8 ms·

What it means to believe that “real” trees no longer exist (2016)

65 points by camtarn 10y ago

Retric 10y ago
I think someone is missing the joke, but I can't tell if it's me or not.
- jackmott 10y ago
  I assume that often these theories are first perpetuated by someone who is joking, but then people take it seriously.
  - jdmichal 10y ago
    Kind of like Scientology, except less well funded.
chasing 10y ago
If you really work at it, you can trick yourself into believing damn near anything's true. Sometimes you don't even have to really work at it.
- dwaltrip 10y ago
  As Feynman put it: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool"
InitialLastName 10y ago
Besides the common community, what does this new concept have to do with flat earth? They seem orthogonal. Also, I can set up at least half a dozen different experiments to let me "experience" that the Earth is round. Is Flat Earth Theory just another set of blinders we get to put on if we want?
- simias 10y ago
  As far as I can tell there's a huge overlap between flat earthers and fundamentalist religious beliefs. If you go digging into their resources you'll very often find treatises about "the science of the Bible" and similar things. As such you'll often see the same people arguing for a flat earth, intelligent design, 6000yo earth and similar things. See for instance this video I was just watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LNT3CucL6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LNT3CucL6c It's a video about how NASA supposedly fakes the Mars rover pictures, yet the description starts with "I believe the pope of Rome is Antichrist (Daniel 7:7-27,2Thessalonians 2:1-12,2Peter 2:1-22,1John 2:18-25, Revelation 13:1-9) and Rome 'Mystery Babylon the Great the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth' (Revelation 17:1-18)." This is one of the first resources on the "flat earth society" website: http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/library/books/Is%20the%20Newtonian%20Astronomy%20True%20%28William%20Carpenter%29.pdf http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/library/books/Is%20the%20... I haven't read through it but it features a chapter called "The Bible and science", an other "Moses and geologists" and a third one "science versus christianity". I'm sure this tale of a primeval forest being destroyed by evil beings resonates with people who believe in flood myths and the like. In the end all these conspiracy theories are about rejecting science and the "new world order/illuminatis/freemasons/..." who are the work of the devil trying to corrupt us so that we stray away from god's path, or somesuch.
qntty 10y ago
Big if true
YCode 10y ago
Scientology has clear paths to make money from their nonsense... What's the goal with arch trees/flat earth theory?
- Cthulhu_ 10y ago
  Maybe some of the more influential ones sell books and speak at seminars? I mean the article talks about a video being viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and articles like this will only get them more viewers - which equals money.
- scott_s 10y ago
  I don't think there is a goal. I think it's a relatively organic community made up of loosely connected people who are all susceptible to conspiratorial thinking.
- lutusp 10y ago
  > What's the goal with arch trees/flat earth theory? It's a very efficient fruitcake detector. It's sort of like a pyramid marketing scheme -- the dumbest people naturally float to the top.
- J-dawg 10y ago
  Similar to your point - with some conspiracy theories I get the emotional reasons for believing in them. Global warming denial, 9/11 was done by the government, etc. I get that on an emotional level the reality is pretty hard to handle, so the conspiracy theories are a sort of security blanket. However ridiculous they are, I can see how they are appealing on some level. But what's the emotional advantage of believing in a flat earth? And who is the imagined evil enemy who benefits from making us all think the Earth is a spheroid?
  - SuperGent 10y ago
    To be different. To prove that YOU know something that all the others don't. For some people, this gives them meaning, a group to belong to, and reasons to hate/distrust others.
Luc 10y ago
Hey, that's the 'mountain' from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
- protomyth 10y ago
  On a side note, I highly recommend visiting Devils Tower[1]. It is a pretty place, but a bit out of the way. The perfect stop on one of those long road trips to clear your head. 1) https://www.nps.gov/deto/index.htm https://www.nps.gov/deto/index.htm
  - hprotagonist 10y ago
    and it's only a 5.6!
scarmig 10y ago
The most unbelievable thing of all of this is that I spent an hour watching the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHkiZNT3cyE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHkiZNT3cyE I started taking notes on everything that was wrong, but literally ran out of ink. I advise watching at 1.5x speed.
teilo 10y ago
This is sheer beauty. Once upon a time I would experience anxiety when I ran into this kooky stuff. Now I find it delightful because I have come to realize that is it impossible to have a rational discussion with irrational people, and in any society there will always be a significant population that does not yield to rational thought. While one might argue that such people are detrimental to the mental and intellectual health of a society, I find those claims to be mostly posturing. With some exceptions, these people are mostly harmless. So what to do? Why fret about it? Study the phenomenon and enjoy it.
- crispyambulance 10y ago
