31 ms·

In defense of flat earthers (2020)

• akkartik 5y ago
  Ha, anybody who thinks memorization is a Western thing hasn't experienced Indian schools. Isn't Flat Earthism an American phenomenon? If so, the school system wouldn't explain why Europe doesn't have it.
  • chrismorgan 5y ago
    Excerpt from a text book in Hyderabad in 2006: “Why is a computer called a number cruncher?” “A computer is called a number cruncher because it crunches numbers with its teeth.” Students were expected to write down exactly that answer. This is a particularly crazy example, but my favourite and by no means isolated. Rote learning is certainly taken to an extreme in the Indian system, though it has been improving a bit over the past couple of decades.
    • gerdesj 5y ago
      A computer was a person who made computations. The electronic things were named after a person's job. Number cruncher is probably a 1990s affectation. The teeth thing is a bit worrying.
    • bee_rider 5y ago
      Is it part of some broader analogy or something? I don't understand at all.
    • 908B64B197 5y ago
      There has to be something mistranslated here somewhere.
      • chrismorgan 5y ago
        No; it’s much simpler than that: the Indian education system is immature, which often leads to the blind leading the blind, and such stunningly bad errors as this because the writers of the textbook were incompetent. I’m fairly confident in this case that the writer deliberately made something up because he had heard this expression (an English expression, you’ll note—Telugu and Hindi probably don’t have a direct equivalent), figured it was relevant, but didn’t know the answer and didn’t bother to investigate, because who cares what the answer is anyway? It’s just computers, no one needs to know about them anyway. That English was probably his third language will probably have contributed a bit (he would probably recognise a similar phrase in Telugu of an object he was familiar with as a metaphor), but it won’t have been the most important factor. Simplifying and not getting into the cultural aspects which are also significant: Most of the people in the country are uneducated or poorly educated. You need teachers to teach, but there are nowhere near enough qualified ones. Unskilled teachers can’t teach understanding since they lack it themselves, and so they favour rote learning, and textbooks do too. This builds up a lot of inertia, so that it takes several generations to break out of it rather than just one or two as you might hope. As usual, the poor are especially badly affected by it, since they’re much less likely to get a competent teacher. English-medium teaching also comes into the equation as a double-edged sword, having advantages and disadvantages that I won’t get into.
        • 908B64B197 5y ago
          > figured it was relevant, but didn’t know the answer and didn’t bother to investigate, because who cares what the answer is anyway? It’s just computers, no one needs to know about them anyway. That English was probably his third language will probably have contributed a bit (he would probably recognise a similar phrase in Telugu of an object he was familiar with as a metaphor), but it won’t have been the most important factor. Why not just get textbooks from the US then? If they are going to teach in English anyways, someone already went through the trouble of writing those.
          • chrismorgan 5y ago
            Importing textbooks or syllabi from another country doesn’t work well, because there’s a lot of culture that goes into such things, far more than you probably realise, and Indian culture is very different from such as British, Australian, Canadian and American. For some subjects it will work better than others, but it’s a total non-starter as a general strategy even from a technical aspect, quite apart from the politics that would render it quite untenable (especially with India’s nationalism and comparatively recent independence from the British). Even so, there are some places where foreign culture has unduly influenced the textbooks; for example, the Class III and IV Social Studies textbooks go over the seasons, and teach as fact the four season model with snow and all, which is only suitable for temperate or subarctic climates (and doesn’t always have snow); it’s wildly inappropriate in Hyderabad and India at large, which have a radically different, monsoony sequence, reckoned in 3, 4 or 6 seasons. And none of the kids have ever seen snow, Hyderabad’s record low being 6°C. I would also note that getting incompetent teachers only capable of rote-based teaching to use syllabi or textbooks designed for understanding-based teaching will be a disaster.
  • cm2187 5y ago
    And I understand it is one level further up in China (memorisation wise). I still think it’s a form of trolling to make people mad. And it works. A form of “fuck you” to the ellite.
• Kim_Bruning 5y ago
  Oh! I already knew high school textbooks were the worst, and have been for some time. (I've even read stuff by Feynman criticizing them). But yeah, of course that has real consequences!
• mikewave 5y ago
  From what I can tell from engaging with Flat Earthers, it's actually 50/50 people who reject everything reasonable they've been told, and people who are playing a game. The game is fun and simple: pretend you believe in the Flat Earth to piss people off. Refute their scientific facts with questioning and amusing statements, like "I never said it wasn't a circle" or "How do you really know Australia exists if you haven't been", etc. You win the game if the other person gets mad and truly believes you believe in the Flat Earth. You lose if either they don't believe that you believe this, i.e. if you've given it away with your facial expressions, or if they manage to actually present convincing evidence (e.g. like Carl Sagan's sundial shadows) that cannot be refuted. I have conversed with both kinds. The latter can be highly amusing people to talk to, the former are legitimately strange and I can't fathom how they come to exist. The linked post may be correct; I think some people simply have the innate urge to reject everything they've been told and to look for a countercultural answer instead, regardless of the subject matter. At least this is a safe direction to channel their madness into.
  • 1cvmask 5y ago
    Perhaps they seen lots of lying from their governments and the media mouthpieces and so have developed an ingrained disbelief of authority and the establishment and this pervades to all parts of life. Just like how all the mainstream media attacked MLK and the government treated him like a domestic terrorist. Now we lionize him. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29973075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29973075
    • mistermann 5y ago
      Flat Earthers aren't the only ones who are good at rationalizing things away, it seems to be a skill that is innate to all humans. And, most seem oblivious to it, which makes conversations like this that much more fun.
  • kerneloftruth 5y ago
    "...the former are legitimately strange and I can't fathom how they come to exist" I've come to believe that 10+% of any given population is insane (i.e. the fringe). I find it true almost regardless of what defines the group: professionals, academics, regular folks, ...
• protomyth 5y ago
  The one thing I don't get about Flat Earthers is who benefits from promoting a globe? I haven't see a conspiracy theory that didn't have someone benefiting from the conspiracy. Who exactly benefits / profits off people believing in a globe instead of a flatland? The motivation escapes me.
  • sekh60 5y ago
    Big cartography!
  • mrtesthah 5y ago
    The Jews[1], apparently. Somehow when you follow any conspiracy theory for long enough you find antisemitism at the root of it. 1. Flat Earth Conference, All Gas No Breaks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H110vCGvTmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H110vCGvTmM
  • CamperBob2 5y ago
    Not uncommon to find plain old ordinary antisemitism at the root of these conspiracies.
    • FridayoLeary 5y ago
      That's not fair. You are taking a perfectly innocent -albeit stupid belief and tying it with an entirely unrelated reprehensible one. This is a poor method of shutting down a conversation because a)it's intellectually dishonest and b)is a sweeping generalisation. I'm seeing a lot of it and i think it's terrible and has disastrous results. Instead of settling a debate, it ends up alienating and dividing people. Now, i'm sure you didn't mean to do that and it was just a passing remark with no particular intent. But i feel it's a broader issue which ties in with the subject being discussed.
      • mod 5y ago
        See a sibling comment--they do, for whatever reason, seem to go hand in hand.
      • 5y ago
• awb 5y ago
  > The main problem is that most of the facts we are taught in school are all just things that were read in a book or told by an authority figure. We don’t come to them from scientific investigations. I think it’s also a byproduct of having so much information persisted through generations. We want to “wow” students with the new, exciting information and end up skipping over or glossing over the “trivial” stuff that humans figured out a hundred or more years ago, treating it more like something to be memorized rather than discovered. And if you don’t memorize it (out of inability, or distrust in authority, etc.) then the conclusions might seem unbelievable. Imagine just seeing the last 10min of a movie, it would seem pretty confusing and unbelievable in many cases. But if you filmed the movie or edited it, it would probably seem pretty realistic and predictable.
