. They benefit from the earth being verifiably a globoid because a celestial body being in that particular shape is quite simply explainable by gravity. If the earth were verified as shaped like a flat plane floating in space, or a cube, or some other shape with very large flat surfaces its formation would be far less explainable by impersonal, natural forces.
A creator of the earth would be a foregone conclusion and atheism would be an extremely fringe position. They'd be the ones clinging to theories like "The surface is curved because gravity keeps bending our surface back on itself... But, iron asteroids impact the earth from beneath, attracted to go up and into the inner planar ridge along the lines of the great divided magnetic ring field of our fractured south pole, and the energy from these impacts keep the earth from smoothing out into a sphere! But as asteroid impacts begin to decline, it will close into a sphere shape one day, and when it is you'll all be sorry!".
That's not fair. You are taking a perfectly innocent -albeit stupid belief and tying it with an entirely unrelated reprehensible one. This is a poor method of shutting down a conversation because a)it's intellectually dishonest and b)is a sweeping generalisation.
I'm seeing a lot of it and i think it's terrible and has disastrous results. Instead of settling a debate, it ends up alienating and dividing people.
Now, i'm sure you didn't mean to do that and it was just a passing remark with no particular intent. But i feel it's a broader issue which ties in with the subject being discussed.
YouTube started recommending me Flat Earth videos a few years ago, and while it's a broad camp there's certainly plenty of religiously-driven antisemiticism there: references to "JewTube" deleting videos to hide the truth (as opposed to the more likely reason:it was 95% material copyrighted by others)
Maybe instead of dismissing it as ridiculous, you should do some research into who exactly many of these folks think are perpetuating the lies about the earth being a globe. Far too often, people who are more ignorant of the actual beliefs these conspiracy theorists spout give them the benefit of the doubt and paint them as harmless.
From what I can tell from engaging with Flat Earthers, it's actually 50/50 people who reject everything reasonable they've been told, and people who are playing a game.
The game is fun and simple: pretend you believe in the Flat Earth to piss people off. Refute their scientific facts with questioning and amusing statements, like "I never said it wasn't a circle" or "How do you really know Australia exists if you haven't been", etc. You win the game if the other person gets mad and truly believes you believe in the Flat Earth. You lose if either they don't believe that you believe this, i.e. if you've given it away with your facial expressions, or if they manage to actually present convincing evidence (e.g. like Carl Sagan's sundial shadows) that cannot be refuted.
I have conversed with both kinds. The latter can be highly amusing people to talk to, the former are legitimately strange and I can't fathom how they come to exist. The linked post may be correct; I think some people simply have the innate urge to reject everything they've been told and to look for a countercultural answer instead, regardless of the subject matter. At least this is a safe direction to channel their madness into.
I distinctly remember playing this Flat Earth game when I was a young teenager, over 20 years ago now. It was great practice for exercising my burgeoning reasoning skills and annoying my friends to no end.
The charm wore off after a short time when I realised that playing private games is not conducive to productive relationships with people.
"...the former are legitimately strange and I can't fathom how they come to exist"
I've come to believe that 10+% of any given population is insane (i.e. the fringe). I find it true almost regardless of what defines the group: professionals, academics, regular folks, ...
I can't fathom how they come to exist. The linked
post may be correct; I think some people simply
have the innate urge to reject everything they've
been told and to look for a countercultural answer
Others take a look at the status quo of our society, and perhaps reasonably, decide that it sucks. Our society has a lot of shortcomings, and has let a lot of people down. So they reject the institutions they view as being responsible for what they consider this poor state of affairs. In other words they are not blindly opposed to the concept of authority; but they have come to the conclusion that the current set of authorities that govern us kind of suck.
I don't think their opinion of society and the institutions that shape it is necessarily wrong, though I most certainly believe that rejecting our accumulated scientific knowledge is most definitely mistake. A true "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" situation.
Also, aside from issues with authority, it's just kind of cool to feel like you have some sort of special and secret knowledge that (most) others lack. A very seductive prospect. Especially if you are lacking in intelligence and/or education and don't get a lot of opportunities to feel that way. After all, we tend to place such people on a pedestal -- folks who figured things out before others and were eventually proven correct. Adopting a fringe theory like Flat Earthism lets people feel they're part of the special/chosen few.