  > ... it impossible to have a rational discussion with irrational people ... Not necessarily. Many are able to compartmentalize irrational beliefs into their everyday lives. You can have folks that appear perfectly rational in almost all things and live full professional lives. Yet when they discuss their tar-baby, "the crazy" comes out. I would lump fundamentalist religious people into this category. I think if one is able to introspect hard enough, it is possible for _everyone_ to realize that they're holding irrational beliefs at some level. Whether or not this is harmful depends on the norms of the culture, and to what extent one is willing to act on their beliefs or impose them on others.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    I believe in crazy stuff--like batshit crazy stuff. I can still have a rational discussion, because I severed that part of my personality and crammed it into a tiny, fortified metal box inside my brain. I have found that it is still useful for writing fiction. That is, for writing things that the remainder of myself, and everyone else in the real world around me, can recognize and know to be untrue. Because there is no way that raving lunatic in there could possibly know whether any of the things it shouts out could be true. Could it? It shouldn't really matter that it has such an eye for detail and a knack for explaining things that seem otherwise unexplainable in a rational world. I heartily encourage you to not make any attempt to pry that box open. Don't touch the lock. Mind the warning signs. The crazy is inside the box. The rational is outside it. I should probably stop talking to my crazy so much, but it's so much more entertaining than television. It really is an infinite source of amusement. I mean, the story about Devil's Tower being a fossilized tree stump left over from a previous epoch is just amateur stuff in comparison.
lutusp 10y ago
A quote from the flat-Earthers included in the article: "After watching this video, you will reverse your concept of forests by 360 degrees." At least these people understand their audience's intellectual limitations. For the record, I circumnavigated the world solo in a 31-foot boat (https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/ https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/). From direct empirical evidence, I know the earth is round.
- Neliquat 10y ago
  Reminds me of the ol 'turn 360 degrees and walk away' gambit.
- QuantumGravy 10y ago
  Not a flat-earther myself, but as an amateur topology enthusiast, it does not follow from your experience that the earth is round. Care to join me in a new splinter group? I figure the Cylindrical Earth Society to be the least-radical option, and possibly a common ground for many. /s
  - benji-york 10y ago
    No! Join me in newest splinter of a splinter group: the Toroidal Earth Society.
    - QuantumGravy 10y ago
      I'm skeptical, having heard far more personal anecdotes about circumnavigating the earth as opposed to visiting those so-called "poles" or the "inner ring" as your group hypothesizes. Once you accept the torus, where do you stop? I can mentally map the earth to a genus one torus, absurd as that is, but your splinter group has its own splinters with proponents of genus two, three, and beyond! Where does the madness stop?
- inetknght 10y ago
  That's pretty sweet. I have a mild interest in boating. Would you say that it's a bad idea to mix a software engineer with a boat on the open sea?
ruminasean 10y ago
I have a sketch of a theory that rattles around in my head. I'm fairly sure I'll be pilloried, but what the heck. It starts with a nation founded on faith and religion, of a group of people who are willing to kill and enslave based purely on things they believe but can't prove. They'll try like hell to prove it, they'll search up and down for the slightest hint of something they feel to which they can connect other tiny little other unproven dots to. It doesn't matter if YOU don't think it's true, it's MY religion and I believe it and YOU can't fuck with MY faith. It continues on through a society full of advertisements that scream "the best!" "foolproof!" "most delicious!" night and day, from every corner...first from papers and billboards and then up through radio, tv and the internet. Even when demonstrably untrue and nonsensical, they're allowed to be propagated and repeated. It reaches a modern day where political classes can literally almost say or do or vote what or however they want without fear of any serious reprisal or of the citizens taking half a minute to remember that they said/did/voted the exact opposite 6 months or two years ago. This is true in the US specifically but also in varying proportions throughout the world, and moreso as our model is spread everywhere. So basically I wonder if first we have been misdirected and advertised at and lied to for so long that a sizeable portion of those among us have actually lost sight of what's true reality anymore. Some of my family members I previously thought of as sane and rational have become so unhinged and irrational that if they suddenly came to me and said "the earth is flat and there are no trees" I might flinch for a second but otherwise would not be all that surprised.
- rndmize 10y ago
