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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 th

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.
    - IncRnd 5y ago
      > 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. That's simply made up. There are two examples in my comment. They are not from long dead ancient squabbling scientists of natural philosophy but from my own experience of setting experiments to prove empirically whether the Earth is round or flat.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Teaching a single scientific fact based on supporting evidence is easy, teaching every single fact plus it’s associated evidence simply takes longer. Nobody questions that sugar contains C6H12O6, so it’s simply taught as a fact without showing the evidence used to derive it. This can even run into problems when people get taught a bunch on regurgitated nonsense around stuff like how wings work. In the end people get skeptical around a tiny number of scientific facts like climate change, evolution, and vaccination but they have no problem accepting everything from the MOS hardness scale, echos, buoyancy, etc etc. Why most people object to just those specific things has absolutely nothing to do with evidence, it’s completely part of a wider social phenomenon.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > In the end people get skeptical around a tiny number of scientific facts like climate change, evolution, and vaccination but they have no problem accepting everything from the MOS hardness scale, echos, buoyancy, etc etc. The Mohs scale is pretty easy to validate, and the exercises typically done when it is taught tend to serve to do that.
      - Retric 5y ago
        Just imaging if people showed similar levels of skepticism around the Mohs scale as the did global warming etc. The Mohs hardness scale is actually extremely difficult to demonstrate across a full range of natural materials. It’s intuitive that if A scratches B and B scratches C then A should scratch C, but testing a few samples is nowhere near enough to demonstrate across every natural mineral. It’s even more difficult to show this is a stable property that doesn’t very significantly over time. So, sure a teacher might hand out a few samples and show what the idea is, but that’s little more than hand waving.
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > The Mohs hardness scale is actually extremely difficult to demonstrate across a full range of natural materials Well, sure combinatorial explosion and the difficulty of gathering every possible natural material makes it impractical to show that: (1) the scale measures a real trait that exhibits the same consistent transitive behavior across all possible combinations of natural materials, and (2) every natural material with a rating on the scale is correctly rated. It's relatively easy to establish that the set of standard examplars for the integer ratings consistently show the relative properties the scale is supposed to measure. Of course, it trivial to then verify the same is true relative to the examplars for any other material with an established rating, or to establish (within the bounds of the ceiling/floor integers) the rating of any material for which one doesn't have a measure and confirm consistency against examplars and any manageable sample of other rated materials.
- rPlayer6554 5y ago
  But with that thinking society will never progress. If we take everything in the past on faith, then we will stay stuck in those ideas of the past. New ideas often come out of challenging the old ones, especially when that change is revolutionary. Absolutely some things you may need to take on faith; but you shouldn't base your world view on only taking people in authority's views on faith. The more you use the scientific method, the more you know when you need to use it or not.
  - kiba 5y ago
    But with that thinking society will never progress. If we take everything in the past on faith, then we will stay stuck in those ideas of the past. New ideas often come out of challenging the old ones, especially when that change is revolutionary. It's not a matter of mindset but the sheer impracticality. As individual, we can only question small parts of humanity's knowledge base.
    - rPlayer6554 5y ago
      All the article is suggesting is that we do more than just have people focus on memorizing facts. It isn't asking _everyone_ to understand and prove _everything_. Just that there is more focus on having people understand the why, not just the what.
- version_five 5y ago