  • NikolaNovak 5y ago
    It's tricky. In my school system we ran experiments for the basics. Put balls and blocks down Inclines and dragged things over various surfaces and watched things swing for couple of semesters, then "figured out" and calculated results of experiments, until we got results we already knew we were looking for :-). I'm sure those experiments can be done in a fun and educational manner, I just haven't been privy to that. Maybe they come too late in North American system - they should've been done way way earlier in life. I was a total sucker for science but they fell flat even for me. For those who didn't have inherent interest they were even less engaging. I do agree that accumulated knowledge through generations is a factor. There's so much of it and we are so far removed from its inception and wonder
    • roywiggins 5y ago
      I recall one "experiment" I had to do in a science class was literally "do the batteries wear out if you leave a flashlight on in a closet overnight". Turns out yes, they do. What a surprise. This was in middle school. What lesson this was supposed to impart was unclear, but the lesson it did impart was "your teacher thinks you're a moron who doesn't know how batteries behave." I think maybe a previous experiment hadn't worked properly and my teacher wanted one that definitely would and came up with this idea from scratch. It's totally possible to do this stuff well- I remember a pulleys-and-weights module another year that I liked- but when it's bad it's pretty bad.
• slmjkdbtl 5y ago
  I found it highly amusing how much people care about what other people think, as if the earth is really going to physically change its shape if some people believe it to be another. It's like believing the world is created by a god, or believing the universe isn't expanding, or believing there are finite amount of prime numbers. So what? These beliefs are descriptions, not ideals. They are believing in the earth is flat, not the earth should be flat (oh but I hope so much there's someone believing in the earth is round but we should flatten it). I personally prefer to live in a world where people have absurdly different beliefs on things that won't make a difference in everyday life.
  • eximius 5y ago
    they dont make a difference until they do. ignorance builds into decay of our institutions.
    • slmjkdbtl 5y ago
      What kind of difference do you think they want to make?
      • JetAlone 5y ago
        I'm probably wrong about this but I think Flat-Earthers, if they became influential enough, should want to clandestinely (due to concern of dangerous guards patrolling the world border) colonize Antarctica (with resources provided by all sympathetic to their cause) as a staging ground to find and prove the existence of the ice wall. If thwarted in their search for it, they might conclude that the authorities set up some kind of ionic illusion field to make it seem like it simply isn't there and redirect them to wander the same ice plains forever. If the Antarctican colony were successful, I think the importance of believing in earth's flatness would be the mark of a true citizen, and for people of faith among them, they would be willing to schismate over highly literalist interpretation of parts of scriptures that suggest imagery of a flat earth. The Ice Wall might be colloquially seen as a legendary gate which will one day be revealed, through which the just citizens of Antarctica will be invited to escape to heaven before the end of the world...
• ozten 5y ago
  "These people tend to be more suspicious, untrusting, eccentric, needing to feel special, with a tendency to regard the world as an inherently dangerous place," Hart said. "They are also more likely to detect meaningful patterns where they might not exist. People who are reluctant to believe in conspiracy theories tend to have the opposite qualities." - Joshua Hart [1] discussing their research [2] of 1,200 American adults. [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180925075108.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180925075108.h... [2] Joshua Hart, Molly Graether. Something’s Going on Here: Psychological Predictors of Belief in Conspiracy Theories. Journal of Individual Differences, 2018; DOI: 10.1027/1614-0001/a000268
  • CoastalCoder 5y ago
    I'm trying to understand the author's meaning for this statement: "They are also more likely to detect meaningful patterns where they might not exist." It sounds like a critique of the persons who detect those patterns. But if/how one could refute that such patterns exist, or are meaningful, seems to hinge on the meaning of that quote. In a recent season of The Expanse, there was a religious women (sorry, can't remember the character). Someone (perhaps herself) said that "she sees patterns that other's don't". That claim makes sense to me, because it doesn't rely on somehow knowing whether or not the patterns she sees are noteworthy.
    • ozten 5y ago
      I think if you focus on the need to feel special, there is a desire to have 'figured it out' and to be 'smarter than the mainstream'. From this perspective, these people find 'facts', blow them out of proportion, and construct a wild theory. For example, review all the 'facts' in PizzaGate. [1] This isn't about people not learning science. The QAnon folks took a lot of really random pieces of data, such as a photo of Obama playing ping pong, and constructed an highly dubious story. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/10/business/media/pizzagate.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/10/business/medi...
      • CoastalCoder 5y ago
• Terry_Roll 5y ago
  I think the Flat Earthers are really referring to the Masons Firmament which is the Masons way of suggesting they control everything.
  • JetAlone 5y ago
    I'm quite aware of the idea of a firmament and its symbolism, but that's a take on the flat earther community I have never heard of before...
• createdapril24 5y ago
  I think the author of the post is on to something. It isn't that he's saying flat earthers have evidence or are saying something reasonable. He's saying that the Western education system teaches people to memorize facts such as the roundness of the Earth without teaching process methodology to derive the roundness of the Earth. Anyone who begins to question some of the facts they have been indoctrinated to memorize: (1) will not have a methodology for coming to a conclusion, past "hypothesis" and anecdote (2) will not have peers and close contacts who are able to refute the hypothesis, outside just insisting on the fact themselves, which itself isn't credible or scientific. One claim that the author makes is that this is a flaw in Western education systems. It would seem to me that Western education varies significantly. And I am not familiar enough with other types of education to know what alternatives are working better in different cultural contexts.
  • kiba 5y ago
    You want to teach the scientific method and skepticism? Fine. But you have to remember it's extremely laborious for us to do so, especially since these accumulated knowledge exceed anybody's ability to learn it within their lifetime. I don't think it's a flaw per se to focus on the facts, knowledge, and concept at the expense of scientific thinking, but we all ought to acknowledge that much of our knowledge of the world essentially relied on faith.
    • IncRnd 5y ago
      No, it isn't laborious when the teacher understands the why and wherefore of the scientific method. I know the Earth is round, because I have observed that when a ship sails away from me, the top portion of the ship is the last to fade over the horizon. When flying, the shadow of the plane has a surrounding glory.
      • kiba 5y ago
        You confuse your actual collection of knowledge, facts, and conceptual understanding from actual thinking. Actual thinking is hard, confusing, slow, and infinitely more painful. Your ability to know that the Earth is round is based on facts and knowledge acquired, not thinking from first principle. The ancient did all the hard work, we just co-opted it.
• joe_the_user 5y ago
  I was educated in the 1970s. My physics, chemistry and biology classes didn't verify every single thing that's taught but we did do experiments that verified directly quite a bit of it (including ordinary and AP classes). Has this changed? I can google that AP biology still does labs.
  • insickness 5y ago
    Agreed. Most decent teachers in school incorporate some experimentation or explanation of "How do we know that...?" They often discuss who is crediting with a discovery, with an explain how the person made the discovery. But unless you delve deep into a particular field, the amount of facts students need to learn will far outweigh the ability to explain how we came to learn each and every fact.
• NikolaNovak 5y ago
  It jives with my own broader observation that most people who are (forgive generalization) "anti-science" have a different basic definition or perspective - whereas I think of "science, yay!" as a method, a way of thinking, an approach to things ; they think of it as "body of knowledge approved / disseminated by The Man". It can enable a starting from point of agreement - you should be skeptical, you should look for proof or consistency. But just because any given theory or hypothesis may be flawed, I have not personally found a better method to discover things. (I await Poppers and Khuns to attack me with appropriate zeal :-)
  • klabb3 5y ago
    > most people who are (forgive generalization) "anti-science" [...] think of it as "body of knowledge approved / disseminated by The Man" I don't think this is unique to anti-science people, but the majority view. Increasingly, the narrative pushed by pro-science factions (whether media, politicians or even academia), are increasingly eroding and morphing "science as a way of thinking" into "authorities who claim to be scientifically oriented". This can be observed in the premature and vigorous pushes for consensus, and silencing of scientists who disagree with some mainstream narrative, and a lack of openness to debate. So I agree with the post that we do have a crisis. Personally, I'm much more concerned with the quality and integrity of actual science than about those on the fringes who reject it.
