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That popsci article should really be "10 pieces of evidence that are consistent with the round Earth model". Most of them aren't super easy to reproduce either.

That popsci article should really be "10 pieces of evidence that are consistent with the round Earth model". Most of them aren't super easy to reproduce either. > Blanket skepticism no more intellectually valid than blind faith. This sounds vaguely like a moral judgement to me. What does "valid" mean here? I find it less inciteful, and more useful, to take a pragmatist approach. Was Newton wrong and Einstein right? Even if we call Newtonian mechanics "wrong" it's certainly super useful. In the same way, thinking of the Earth as flat is pretty darn useful in daily life. I'd bet a pretty penny that almost everybody operates with an implicit "flat Earth" model in their head for mundane tasks. On the other hand, the Round Earth model is probably super useful to sattelite engineers. If the Flat Earthers start doing cool space science or something, I'm more than happy to encourage them.

krapp 9y ago
Newtonian mechanics wasn't wrong, it wasn't right enough at certain scales - AFAIK, it correctly predicted the orbits of all of the planets except Mercury, whose proximity to the sun was close enough that relativity had to be taken into account to explain it. However, flat Earthers aren't "wrong" in the same way that Newton was, they don't simply have an alternative model of reality which is useful in its own peculiar way. Newtonian mechanics and Einstein don't contradict each other, and one doesn't override the other. Flat Earthism, meanwhile, is like the crackpot who denies all this newfangled quantum timespace relativity mumbo jumbo and refuses to believe in anything but Newton, because Newton is simple and obvious. It doesn't refine and augment existing knowledge, it denies its validity altogether. Thinking of the earth as being flat at human scale is simple and obvious. Thinking of the earth in its entirety as being flat is simple and obvious and wrong in ways that even the ancients could figure out. There's no domain in which that's useful.

krapp 9y ago

Newtonian mechanics wasn't wrong, it wasn't right enough at certain scales - AFAIK, it correctly predicted the orbits of all of the planets except Mercury, whose proximity to the sun was close enough that relativity had to be taken into account to explain it. However, flat Earthers aren't "wrong" in the same way that Newton was, they don't simply have an alternative model of reality which is useful in its own peculiar way. Newtonian mechanics and Einstein don't contradict each other, and one doesn't override the other. Flat Earthism, meanwhile, is like the crackpot who denies all this newfangled quantum timespace relativity mumbo jumbo and refuses to believe in anything but Newton, because Newton is simple and obvious. It doesn't refine and augment existing knowledge, it denies its validity altogether. Thinking of the earth as being flat at human scale is simple and obvious. Thinking of the earth in its entirety as being flat is simple and obvious and wrong in ways that even the ancients could figure out. There's no domain in which that's useful.