  > we all ought to acknowledge that much of our knowledge of the world essentially relied on faith Maybe for many people, but this is not a given. I obviously don't have deep knowledge of every discipline, but with an engineering undergraduate degree (20 years ago) I feel like I have strong tools to understand the world around me down to first principles, question what I'm told and situate it within the axioms I firmly believe, and in general apply the scientific method. There is almost nothing they feels like "magic" to me, even if I'm not a specialist. I think it's a question of critical thinking, understanding a bit about the philosophy of science (not the current religious version) and thinking about cause and effect. I'm prepared to accept we're all living within a simulation, or in some reality constructed by a diety, or some other currently un-testable unknowable thing, but in the world as we perceive it, there is a lot of order that can be understood in general, without having to be a specialist and without requiring faith
- JohnBooty 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 I think there's a miscommunication/misunderstanding here; perhaps a language/culture barrier? I'm quite sure that when people refer to "the scientific method" they're talking about this -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method It's a method with six steps. It's usually something primary education science teachers spend like, twenty minutes on at the beginning of a school year. It's not laborious. (For maximum effect, the concept of the scientific method is then of course reinforced throughout the rest of the class, whenever experiments are performed. Assuming classes will be doing these experience anyway, this is not what I would remotely call "laborious") skepticism I suppose one could spend a lot of time teaching the history of skepticism, but from a scientific perspective, literally the only relevant bits are the notion that "repeatable, properly-designed experiments" are truly the cornerstone of science. I mean, it's certainly a notion that should suffuse the entire curriculum, but "laborious?"
  - adolph 5y ago
    Deutsch in Beginning of Infinity places the cornerstone at conjecture and criticism leading to Good Explanations: “An explanation that is hard to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for” that are treated as fallible (“Fallibilism The recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying knowledge as true or probable.”). Falliblism to Deutsch is in contrast to: * Relativism The misconception that statements cannot be objectively true or false, but can be judged only relative to some cultural or other arbitrary standard. * Instrumentalism The misconception that science cannot describe reality, only predict outcomes of observations. * Justificationism The misconception that knowledge can be genuine or reliable only if it is justified by some source or criterion.
gonehome 5y ago
What’s interesting about this is that a little reason can be a dangerous thing. The current vaccine debate is kind of a modern example of this. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret... I generally agree with you, but also recognize that most people would probably be better served accepting consensus - even if I’d rather everyone be capable of critical thinking and reason/rationality.
dnautics 5y ago
I'm not convinced. I am pretty sure I got a better education in specifically how we "know" (historically, anyways, eratosthenes and all that) the Earth was round, by 7th grade in the US (public school, albeit a very good one), and having done equivalent coursework in a school run by the Japanese Embassy, you don't get that knowledge in the same way. Japanese education is much, much more like rote knowledge-learning than conceptual frameworks of thinking. If you made the opposite argument -- that flat earthers exist because in the US we teach conceptual frameworks and not rote memorization, I would be more persuaded.
alsetmusic 5y ago
If we taught the story of Eratosthenes[0] and his method of measuring / calculating the circumference of the earth, I imagine that would go a long way toward making it “real.” I never heard of him in school. I learned of him as an adult who was already interested in learning about history. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pvg 5y ago
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. That's also a claim without much in the way of evidence and plenty of evidence against. The whole rather slight piece is based on this unexamined idea.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Yeah, I certainly remember the Eratosthenes shadow experiment making an appearance. That, and plenty of space footage, because space footage is awesome.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> 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 I dunno about anyone else, but my Western, public-school education taught specific methods of deriving the roundness of the Earth and it's size (and when they had first been historically recorded as being used, as well), repeatedly, as part of all of the history, math, and science curricula. It also taught the more general methodology of exploring any issue of material fact.