• grzm 5y ago
  (2020)
• stephc_int13 5y ago
  I used to be scared by the proliferation of conspiracy theories. I was scared by the chaos and uncertainty, and the by the potentially grim political consequences. These days I tend to view all this as a relatively painful transitory state, people are inquiring and making mistakes, but we're collectively learning. Access to information is power, we've been like a child with powerful new toys, but humanity is growing up, in the grand scheme of things it happens quickly. Generations before us have been much crazier and gullible than we are. The only problem I see at the moment is the over-reaction of the so-called elite, they are a bit too scared and they are making mistakes that will undermine their credibility and power in the mid and long term.
  • LAC-Tech 5y ago
    The elephant in the room people don't want to talk about is declining trust in powerful institutions, whether official or unofficial. It's easy and very middle class to just say "oh these dumb people believe dumb things" and much harder and less comfortable to consider there's a growing issue with trust and - ultimately - legitimacy.
    • stephc_int13 5y ago
      I think there are legitimate reasons to always be concerned about the legitimacy of the ruling class. They need feedback.
    • psychlops 5y ago
      I think it's more the decline of trustable institutions.
    • nefitty 5y ago
      I didn't have health insurance for a long time. I had it growing up through my parents, but there's always this weird sense of "fix yourself, don't waste resources". It may have been a holdout from the scarcity of services my parents grew up with in rural Mexico and Central America. I got hit with a really bad chronic disease that I've been dealing with for over a decade. It manifests in so many weird, seemingly unrelated ways because it's systemic. As I traversed the world of professional medical treatment, I initially felt the rapture of attention. "Oh my God, doctors are like magic. They are literally just focused on making me feel better!" As I continued, and initial treatments lost efficacy or side effects became intolerable, my hope became overwhelmed with a feeling of resignation. I was thoroughly convinced that doctors can fix things, and that is the signal everything and everyone in society communicates. "But why am I still fucked up? Why am I on treatment #7? Why am I on procedure #3? Why am I out thousands of dollars and seemingly in the same spot I was when I started all of this?" I gave up. I stopped going to doctors. I stopped looking to them for answers. In the middle of this year's long resignation, I happened to hear an interview on NPR with a doctor. She said, "I think doctors really need to be more open with the fact that there's things we can't fix. There's things we don't know. Trust disintegrates when people approach us expecting miracles, and we fail to temper those expectations. It's hard to tell someone, 'I am an expert at X but I have no idea how to fix X." That was revelatory to me. I felt anger when doctors would prescribe me Tylenol or antibiotics or off-label depression medicine. "How the fuck are antibiotics going to fix this?!" I realized that those reactions were because I'm the kind of person that needs to know the chain of logic that leads to a conclusion. I would be so much more amenable to unintuitive treatments if the doctors had taken a second to tell me, "JAMA concluded that a combination of acetaminophen and ibuprofen are as effective as tramadol. In addition, I'm going to prescribe you these OTC's because you're young and you have a high risk of opiate abuse." Oh, that is such sound logic that I'm 100% on board with following your orders. Since I realized that, I now know what to ask and what to research when being treated. I know what my brain needs to be convinced. I know my mind's extreme hesitance to take information on faith. I gained more compassion for conspiracy theorists and radical subjectivists. Yeah, they filled their brain with bullshit from Facebook, but maybe the authority figures they relied on failed to recognize the frames from which they operate. I don't know if reading about my experience helps anyone. Ultimately, I realized that "be your own advocate" is a tremendously powerful way to operate. For the most part, authority figures and elites aren't trying to bullshit us into complacency. They have to juggle efficiency and effectiveness, and sometimes our individual pecadillos get lost in the mix. The things societies have achieved are because individuals joined in collective efforts, and flat-out ignoring or rejecting that momentum can lead to unnecessary strife and suffering for us individually. If you're on HN, you're probably super smart. Try to decode what your brain needs. If your conclusions seem to be in contradiction to the world's signals, maybe slow down and entertain ways of convincing yourself of what the signals are telling you. Your mind is powerful, it can hold contradictory facts. Trust in that.
• ronnier 5y ago
  The thing that's interesting about "flat earthers" to me is that they largely do not exist. I've never met one or even know anyone who has met one, but the level of discussion about them is insane. It's blown way out or proportion to the actual number of actual flat earthers (you gotta exclude all the ones that are just doing it for debate and to make stupid videos online). Ultimately, there's really no flat earthers at any meaningful level.
  • e40 5y ago
    Every time someone has purported to find and interview one, it seems to me their really just trolling everyone. There was a seemingly genuine AMA on reddit of one and he said he really enjoyed arguing with people at parties, but he didn't really believe it.
    • Thorrez 5y ago
      The article links to an interview with Kyrie Irving, an NBA player, and in the video he confirms he's a flat earther.
      • mFixman 5y ago
        That was one joke that was blown out of proportion by the media. https://www.nbcsports.com/boston/boston-celtics/kyrie-irving-boston-celtics-says-he-does-not-believe-earth-is-flat-was-just-trolling https://www.nbcsports.com/boston/boston-celtics/kyrie-irving...
        • e40 5y ago
          He was clearly trolling the media. Honestly, some of the sports media are so bad that I don't really blame sports figures from trolling them. It was done in usual Kyrie style, though.
          • Thorrez 5y ago
            See my reply. I don't think it was clear he was only joking.
• gerdesj 5y ago
  "What does it mean to be indoctrinated in “science” class? Let’s think back to an example that most of us learned growing up. If I asked you, “What is the mitochondria,” you, like me, would probably say “it’s the powerhouse of the cell,” or some similar concept." "Lies to children". Sir Terry Pratchett's words. That's how education works. You start off with lies and you compound them and compound them until no one even knows what on earth is going on but there is a narrative from A to B. Lucy Worsley calls them "fibs" and I agree. That's good enough for most people. It's slightly better than Just So stories and ideally avoids people doing something terminal. Sometimes, someone brought up on this nonsense looks really deeply into something and writes a paper on it. You never know, it might fly. Flat earth? What a complete pile of bollocks. Imagine how gravity would work on a disc. If you have snags with gravity as a concept then I'm mad.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• kerblang 5y ago
  Question: Does anybody actually have a good quality reference point of "This is how I know the earth really is a sphere"? Like, something more direct than indirect (I know you'd need a fairly massive conspiracy, but that's indirect). Previous googling and so forth didn't really yield particularly good results for me.
  • fullshark 5y ago
    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/7-diy-experiments-b-o-b-the-earth-is-round https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/7-diy-experiments-b-o-b...
  • gnopgnip 5y ago
    Foucault's Pendulum is a practical proof to show directly the earth is rotating and spherical. There are thousands of these around the world in museums or universities. Or you could create one with some relatively inexpensive materials.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • bee_rider 5y ago
    Wikipedia has an article about historical computations of Earth's circumference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_circumference#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_circumference#Histor... They used some pretty low-tech means to do so, which you could probably reproduce if you were so inclined.