  You're attaching the issue to the US (or maybe western society), when in fact this issue is inherent to humans as a whole. People are able to create mental connections between things. They are able to see patterns and extrapolate. This is one of the things that separates us from most other species and gives us tremendous capabilities, such as the ability to examine the past for mistakes and plan things out for the future. It also leads to storytelling and culture - ways to rapidly adapt at a societal level rather than a genetic or behavioral one. However, this capability doesn't have to be 100% accurate to work effectively - it only needs to be effective most of the time to provide a significant competitive advantage as far as survival. You can see this in any number of current or past societies, from small tribes to continental civilizations - beliefs and behaviors develop and become standardized/traditional, which are frequently a mix of useful/effective and pointless. A simple example would be prayer - consistently, human societies invent higher powers that they ascribe control of various aspects of the world to and construct rituals around them, and regardless of the lack of evidence, you can find this is pretty much all human societies. The details, of course, vary widely. In short, humans have never had a firm grasp on reality - we've already invented things and filled in the blanks with our own imagination, amped up our importance in the universe, because we're limited in scope as far as what we can interact with and control. Today things are both better and worse than in the past - we have cultural patterns like the scientific method, which ideally gives us more reliable information than most prior constructs; tools that expand our ability to examine the universe around us, giving us a better idea of where we are; consistently better information transfer (spoken word > written word > mass-produced written > analog mass media > digital). But at the same time, these things can be used to spread incorrect information just as much as correct; things can be cherry-picked, ignored, manipulated; logical fallacies abound; and, as ever, people will see the things they want to see to fit their patterns and beliefs, ignoring or deeming irrelevant the pieces that don't fit for them. We know more than ever as a species and society; but individually it is completely beyond anyone's grasp to gain a solid understanding of everything we know simply because there is so much. We're relegated to trusting each other - and unfortunately, people don't choose who they trust based on how accurate those people might be, but on things like social relations, world-view match, and so on.
gmarx 10y ago
I am fascinated by holocaust denial and the people who think the moon landing was faked. Does anyone believe both? Do the people who believe those have any other historic events that they think were made up? Most importantly (too me) would it be possible to start one of these on purpose? If you wanted to, what would be a good candidate? I concluded that the atomic bomb is an excellent choice. I say there never was an atomic bomb. It was propaganda to prevent the US and Soviet Union from engaging in a disastrous WWIII so soon after WWII. And it was very effective but it's time for all the suckers to wake up. I know you've seen the films. Special effects! Hiroshima/Nagasaki? Regular fire bombing that happened to get out of control because of favorable (or unfavorable) winds! Godzilla? Well that's more difficult to explain but I'm sure if we put our heads together we could come up with something. Who's with me?!?!?
- toxican 10y ago
  If you're going to deny undeniable fact, may as well go all the way crazy. I'm in! Let's work on that Godzilla problem though, that's the real hole in our theories.
  - conception 10y ago
    Simple. The director worked with the Japanese and American governments to create a reason why the Japanese Emperor lost that didn't delegitimize the government. Who could fault a surrender after a "superweapon" was used on you?? Genius black ops on the part of the US and Japan! Then they create various movies propping up the idea. Turn Japan into America's R&D division for electronic development so we didn't have to educate Americans and could continue to dumb down the education system and keep the rowdy Americans in check until they were needed for the next war.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    Ha! Get this. It's unassailable. Godzilla... was just an ordinary human in a rubber suit, in a movie studio sound stage where scale models of cities and landscapes had been built. In later years, as film technology improved, the more detailed films of Godzilla were created with a CGI model, with the virtual skeleton and muscle movements derived from filming a human actor in a mo-cap suit. It only looks real because the animators are so skilled, and the actor is so good at mo-cap acting. It is in no way live footage of a real animal. That's right. Godzilla doesn't exist. He never existed. He was always a made-up movie character. I bet you could get literally thousands of people to believe that. With enough gaslighting, I bet you could even get someone whose actual home was actually stepped on and burned by Godzilla to believe that it was due to an earthquake or tsunami or tornado or nuclear reactor meltdown or something equally farfetched.
BEEdwards 10y ago
>Flat earth insists on the primacy of direct experience (look at the horizon, really look, and try to see the curve) against abstract domination. But you can see the curve... Have they never been to the ocean?
- toxican 10y ago
  Yeah, but that's just because our eyes are round!
- chc 10y ago
  I've been to the ocean many times and have never noticed any obvious curvature. If it is visible, I can only imagine it's much easier for somebody who doesn't want to see it to miss it. EDIT: I just Googled and it sounds like the planet's radius is big enough that, within the range our eyes can see, the curve is extremely subtle.
  - wbl 10y ago
    Notice the horizon. On a flat surface you should see until haze. On a clear day on the ocean you see a horizon.
