17 ms·

Is there any research on how to talk to these people? I know a flat earthed and anything I say just makes them dig in more.

hannesfostie 7y ago
aren't they afraid they'll fall through?
3pt14159 7y ago
Ask questions and don't make it personal. It's annoying and the answers are rubbish, but it's the only way to break these people out of their shell. > The earth is flat? Why do people in Japan see the moon and a dark sky while I see the sun? With enough of these types of questions that don't have sensible answers you may be able to get the person into a "maybe this is all bullshit" mindset. It's hard though. Especially with global warming skeptics.
- keymone 7y ago
  “Because light doesn’t travel forever” Every sensible line of questions will inevitably hit this wall of incomprehensible undebunkable “understanding” of the world. It’s better to dig into their understanding of what is a conspiracy and how do they determine where in the conspiracy chain they should stop and why. (Flat Earth conspiracy, flat earth conspiracy conspiracy and so on)
catalogia 7y ago
> Is there any research on how to talk to these people? Treat them like people, not specimens. Part of that means recognizing that each is an individual and there is no universal formula for how to effectively relate and communicate with individuals.
- undersuit 7y ago
  No, but how can we ignore that, like we do in every other facet of life. I mean un-nuanced thinking has done great for so many of our other problems like: war, homelessness, drug-use, and governance! Joking aside, we might just need to write certain people off and just let them be. We might not have the resources to tackle climate change, feed and shelter an increasingly populated world, and individually talk people out of these entertaining delusions like believing in flat earth or doubting the efficacy of vaccines.
  - BitwiseFool 7y ago
    I don't place Flat-Earthers on the same level as Anti-Vaxxers. First off, I think most flat-earthers aren't sincere, they just love getting attention and a rise out of people. But for those that are sincere, their belief in a flat earth doesn't impact me or society. Someone who believes the earth is flat isn't an ideological threat. So I agree, we just need to calm down and let these loons be.
awb 7y ago
Talking is easy. Convincing them to rethink their position or even abandon it is much harder and takes a lot of time, patience, persistence and friendliness. The friendship part is probably the hardest. But what's the success rate of shaming someone into changing their mind? Pretty low to zero. It makes them dig in more. The best example I know of is Daryl Davis (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis). He's a black man that befriends active Klan members. He invites them to bars and his home and gets to know them. He intelligently refutes their nonsense but he never asks them to change their mind or leave the Klan. He simply waits until they want to do it on their own accord. The problem is sometimes people get stuck in a group or culture for various reasons. The key is to give them a safe, friendly alternative rather than a violent disagreement.
- devtul 7y ago
  Darryl's work is amazing. Today we see people doing the polar opposite, label someone, shum and deplatform, label some more, harass, destroy his/her livelihood, destroy his/her reputation.
  - hexane360 7y ago
    It's challenging because the optimal strategy for converting an individual is not necessarily what's best for society as a whole. Risking Godwin's law, imagine the extreme case of Hitler. The best strategy to convert Hitler may well be Jewish people befriending him, rather than confronting him. But in the meantime, Hitler is radicalizing others and committing genocide. At some point, it makes more sense to just assassinate Hitler (or deplatform him, or depose him, etc.) rather than trying to save him.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - jstarfish 7y ago
api 7y ago
The key to understanding these and many other flagrantly irrational "beliefs" is that these things are believed for social or political reasons not simply rational ones. There is an interview floating around with a flat Earth dude saying exactly this: that even if he were convinced the Earth were round he would stick with it because they have a community. Humans are not rational robots. We are hyper-social emotional beings. The classical wire monkey experiment shows that primates will prioritize affection over food to the point of near starvation. It's not much of a leap to consider that humans may also prioritize affection over truth to the point of folly. We see circumstantial evidence of this constantly. Most people would rather be wrong and have friends than right and alone. If rational ideas look like they are failing, perhaps it's because we have failed to construct positive and lasting communities around them. If anything it's the opposite: the rational worldview is linked culturally to isolating sterile social orders with sterile objectives like GDP maximization or abstract political goals. These may be rational but they are not human. If the rational can't rationalize community and culture we will continue to see a popular flight from reason.
- GVIrish 7y ago
  I think some people believe in irrational things so that they can conform with their in-group, but I there are a number of emotional reasons people believe in irrational conspiracies. -Desire to be nonconformist -Desire to feel intellectually superior by 'knowing something others don't' -Mistrust in authority -Fear of accepting a truth that will upend their understanding or the world -Fear (or refusal) of accepting a truth that upends their place in the world -Outright mental illness One thing I think the internet and social media does is that it allows people with singular causes of irrational beliefs to find others like them and that in turn reinforces their irrational beliefs. Not to mention that they can easily find misinformation on the internet that reinforces them.
  - api 7y ago
    The desire to be noncomformant or know secrets is a desire for a small social in group that is relatable vs belonging to the alienating mass. This is basically why cults exist. The motive is fundamentally social. Search for Dunbar's number, the maximum "social horizon" size for most humans.
Diederich 7y ago