  • rocketflumes 5y ago
    This series on YouTube has some fairly easy arguments on the Earth being a sphere w/o using any math: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bHqBy92iGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bHqBy92iGM
  • dwaltrip 5y ago
    The Earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse. It's always round -- no matter the time of day, etc. -- which is only possible if the earth is a sphere.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  Since my school days I always thought Theory of Knowledge was the most important and underrated class. That's where you talk about the scientific method and how we discover facts. Somehow it was only worth a tiny portion of the international baccalaureate. Basically this essay is correct. Science is taught the wrong way. It should all be a mix of history (of thought) and experiments that guided that thinking. Something like that Bill Bryson book, a brief history of everything. Instead of telling kids the end result, tell them how we got there. Basically, follow the method that you say you use. If you understand science, you know the end result is tentative anyway. Speaking of everything, there's probably too much content as well. Too many insignificant details that people have to cram, and that they'll never need to know, and if they do, it won't take them long to find. People need to know the large movements, not lots of specific reactions and equations. The content is also missing a rather important ingredient: what are the open questions in each field? Why turbulence? Teaching kids that we don't know everything is an antidote to science denial, however strange that may sound. The objection people have to science is often that it's arrogant.
• faeriechangling 5y ago
  I don't disagree with the authors point, yet I would contend that it's practically impossible for education to happen without indoctrination. Philosophy itself has a heck of a time proving anything is true in the face of radical doubt besides maybe some elementary notions such as that thought exists. Never mind proving anything as complex as the shape of the earth. Trying to prove to a radically sceptical flat earther that the earth is a specific shape is folly, you will never successfully demonstrate such proof against a sufficiently prepared opponent. You CAN demonstrate that it cannot be proven that the earth is flat, but that's about it. One of the most absurd thing about flat eartherdom is how "round earthers" don't seem to truly understand the limits of their own knowledge but are eager to get into arguments with other people, whereas flat earthers range from those who are equally inept to savvy people playing a prank on those who wrongly consider themselves knowledgeable. I see the entire phenomena to be a great public lesson on philosophy and science, as well as the futility of imposing your views on other people.
• temp12913231 5y ago
• tonymet 5y ago
  What were really talking about is epistemology – how do we know what we know. What the author is saying is that much of what we call science are actually facts that we take on faith. Middle school science are experiments we can all confirm, like observing protazoa under a microscope, or basic chemistry experiments. College (and beyond) science delves into things that we have to trust others to perform on our behalf. 90% of western understanding of cosmology, anthropology, physics, molecular biology, etc all rely on us taking others’ observations on faith alone. And many are merely models or theories with no modern observation. Moreover, the researchers who are making observations, are themselves using complicated apparatus designed by another person, like an electron microscope. The researchers are putting faith that the apparatus is producing an accurate & informative signal. Your ability to observe and understand the world requires a lot of faith in that system. Just remember that the entire system is built upon people, who have biases and are vulnerable to groupthink. There have been misunderstandings in the past, which are glamorously called “scientific revolutions”. Even small-scale misunderstandings should remind people to remain intellectually vigilant.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • imgabe 5y ago
    I was listening to a podcast that made a really good point about the varying reliability of different sciences. In psychology, for example, a theory might have been validated in only a small experiment and fails when replicated. Meanwhile, something like Maxwell's Laws of electromagnetism are replicated trillions of times a day. Every time your cell phone or wifi works correctly, that is another replication indicating that Maxwell's equations were correct. When the science becomes engineering and we can build functioning things based on the theories, that is a good indication that they are correct. Maybe you didn't personally verify that the Earth is round, but the people who built the GPS system used that fact. If the Earth were flat, the GPS wouldn't work. So far, no flat-earthers have built a functioning GPS based on the Earth being flat.
    • tonymet 5y ago
• adolph 5y ago
  I think I'm effectively a flat earther because I wasn't able to generalize Bostock's "Command Line Cartography" [0]--totally got stuck trying to work out projections for different shapes. I notice that no other comment has brought up the challenges of calculating different projections, does it just come naturally to other people? 0. https://medium.com/@mbostock/command-line-cartography-part-1-897aa8f8ca2c https://medium.com/@mbostock/command-line-cartography-part-1... 1. https://spatialreference.org/ref/epsg/nad83-california-albers/ https://spatialreference.org/ref/epsg/nad83-california-alber...
• jere 5y ago
  Good point. I wouldn't know how to answer most of the tik tok girl's questions but I wish I knew.
  • throwaway69123 5y ago
    He used it to find the hypotenuse
  • spc476 5y ago
    It's too bad _Mathematics for the Millions_ [1] isn't used as a text book. It covers the evolution of math throughout history, basically showing how mathematics was derived by the problems being solved. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/039331071X/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/039331071X/
  • BrissyCoder 5y ago
    Serious question - is she for real? Surely she's doing satire right?
    • schleck8 5y ago
      Thrre is quite a lot of people on tiktok who are very confident in what they say but have absolutely no clue
• gexla 5y ago
  I haven't met anyone who believes in a flat Earth. I'm also wondering if anyone here has. Or if anyone anywhere has. I wonder if they really exist. My current theory is that the belief is a wildly successful joke which has created a community in which they can all share in. Maybe the flat Earth people are the good ones. ETA: Which also means I screwed up a great opportunity to continue the joke by posting information on why the world really is flat.
  • stevenwoo 5y ago
    I have met people who work in Silicon Valley who believe in a flat earth. After pressing the issue a bit, no matter what logical argument you throw at them, they can excuse it as "the earth might be curved a little bit, but it's not a sphere" (so no mathematical argument backed by facts they can see is going to persuade them) or "there's a conspiracy so no astronaut/satellite can see/show the true shape of the earth". It's not worth the time to engage someone who holds such a belief in conspiracy nonsense.
• Method5440 5y ago
  To those who say that flat earthers don’t exist in reality… There’s a guy who drives around town where my parents live in Arizona with his flat earth position writ large on the side of his pickup truck. He will stop to debate with you even if you’re next to him at a traffic light. [1] I think flat earthers do exist but the majority of them may not admit it openly if they’re still sufficiently “there” to fear the social ostracization (word?) that might follow. I agree to some extent with the original article under discussion and I would point interested folks to an interesting video by Sabine Hossenfelder which makes some tangentially similar points. [2] I would also add that the western school system teaches us to fear being wrong and finally letting go of this can be a liberating and empowering experience. After that it seems to become a little easier to believe the next similarly counterfactual thing that comes along. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/InfowarriorRides/comments/gow054/moon_man_prescott_az/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/InfowarriorRides/comments/gow054/mo... [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f8DQSM-b2cc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f8DQSM-b2cc
• jedberg 5y ago
  I must have gone to a pretty great school. We did experiments to prove the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell and we spent an entire 2.5 hour chemistry class on deriving avagrado's number and proving it was correct. And this was public school in LA county in the 90s. I see a lot of posts about "I'll bet you never saw/did/learned this in high school!" and almost every time the answer is, "yeah, actually I did". Like we were taught that Colombus massacred the locals, and we were taught that Native American's were treated poorly by European settlers. So I guess I should be thanking my teachers for doing it right.
  • jmercouris 5y ago
    I had a very similar experience in my school in the Chicago suburbs. I don’t know how it is elsewhere.
  • MPSimmons 5y ago
    I grew up in West Virginia, and I can guarantee that virtually none of my teachers could explain how to derive most of what we were taught from first principles. There were a few very bright stars in my list of teachers, but most were really phoning it in and didn't understand well enough to teach anyone aside from reciting from the teacher's edition of the book.
  • jl2718 5y ago
    I’m impressed that you had X-ray diffraction equipment in your high school chemistry lab. If not, then I’m pretty sure you were making some circular assumptions. The number was a purely theoretical unknown quantity to Avogadro himself, based only on the assumption that a fixed volume of gas should contain the same number of ‘molecules’ regardless of its composition. Oh and then there’s history. Wow, you honestly believe that just because you were taught the trendy woke parts of history that you got the whole story. I’ll pick an innocuous example. How much do you know about the Salem witch trials, and how much of that was taught from primary source evidence?