- djur 5y ago
  If anything, the public school education I received (US, '90s-'00s) went out of its way to provide this kind of background. Did it sink in for a lot of kids? Probably not. It's really hard to test for that, and if public schools actually tried to hold kids back who didn't truly absorb the material there would be riots.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    Education was in NJ, same time period as you, same experience. Teachers made sure to show us how the things we were learning followed from the other things that we knew. I always loved that because it's much easier to remember things when you know how they derive from other concepts.
    - rtkaratekid 5y ago
      Same experience, same timeframe in TX. I remember learning about shadows in Egypt vs Greece during the same day of the year and thinking it was really cool. In elementary school even.
CoastalCoder 5y ago
I share this concern. I think Flat Earthers and Pastafarians both provide an excellent service to society: they demonstrate many persons' inability to argue from agreed-upon premises to a widely held belief. I.e., they demonstrate that many of our emperors have no clothes. Unfortunately I'm not seeing this triggering the major educational rethink that I think it warrants.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Aren't pastafarians just openly mocking religion?
  - CoastalCoder 5y ago
    I could be remembering wrong, but I thought part of their early schtick was to provide evidence for His Great Noodliness using chains of logic similar to what some Christians used in public debates. Note: I'm not saying that the benefit of Pastafarianism was that it refuted Christianity. Rather, I'm saying that it exposed the weaknesses of some arguments being used to promote Christianity. I think serious Christian apologists would agree that bad arguments for Christianity should be discarded.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    I think they are taking the piss, yes, but particularly targetting the special privileges society awards to true believers.
djur 5y ago
Western mass education is, if anything, much more tilted toward "learning skills" versus "memorizing facts" than any other education tradition, contemporary or historical. The piece also implicitly rests on the pretty controversial assumption that conspiracist worldviews like Flat Earth are more common among people educated in Western education systems.
im_down_w_otp 5y ago
I'm very skeptical of any thesis that this phenomenon is about a failure of people to be able to discern fact from non-fact (or "critical-thinking" as it is often characterized). As it misses that the common thread among all these, formerly esoteric and now increasingly mainstream, subcultures. They're about "belonging" and in-group/out-group signaling. It may be true that they're ill-equiped to discern such things, but it's also the case that there are social incentives for them to not want to adhere to facts, self-derived or otherwise. It's possible, I suppose, that teaching people to discern and derive some domain of facts might coincidentally produce a broader cultural "in-group" of people that value social cohesion with others like them, but underneath it all this is all culture/counter-culture dynamics, not whether or not people have the tools to figure out the curvature of the Earth based on basic science and mathematics. There still exist religious scientists. Heck, I even know creationists who fully understand how carbon and uranium dating work, and yet they're still creationists. Getting them to abandon their creationism is at a minimum a matter of getting them to be willing to overcome the in-group judgement of their family, their friends, their extended social circles, etc. Unsurprisingly, outside of specific trauma they're not likely to embark on such an upheaval. People mostly behave like the people they're around. Being shunned or ostracized is (or used to be) an effective mechanism for social cohesion for this category of issue. The trouble at present is that social media makes it much more difficult (for better or worse) for shunning or ostracizing to improve that flavor of cohesion because it allows the universe of the shunned and ostracized to find cohesion amongst themselves, so the local fringe morphs into the global mainstream.
- humanrebar 5y ago