> how to talk to these people? listening is far more important than talking to. To reinforce one of the other replies: asking questions is pretty good, as long as one takes it slow and actually listens to the responses. I've (very lightly and positively) engaged with flat-earth folk for years now, and it's been fairly interesting. Many are 'cranks', many are trolls, but many have something like an honest desire to really know and understand, though with some pretty big blind spots.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  Contrarian view warning: neither listening to nor talking to them are important! At least not in the context of helping them come to a more correct belief about the shape of our planet -- talking to them just as people is fine and no worse or better than talking to anyone else. I guess most people presenting themselves as flat Earthers actually know deep down that the Earth is round. Perhaps they enjoy playing the fool. Perhaps they are trolling. Perhaps they just want attention. But they probably know. Even if they don't, who cares? By virtue of being a flat Earther you basically exclude yourself from any position where such a viewpoint might be relevant. They're not hurting anyone, so just leave them alone. Let people be wrong on the internet. (Note that like many aspirational exhortations, this one is a little hypocritical. I've been known to have a problem with people being wrong on the internet before. But I'm trying to be better. :))
  - tgflynn 7y ago
    Don't you think there's a danger that letting incorrect (especially wildly wrong) statements stand unchallenged on the internet encourages those ideas to spread further ?
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      I have seen studies that suggest engaging with incorrect beliefs does nothing to prevent their spread and might even encourage them. Denying prominent supporters of a belief a platform ("cancelling" them) has plainly been effective in a few cases. However, I think that hammer should be reserved for seriously harmful and dangerous beliefs. I think flat Earth is quite harmless and also sufficiently unpopular that there's not really much that needs to be done.
lisper 7y ago
The most important thing to keep in mind is that fringe beliefs like flat-eartherism, young-earth creationism [EDIT: not to be confused with creationism in general], lunar landing denialism, etc. are not subscribed to for logical reasons but emotional ones. It's a club that you can join whose rules are very clear -- all you have to do is to profess to subscribe to the belief. Once you're in you get to feel special, like you are part of a small elite group who knows a Deep Truth that no one else does. As such, no logic is going to convince them. The only thing that will extract a person from such a belief system is emotional support, something to fill to emotional void that giving up the belief and hence the membership in the group will leave. Good luck.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- xsmasher 7y ago
  It always seemed like a mutation of whatever lobe or gland makes us interested in the arcana of computer systems, or makes kids get obsessive about dinosaurs. They have some kind of construct that generates happiness when they have some secret and/or contrarian knowledge. it's just disconnected from the actual truth value of that "knowledge."
JCoder58 7y ago
Steve Hassen has done a lot work in this area. He has written several books on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hassan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hassan
throwaway5752 7y ago
When someone is brainwashed or otherwise influenced by propaganda, you cannot argue them out of the position or trap them in a logical contradiction. There is some literature out there on it, but they have to work there way out of it on there own. The best you hope for is to state someone that tricks someone into questioning its validity - creating a seed of doubt. You'd probably have to state something about flat earth "ideas" that has such an obvious flaw that they can't rationalize it. But not in a confrontational way. Also, understand that it's not about flat earth. It's filling some other psychological need or some deeper issue. edit: I had come across https://www.culteducation.com/ https://www.culteducation.com/ a while ago and found it useful. I don't think flat-earthers are a cult, per se, but some of the same techniques could still apply.
larrywright 7y ago
I was having a “conversation” with an anti-vaxxer on Facebook once, while simultaneously having a backchannel conversation about it with a friend. He made a point that resonated with me: If someone hasn’t used logic and reason to arrive at a conclusion, you’re not going to use logic and reason to get them to change it. I think that’s the crux of the issue here. I have another, somewhat related, observation: there are a number of these issues, such as anti-vaxx, flat earth, climate change denialism, and the existence of a “deep state”, where the central premise is that there is some vast conspiracy to mislead the public, with huge numbers of people involved in perpetuating the lie. Once someone believes that these conspiracies are real, any attempt to provide evidence to the contrary is rejected as fake news/lies by big pharma/etc. I honestly don’t know how to reach someone like this. Beliefs like this used to be a rare thing, something you’d only see in the tin foil hat crowd, but it has spread in recent years to a much wider segment of the population. I’m not sure what is to blame for that.
- mrguyorama 7y ago
  A lot of things in the world are pretty fucked up lately, and many people want to find an explanation that doesn't boil down to "stop voting in shitty people/ stop being an asshole/ stop being so stupid/ stop being a shitty person"
  - awb 7y ago
    Unfortunately, this thinking seems to have a long history: human sacrifices, medieval medicine, witch trials, genocide, on and on. People have been using poor logic to make poor decisions for a long time.
bytematic 7y ago
Socratic method?
xsmasher 7y ago
It seems like an entirely harmless belief system, so I'm not sure why you'd want to try and talk them out of it, unless it's leading to dangerous behavior on their part. It reminds me of Sherlock Holmes, on being told that the Earth goes around the sun: "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." [...] "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work." Better a flat-earth obsession than getting into colloidal silver or those shoes with the little toes.