Perhaps they seen lots of lying from their governments and the media mouthpieces and so have developed an ingrained disbelief of authority and the establishment and this pervades to all parts of life.
Just like how all the mainstream media attacked MLK and the government treated him like a domestic terrorist. Now we lionize him.
Flat Earthers aren't the only ones who are good at rationalizing things away, it seems to be a skill that is innate to all humans. And, most seem oblivious to it, which makes conversations like this that much more fun.
People are too quick to laugh at flat earthers. Instead, it's a great opportunity to learn about the world. Anyone who has laughed at them before, have you first entertained the "what if it's true" stance? It's an easy one to entertain and disprove yourself, so it's great for practice. If the earth is flat, what is their model for the planet? Why is that model impossible?
At the very least, it helps you uncover some of your false assumptions of the how the world is by understanding your own model better.
In "Behind the Curve" (Netflix doc about flat earther's) the thing that became very clear is that it's not just about believing the earth is flat for these people, it is about belonging to a community of like minded people all fighting the same good fight.
A sense of community. A sense of purpose. I think that is why they so doggedly stick to their guns. Without sticking to the belief, there is so much to lose (friends, partners, purpose, etc).
I came to think that first comes the unwillingness to accept world as presented by society. The community forms on the basis of this need. It does not matter what element of current consensus gets questioned. Unhappy people go into psychosis sometimes.
I liked that they set out to prove via science that they are correct. They were, of course, stunned to find out that they are wrong. But still, nothing wrong with being skeptical, as long as you are prepared to accept results to the contrary.
Statements like “Schools, as they exist in most Western countries today, do not teach science as such” are wonderfully tautological. Has the author done a study? Are there findings to be shared? What is the definition of “teaching science”? How long is the “now”? What is the “west”? A person understanding the scientific process might ask similar questions, find them not having clear answers and thus not make sweeping statements.
I don't disagree with the authors point, yet I would contend that it's practically impossible for education to happen without indoctrination. Philosophy itself has a heck of a time proving anything is true in the face of radical doubt besides maybe some elementary notions such as that thought exists. Never mind proving anything as complex as the shape of the earth.
Trying to prove to a radically sceptical flat earther that the earth is a specific shape is folly, you will never successfully demonstrate such proof against a sufficiently prepared opponent. You CAN demonstrate that it cannot be proven that the earth is flat, but that's about it. One of the most absurd thing about flat eartherdom is how "round earthers" don't seem to truly understand the limits of their own knowledge but are eager to get into arguments with other people, whereas flat earthers range from those who are equally inept to savvy people playing a prank on those who wrongly consider themselves knowledgeable.
I see the entire phenomena to be a great public lesson on philosophy and science, as well as the futility of imposing your views on other people.
This is where classes that teach the HISTORY of science and how discoveries were made can be so valuable. I was recently reading Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and he does an excellent job of explaining how each discovery led into the next. He also describes how some discoveries just took a long time because either the apparatus to make that discovery didn't exist yet or the right person didn't have the right idea.
As a personal example, in a college "History of Economics" class, the professor described the "Diamond/Water Paradox". Prior to understanding how the intersection of supply and demand could lead to a market price, very smart people were perplexed how diamonds, which were rare but basically useless, were so expensive but water, a critical element to life, was so cheap.
In hindsight, it all seems so obvious but explaining this history of the concept helps add an intuitive understanding of "it's not just what an item does but how available it is that helps define the price".
The diamond water paradox is one of the first concepts learned in an introductory Econ class; hopefully not until a “history” class.
I was an Econ professor in the past and this was quite literally the first thing I spoke about in introductory courses. This is the analogy used to describe what the science of economics is, the study of the allocation of scarce resources.
I was an Economics major and also took AP Economics in high school and there may have been other analogies used but I don't remember hearing the D/W paradox till that history of econ class.
That class was wonderful b/c it taught me a lot of the "first principles" of economics using real stories and examples instead of "here is a supply/demand chart, accept that it's true".