- chadgeidel 10y ago
  I've often wondered why someone who believes the earth is flat can't explain why one couldn't see London from NYC. Presumably we could build a strong enough optical telescope to look at the city. Or is it claimed that there's "too much debris in the air" to prevent this?
nkrisc 10y ago
Flat-Earthers are actually part of a vast CIA conspiracy to distract us from the truth of a spherical Earth. They don't want us to know we can travel the Earth over the poles, where the Earth's magnetic field and radiation causes their mind-tracking technology to fail.
- jshevek 10y ago
  Not spherical, rather spheroid. Oblate spheroid.
  - nkrisc 10y ago
    That's another conspiracy propagated by the Imperfect-Spherists.
    - qbrass 10y ago
      Just wait until you discover it's toroidal, but your perception of space-time makes it's appear spherical.
BugsJustFindMe 10y ago
> I’ve always been mildly obsessed with the flat-earth truth movement, the sprawling network of people utterly convinced that... I can't help but feel a little bad for anyone who believes that flat-earthers are genuine. I've pretty much convinced myself that flat-earth groups are more like speculative fanfiction archives than churches. The people who come up with all of these theories and defenses do it because thinking about these things is fun, not because they believe it. And they feed the perceptions of true belief because that's fun too. And they form these little communities for the same reasons that people writing new fan stories about Harry Potter do, because it's more fun to do it with other people. The author here isn't uncovering some secret truth about the world so much as getting suckered into the drama, feeding it, and providing further joy and incentive to the players. And here I am possibly getting suckered into the author's drama. Maybe the author is just one of the players and doesn't actually believe that they believe.
- comstock 10y ago
  I've met someone who claimed he believed in the flat earth theory. I see no reason to believe he was misleading me. Not massively educated, not really interested in analytical games. I've met people who believed they could communicate with aliens by meditating under pyramids made of steal pipes. I've met people who believed that putting a crystal on a bottle of water will make it stay fresh longer. That they could charge batteries with their mind. Not sure what kind of proof you might want to be sure these people really believe what they say. And I'm not sure how meaningful that statement is. I never thought they were playing the mind of fan-fic games you suggest though. My observations lead me to believe people in general believe some pretty weird things.
- Diederich 10y ago
  Quite a few flat-earthers really do believe it, and they're generally not dummies. I've engaged in open-minded and friendly conversations with flat-earth individuals off and on for quite a few years. It's fascinating stuff; many are pretty chill and willing to chat if you go in with a positive affect. I think if you graphed the total number of people who truly believe the earth is flat compared to the number of people who profess that just for 'troll' purposes, the latter group would be growing rapidly, and the former growing very slowly. Why do I do this? Because the older I get, the more I realize that all of us, everyone, make a lot of choices every day that we think are based on logic and reason, but that are actually based on irrational experience and emotions. I think we tend to back-fill with logic and reason as much as we can. Many people get more things 'right' than others, but what's 'right' is damn hard to know, isn't it? This might seem like a wallow in all kinds of intellectual relativism, but it's really not. We should all strive for logical and rational thought and decision making, yet at the same time realize that we are all still fundamentally driven by forces that are quite the opposite, and that drive is largely invisible to us.
pklausler 10y ago
I've begun using the term "epistemologically disabled" to cover those in the general class of crazy people that includes flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, chemtrailers, climate change deniers (anthropic or not), "Obama is a Kenyan Muslim" republicans, &c. Because seeing this problem as a disability changes my response from contempt into one that's more sympathetic.
ozy 10y ago
Anybody here will to confess they have pushed flat earth, while believing/knowing the earth is round? I am willing to confess I have pushed sharks are smooth: https://twitter.com/bransonreese/status/848746940179382272 https://twitter.com/bransonreese/status/848746940179382272
zeveb 10y ago
What I'm curious about is the population distribution of flat-earthers. I think it's pretty clear that some of them are trolls, having fun with a ludicrous idea; some of them are mentally disturbed (schizophrenics of one sort or another, I suppose), some fraction have exceedingly low IQs, some fraction have high IQs but are exceedingly-poorly educated. But is it really just mostly trolls? That's the only explanation that makes sense. > The particulars differ, but here everyone takes it as a given that a conspiracy reaching from your first schoolteacher to NASA to the metaphysical Beyond has deluded humanity [ed: emphasis mine] Misusing 'humanity' to mean 'mankind' (or, if you must, 'humankind') is one of my pet peeves: humanity is the quality of being humane. Flat earthers don't believe that a conspiracy is deluding the quality of being humane (that phrase doesn't even make sense); they believe that a conspiracy is deluding mankind (or, again, 'humankind'). edit: add closing paren