  > There still exist religious scientists. Heck, I even know creationists who fully understand how carbon and uranium dating work, and yet they're still creationists. You can be creationist and believe in carbon dating, fossils, etc. There's no contradiction. There are unanswered questions, such as "Why would a creator create a young planet that looked very, very old?" But that's not a scientific question, it's philosophical and irrefutable one, and therefore (IMO) it is not a particularly interesting question to get hung up on. I mostly agree with your point that these kinds of phenomena are not about critical thinking as such. Though I do think fans of deductive and inductive reasoning tend to entirely overlook other forms of reasoning. For instance, abductive reasoning: what narrative makes the most sense given the options? Also, reputational reasoning: which experts am I going to trust on this? Abductive reasoning doesn't apply in the case of the shape of the Earth, but reputational reasoning certainly does. At any rate, they help me understand why people make (to me) consterning choices, including in politics, religion, criminal verdicts, investing, and (lately) personal health care.
Tildey 5y ago
I think this claim of how western education works is rather broad, and really depends where you are. Where I live (New Zealand), high school questions are graded based in large part on the methodology used and/or how well you demonstrate grasp on the concept. You could get every physics question wrong on an exam, but still get an above average grade if the way you articulated understanding of the topic was very in-depth. In contrast, I’ve heard that in places in the USA for example (don’t know how regional this is, but even big stuff like the SAT), multiple choice questions are commonplace. I don’t think I encountered any marked work with more than one or two multiple choice questions, and even then you were still graded on your work not just your mark. The system I’m used to emphasises clearly understanding of the topic, multiple choice does not. Your marked work was also returned to you, and you could apply to have it re assessed if you felt it wasn’t fair.
_moof 5y ago
My high school physics teacher didn't tell us the kinematics equations. He had us perform experiments to find them ourselves. I learned more about science in one week than I had in all the years up to that point. (We were also allowed to smoke on campus. Those were the days!)
neRok 5y ago
I think a lot of people that get wrapped up in flat earth stuff aren't the smartest, and so the problem starts in school when they are taught things like trigonometry, they often have a bad/dismissive attitude towards it (thinking "when would I ever use this in real life") or they just can't do it. As an example, I have a friend that dropped out of high school relatively early to do a trade, and now he is keen about science and watches many videos on space and the like. One time he was theorising to me about how electricity in a wire makes a magnetic field, and that if you put it near a magnet then it would move. I said, that's what an electric motor is, lol. He probably would have learned that if he did better and stayed in school longer, but he wasn't interested back then. But at the other end of the spectrum, the first person I really heard about flat earth from happened to be someone I went to highschool with. This was at our 10 year reunion (and was nearly 10 years ago now), and he had gone on to become a geologist, but had recently jumped onto flat earth. So, it's quite mind boggling to think about what was going on in his life that lead to that conclusion. And 1 more thing about learning, I don't recall any schooling regarding 3D space, like how to think about it, approach it, etc. And then when talking about viewing/measuring space from the perspective of earth, you also have to consider your position on the globe, and how that relates to other objects. Even now I struggle with this aspect, and my job for nearly 20 years has involved 3D modelling on computers (although my work is 3D, it is all "planar" though, which is different to bodies in space).
- adolph 5y ago
  The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. https://medium.com/mind-cafe/the-5-basic-laws-of-human-stupidity-513de9dd0bd5 https://medium.com/mind-cafe/the-5-basic-laws-of-human-stupi...
dgellow 5y ago
As a European, the idea that there is such a thing as western education sounds completely foreign and absurd. Based on my personal experience I can see that education systems vary quite a lot from region to region within a country, and even more between states and countries themselves. There is no such thing as a unified western education system (not considering universities here), that sounds like an over broad concept without real meaning that can be used a boogey man for criticism. Generally speaking when I see “western whatever”, it seems to be a lazy way to express something about the United States, without naming the country.