Which brings me back to my original point, methods of teaching that explain HOW we got to the current way of thinking, IMHO, are the best way to teach people. The variety of responses in other threads show that not everyone is taught that way unfortunately. Your point in particular shows that even someone with an Econ background (aka me) may not have gotten this form of instruction.
I mean the difference with flat earth and other sorts of conspiracy theories is that you can directly observe the fact that the Earth is not flat. I’ve been flights, a few on clear days at ~40,000ft and you can definitely make out the curve of the Earth with the naked eye. It doesn’t require any special tools or leaps of logic, you can simply look out the window.
Question: Does anybody actually have a good quality reference point of "This is how I know the earth really is a sphere"? Like, something more direct than indirect (I know you'd need a fairly massive conspiracy, but that's indirect). Previous googling and so forth didn't really yield particularly good results for me.
Foucault's Pendulum is a practical proof to show directly the earth is rotating and spherical. There are thousands of these around the world in museums or universities. Or you could create one with some relatively inexpensive materials.
Have you lived in different latitudes? Not only the stars change (what is not very noticeable nowadays), but the Sun goes through entirely different paths on the sky.
If you care to observe the stars, moving only a couple hundred km on the north-south direction is enough to see the change with bare eyes.
The Earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse. It's always round -- no matter the time of day, etc. -- which is only possible if the earth is a sphere.
PSA on how to prove to yourself the Earth is a.) not flat b.) specifically not a disc with balls circling overhead, easy edition:
1. Watch a sunset. The Sun goes over the horizon (not around in circles overhead).
2. Clouds high in the atmosphere stay lit longer at sunset (and light up earlier at sunrise) than clouds lower in the atmosphere. It'd be the opposite with a "Spotlight sun", which would project a cone of light onto Earth, wider at the base than the top.
3. The Sun's apparent diameter never changes. It can't be a little ball flying around in circles overhead, because it'd get smaller when it's farther away.
4. Watch a lunar eclipse. The shadow of the Earth is curved.
5. If you are in the Northern hemisphere, find Polaris, i.e. the Norh Star. At night, all the stars go counterclockwise around it. Its angle off the horizon is exactly your latitude. Go to the Southern hemisphere. No Polaris, it's over the horizon ffs. But there is a south pole point you can find by using the southern pointers. All the stars go around the south pole...clockwise. [1]
6. Like Polaris, the constellations disappear over the horizon as you move south.
7. Go to the ocean. Watch a ship sail away. It disappears hull first over the horizon. Use binoculars. You can see more of the ship if you are higher above the water. The ocean is curved.
8. Watch the Sun for a year. It moves through the Zodiac (i.e. against the background stars). That's because the Earth orbits the Sun, duh.
9. Take a flight from South America to South Africa. Take a stopwatch if you don't believe clocks are real. Planes would have to be supersonic to fly the greatly exaggerated distance of a disk Earth.
10. Look through a frickin telescope. Literally every planet and star and moon we see is round. Why would the Earth be different?
11. Swing a pendulum for 24 hours. It won't just rotate back and forth. Foucault showed a free-swinging pendulum will rotate in a circle because of the rotation of the Earth. You can even compute your latitude from the speed at which it processes.
Hypothesis for why there could be an actual /defense/ for the existence and even utility of flat earthers and similar groups: They act as a continual, low-grade chaos assault on scientific institutions, thus encouraging the institutions to maintain resiliency and not stagnate. The more you simply shut these groups down without tackling their actual arguments, the less benefit you'll receive, and the more likely it is to take on the magnitude of a true threat. On the other hand, too much of this would lead to significant wasted effort.
The question I always come back to is, “what do I expect to be true”? If I believe that the earth is a spheroid, then I expect that satellites rely on orbital mechanics. If I learn about orbital mechanics, I expect to find math that describes orbits. If I learn about that math, I expect that it’s based on the geometry of circles and ellipses.
I don’t have to have firsthand knowledge of these things. I can just build a network of expectations based on other things I know. And when something I observe doesn’t match my expectation, I can shake the tree a bit and figure out why. Individual assumptions can always be challenged with experimental evidence, and the knowledge network only becomes more complete as a result.