65 points by camtarn 10y ago

Retric 10y ago

I think someone is missing the joke, but I can't tell if it's me or not.

jackmott 10y ago
I assume that often these theories are first perpetuated by someone who is joking, but then people take it seriously.
- jdmichal 10y ago
  Kind of like Scientology, except less well funded.

chasing 10y ago

If you really work at it, you can trick yourself into believing damn near anything's true. Sometimes you don't even have to really work at it.

dwaltrip 10y ago
As Feynman put it: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool"

InitialLastName 10y ago

Besides the common community, what does this new concept have to do with flat earth? They seem orthogonal. Also, I can set up at least half a dozen different experiments to let me "experience" that the Earth is round. Is Flat Earth Theory just another set of blinders we get to put on if we want?

simias 10y ago
As far as I can tell there's a huge overlap between flat earthers and fundamentalist religious beliefs. If you go digging into their resources you'll very often find treatises about "the science of the Bible" and similar things. As such you'll often see the same people arguing for a flat earth, intelligent design, 6000yo earth and similar things. See for instance this video I was just watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LNT3CucL6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LNT3CucL6c It's a video about how NASA supposedly fakes the Mars rover pictures, yet the description starts with "I believe the pope of Rome is Antichrist (Daniel 7:7-27,2Thessalonians 2:1-12,2Peter 2:1-22,1John 2:18-25, Revelation 13:1-9) and Rome 'Mystery Babylon the Great the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth' (Revelation 17:1-18)." This is one of the first resources on the "flat earth society" website: http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/library/books/Is%20the%20Newtonian%20Astronomy%20True%20%28William%20Carpenter%29.pdf http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/library/books/Is%20the%20... I haven't read through it but it features a chapter called "The Bible and science", an other "Moses and geologists" and a third one "science versus christianity". I'm sure this tale of a primeval forest being destroyed by evil beings resonates with people who believe in flood myths and the like. In the end all these conspiracy theories are about rejecting science and the "new world order/illuminatis/freemasons/..." who are the work of the devil trying to corrupt us so that we stray away from god's path, or somesuch.

qntty 10y ago

Big if true

YCode 10y ago

Scientology has clear paths to make money from their nonsense... What's the goal with arch trees/flat earth theory?

Cthulhu_ 10y ago
Maybe some of the more influential ones sell books and speak at seminars? I mean the article talks about a video being viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and articles like this will only get them more viewers - which equals money.
scott_s 10y ago
I don't think there is a goal. I think it's a relatively organic community made up of loosely connected people who are all susceptible to conspiratorial thinking.
lutusp 10y ago
> What's the goal with arch trees/flat earth theory? It's a very efficient fruitcake detector. It's sort of like a pyramid marketing scheme -- the dumbest people naturally float to the top.
J-dawg 10y ago
Similar to your point - with some conspiracy theories I get the emotional reasons for believing in them. Global warming denial, 9/11 was done by the government, etc. I get that on an emotional level the reality is pretty hard to handle, so the conspiracy theories are a sort of security blanket. However ridiculous they are, I can see how they are appealing on some level. But what's the emotional advantage of believing in a flat earth? And who is the imagined evil enemy who benefits from making us all think the Earth is a spheroid?
- SuperGent 10y ago
  To be different. To prove that YOU know something that all the others don't. For some people, this gives them meaning, a group to belong to, and reasons to hate/distrust others.

Luc 10y ago

Hey, that's the 'mountain' from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

protomyth 10y ago
On a side note, I highly recommend visiting Devils Tower[1]. It is a pretty place, but a bit out of the way. The perfect stop on one of those long road trips to clear your head. 1) https://www.nps.gov/deto/index.htm https://www.nps.gov/deto/index.htm
- hprotagonist 10y ago
  and it's only a 5.6!

scarmig 10y ago

The most unbelievable thing of all of this is that I spent an hour watching the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHkiZNT3cyE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHkiZNT3cyE I started taking notes on everything that was wrong, but literally ran out of ink. I advise watching at 1.5x speed.

teilo 10y ago

This is sheer beauty. Once upon a time I would experience anxiety when I ran into this kooky stuff. Now I find it delightful because I have come to realize that is it impossible to have a rational discussion with irrational people, and in any society there will always be a significant population that does not yield to rational thought. While one might argue that such people are detrimental to the mental and intellectual health of a society, I find those claims to be mostly posturing. With some exceptions, these people are mostly harmless. So what to do? Why fret about it? Study the phenomenon and enjoy it.