    • jdaxe 5y ago
      What do you mean "The Crucible" doesn't count as a primary source??? ;)
• GuB-42 5y ago
  I actually like flat earthers as an exercise in epistemology. We all know that the earth is not flat, there are countless evidence, and a lot of them easy to try for yourself. And flat earth is not a dangerous idea. The only thing you risk by believing and trying to spread the idea is ridicule. It is the perfect playground for trying "alternative" ideas. So go look at all the flat earthers arguments and try to take them seriously. Some of them are actually great. There is even one that mirrors general relativity: the earth is a constantly accelerating disk, this is what creates gravity. Of course they are all wrong, but disproving them require actual thinking. When you have trained yourself on the flat earth, you have completed the tutorial and you can now move on to the real subjects: climate change, vaccines, quack medicine, etc... Here you have actual believers, and they have ideas that can be convincing and dangerous. People die because of quack medicine.
• Barrin92 5y ago
  It's a pretty nonsensical article to be honest. Experiments to demonstrate that the earth isn't flat, like Foucault's Pendulum happen in plenty of schools, in fact pretty much every physics, biology or chemistry class does plenty of experiments to show kids rudimentary science. Flat-Earthers can disprove their own flat earth theory in ten minutes if they wanted to with high school science. The reason they don't is because most of them are insane, have like the author a pathological resistance to justified authority (which has its place in science as well), or just want to prey on gullible people which often is pretty lucrative financially.
  • JohnBooty 5y ago
    have like the author a pathological resistance to justified authority I'm not seeing anything of the sort in this blog post. He merely says that we're not doing a good job of teaching science. We can have a respect for justified authority, and at the same time do a better job demonstrating the foundations of science, rather than simply expecting students to learn by rote memorization.
    • Barrin92 5y ago
      >He merely says that we're not doing a good job of teaching science Not true at all. He equates ordinary high school education with 'indoctrination' (more than once), claims that the education system is responsible for producing conspiracy theories (the main point of the article) and asserts that schools do not teach 'real science'. As for rote memorization, if you want to see actual rote memorization you need to go through a Russian STEM education for gifted kids and a few math competitions. In our Western systems we almost notoriously try to insert 'critical thinking' at every corner. Ironically enough, the Russian system has always produced excellent scientists while we're increasingly falling down the ladder. If anything we need more, not less rote memorization so people don't suck at 10th grade math. The defining feature of the conspiracy theorist is that he is both too critical and sucks at thinking. A conspiracy theorist is a person who questions everything without having the capacity to ask the right questions.
      • 5y ago
• titzer 5y ago
  This article is not a defense of flat earthers, it's an explanation for why they exist (that the educational system failed to teach them critical thinking). Even then, I still do not think that's really it. Flat earthers are proof that some people will just obstinately believe in complete and utter horseshit. I've seen dozens of flat earth videos. These people do not listen to reason; they didn't reason themselves into the position and you cannot reason them out of it. The flat earthers doing the "experiments" keep coming up with reasons to keep on believing, even when their experiments are so blinkered and janky they show either nothing at all or that they are, in fact, wrong. (I recommend "Behind the Curve" to see some of these people in action.) Some might just get bored and move on to something else, but mark my words, some people are just seriously stupid[1] and will keep right on believing absurd crap to their graves, on faith alone. The universe will keep smacking them in the face with being wrong, but they'll only get angrier. Hopefully they get tired before they get dangerous. [1] I mean something specific about stupid. Not just wrong, not just ignorant, but actively and self-assuredly wrong, often to their own detriment. Beware stupid people in large numbers.
  • spc476 5y ago
    I came across this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjYc8h3xt-E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjYc8h3xt-E) where-by a former flat-earther goes into why they (and formerly, he) believed in the Flat Earth model.
  • podiki 5y ago
    > Hopefully they get tired before they get dangerous. Clearly, it is much too late for that.
    • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      For the flat earthers? How are they dangerous?
      • JaimeThompson 5y ago
• alexpotato 5y ago
  This is where classes that teach the HISTORY of science and how discoveries were made can be so valuable. I was recently reading Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and he does an excellent job of explaining how each discovery led into the next. He also describes how some discoveries just took a long time because either the apparatus to make that discovery didn't exist yet or the right person didn't have the right idea. As a personal example, in a college "History of Economics" class, the professor described the "Diamond/Water Paradox". Prior to understanding how the intersection of supply and demand could lead to a market price, very smart people were perplexed how diamonds, which were rare but basically useless, were so expensive but water, a critical element to life, was so cheap. In hindsight, it all seems so obvious but explaining this history of the concept helps add an intuitive understanding of "it's not just what an item does but how available it is that helps define the price".
  • chasedehan 5y ago
    The diamond water paradox is one of the first concepts learned in an introductory Econ class; hopefully not until a “history” class. I was an Econ professor in the past and this was quite literally the first thing I spoke about in introductory courses. This is the analogy used to describe what the science of economics is, the study of the allocation of scarce resources.
    • alexpotato 5y ago
      I was an Economics major and also took AP Economics in high school and there may have been other analogies used but I don't remember hearing the D/W paradox till that history of econ class. That class was wonderful b/c it taught me a lot of the "first principles" of economics using real stories and examples instead of "here is a supply/demand chart, accept that it's true". Which brings me back to my original point, methods of teaching that explain HOW we got to the current way of thinking, IMHO, are the best way to teach people. The variety of responses in other threads show that not everyone is taught that way unfortunately. Your point in particular shows that even someone with an Econ background (aka me) may not have gotten this form of instruction.
• throwaway69123 5y ago
  If schools taught the scientific method universally it would be harder to indoctrinate them with things like social "science" that dont stand up against that kind of thinking.
• titzer 5y ago
  PSA on how to prove to yourself the Earth is a.) not flat b.) specifically not a disc with balls circling overhead, easy edition: 1. Watch a sunset. The Sun goes over the horizon (not around in circles overhead). 2. Clouds high in the atmosphere stay lit longer at sunset (and light up earlier at sunrise) than clouds lower in the atmosphere. It'd be the opposite with a "Spotlight sun", which would project a cone of light onto Earth, wider at the base than the top. 3. The Sun's apparent diameter never changes. It can't be a little ball flying around in circles overhead, because it'd get smaller when it's farther away. 4. Watch a lunar eclipse. The shadow of the Earth is curved. 5. If you are in the Northern hemisphere, find Polaris, i.e. the Norh Star. At night, all the stars go counterclockwise around it. Its angle off the horizon is exactly your latitude. Go to the Southern hemisphere. No Polaris, it's over the horizon ffs. But there is a south pole point you can find by using the southern pointers. All the stars go around the south pole...clockwise. [1] 6. Like Polaris, the constellations disappear over the horizon as you move south. 7. Go to the ocean. Watch a ship sail away. It disappears hull first over the horizon. Use binoculars. You can see more of the ship if you are higher above the water. The ocean is curved. 8. Watch the Sun for a year. It moves through the Zodiac (i.e. against the background stars). That's because the Earth orbits the Sun, duh. 9. Take a flight from South America to South Africa. Take a stopwatch if you don't believe clocks are real. Planes would have to be supersonic to fly the greatly exaggerated distance of a disk Earth. 10. Look through a frickin telescope. Literally every planet and star and moon we see is round. Why would the Earth be different? 11. Swing a pendulum for 24 hours. It won't just rotate back and forth. Foucault showed a free-swinging pendulum will rotate in a circle because of the rotation of the Earth. You can even compute your latitude from the speed at which it processes.
• rpmisms 5y ago
  Honestly, I don't care if it's flat or not, and I will happily make the argument for it being flat, just to annoy people who can't let others just be wrong.
  • tshaddox 5y ago
    Being ignorant or mistaken can be innocent. Explicitly rejecting reason cannot be innocent.
    • rpmisms 5y ago
      "cannot be innocent" is an interesting phrase to use, can you define innocence in this context? I think I understand your underlying opinion, but you're not expressing it particularly explicitly.