Every conversation I’ve had with conspiracy theorists suggests that they can’t (or won’t) do this. For them, knowledge is an accumulation of discrete units. Facts need not be built on other facts. Each wild belief is essentially a different Russel’s Teapot: Falsifiability is optional, and contrary evidence is easily waved away as propaganda. Bold predictions don’t need to ever come true, as there are always bolder ones to take their place.
I think it comes down to different goals. Their goals are not to make dispassionate predictions about the world, but to fit the world into a mold that matches their emotional state. And to signal to others that their feelings aren’t just valid, but real— Explained by forces that the rest of the world dismisses as “crazy”.
Projective geometry should allow for homomorphisms to the euclidean plane, see moebius transform. This creates the literal edge case, but then I don't need to take satelites for an analogy to see that. If I had reason to be afraid of falling of the edge, surely I could reason about circumnavigation as well. I really doubt that this is what flat earthers are worried about.
I actually like flat earthers as an exercise in epistemology.
We all know that the earth is not flat, there are countless evidence, and a lot of them easy to try for yourself. And flat earth is not a dangerous idea. The only thing you risk by believing and trying to spread the idea is ridicule. It is the perfect playground for trying "alternative" ideas.
So go look at all the flat earthers arguments and try to take them seriously. Some of them are actually great. There is even one that mirrors general relativity: the earth is a constantly accelerating disk, this is what creates gravity. Of course they are all wrong, but disproving them require actual thinking.
When you have trained yourself on the flat earth, you have completed the tutorial and you can now move on to the real subjects: climate change, vaccines, quack medicine, etc... Here you have actual believers, and they have ideas that can be convincing and dangerous. People die because of quack medicine.
To those who say that flat earthers don’t exist in reality…
There’s a guy who drives around town where my parents live in Arizona with his flat earth position writ large on the side of his pickup truck. He will stop to debate with you even if you’re next to him at a traffic light. [1]
I think flat earthers do exist but the majority of them may not admit it openly if they’re still sufficiently “there” to fear the social ostracization (word?) that might follow.
I agree to some extent with the original article under discussion and I would point interested folks to an interesting video by Sabine Hossenfelder which makes some tangentially similar points. [2]
I would also add that the western school system teaches us to fear being wrong and finally letting go of this can be a liberating and empowering experience. After that it seems to become a little easier to believe the next similarly counterfactual thing that comes along.
Honestly, I don't care if it's flat or not, and I will happily make the argument for it being flat, just to annoy people who can't let others just be wrong.
"cannot be innocent" is an interesting phrase to use, can you define innocence in this context? I think I understand your underlying opinion, but you're not expressing it particularly explicitly.
I don't mean "innocent" in any formal, moral, or legal sense. I just mean that explicitly rejecting reason is an inherently dangerous mental practice, even if the specific case is something small that doesn't have any direct consequences.
One big motivator I've seen for flerfers to hold their belief is a desire to feel significant. Many of these people appear to be frightened by the thought that humans are just a blip compared to the vastness of space and time. It ties in very closely to them wanting to believe that we are so significant to their deity that we were made in its image. These people will probably never be convinced that the Earth isn't flat.
I personally enjoyed that early flat earth momentum.
It forced me to check the working of great science thinkers that came before me. I learned a lot about the earth in general attempting to prove the flat earth trolls wrong.
Its like you are offering a conjecture, a thought experiment where you are forced to ask could this model be possible.
I remember a story about Euler I believe, suggested the thought experiment that the earth was hollow and has a central sun, to explain a interesting observation in the magnetosphere.
You could also draw parallels to programmers, in that we used to have to figure things out the hard way, by experimentation, or by reading the documentation (gasp!), whereas nowadays people just go to StackOverflow for answers.
People aren't used to building their own understanding of things, but instead allow for an excessive amount of outside influence to slowly mold that understanding, without having control over it yourself. I recognize this often in myself, starting to think of a concept or problem, and giving up too soon when facing a complex train of thought and instead resort to trying to search for a solution online, or at least someone who's thought about the problem before. This Sucks™.
We're using our conceptualization skills less and less. I remember a time where you were able (or forced) to ponder a concept for minutes, or hours, or days/weeks (depending on the scope of the problem) since there wasn't an all-knowing web of information, whereas nowadays it's easy to just hit the "I give up" button and find a solution online.