crispyambulance 10y ago
> ... it impossible to have a rational discussion with irrational people ... Not necessarily. Many are able to compartmentalize irrational beliefs into their everyday lives. You can have folks that appear perfectly rational in almost all things and live full professional lives. Yet when they discuss their tar-baby, "the crazy" comes out. I would lump fundamentalist religious people into this category. I think if one is able to introspect hard enough, it is possible for _everyone_ to realize that they're holding irrational beliefs at some level. Whether or not this is harmful depends on the norms of the culture, and to what extent one is willing to act on their beliefs or impose them on others.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  I believe in crazy stuff--like batshit crazy stuff. I can still have a rational discussion, because I severed that part of my personality and crammed it into a tiny, fortified metal box inside my brain. I have found that it is still useful for writing fiction. That is, for writing things that the remainder of myself, and everyone else in the real world around me, can recognize and know to be untrue. Because there is no way that raving lunatic in there could possibly know whether any of the things it shouts out could be true. Could it? It shouldn't really matter that it has such an eye for detail and a knack for explaining things that seem otherwise unexplainable in a rational world. I heartily encourage you to not make any attempt to pry that box open. Don't touch the lock. Mind the warning signs. The crazy is inside the box. The rational is outside it. I should probably stop talking to my crazy so much, but it's so much more entertaining than television. It really is an infinite source of amusement. I mean, the story about Devil's Tower being a fossilized tree stump left over from a previous epoch is just amateur stuff in comparison.

lutusp 10y ago

A quote from the flat-Earthers included in the article: "After watching this video, you will reverse your concept of forests by 360 degrees." At least these people understand their audience's intellectual limitations. For the record, I circumnavigated the world solo in a 31-foot boat (https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/ https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/). From direct empirical evidence, I know the earth is round.

Neliquat 10y ago
Reminds me of the ol 'turn 360 degrees and walk away' gambit.
QuantumGravy 10y ago
Not a flat-earther myself, but as an amateur topology enthusiast, it does not follow from your experience that the earth is round. Care to join me in a new splinter group? I figure the Cylindrical Earth Society to be the least-radical option, and possibly a common ground for many. /s
- benji-york 10y ago
  No! Join me in newest splinter of a splinter group: the Toroidal Earth Society.
  - QuantumGravy 10y ago
    I'm skeptical, having heard far more personal anecdotes about circumnavigating the earth as opposed to visiting those so-called "poles" or the "inner ring" as your group hypothesizes. Once you accept the torus, where do you stop? I can mentally map the earth to a genus one torus, absurd as that is, but your splinter group has its own splinters with proponents of genus two, three, and beyond! Where does the madness stop?
inetknght 10y ago
That's pretty sweet. I have a mild interest in boating. Would you say that it's a bad idea to mix a software engineer with a boat on the open sea?

ruminasean 10y ago

I have a sketch of a theory that rattles around in my head. I'm fairly sure I'll be pilloried, but what the heck. It starts with a nation founded on faith and religion, of a group of people who are willing to kill and enslave based purely on things they believe but can't prove. They'll try like hell to prove it, they'll search up and down for the slightest hint of something they feel to which they can connect other tiny little other unproven dots to. It doesn't matter if YOU don't think it's true, it's MY religion and I believe it and YOU can't fuck with MY faith. It continues on through a society full of advertisements that scream "the best!" "foolproof!" "most delicious!" night and day, from every corner...first from papers and billboards and then up through radio, tv and the internet. Even when demonstrably untrue and nonsensical, they're allowed to be propagated and repeated. It reaches a modern day where political classes can literally almost say or do or vote what or however they want without fear of any serious reprisal or of the citizens taking half a minute to remember that they said/did/voted the exact opposite 6 months or two years ago. This is true in the US specifically but also in varying proportions throughout the world, and moreso as our model is spread everywhere. So basically I wonder if first we have been misdirected and advertised at and lied to for so long that a sizeable portion of those among us have actually lost sight of what's true reality anymore. Some of my family members I previously thought of as sane and rational have become so unhinged and irrational that if they suddenly came to me and said "the earth is flat and there are no trees" I might flinch for a second but otherwise would not be all that surprised.