      • tshaddox 5y ago
        I don't mean "innocent" in any formal, moral, or legal sense. I just mean that explicitly rejecting reason is an inherently dangerous mental practice, even if the specific case is something small that doesn't have any direct consequences.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• lofatdairy 5y ago
  I think the key point the post tries to make is that your average Western education student is primed to memorize and take facts at face value, without interrogation. Overall, besides the assumption that Western education is hardly homogeneous, a point already made by several commenters, this seems somewhat valid but incomplete. It's not as if _all_ flat Earthers come to their belief by accepting it at face value. There's the people from the Netflix doc Beyond the Curve [1] and that guy who's trying to build a rocket [2], so it seems to me that there's at least some evidence that contradicts the original point - there are conspiracy theorists who not only proceed to interrogate their beliefs, but test them in a way that _should_ lead them to the correct conclusion. It's not so much a problem with memorization so much as it's a problem with the interpretation of results - any test that contradicts a flat Earth must be from a mistake. This is a much more subtle problem than the one introduced by the post, this is not just a case of mindless sheep doubting one memorized system and switching to some other memorized system, these are rational people deriving their beliefs in a rational way, but for several different reasons, arriving at the wrong conclusion. I don't want to type up a massive wall of text, but some other problems I have are: 1. The fact that education isn't occurring in a vacuum, even if "Western education" was constructed to teach all facts by rationally deriving the facts, we can't deny that there's a religious element to Flat Earth, and if you're taught from an early age that the Bible is both true and literal, then they're going to ignore that rational education anyways (I have nothing against religion, but the literal interpretation I was taught at an early age led me to believe that the Earth was only 6000 years old). This is also important because a conspiracy theory does not come from nowhere, there has to be a narrative. Otherwise, there's no reason to doubt what you've been taught. There's no anti-mitochondria conspiracy. 2. There's going to be an element of memorization, if not the conclusion ("the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell") then the observation, and so what happens if they doubt the experiment they've been taught? At _some_ point the student has to have faith in the teacher, and faith in the scientists who came before us. We can't just dismiss all memorization as inferior to frameworks and rationality, there's a need for a distinction to be made here. 3. Reducing belief in conspiracy theories to an inadequacy in education seems to be ignoring the underlying problem of doubt. We can lampshade this and say that teaching people to accept things at face value causes them to accept other things at face value as well, but ultimately there's no system under this framework for explaining _why_ a person may privilege one belief over the other. I overall agree with the point that education seems to focus too much on memorizing disparate facts that almost feel like trivia at points, but the post seems to assume that providing the tools to interrogate our beliefs will lead us to the right conclusion, but these tools can still be misused and the underlying assumptions under which we apply our rationality are still important. Understanding these underlying assumptions seems far more important to me than trying to pin down a complex issue on a single, equally complex thing as education. [1]https://www.businessinsider.com/flat-earthers-tried-to-prove-the-earth-was-flat-and-it-did-not-go-well-2019-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/flat-earthers-tried-to-prove... [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32X88HMae0I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32X88HMae0I
• TimedToasts 5y ago
  Much of Flat Earth is populated and promoted by Discordianism. Ha ha only serious and all that. The great thing about it is that I can tell you that and it doesn't affect a thing. Hail Eris.
• booleandilemma 5y ago
  I do not believe that flat earthers exist. The only people I've seen claiming to believe the earth is flat are youtube celebrities seeking attention or big name celebrities saying it in jest. I have yet to see a non-celebrity (or celebrity wannabe) who believes the earth is flat. Similarly, internet randos don't count. As far as I'm concerned, the whole thing is a 4chan joke gone too far. I certainly don't think it has anything to do with our education system.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• laev313 5y ago
• razzimatazz 5y ago
  I've been looking for the comment to explain what I see as the most significant factor in flat earth belief, which would be - missing respect for scientific authority. It's possible to be a flat earther if you don't see how much your day to day life depends on the work of scientists and engineers - regular people who just focus their energy differently to you. But if you care a little about those brainy sorts, and have enough trust for the prominent ones who communicate well such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson, you would come to accept that there are millions of us who depend on the knowledge of the shape of the earth (almost directly) in our day to day life. It might be the case that given enough bad science teachers and a lack of decent 'nerdy' people in your life, you never gain that respect, and a flat earth becomes a real possibility.
• ziml77 5y ago
  One big motivator I've seen for flerfers to hold their belief is a desire to feel significant. Many of these people appear to be frightened by the thought that humans are just a blip compared to the vastness of space and time. It ties in very closely to them wanting to believe that we are so significant to their deity that we were made in its image. These people will probably never be convinced that the Earth isn't flat.
• aaron695 5y ago
• spurgu 5y ago
  You could also draw parallels to programmers, in that we used to have to figure things out the hard way, by experimentation, or by reading the documentation (gasp!), whereas nowadays people just go to StackOverflow for answers. People aren't used to building their own understanding of things, but instead allow for an excessive amount of outside influence to slowly mold that understanding, without having control over it yourself. I recognize this often in myself, starting to think of a concept or problem, and giving up too soon when facing a complex train of thought and instead resort to trying to search for a solution online, or at least someone who's thought about the problem before. This Sucks™. We're using our conceptualization skills less and less. I remember a time where you were able (or forced) to ponder a concept for minutes, or hours, or days/weeks (depending on the scope of the problem) since there wasn't an all-knowing web of information, whereas nowadays it's easy to just hit the "I give up" button and find a solution online.
• dilliwal 5y ago
  One request from writers, please avoid mentioning “western world”. It kinda gives impression that you know rest of the “western” world (in many cases you don’t) and that the west is something special. Be specific, if it is your country, just mention that. Nothing specific to the author of this but in general. :)
  • imgabe 5y ago
    It gives me the opposite impression, the the author is only speaking of the portion of the world they have knowledge of, and don't presume to speak for other areas they don't know about.
• dmvaldman 5y ago
  i have a different take. i'm very glad flat earthers exist. in general i would hope the population of people who believe an idea be proportional to the probability of its truth. so even the wildest ideas should have some modicum of support. consider a world without this. i would imagine it would necessarily have to be thought-policed. i believe this is how we should frame this discussion. what i think is the issue is that we have a broadcasting machine (social media, news, etc) that works on sensationalism. so you are always hearing about fringe ideas and given no signaling to the size of the population that supports it.
• IAmEveryone 5y ago
  I miss the times when idiots were really into ideas that had absolutely no chance of causing any meaningful harm.
  • cortexio 5y ago
• addicted 5y ago
  It’s actually ironic but the author claims the problem is that we don’t teach science, when in reality their complaint is that we don’t teach the history of science. They just don’t seem to realize it. And they are probably right. We should maybe teach less science/math concepts, and spend more time discussing how those concepts were created. What were the motivations of the people who came up with these concepts. How a certain individual came up with 1 concept and that was refined by another, etc to the point we got what we have today. The true problem is that we don’t have enough social science about science/math.
• trees101 5y ago
  Flat Earth is true in the most important sense, which is our direct experience. Although we regularly use technology which relies on the standard scientific understanding of the Earth and Solar System, our everyday experience and all our planning is based on a mental model of a flat earth. When you go for a walk, you act as if the earth is flat. When you plan a journey, you act as if the earth is flat. It is a valid approximation that works. I think that some of the rise of Flat Earth belief, is a rebellion against being told very strange, abstract and foreign things that directly contradict our everyday experience. In this sense, Flat Earth theory is "true" in a limited Phenomenological sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg0i-4m2L0g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg0i-4m2L0g
  • dlp211 5y ago
    This is the difference between flat earth and flat Earth. Flat Earther's argue the latter, not the former, though they do use the former as "proof" of the latter.