"What does it mean to be indoctrinated in “science” class? Let’s think back to an example that most of us learned growing up. If I asked you, “What is the mitochondria,” you, like me, would probably say “it’s the powerhouse of the cell,” or some similar concept."
"Lies to children". Sir Terry Pratchett's words. That's how education works. You start off with lies and you compound them and compound them until no one even knows what on earth is going on but there is a narrative from A to B. Lucy Worsley calls them "fibs" and I agree.
That's good enough for most people. It's slightly better than Just So stories and ideally avoids people doing something terminal. Sometimes, someone brought up on this nonsense looks really deeply into something and writes a paper on it. You never know, it might fly.
Flat earth? What a complete pile of bollocks. Imagine how gravity would work on a disc. If you have snags with gravity as a concept then I'm mad.
I've been looking for the comment to explain what I see as the most significant factor in flat earth belief, which would be - missing respect for scientific authority.
It's possible to be a flat earther if you don't see how much your day to day life depends on the work of scientists and engineers - regular people who just focus their energy differently to you. But if you care a little about those brainy sorts, and have enough trust for the prominent ones who communicate well such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson, you would come to accept that there are millions of us who depend on the knowledge of the shape of the earth (almost directly) in our day to day life.
It might be the case that given enough bad science teachers and a lack of decent 'nerdy' people in your life, you never gain that respect, and a flat earth becomes a real possibility.
"These people tend to be more suspicious, untrusting, eccentric, needing to feel special, with a tendency to regard the world as an inherently dangerous place," Hart said. "They are also more likely to detect meaningful patterns where they might not exist. People who are reluctant to believe in conspiracy theories tend to have the opposite qualities." - Joshua Hart [1] discussing their research [2] of 1,200 American adults.
I'm trying to understand the author's meaning for this statement: "They are also more likely to detect meaningful patterns where they might not exist."
It sounds like a critique of the persons who detect those patterns. But if/how one could refute that such patterns exist, or are meaningful, seems to hinge on the meaning of that quote.
In a recent season of The Expanse, there was a religious women (sorry, can't remember the character). Someone (perhaps herself) said that "she sees patterns that other's don't". That claim makes sense to me, because it doesn't rely on somehow knowing whether or not the patterns she sees are noteworthy.
I think if you focus on the need to feel special, there is a desire to have 'figured it out' and to be 'smarter than the mainstream'.
From this perspective, these people find 'facts', blow them out of proportion, and construct a wild theory. For example, review all the 'facts' in PizzaGate. [1]
This isn't about people not learning science. The QAnon folks took a lot of really random pieces of data, such as a photo of Obama playing ping pong, and constructed an highly dubious story.
> I think if you focus on the need to feel special, there is a desire to have 'figured it out' and to be 'smarter than the mainstream'.
IIUC you're saying that those traits explain why many conspiracy theorists fall into that camp.
I don't like leaning on ancedata, but I think I've seen persons like that in every ideological camp I've encountered. So I'm a bit skeptical that it's strongly correlated with being a conspiracy theorist.
I think I've seen persons like that in every ideological
camp I've encountered
I'm not the parent poster but yeah, I think the concept of being "in the know" in relation to others is definitely a concept that appeals to nearly everybody.
I mean, who doesn't enjoy that to an extent? Even if it's something innocuous like being "the person within your friends group who knows where all the cool bars in town are."
The allure of being "in the know is certainly not unique to conspiracy theorists, but I think it clearly is a major part of the appeal.
I think I'm effectively a flat earther because I wasn't able to generalize Bostock's "Command Line Cartography" [0]--totally got stuck trying to work out projections for different shapes. I notice that no other comment has brought up the challenges of calculating different projections, does it just come naturally to other people?
It is actually a very natural thing to believe and when all we have are beliefs some people are simply wired to distrust consensus. I think having outliers is a survival strategy as a species, although it usually goes wrong against the individuals.
We just went through the previous four years of this from the highest level, it's obviously not a real belief, just something to "punk the system" where being contrarian is somehow profitable financially, emotionally or mentally to some people.