hannesfostie 7y ago

aren't they afraid they'll fall through?

3pt14159 7y ago

Ask questions and don't make it personal. It's annoying and the answers are rubbish, but it's the only way to break these people out of their shell. > The earth is flat? Why do people in Japan see the moon and a dark sky while I see the sun? With enough of these types of questions that don't have sensible answers you may be able to get the person into a "maybe this is all bullshit" mindset. It's hard though. Especially with global warming skeptics.

keymone 7y ago
“Because light doesn’t travel forever” Every sensible line of questions will inevitably hit this wall of incomprehensible undebunkable “understanding” of the world. It’s better to dig into their understanding of what is a conspiracy and how do they determine where in the conspiracy chain they should stop and why. (Flat Earth conspiracy, flat earth conspiracy conspiracy and so on)

catalogia 7y ago

> Is there any research on how to talk to these people? Treat them like people, not specimens. Part of that means recognizing that each is an individual and there is no universal formula for how to effectively relate and communicate with individuals.

undersuit 7y ago
No, but how can we ignore that, like we do in every other facet of life. I mean un-nuanced thinking has done great for so many of our other problems like: war, homelessness, drug-use, and governance! Joking aside, we might just need to write certain people off and just let them be. We might not have the resources to tackle climate change, feed and shelter an increasingly populated world, and individually talk people out of these entertaining delusions like believing in flat earth or doubting the efficacy of vaccines.
- BitwiseFool 7y ago
  I don't place Flat-Earthers on the same level as Anti-Vaxxers. First off, I think most flat-earthers aren't sincere, they just love getting attention and a rise out of people. But for those that are sincere, their belief in a flat earth doesn't impact me or society. Someone who believes the earth is flat isn't an ideological threat. So I agree, we just need to calm down and let these loons be.