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.
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    > 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. That's simply made up. There are two examples in my comment. They are not from long dead ancient squabbling scientists of natural philosophy but from my own experience of setting experiments to prove empirically whether the Earth is round or flat.
- Retric 5y ago
  Teaching a single scientific fact based on supporting evidence is easy, teaching every single fact plus it’s associated evidence simply takes longer. Nobody questions that sugar contains C6H12O6, so it’s simply taught as a fact without showing the evidence used to derive it. This can even run into problems when people get taught a bunch on regurgitated nonsense around stuff like how wings work. In the end people get skeptical around a tiny number of scientific facts like climate change, evolution, and vaccination but they have no problem accepting everything from the MOS hardness scale, echos, buoyancy, etc etc. Why most people object to just those specific things has absolutely nothing to do with evidence, it’s completely part of a wider social phenomenon.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > In the end people get skeptical around a tiny number of scientific facts like climate change, evolution, and vaccination but they have no problem accepting everything from the MOS hardness scale, echos, buoyancy, etc etc. The Mohs scale is pretty easy to validate, and the exercises typically done when it is taught tend to serve to do that.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Just imaging if people showed similar levels of skepticism around the Mohs scale as the did global warming etc. The Mohs hardness scale is actually extremely difficult to demonstrate across a full range of natural materials. It’s intuitive that if A scratches B and B scratches C then A should scratch C, but testing a few samples is nowhere near enough to demonstrate across every natural mineral. It’s even more difficult to show this is a stable property that doesn’t very significantly over time. So, sure a teacher might hand out a few samples and show what the idea is, but that’s little more than hand waving.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > The Mohs hardness scale is actually extremely difficult to demonstrate across a full range of natural materials Well, sure combinatorial explosion and the difficulty of gathering every possible natural material makes it impractical to show that: (1) the scale measures a real trait that exhibits the same consistent transitive behavior across all possible combinations of natural materials, and (2) every natural material with a rating on the scale is correctly rated. It's relatively easy to establish that the set of standard examplars for the integer ratings consistently show the relative properties the scale is supposed to measure. Of course, it trivial to then verify the same is true relative to the examplars for any other material with an established rating, or to establish (within the bounds of the ceiling/floor integers) the rating of any material for which one doesn't have a measure and confirm consistency against examplars and any manageable sample of other rated materials.
rPlayer6554 5y ago
But with that thinking society will never progress. If we take everything in the past on faith, then we will stay stuck in those ideas of the past. New ideas often come out of challenging the old ones, especially when that change is revolutionary. Absolutely some things you may need to take on faith; but you shouldn't base your world view on only taking people in authority's views on faith. The more you use the scientific method, the more you know when you need to use it or not.
- kiba 5y ago
  But with that thinking society will never progress. If we take everything in the past on faith, then we will stay stuck in those ideas of the past. New ideas often come out of challenging the old ones, especially when that change is revolutionary. It's not a matter of mindset but the sheer impracticality. As individual, we can only question small parts of humanity's knowledge base.
  - rPlayer6554 5y ago
    All the article is suggesting is that we do more than just have people focus on memorizing facts. It isn't asking _everyone_ to understand and prove _everything_. Just that there is more focus on having people understand the why, not just the what.
version_five 5y ago
> we all ought to acknowledge that much of our knowledge of the world essentially relied on faith Maybe for many people, but this is not a given. I obviously don't have deep knowledge of every discipline, but with an engineering undergraduate degree (20 years ago) I feel like I have strong tools to understand the world around me down to first principles, question what I'm told and situate it within the axioms I firmly believe, and in general apply the scientific method. There is almost nothing they feels like "magic" to me, even if I'm not a specialist. I think it's a question of critical thinking, understanding a bit about the philosophy of science (not the current religious version) and thinking about cause and effect. I'm prepared to accept we're all living within a simulation, or in some reality constructed by a diety, or some other currently un-testable unknowable thing, but in the world as we perceive it, there is a lot of order that can be understood in general, without having to be a specialist and without requiring faith
JohnBooty 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 I think there's a miscommunication/misunderstanding here; perhaps a language/culture barrier? I'm quite sure that when people refer to "the scientific method" they're talking about this -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method It's a method with six steps. It's usually something primary education science teachers spend like, twenty minutes on at the beginning of a school year. It's not laborious. (For maximum effect, the concept of the scientific method is then of course reinforced throughout the rest of the class, whenever experiments are performed. Assuming classes will be doing these experience anyway, this is not what I would remotely call "laborious") skepticism I suppose one could spend a lot of time teaching the history of skepticism, but from a scientific perspective, literally the only relevant bits are the notion that "repeatable, properly-designed experiments" are truly the cornerstone of science. I mean, it's certainly a notion that should suffuse the entire curriculum, but "laborious?"
- adolph 5y ago
  Deutsch in Beginning of Infinity places the cornerstone at conjecture and criticism leading to Good Explanations: “An explanation that is hard to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for” that are treated as fallible (“Fallibilism The recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying knowledge as true or probable.”). Falliblism to Deutsch is in contrast to: * Relativism The misconception that statements cannot be objectively true or false, but can be judged only relative to some cultural or other arbitrary standard. * Instrumentalism The misconception that science cannot describe reality, only predict outcomes of observations. * Justificationism The misconception that knowledge can be genuine or reliable only if it is justified by some source or criterion.