And it's not really a belief any more than "believing" drinking bleach won't kill you. It's a contrarian denial of obvious facts when again, it's profitable even on just an ego-level to think/say so.
However this post made me think of this which if true, is fascinating:
Most of science and math taught in school is useless to students who doesn’t pursue a STEM career. However we desperately need a percentage of students to peruse a STEM career for society to function. And we don’t know ahead of time who those students will be. So we force all students to try to learn it. The result being a large percentage of students feeling that they are wasting their time and that “science is useless”. Which it is for them.
If schools taught the scientific method universally it would be harder to indoctrinate them with things like social "science" that dont stand up against that kind of thinking.
I don't believe many genuine flat earthers exist, I think 'conspiracies' like the flat earth and the moon landing being a hoax are a massive psyop to make conspiracy theories seem completely insane to the average Joe so that people are less inclined to believe in other conspiracy theories that are a bit more grounded. After all, you don't wanna be lumped in with those crazies that think the Earth is flat, right?
I have to admit I subscribe to this line of thinking, but I also have to admit it is just conspiracy theory advanced classes. However I do believe it is useful to talk about conspiracy theories in a more fine grained way, after all even the most rationale people who flat out renounce them have at least some opinion which do not 100% align with the official narratives.
I haven't met anyone who believes in a flat Earth. I'm also wondering if anyone here has. Or if anyone anywhere has. I wonder if they really exist. My current theory is that the belief is a wildly successful joke which has created a community in which they can all share in. Maybe the flat Earth people are the good ones.
ETA: Which also means I screwed up a great opportunity to continue the joke by posting information on why the world really is flat.
I have met people who work in Silicon Valley who believe in a flat earth. After pressing the issue a bit, no matter what logical argument you throw at them, they can excuse it as "the earth might be curved a little bit, but it's not a sphere" (so no mathematical argument backed by facts they can see is going to persuade them) or "there's a conspiracy so no astronaut/satellite can see/show the true shape of the earth". It's not worth the time to engage someone who holds such a belief in conspiracy nonsense.
Someone who is a flat-earther is probably also someone who isn't concerned about getting a 100% A+ on their homework and tests.
The kids who question the system of schooling are the ones who are doing it appropriately. We don't need to make a 100% A+ incorporate questioning indoctrination, we need to make people not so concerned about getting 100% A+.
It's too bad _Mathematics for the Millions_ [1] isn't used as a text book. It covers the evolution of math throughout history, basically showing how mathematics was derived by the problems being solved.
One request from writers, please avoid mentioning “western world”. It kinda gives impression that you know rest of the “western” world (in many cases you don’t) and that the west is something special.
Be specific, if it is your country, just mention that.
Nothing specific to the author of this but in general. :)
It gives me the opposite impression, the the author is only speaking of the portion of the world they have knowledge of, and don't presume to speak for other areas they don't know about.
He had me at „powerhouse of the cell“. But I also remember mitochondria have been separate organisms once that we basically adopted into our own DNA. Hat’s why mitochondrial DNA is used a lot for determining the evolutionary distance between organisms.
In a previous job, the shuttle driver to our office was a flat Earther and would always be trying to convince the engineers that the Earth was flat. No punchline, just good times.
Flat earthers are no more preposterous than [insert religion], though... so how comes that we can laugh about flat earthers, but non about christians, muslims etc?
The interesting part is, however, that more than 99.99999% of the earth's population answer the question whether the earth is flat or a sphere incorrectly.
The only correct answer is: "Both".
I personally find it kind of ironic that the vast majority of people who think they are on science side and "sphere" is the correct answer are also wrong.
"When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." -- Isaac Asimov
The correct answer isn't "both." "The earth" in the question you're posing refers to the planet as a whole. The planet Earth is not flat as described by flat earthers, but spherical, as demonstrated by science. The earth is not a mathematically perfect sphere, but that isn't an assumption being made in the question. If it were, it would also be assumed that "flat" refers to a perfectly flat plane, which would obviously also make the answer that the earth is also flat incorrect.
You probably mean the earth can appear flat in some locations from the point of view of the observer, which at best is only subjectively true and still doesn't contradict the premise that considering the earth to be spherical is scientifically invalid. You're just playing semantic games in that case, and arguing that ignorance and knowledge are equivalent due to linguistic vagueness. The science is still firmly on the side of "sphere and not flat" when the terms are used in the context commonly understood.
