You totally don't have to be stupid to believe completely insane stuff. Though they can employ logic, brains aren't logical; from what I've read and observed, i

You totally don't have to be stupid to believe completely insane stuff. Though they can employ logic, brains aren't logical; from what I've read and observed, it seems a person's response to new information is a function of how well that information fits into their existing belief structures with modification by their emotional state. I'm not interested enough in the flat earthers to have looked into what keeps them in their beliefs. However, thanks to someone's comment in a cognitive dissonance thread here a few months ago, I do have a deep personal interest in doomsday cults. Turns out people of all backgrounds can believe the craziest shit if they were groomed to believe it from birth, or if believing the crazy shit is easier than believing that the majority of your information intake has been straight lies, or if your entire social network is predicated on believing. The only thing someone being a flat earther tells you is that at some point, their cognitive biases catastrophically failed them. There's a whole world of phenomena that could be the cause.