4 ms·

What worries me most is how so many people can believe in obviously stupid ideas. One would assume that some basic education is enough to debunk such crackpot

• caio1982 9y ago
  Inequality; it makes people feel deeply abandoned, which leads to distrust in the system, that fuels lunacy and fanaticism.
  • sheldor 9y ago
    Very true, but one also needs to be illiterate to believe such things. And in western countries where people get to go to school (most of them at least), it seems absurd. So, the only thing left to assume is that they make things for popularity and/or funding.
    • icebraining 9y ago
      one also needs to be illiterate to believe such things Certainly not. You just have to not believe what you read.
      • sheldor 9y ago
        If someone believes that the earth is flat then he automatically believes that all the pilots in the world know it (and never speak about it). That is illiteracy to say the least. You certainly don't believe everything you read, but well established knowledge from centuries ago isn't something some lunatic came up with. So if someone dismisses gravity as a hoax, are we to support him because he is a critical thinker and start jumping off cliffs trying to fly?
    • lloeki 9y ago
      > And in western countries where people get to go to school (most of them at least), it seems absurd. When schools make a duty of learning by rote instead of learning to learn and exercise thoughtful criticism, only distrust can emerge.
• michaelbrooks 9y ago
  It would be easier and safer if he just sent an air balloon strapped with a Go Pro up. He would get the footage he needs to prove his bogus claims are wrong and he would be safe on the ground. You are right though, we need to understand how so many people still believe that the Earth is flat.
  • beaconstudios 9y ago
    I get the impression from reading the article that this guy doesn't himself believe in the flat earth theory but is using his "recent conversion" (which occurred long after he started his rocket experiments) to try to get funding from conspiracy theorists after his kickstarter failed.
  • Vinnl 9y ago
    Is it so many people, though? Or is the onus on us for thinking it is?
  • rothron 9y ago
    People have done this of course, but you cannot convince a flat earther with GoPro footage because of the fisheye lens that will allow you to film the horizon curve either way, depending on the angle. What you'd need is a wide angle rectilinear lens not normally found on light weight cameras. He shouldn't expect much from 1800 feet tough in terms of seeing the curvature. It won't be pronounced. I think he just wants to fly.
    • dekhn 9y ago
      Counterpoint: you can trivially correct for lens distortions by calibrating the camera on earth using far-away objects. I agree that he's making claims in bad faith and just wants to fly.
  • codingdave 9y ago
    "Hughes only recently converted to flat-Eartherism, after struggling for months to raise funds for his follow-up flight over the Mojave." He isn't trying to prove the earth is flat. He just wants to ride a rocket. Everything else is oddball marketing to get some funds.
• hutzlibu 9y ago
  "We should all be asking ourselves where such big distrust is coming from." Well, I would say it starts with basic things early, like Santa Claus brings the presents. Later you find out, oh a lie. And so on with many things. Church, all loving god, nice and caring government, war only for peace, health corporation's only make good medicine, etc. etc. And then things like Kennedy and 9/11. I don't know what happened and I also don't care so much, but the more I looked into it, the less convincing became the mainstream truth. Or less controversial lies, like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and so on. No wonder people then start to believe in more goofy things like the moon landing hoax, or climategate - or ultimately, flat earth. They have just been lied too often by their authorities. And then make the stupid assumption, everything opposite must be true then.
  • sddfd 9y ago
    >They have just been lied too often by their authorities. And then make the stupid assumption, everything opposite must be true then. Unfortunately, this explanation seems all too plausible to me.
• amrrs 9y ago
  I wouldn't call this distrust but an extreme level of skepticism. I think being Skpetic means you're not supposed to believe anything just like that and always be willing to see the other side of the story in fact believing the there is another side to this story. But like every philosophical and religious institutions getting extreme believers and followers, Science Skeptics have also reached that point. This is very much like an Atheist seeing Atheism as a religion itself. Being Skeptic also means you gotta be ready to fix your belief when you get an alternative that could seems rational or right, if you are not ready to do that, you are not a skeptic
  • xelxebar 9y ago
    It seems more like Highly Selective Skepticism at best to me. Straight naïve skepticism in the "question everything" sense tends to converge around scientific consensus unless you start from several wildly different and confident priors; however, the Flat Earth rhetoric seems to be quite satisfied with handwavy phyiscs when it comes to the sanctified Flat Earth Dogma. Personally, I like reading FE stuff if only because it gets me thinking about "how do I know what I actually know". I like trying to think up simple experiments that test my underlying trust in standard scientific explanations. Like, if I deeply mistrust data that's not my own, how could I convince myself that space has no atmosphere to speak of?
  • joshvm 9y ago
    There is certainly scepticism, but there is also a huge amount of distrust. A large amount of flat Earth theory revolves (hah) around conspiracy theories. The two are probably intertwined though. Flat Earth theory doesn't work unless you assume that everyone (except you) is in on it - the government is in on it, airlines and shipping companies are in on it, the people who make the jets are in on it, NASA (et al) has been conning us for decades, the 'scientists' have been publishing false information for centures, and on and on.
• orf 9y ago
  > We should all be asking ourselves where such big distrust is coming from. Seems to be pretty unique to America - climate change deniers, flat earthers, anti-vaxers, etc are no where near as prevalent in any other first world country.
  • matheusSerp 9y ago
    I really think that even in "third world" countries people know that vaccines save lives, because they are (our have been) struck by diseases. They're the ones suffering the effects of climate change. Living in Brazil, a "third world" country, I have a feeling that people can't be bothered to feed this bullshit theory about flat-earth, because it just doesn't make any sense.
• sxg 9y ago
  A basic education (assuming grade school level) would only inform you that the world isn't flat. It wouldn't go so far as to rigorously prove the idea. In fact, I honestly couldn't prove to you that the world isn't flat myself off-hand. My "knowledge" of the unflat world is really just trust in prior mathematicians and scientists who I believe have proven the idea. I think this continuum between knowledge and belief is where these crackpot ideas are coming from. The average person doesn't know how the things they depend on actually work on a deeper level (e.g. the internet, cars, indoor plumbing, seasonal weather, the stock market). And upon researching the inner workings of these day-to-day mysteries, people realize that the mechanisms aren't 100% clear or they don't fully understand them. I'd wager this is the diverging point: most people give up on learning the mechanisms and accept that they work on belief while a small portion of people come up with alternative hypotheses and/or reject the mechanisms. A recent episode of This American Life discusses this (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/630/things-i-mean-to-know https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/630/...).
  • krapp 9y ago
    Eratosthenes proved the earth was round, trivially and in a straightforward manner, thousands of years ago[0]. Persistence in the belief in a flat earth can't be a matter of simple ignorance and lack of faith in the status quo. Understanding the rules of basic arithmetic is more difficult than understanding why the earth is round. [0]http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/09/21/who-discovered-the-earth-is-ro/ http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/09/21/who-disco...
• happyraul 9y ago
  How does such a belief stand up to something as simple as talking to someone on the other side of the world, where it is night during the day for you? Even if one believed that people lived on two sides of a flat earth, surely flying between two such places would be sufficient to convince anyone that the earth is not flat?
  • marcosdumay 9y ago
    Not many people talk to people at the other side of the world.
  • adsfqwop 9y ago
    Oh boy..you clearly haven't investigated flat earth properly yet. Arguments like that don't stand up in their universe. They simply create light that only travels as far as needed, to fit their model, and other curious contraptions. Consider yourself lucky though, because you will grow gray hair quickly when venturing down into that labyrinth.