awb 7y ago

Talking is easy. Convincing them to rethink their position or even abandon it is much harder and takes a lot of time, patience, persistence and friendliness. The friendship part is probably the hardest. But what's the success rate of shaming someone into changing their mind? Pretty low to zero. It makes them dig in more. The best example I know of is Daryl Davis (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis). He's a black man that befriends active Klan members. He invites them to bars and his home and gets to know them. He intelligently refutes their nonsense but he never asks them to change their mind or leave the Klan. He simply waits until they want to do it on their own accord. The problem is sometimes people get stuck in a group or culture for various reasons. The key is to give them a safe, friendly alternative rather than a violent disagreement.

devtul 7y ago
Darryl's work is amazing. Today we see people doing the polar opposite, label someone, shum and deplatform, label some more, harass, destroy his/her livelihood, destroy his/her reputation.
- hexane360 7y ago
  It's challenging because the optimal strategy for converting an individual is not necessarily what's best for society as a whole. Risking Godwin's law, imagine the extreme case of Hitler. The best strategy to convert Hitler may well be Jewish people befriending him, rather than confronting him. But in the meantime, Hitler is radicalizing others and committing genocide. At some point, it makes more sense to just assassinate Hitler (or deplatform him, or depose him, etc.) rather than trying to save him.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jstarfish 7y ago

api 7y ago

The key to understanding these and many other flagrantly irrational "beliefs" is that these things are believed for social or political reasons not simply rational ones. There is an interview floating around with a flat Earth dude saying exactly this: that even if he were convinced the Earth were round he would stick with it because they have a community. Humans are not rational robots. We are hyper-social emotional beings. The classical wire monkey experiment shows that primates will prioritize affection over food to the point of near starvation. It's not much of a leap to consider that humans may also prioritize affection over truth to the point of folly. We see circumstantial evidence of this constantly. Most people would rather be wrong and have friends than right and alone. If rational ideas look like they are failing, perhaps it's because we have failed to construct positive and lasting communities around them. If anything it's the opposite: the rational worldview is linked culturally to isolating sterile social orders with sterile objectives like GDP maximization or abstract political goals. These may be rational but they are not human. If the rational can't rationalize community and culture we will continue to see a popular flight from reason.

GVIrish 7y ago
I think some people believe in irrational things so that they can conform with their in-group, but I there are a number of emotional reasons people believe in irrational conspiracies. -Desire to be nonconformist -Desire to feel intellectually superior by 'knowing something others don't' -Mistrust in authority -Fear of accepting a truth that will upend their understanding or the world -Fear (or refusal) of accepting a truth that upends their place in the world -Outright mental illness One thing I think the internet and social media does is that it allows people with singular causes of irrational beliefs to find others like them and that in turn reinforces their irrational beliefs. Not to mention that they can easily find misinformation on the internet that reinforces them.
- api 7y ago
  The desire to be noncomformant or know secrets is a desire for a small social in group that is relatable vs belonging to the alienating mass. This is basically why cults exist. The motive is fundamentally social. Search for Dunbar's number, the maximum "social horizon" size for most humans.

Diederich 7y ago

> how to talk to these people? listening is far more important than talking to. To reinforce one of the other replies: asking questions is pretty good, as long as one takes it slow and actually listens to the responses. I've (very lightly and positively) engaged with flat-earth folk for years now, and it's been fairly interesting. Many are 'cranks', many are trolls, but many have something like an honest desire to really know and understand, though with some pretty big blind spots.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
Contrarian view warning: neither listening to nor talking to them are important! At least not in the context of helping them come to a more correct belief about the shape of our planet -- talking to them just as people is fine and no worse or better than talking to anyone else. I guess most people presenting themselves as flat Earthers actually know deep down that the Earth is round. Perhaps they enjoy playing the fool. Perhaps they are trolling. Perhaps they just want attention. But they probably know. Even if they don't, who cares? By virtue of being a flat Earther you basically exclude yourself from any position where such a viewpoint might be relevant. They're not hurting anyone, so just leave them alone. Let people be wrong on the internet. (Note that like many aspirational exhortations, this one is a little hypocritical. I've been known to have a problem with people being wrong on the internet before. But I'm trying to be better. :))
- tgflynn 7y ago
  Don't you think there's a danger that letting incorrect (especially wildly wrong) statements stand unchallenged on the internet encourages those ideas to spread further ?
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    I have seen studies that suggest engaging with incorrect beliefs does nothing to prevent their spread and might even encourage them. Denying prominent supporters of a belief a platform ("cancelling" them) has plainly been effective in a few cases. However, I think that hammer should be reserved for seriously harmful and dangerous beliefs. I think flat Earth is quite harmless and also sufficiently unpopular that there's not really much that needs to be done.