rndmize 10y ago
You're attaching the issue to the US (or maybe western society), when in fact this issue is inherent to humans as a whole. People are able to create mental connections between things. They are able to see patterns and extrapolate. This is one of the things that separates us from most other species and gives us tremendous capabilities, such as the ability to examine the past for mistakes and plan things out for the future. It also leads to storytelling and culture - ways to rapidly adapt at a societal level rather than a genetic or behavioral one. However, this capability doesn't have to be 100% accurate to work effectively - it only needs to be effective most of the time to provide a significant competitive advantage as far as survival. You can see this in any number of current or past societies, from small tribes to continental civilizations - beliefs and behaviors develop and become standardized/traditional, which are frequently a mix of useful/effective and pointless. A simple example would be prayer - consistently, human societies invent higher powers that they ascribe control of various aspects of the world to and construct rituals around them, and regardless of the lack of evidence, you can find this is pretty much all human societies. The details, of course, vary widely. In short, humans have never had a firm grasp on reality - we've already invented things and filled in the blanks with our own imagination, amped up our importance in the universe, because we're limited in scope as far as what we can interact with and control. Today things are both better and worse than in the past - we have cultural patterns like the scientific method, which ideally gives us more reliable information than most prior constructs; tools that expand our ability to examine the universe around us, giving us a better idea of where we are; consistently better information transfer (spoken word > written word > mass-produced written > analog mass media > digital). But at the same time, these things can be used to spread incorrect information just as much as correct; things can be cherry-picked, ignored, manipulated; logical fallacies abound; and, as ever, people will see the things they want to see to fit their patterns and beliefs, ignoring or deeming irrelevant the pieces that don't fit for them. We know more than ever as a species and society; but individually it is completely beyond anyone's grasp to gain a solid understanding of everything we know simply because there is so much. We're relegated to trusting each other - and unfortunately, people don't choose who they trust based on how accurate those people might be, but on things like social relations, world-view match, and so on.

gmarx 10y ago

I am fascinated by holocaust denial and the people who think the moon landing was faked. Does anyone believe both? Do the people who believe those have any other historic events that they think were made up? Most importantly (too me) would it be possible to start one of these on purpose? If you wanted to, what would be a good candidate? I concluded that the atomic bomb is an excellent choice. I say there never was an atomic bomb. It was propaganda to prevent the US and Soviet Union from engaging in a disastrous WWIII so soon after WWII. And it was very effective but it's time for all the suckers to wake up. I know you've seen the films. Special effects! Hiroshima/Nagasaki? Regular fire bombing that happened to get out of control because of favorable (or unfavorable) winds! Godzilla? Well that's more difficult to explain but I'm sure if we put our heads together we could come up with something. Who's with me?!?!?

toxican 10y ago
If you're going to deny undeniable fact, may as well go all the way crazy. I'm in! Let's work on that Godzilla problem though, that's the real hole in our theories.
- conception 10y ago
  Simple. The director worked with the Japanese and American governments to create a reason why the Japanese Emperor lost that didn't delegitimize the government. Who could fault a surrender after a "superweapon" was used on you?? Genius black ops on the part of the US and Japan! Then they create various movies propping up the idea. Turn Japan into America's R&D division for electronic development so we didn't have to educate Americans and could continue to dumb down the education system and keep the rowdy Americans in check until they were needed for the next war.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  Ha! Get this. It's unassailable. Godzilla... was just an ordinary human in a rubber suit, in a movie studio sound stage where scale models of cities and landscapes had been built. In later years, as film technology improved, the more detailed films of Godzilla were created with a CGI model, with the virtual skeleton and muscle movements derived from filming a human actor in a mo-cap suit. It only looks real because the animators are so skilled, and the actor is so good at mo-cap acting. It is in no way live footage of a real animal. That's right. Godzilla doesn't exist. He never existed. He was always a made-up movie character. I bet you could get literally thousands of people to believe that. With enough gaslighting, I bet you could even get someone whose actual home was actually stepped on and burned by Godzilla to believe that it was due to an earthquake or tsunami or tornado or nuclear reactor meltdown or something equally farfetched.

BEEdwards 10y ago

>Flat earth insists on the primacy of direct experience (look at the horizon, really look, and try to see the curve) against abstract domination. But you can see the curve... Have they never been to the ocean?

toxican 10y ago
Yeah, but that's just because our eyes are round!
chc 10y ago
I've been to the ocean many times and have never noticed any obvious curvature. If it is visible, I can only imagine it's much easier for somebody who doesn't want to see it to miss it. EDIT: I just Googled and it sounds like the planet's radius is big enough that, within the range our eyes can see, the curve is extremely subtle.
- wbl 10y ago
  Notice the horizon. On a flat surface you should see until haze. On a clear day on the ocean you see a horizon.
chadgeidel 10y ago
I've often wondered why someone who believes the earth is flat can't explain why one couldn't see London from NYC. Presumably we could build a strong enough optical telescope to look at the city. Or is it claimed that there's "too much debris in the air" to prevent this?