gonehome 5y ago

What’s interesting about this is that a little reason can be a dangerous thing. The current vaccine debate is kind of a modern example of this. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret... I generally agree with you, but also recognize that most people would probably be better served accepting consensus - even if I’d rather everyone be capable of critical thinking and reason/rationality.

dnautics 5y ago

I'm not convinced. I am pretty sure I got a better education in specifically how we "know" (historically, anyways, eratosthenes and all that) the Earth was round, by 7th grade in the US (public school, albeit a very good one), and having done equivalent coursework in a school run by the Japanese Embassy, you don't get that knowledge in the same way. Japanese education is much, much more like rote knowledge-learning than conceptual frameworks of thinking. If you made the opposite argument -- that flat earthers exist because in the US we teach conceptual frameworks and not rote memorization, I would be more persuaded.

alsetmusic 5y ago

If we taught the story of Eratosthenes[0] and his method of measuring / calculating the circumference of the earth, I imagine that would go a long way toward making it “real.” I never heard of him in school. I learned of him as an adult who was already interested in learning about history. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

pvg 5y ago

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. That's also a claim without much in the way of evidence and plenty of evidence against. The whole rather slight piece is based on this unexamined idea.

jjoonathan 5y ago
Yeah, I certainly remember the Eratosthenes shadow experiment making an appearance. That, and plenty of space footage, because space footage is awesome.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> 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 I dunno about anyone else, but my Western, public-school education taught specific methods of deriving the roundness of the Earth and it's size (and when they had first been historically recorded as being used, as well), repeatedly, as part of all of the history, math, and science curricula. It also taught the more general methodology of exploring any issue of material fact.

djur 5y ago
If anything, the public school education I received (US, '90s-'00s) went out of its way to provide this kind of background. Did it sink in for a lot of kids? Probably not. It's really hard to test for that, and if public schools actually tried to hold kids back who didn't truly absorb the material there would be riots.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Education was in NJ, same time period as you, same experience. Teachers made sure to show us how the things we were learning followed from the other things that we knew. I always loved that because it's much easier to remember things when you know how they derive from other concepts.
  - rtkaratekid 5y ago
    Same experience, same timeframe in TX. I remember learning about shadows in Egypt vs Greece during the same day of the year and thinking it was really cool. In elementary school even.

CoastalCoder 5y ago

I share this concern. I think Flat Earthers and Pastafarians both provide an excellent service to society: they demonstrate many persons' inability to argue from agreed-upon premises to a widely held belief. I.e., they demonstrate that many of our emperors have no clothes. Unfortunately I'm not seeing this triggering the major educational rethink that I think it warrants.

netizen-936824 5y ago
Aren't pastafarians just openly mocking religion?
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  I could be remembering wrong, but I thought part of their early schtick was to provide evidence for His Great Noodliness using chains of logic similar to what some Christians used in public debates. Note: I'm not saying that the benefit of Pastafarianism was that it refuted Christianity. Rather, I'm saying that it exposed the weaknesses of some arguments being used to promote Christianity. I think serious Christian apologists would agree that bad arguments for Christianity should be discarded.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  I think they are taking the piss, yes, but particularly targetting the special privileges society awards to true believers.

djur 5y ago

Western mass education is, if anything, much more tilted toward "learning skills" versus "memorizing facts" than any other education tradition, contemporary or historical. The piece also implicitly rests on the pretty controversial assumption that conspiracist worldviews like Flat Earth are more common among people educated in Western education systems.

im_down_w_otp 5y ago

I'm very skeptical of any thesis that this phenomenon is about a failure of people to be able to discern fact from non-fact (or "critical-thinking" as it is often characterized). As it misses that the common thread among all these, formerly esoteric and now increasingly mainstream, subcultures. They're about "belonging" and in-group/out-group signaling. It may be true that they're ill-equiped to discern such things, but it's also the case that there are social incentives for them to not want to adhere to facts, self-derived or otherwise. It's possible, I suppose, that teaching people to discern and derive some domain of facts might coincidentally produce a broader cultural "in-group" of people that value social cohesion with others like them, but underneath it all this is all culture/counter-culture dynamics, not whether or not people have the tools to figure out the curvature of the Earth based on basic science and mathematics. There still exist religious scientists. Heck, I even know creationists who fully understand how carbon and uranium dating work, and yet they're still creationists. Getting them to abandon their creationism is at a minimum a matter of getting them to be willing to overcome the in-group judgement of their family, their friends, their extended social circles, etc. Unsurprisingly, outside of specific trauma they're not likely to embark on such an upheaval. People mostly behave like the people they're around. Being shunned or ostracized is (or used to be) an effective mechanism for social cohesion for this category of issue. The trouble at present is that social media makes it much more difficult (for better or worse) for shunning or ostracizing to improve that flavor of cohesion because it allows the universe of the shunned and ostracized to find cohesion amongst themselves, so the local fringe morphs into the global mainstream.