lisper 7y ago

The most important thing to keep in mind is that fringe beliefs like flat-eartherism, young-earth creationism [EDIT: not to be confused with creationism in general], lunar landing denialism, etc. are not subscribed to for logical reasons but emotional ones. It's a club that you can join whose rules are very clear -- all you have to do is to profess to subscribe to the belief. Once you're in you get to feel special, like you are part of a small elite group who knows a Deep Truth that no one else does. As such, no logic is going to convince them. The only thing that will extract a person from such a belief system is emotional support, something to fill to emotional void that giving up the belief and hence the membership in the group will leave. Good luck.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
xsmasher 7y ago
It always seemed like a mutation of whatever lobe or gland makes us interested in the arcana of computer systems, or makes kids get obsessive about dinosaurs. They have some kind of construct that generates happiness when they have some secret and/or contrarian knowledge. it's just disconnected from the actual truth value of that "knowledge."

JCoder58 7y ago

Steve Hassen has done a lot work in this area. He has written several books on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hassan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hassan

throwaway5752 7y ago

When someone is brainwashed or otherwise influenced by propaganda, you cannot argue them out of the position or trap them in a logical contradiction. There is some literature out there on it, but they have to work there way out of it on there own. The best you hope for is to state someone that tricks someone into questioning its validity - creating a seed of doubt. You'd probably have to state something about flat earth "ideas" that has such an obvious flaw that they can't rationalize it. But not in a confrontational way. Also, understand that it's not about flat earth. It's filling some other psychological need or some deeper issue. edit: I had come across https://www.culteducation.com/ https://www.culteducation.com/ a while ago and found it useful. I don't think flat-earthers are a cult, per se, but some of the same techniques could still apply.

larrywright 7y ago

I was having a “conversation” with an anti-vaxxer on Facebook once, while simultaneously having a backchannel conversation about it with a friend. He made a point that resonated with me: If someone hasn’t used logic and reason to arrive at a conclusion, you’re not going to use logic and reason to get them to change it. I think that’s the crux of the issue here. I have another, somewhat related, observation: there are a number of these issues, such as anti-vaxx, flat earth, climate change denialism, and the existence of a “deep state”, where the central premise is that there is some vast conspiracy to mislead the public, with huge numbers of people involved in perpetuating the lie. Once someone believes that these conspiracies are real, any attempt to provide evidence to the contrary is rejected as fake news/lies by big pharma/etc. I honestly don’t know how to reach someone like this. Beliefs like this used to be a rare thing, something you’d only see in the tin foil hat crowd, but it has spread in recent years to a much wider segment of the population. I’m not sure what is to blame for that.

mrguyorama 7y ago
A lot of things in the world are pretty fucked up lately, and many people want to find an explanation that doesn't boil down to "stop voting in shitty people/ stop being an asshole/ stop being so stupid/ stop being a shitty person"
- awb 7y ago
  Unfortunately, this thinking seems to have a long history: human sacrifices, medieval medicine, witch trials, genocide, on and on. People have been using poor logic to make poor decisions for a long time.

bytematic 7y ago

Socratic method?

xsmasher 7y ago

It seems like an entirely harmless belief system, so I'm not sure why you'd want to try and talk them out of it, unless it's leading to dangerous behavior on their part. It reminds me of Sherlock Holmes, on being told that the Earth goes around the sun: "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." [...] "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work." Better a flat-earth obsession than getting into colloidal silver or those shoes with the little toes.