• ck2 5y ago
  We just went through the previous four years of this from the highest level, it's obviously not a real belief, just something to "punk the system" where being contrarian is somehow profitable financially, emotionally or mentally to some people. And it's not really a belief any more than "believing" drinking bleach won't kill you. It's a contrarian denial of obvious facts when again, it's profitable even on just an ego-level to think/say so. However this post made me think of this which if true, is fascinating: https://www.reddit.com/gallery/s5drf0 https://www.reddit.com/gallery/s5drf0
• oceanplexian 5y ago
  I mean the difference with flat earth and other sorts of conspiracy theories is that you can directly observe the fact that the Earth is not flat. I’ve been flights, a few on clear days at ~40,000ft and you can definitely make out the curve of the Earth with the naked eye. It doesn’t require any special tools or leaps of logic, you can simply look out the window.
  • fsh 5y ago
    Or you can go to a harbor and watch ships drop below the horizon.
• iratewizard 5y ago
  People are too quick to laugh at flat earthers. Instead, it's a great opportunity to learn about the world. Anyone who has laughed at them before, have you first entertained the "what if it's true" stance? It's an easy one to entertain and disprove yourself, so it's great for practice. If the earth is flat, what is their model for the planet? Why is that model impossible? At the very least, it helps you uncover some of your false assumptions of the how the world is by understanding your own model better.
• jv22222 5y ago
  In "Behind the Curve" (Netflix doc about flat earther's) the thing that became very clear is that it's not just about believing the earth is flat for these people, it is about belonging to a community of like minded people all fighting the same good fight. A sense of community. A sense of purpose. I think that is why they so doggedly stick to their guns. Without sticking to the belief, there is so much to lose (friends, partners, purpose, etc).
  • starik36 5y ago
    I liked that they set out to prove via science that they are correct. They were, of course, stunned to find out that they are wrong. But still, nothing wrong with being skeptical, as long as you are prepared to accept results to the contrary.
  • thejackgoode 5y ago
    I came to think that first comes the unwillingness to accept world as presented by society. The community forms on the basis of this need. It does not matter what element of current consensus gets questioned. Unhappy people go into psychosis sometimes.
• jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
  It goes beyond a lack of scientific knowledge. To be a flat Earther, you also need to believe there is a vast conspiracy to cover up the fact that the Earth is flat. NASA and other countries' space agencies, astronauts, pilots, astrophysicists, geologists, meteorologists, and anyone whose job requires taking into consideration the spherical nature of the Earth (so: GPS systems engineers, flight guidance software programmers, ballistic weapons systems engineers and operators, and I'm sure many more). They're all in on it for... some reason? They somehow stand to gain from tricking the sheeple into believing the Earth is a globe? And none of these conspirators have defected and blown the whole thing wide open? It's not like there is roughly equally compelling evidence on both sides and these people just lack the mental tools to determine what is right. People become flat Earthers for the same reasons I believe people fall for many conspiracy theories: it's nice to feel special because you see the truth everyone else is blind to, and it's exciting to think there is a big conspiracy happening for who knows what end.
• godmode2019 5y ago
  I personally enjoyed that early flat earth momentum. It forced me to check the working of great science thinkers that came before me. I learned a lot about the earth in general attempting to prove the flat earth trolls wrong. Its like you are offering a conjecture, a thought experiment where you are forced to ask could this model be possible. I remember a story about Euler I believe, suggested the thought experiment that the earth was hollow and has a central sun, to explain a interesting observation in the magnetosphere. https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/85-inside-the-hollow-earth/ https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/85-inside-the-hollow-earth... The earth is not flat, but the universe might be, according to Inflation theory, if the universe is flat the earth could be a holographic projection. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
• andreskytt 5y ago
  Statements like “Schools, as they exist in most Western countries today, do not teach science as such” are wonderfully tautological. Has the author done a study? Are there findings to be shared? What is the definition of “teaching science”? How long is the “now”? What is the “west”? A person understanding the scientific process might ask similar questions, find them not having clear answers and thus not make sweeping statements.
• MarcScott 5y ago
  It's amazing the misconceptions that children and adults can form and than maintain, even when a concept is explained to them. I was once teaching a class about balancing forces, and was using skydivers as an example. I asked them to think about the change in forces on a skydiver when she opens her parachute. Most of them could regurgitate a basic explanation of the changes in forces, but one child chipped in to ask why the skydiver flew upwards? I explained that they continued to fall, but he and several other children all disagreed with me and they had video evidence to prove it as well, showing the skydiver flying upwards from the perspective of their buddy. It took a hastily conducted experiment with small weights and plastic bags to convince them otherwise. A friend of mine once asked me why it was that when the shadow of the Earth is falling on the moon to give a crescent shape, how is it that we can still see the moon sometimes when the sun is rising, and there can't possibly be a shadow. Again, my explanation was insufficient to persuade him, and so I went home and created a computer 3D model of the solar system, so he could see the changes in the moon from different camera angles. This is why we used to do "experiments" in science labs. You could easily describe diffusion, but then how do the learners know that it's real and not just another thing they are being told is the truth. Have them slowly dissolve iodine crystals in different temperatures of water, and even though they and you know what the outcome will be, at least they have the proof of their own eyes. Maybe the pressure on results, lack of time and lack of money is preventing some teachers from spending time conducting experiments with their children, but more need to be done to prevent them from sucking in 'evidence' from YouTube channels about the flat earth, 5G networks causing covid and vaccinations being poisonous. They need proof that their teachers are telling the truth more than 50% of the time, so they can have trust that what else remains is also the truth.
• haspok 5y ago
  The only flat-earth article/video you need to read/watch - more or less the same argument, but much better presented: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/08/flat-earth-science-wrong-but-not-stupid.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/08/flat-earth-science-... "... This is why I think scientists should take flat earthers’ philosophical problem seriously. It’s a problem that any scientifically advanced society must address. It is not possible for each and every one of us to redo all experiments in the history of science. It therefore becomes increasingly important that scientists provide evidence for how science works, so that people who cannot follow the research itself can instead rely on evidence that the system produces correct and useful descriptions of nature. "
• plafl 5y ago
  I agree completely with the article. It is actually a very natural thing to believe and when all we have are beliefs some people are simply wired to distrust consensus. I think having outliers is a survival strategy as a species, although it usually goes wrong against the individuals.
• mro_name 5y ago
  while it's easy to poke fun on flatties, it's uncomforting in what flat earths we mainstreamies tend to believe. Growth to name one. Or Economy. There's a lot of flat earths that glue our day to day life together. Obey. Consume.
• winrid 5y ago
  In a previous job, the shuttle driver to our office was a flat Earther and would always be trying to convince the engineers that the Earth was flat. No punchline, just good times.
• hoseja 5y ago
  > Schools, as they exist in most Western countries today, do not teach science as such. Mostly, they are simply a system of indoctrination. This needs to be repeated and understood. Public schooling is an outgrowth of state's needs for productive patriots, not any sort of noble pursuit.
• tetsuhamu 5y ago
  Someone who is a flat-earther is probably also someone who isn't concerned about getting a 100% A+ on their homework and tests. The kids who question the system of schooling are the ones who are doing it appropriately. We don't need to make a 100% A+ incorporate questioning indoctrination, we need to make people not so concerned about getting 100% A+. In the UK, 80%+ comprehension is considered an A.
• jycoo 5y ago
  Flat earthers are no more preposterous than [insert religion], though... so how comes that we can laugh about flat earthers, but non about christians, muslims etc?
• cortexio 5y ago
• nirui 5y ago
  Here is a documentary Johnny Harris made (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwJzsE8CvzQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwJzsE8CvzQ). In the documentary, he concluded (start at 14:55) that "The Flat Earth movement is not totally about the shape of the Earth ... What it does has to do with is been skeptical of big institutions that are probably watching you, that are probably controlling your life, that are probably feeding you bad information to retain power..." Simply put, it's a trust issue, and not a completely groundless one. You can't fix a trust issue with information produced by the very institutions that they don't trust. This is why Mike Hughes build that rocket, he wants to see it for himself instead of "blindly trust" NASA and "big company/governments". It's not just education I'm afraid. The trust problem must be resolved first somehow.