humanrebar 5y ago
> There still exist religious scientists. Heck, I even know creationists who fully understand how carbon and uranium dating work, and yet they're still creationists. You can be creationist and believe in carbon dating, fossils, etc. There's no contradiction. There are unanswered questions, such as "Why would a creator create a young planet that looked very, very old?" But that's not a scientific question, it's philosophical and irrefutable one, and therefore (IMO) it is not a particularly interesting question to get hung up on. I mostly agree with your point that these kinds of phenomena are not about critical thinking as such. Though I do think fans of deductive and inductive reasoning tend to entirely overlook other forms of reasoning. For instance, abductive reasoning: what narrative makes the most sense given the options? Also, reputational reasoning: which experts am I going to trust on this? Abductive reasoning doesn't apply in the case of the shape of the Earth, but reputational reasoning certainly does. At any rate, they help me understand why people make (to me) consterning choices, including in politics, religion, criminal verdicts, investing, and (lately) personal health care.

Tildey 5y ago

I think this claim of how western education works is rather broad, and really depends where you are. Where I live (New Zealand), high school questions are graded based in large part on the methodology used and/or how well you demonstrate grasp on the concept. You could get every physics question wrong on an exam, but still get an above average grade if the way you articulated understanding of the topic was very in-depth. In contrast, I’ve heard that in places in the USA for example (don’t know how regional this is, but even big stuff like the SAT), multiple choice questions are commonplace. I don’t think I encountered any marked work with more than one or two multiple choice questions, and even then you were still graded on your work not just your mark. The system I’m used to emphasises clearly understanding of the topic, multiple choice does not. Your marked work was also returned to you, and you could apply to have it re assessed if you felt it wasn’t fair.

_moof 5y ago

My high school physics teacher didn't tell us the kinematics equations. He had us perform experiments to find them ourselves. I learned more about science in one week than I had in all the years up to that point. (We were also allowed to smoke on campus. Those were the days!)

neRok 5y ago

I think a lot of people that get wrapped up in flat earth stuff aren't the smartest, and so the problem starts in school when they are taught things like trigonometry, they often have a bad/dismissive attitude towards it (thinking "when would I ever use this in real life") or they just can't do it. As an example, I have a friend that dropped out of high school relatively early to do a trade, and now he is keen about science and watches many videos on space and the like. One time he was theorising to me about how electricity in a wire makes a magnetic field, and that if you put it near a magnet then it would move. I said, that's what an electric motor is, lol. He probably would have learned that if he did better and stayed in school longer, but he wasn't interested back then. But at the other end of the spectrum, the first person I really heard about flat earth from happened to be someone I went to highschool with. This was at our 10 year reunion (and was nearly 10 years ago now), and he had gone on to become a geologist, but had recently jumped onto flat earth. So, it's quite mind boggling to think about what was going on in his life that lead to that conclusion. And 1 more thing about learning, I don't recall any schooling regarding 3D space, like how to think about it, approach it, etc. And then when talking about viewing/measuring space from the perspective of earth, you also have to consider your position on the globe, and how that relates to other objects. Even now I struggle with this aspect, and my job for nearly 20 years has involved 3D modelling on computers (although my work is 3D, it is all "planar" though, which is different to bodies in space).

adolph 5y ago
The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. https://medium.com/mind-cafe/the-5-basic-laws-of-human-stupidity-513de9dd0bd5 https://medium.com/mind-cafe/the-5-basic-laws-of-human-stupi...

dgellow 5y ago

As a European, the idea that there is such a thing as western education sounds completely foreign and absurd. Based on my personal experience I can see that education systems vary quite a lot from region to region within a country, and even more between states and countries themselves. There is no such thing as a unified western education system (not considering universities here), that sounds like an over broad concept without real meaning that can be used a boogey man for criticism. Generally speaking when I see “western whatever”, it seems to be a lazy way to express something about the United States, without naming the country.