nkrisc 10y ago

Flat-Earthers are actually part of a vast CIA conspiracy to distract us from the truth of a spherical Earth. They don't want us to know we can travel the Earth over the poles, where the Earth's magnetic field and radiation causes their mind-tracking technology to fail.

jshevek 10y ago
Not spherical, rather spheroid. Oblate spheroid.
- nkrisc 10y ago
  That's another conspiracy propagated by the Imperfect-Spherists.
  - qbrass 10y ago
    Just wait until you discover it's toroidal, but your perception of space-time makes it's appear spherical.

BugsJustFindMe 10y ago

> I’ve always been mildly obsessed with the flat-earth truth movement, the sprawling network of people utterly convinced that... I can't help but feel a little bad for anyone who believes that flat-earthers are genuine. I've pretty much convinced myself that flat-earth groups are more like speculative fanfiction archives than churches. The people who come up with all of these theories and defenses do it because thinking about these things is fun, not because they believe it. And they feed the perceptions of true belief because that's fun too. And they form these little communities for the same reasons that people writing new fan stories about Harry Potter do, because it's more fun to do it with other people. The author here isn't uncovering some secret truth about the world so much as getting suckered into the drama, feeding it, and providing further joy and incentive to the players. And here I am possibly getting suckered into the author's drama. Maybe the author is just one of the players and doesn't actually believe that they believe.

comstock 10y ago
I've met someone who claimed he believed in the flat earth theory. I see no reason to believe he was misleading me. Not massively educated, not really interested in analytical games. I've met people who believed they could communicate with aliens by meditating under pyramids made of steal pipes. I've met people who believed that putting a crystal on a bottle of water will make it stay fresh longer. That they could charge batteries with their mind. Not sure what kind of proof you might want to be sure these people really believe what they say. And I'm not sure how meaningful that statement is. I never thought they were playing the mind of fan-fic games you suggest though. My observations lead me to believe people in general believe some pretty weird things.
Diederich 10y ago
Quite a few flat-earthers really do believe it, and they're generally not dummies. I've engaged in open-minded and friendly conversations with flat-earth individuals off and on for quite a few years. It's fascinating stuff; many are pretty chill and willing to chat if you go in with a positive affect. I think if you graphed the total number of people who truly believe the earth is flat compared to the number of people who profess that just for 'troll' purposes, the latter group would be growing rapidly, and the former growing very slowly. Why do I do this? Because the older I get, the more I realize that all of us, everyone, make a lot of choices every day that we think are based on logic and reason, but that are actually based on irrational experience and emotions. I think we tend to back-fill with logic and reason as much as we can. Many people get more things 'right' than others, but what's 'right' is damn hard to know, isn't it? This might seem like a wallow in all kinds of intellectual relativism, but it's really not. We should all strive for logical and rational thought and decision making, yet at the same time realize that we are all still fundamentally driven by forces that are quite the opposite, and that drive is largely invisible to us.

pklausler 10y ago

I've begun using the term "epistemologically disabled" to cover those in the general class of crazy people that includes flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, chemtrailers, climate change deniers (anthropic or not), "Obama is a Kenyan Muslim" republicans, &c. Because seeing this problem as a disability changes my response from contempt into one that's more sympathetic.

ozy 10y ago

Anybody here will to confess they have pushed flat earth, while believing/knowing the earth is round? I am willing to confess I have pushed sharks are smooth: https://twitter.com/bransonreese/status/848746940179382272 https://twitter.com/bransonreese/status/848746940179382272

zeveb 10y ago

What I'm curious about is the population distribution of flat-earthers. I think it's pretty clear that some of them are trolls, having fun with a ludicrous idea; some of them are mentally disturbed (schizophrenics of one sort or another, I suppose), some fraction have exceedingly low IQs, some fraction have high IQs but are exceedingly-poorly educated. But is it really just mostly trolls? That's the only explanation that makes sense. > The particulars differ, but here everyone takes it as a given that a conspiracy reaching from your first schoolteacher to NASA to the metaphysical Beyond has deluded humanity [ed: emphasis mine] Misusing 'humanity' to mean 'mankind' (or, if you must, 'humankind') is one of my pet peeves: humanity is the quality of being humane. Flat earthers don't believe that a conspiracy is deluding the quality of being humane (that phrase doesn't even make sense); they believe that a conspiracy is deluding mankind (or, again, 'humankind'). edit: add closing paren