It's amazing the misconceptions that children and adults can form and than maintain, even when a concept is explained to them.
I was once teaching a class about balancing forces, and was using skydivers as an example. I asked them to think about the change in forces on a skydiver when she opens her parachute. Most of them could regurgitate a basic explanation of the changes in forces, but one child chipped in to ask why the skydiver flew upwards? I explained that they continued to fall, but he and several other children all disagreed with me and they had video evidence to prove it as well, showing the skydiver flying upwards from the perspective of their buddy. It took a hastily conducted experiment with small weights and plastic bags to convince them otherwise.
A friend of mine once asked me why it was that when the shadow of the Earth is falling on the moon to give a crescent shape, how is it that we can still see the moon sometimes when the sun is rising, and there can't possibly be a shadow. Again, my explanation was insufficient to persuade him, and so I went home and created a computer 3D model of the solar system, so he could see the changes in the moon from different camera angles.
This is why we used to do "experiments" in science labs. You could easily describe diffusion, but then how do the learners know that it's real and not just another thing they are being told is the truth. Have them slowly dissolve iodine crystals in different temperatures of water, and even though they and you know what the outcome will be, at least they have the proof of their own eyes.
Maybe the pressure on results, lack of time and lack of money is preventing some teachers from spending time conducting experiments with their children, but more need to be done to prevent them from sucking in 'evidence' from YouTube channels about the flat earth, 5G networks causing covid and vaccinations being poisonous. They need proof that their teachers are telling the truth more than 50% of the time, so they can have trust that what else remains is also the truth.
while it's easy to poke fun on flatties, it's uncomforting in what flat earths we mainstreamies tend to believe. Growth to name one. Or Economy. There's a lot of flat earths that glue our day to day life together. Obey. Consume.
yeah, simply put "repeat after me" is no comparison to talking to a learned elder...
Fed up of most of the problems in the west having been preventable had we actually invested in the education and public health systems about 30 years ago and didn't let certain groups become so disenfranchised as to become pointlessly political.
(I understand why schools did, they thought they'd get treated better by a left-wing political parties, but in reality other than platitudes they're not really any better off)
I think the key point the post tries to make is that your average Western education student is primed to memorize and take facts at face value, without interrogation. Overall, besides the assumption that Western education is hardly homogeneous, a point already made by several commenters, this seems somewhat valid but incomplete. It's not as if _all_ flat Earthers come to their belief by accepting it at face value. There's the people from the Netflix doc Beyond the Curve [1] and that guy who's trying to build a rocket [2], so it seems to me that there's at least some evidence that contradicts the original point - there are conspiracy theorists who not only proceed to interrogate their beliefs, but test them in a way that _should_ lead them to the correct conclusion. It's not so much a problem with memorization so much as it's a problem with the interpretation of results - any test that contradicts a flat Earth must be from a mistake. This is a much more subtle problem than the one introduced by the post, this is not just a case of mindless sheep doubting one memorized system and switching to some other memorized system, these are rational people deriving their beliefs in a rational way, but for several different reasons, arriving at the wrong conclusion.
I don't want to type up a massive wall of text, but some other problems I have are:
1. The fact that education isn't occurring in a vacuum, even if "Western education" was constructed to teach all facts by rationally deriving the facts, we can't deny that there's a religious element to Flat Earth, and if you're taught from an early age that the Bible is both true and literal, then they're going to ignore that rational education anyways (I have nothing against religion, but the literal interpretation I was taught at an early age led me to believe that the Earth was only 6000 years old). This is also important because a conspiracy theory does not come from nowhere, there has to be a narrative. Otherwise, there's no reason to doubt what you've been taught. There's no anti-mitochondria conspiracy.
2. There's going to be an element of memorization, if not the conclusion ("the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell") then the observation, and so what happens if they doubt the experiment they've been taught? At _some_ point the student has to have faith in the teacher, and faith in the scientists who came before us. We can't just dismiss all memorization as inferior to frameworks and rationality, there's a need for a distinction to be made here.