  • paulnpace 5y ago
    Indeed, and what I observed is even one step beyond this, to conclude that it is something like an Internet-propagated cult-like "movement". My understanding is that cult leaders teach their followers to be prepared for those trying to convince them of anything outside of the leader's teachings. The leader has carefully planned out all "teachings" such that when someone comes along to convince a member to leave the cult's teachings, the member already has a long series of prepared counter-arguments to every rejection of the teaching. No matter how carefully reasoned the rejections may be, the counter-arguments will defeat them, and, critically, the member will view anyone trying to convince them to leave the cult as a mortal enemy trying to harm them. Apply this to flat-earth and it is why I believe it to be cult-like. I really wish that someone who studies cults from a psychology perspective would take a very serious look at the flat-earth communities. My personal experience with someone I knew for over a decade was seeing this person felt that everything I thought I knew was actually a clever deception and that I and everyone else is out of touch with reality, and they are the few that have been able to see through the deception. It can make even casual discussion exceptionally difficult. When I have gone through YouTube videos "debunking" flat-earthers, what I usually see is the person or group making the video are not respectful of all claims being made, even on a scientific basis. For example, in one video a local group of flat-earthers was contacted for performing an experiment to test their theories. An agreement was made as to how to perform the experiment, and one of the items was the experiment must occur before a specific time in the morning. No surprise, the people who put the experiment together didn't show up to the experiment until several hours after the agreed upon time, invalidating the experiment. Of course, they proceeded to perform the experiment at the invalidated time and post a video disproving flat-earth theory, but the result of this is to embolden the flat-earther, because of course the reason for showing up late is to trick everyone into continuing to believe the deception. Nearly always, the people trying to disprove such theories will use this to show how crazy the flat-earthers are, and not see or publicly admit they have made the problem worse with their actions. Similar results are achieved with science-based videos put out by science or engineering-based YouTube channels, where the person making the video is, frankly, disrespectful to the flat-earthers. This never helps, but it does get the person making the video more than usual views for probably less than usual effort. Also, a lot of discussion and content will be in regards to the cult leaders. Part of the attraction to the leaders is they are the lone sane ones fighting against the hordes of crazies. Instead, people should ignore the leaders and focus on the members. You can never get a con-man to admit what they are.
• sensanaty 5y ago
  I don't believe many genuine flat earthers exist, I think 'conspiracies' like the flat earth and the moon landing being a hoax are a massive psyop to make conspiracy theories seem completely insane to the average Joe so that people are less inclined to believe in other conspiracy theories that are a bit more grounded. After all, you don't wanna be lumped in with those crazies that think the Earth is flat, right?
  • a_imho 5y ago
    I have to admit I subscribe to this line of thinking, but I also have to admit it is just conspiracy theory advanced classes. However I do believe it is useful to talk about conspiracy theories in a more fine grained way, after all even the most rationale people who flat out renounce them have at least some opinion which do not 100% align with the official narratives.
• Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Here's a neat video where flat earthers spout their Truth and reveal themselves to actually be antisemites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H110vCGvTmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H110vCGvTmM
• sazz 5y ago
  The interesting part is, however, that more than 99.99999% of the earth's population answer the question whether the earth is flat or a sphere incorrectly. The only correct answer is: "Both". I personally find it kind of ironic that the vast majority of people who think they are on science side and "sphere" is the correct answer are also wrong.
  • krapp 5y ago
    "When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." -- Isaac Asimov The correct answer isn't "both." "The earth" in the question you're posing refers to the planet as a whole. The planet Earth is not flat as described by flat earthers, but spherical, as demonstrated by science. The earth is not a mathematically perfect sphere, but that isn't an assumption being made in the question. If it were, it would also be assumed that "flat" refers to a perfectly flat plane, which would obviously also make the answer that the earth is also flat incorrect. You probably mean the earth can appear flat in some locations from the point of view of the observer, which at best is only subjectively true and still doesn't contradict the premise that considering the earth to be spherical is scientifically invalid. You're just playing semantic games in that case, and arguing that ignorance and knowledge are equivalent due to linguistic vagueness. The science is still firmly on the side of "sphere and not flat" when the terms are used in the context commonly understood.
• declnz 5y ago
  Agh, another site delivered over HTTP
• Fellshard 5y ago
  Hypothesis for why there could be an actual /defense/ for the existence and even utility of flat earthers and similar groups: They act as a continual, low-grade chaos assault on scientific institutions, thus encouraging the institutions to maintain resiliency and not stagnate. The more you simply shut these groups down without tackling their actual arguments, the less benefit you'll receive, and the more likely it is to take on the magnitude of a true threat. On the other hand, too much of this would lead to significant wasted effort.
• rob_c 5y ago
  yeah, simply put "repeat after me" is no comparison to talking to a learned elder... Fed up of most of the problems in the west having been preventable had we actually invested in the education and public health systems about 30 years ago and didn't let certain groups become so disenfranchised as to become pointlessly political. (I understand why schools did, they thought they'd get treated better by a left-wing political parties, but in reality other than platitudes they're not really any better off)
• alexose 5y ago
  The question I always come back to is, “what do I expect to be true”? If I believe that the earth is a spheroid, then I expect that satellites rely on orbital mechanics. If I learn about orbital mechanics, I expect to find math that describes orbits. If I learn about that math, I expect that it’s based on the geometry of circles and ellipses. I don’t have to have firsthand knowledge of these things. I can just build a network of expectations based on other things I know. And when something I observe doesn’t match my expectation, I can shake the tree a bit and figure out why. Individual assumptions can always be challenged with experimental evidence, and the knowledge network only becomes more complete as a result. Every conversation I’ve had with conspiracy theorists suggests that they can’t (or won’t) do this. For them, knowledge is an accumulation of discrete units. Facts need not be built on other facts. Each wild belief is essentially a different Russel’s Teapot: Falsifiability is optional, and contrary evidence is easily waved away as propaganda. Bold predictions don’t need to ever come true, as there are always bolder ones to take their place. I think it comes down to different goals. Their goals are not to make dispassionate predictions about the world, but to fit the world into a mold that matches their emotional state. And to signal to others that their feelings aren’t just valid, but real— Explained by forces that the rest of the world dismisses as “crazy”.
  • posterboy 5y ago
    Projective geometry should allow for homomorphisms to the euclidean plane, see moebius transform. This creates the literal edge case, but then I don't need to take satelites for an analogy to see that. If I had reason to be afraid of falling of the edge, surely I could reason about circumnavigation as well. I really doubt that this is what flat earthers are worried about.
• meatsauce 5y ago
  There are no flat earthers. You've been trolled.
• gadders 5y ago
  I'm still not sure that flat-earthers aren't part of some major prank like the "Birds aren't real" group - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren%27t_Real https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren%27t_Real
• paperoli 5y ago
  I think the earth is flat AMA
• ArtemZ 5y ago
• heckerhut 5y ago
  He had me at „powerhouse of the cell“. But I also remember mitochondria have been separate organisms once that we basically adopted into our own DNA. Hat’s why mitochondrial DNA is used a lot for determining the evolutionary distance between organisms.
• RickJWagner 5y ago
• mbrodersen 5y ago
  Most of science and math taught in school is useless to students who doesn’t pursue a STEM career. However we desperately need a percentage of students to peruse a STEM career for society to function. And we don’t know ahead of time who those students will be. So we force all students to try to learn it. The result being a large percentage of students feeling that they are wasting their time and that “science is useless”. Which it is for them.