3. Reducing belief in conspiracy theories to an inadequacy in education seems to be ignoring the underlying problem of doubt. We can lampshade this and say that teaching people to accept things at face value causes them to accept other things at face value as well, but ultimately there's no system under this framework for explaining _why_ a person may privilege one belief over the other.
I overall agree with the point that education seems to focus too much on memorizing disparate facts that almost feel like trivia at points, but the post seems to assume that providing the tools to interrogate our beliefs will lead us to the right conclusion, but these tools can still be misused and the underlying assumptions under which we apply our rationality are still important. Understanding these underlying assumptions seems far more important to me than trying to pin down a complex issue on a single, equally complex thing as education.
I found it highly amusing how much people care about what other people think, as if the earth is really going to physically change its shape if some people believe it to be another. It's like believing the world is created by a god, or believing the universe isn't expanding, or believing there are finite amount of prime numbers. So what? These beliefs are descriptions, not ideals. They are believing in the earth is flat, not the earth should be flat (oh but I hope so much there's someone believing in the earth is round but we should flatten it). I personally prefer to live in a world where people have absurdly different beliefs on things that won't make a difference in everyday life.
On one hand I agree that variety of thoughts and opinions and ideas make things FUN.
But we live in an interconnected society. The person next to me who thinks vaccines are tools of the devil that will install chip, or who believes climate change doesn't exist and God has promised to never again destroy the earth so we are fine, or the guy who believes homosexuality is a sin, or that earth is flat... They Get the same vote I do and their efforts impact me and others, and the only way I can see forward is education. So we can debate things which are value oriented and subjective but dear Gawd let's at least agree on basic facts :->.
Or to put it differently, to what degree is true heart-felt belief in flat earth a predictor or sign of a belief system axiomatically different than mine - which again is super fun in casual philosophical chat with coffee way, and truly terrifying when they are e.g. in position of authority. To use example you've put forward, people who truly fervently believe ib a literal god can be lovely people on individual basis, but on average are likely to act in ways which terrify me.
To put it another another way - a random person from another country being a flat earther is fascinating. My minister of science being a flat earther is not :-P
I agree with everything you said. I'm under the impression that flat earth does not possess an actual threat. If that's true then there's a difference to people believing vaccines are evil, an idea that also advocates action - to not take vaccine, which is capable of causing actual damage. Or believing in homosexuality is a sin - which advocates disrespecting or trying to convert homosexuals which can make people's lives harder. So curious to know how big of a threat flat earth truly is today.
I'm probably wrong about this but I think Flat-Earthers, if they became influential enough, should want to clandestinely (due to concern of dangerous guards patrolling the world border) colonize Antarctica (with resources provided by all sympathetic to their cause) as a staging ground to find and prove the existence of the ice wall. If thwarted in their search for it, they might conclude that the authorities set up some kind of ionic illusion field to make it seem like it simply isn't there and redirect them to wander the same ice plains forever.
If the Antarctican colony were successful, I think the importance of believing in earth's flatness would be the mark of a true citizen, and for people of faith among them, they would be willing to schismate over highly literalist interpretation of parts of scriptures that suggest imagery of a flat earth. The Ice Wall might be colloquially seen as a legendary gate which will one day be revealed, through which the just citizens of Antarctica will be invited to escape to heaven before the end of the world...
Even then, I still do not think that's really it. Flat earthers are proof that some people will just obstinately believe in complete and utter horseshit. I've seen dozens of flat earth videos. These people do not listen to reason; they didn't reason themselves into the position and you cannot reason them out of it. The flat earthers doing the "experiments" keep coming up with reasons to keep on believing, even when their experiments are so blinkered and janky they show either nothing at all or that they are, in fact, wrong. (I recommend "Behind the Curve" to see some of these people in action.) Some might just get bored and move on to something else, but mark my words, some people are just seriously stupid[1] and will keep right on believing absurd crap to their graves, on faith alone. The universe will keep smacking them in the face with being wrong, but they'll only get angrier. Hopefully they get tired before they get dangerous.
[1] I mean something specific about stupid. Not just wrong, not just ignorant, but actively and self-assuredly wrong, often to their own detriment. Beware stupid people in large numbers.