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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). Ev

• 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
      • mistermann 5y ago
        If you don't mind me asking, can I inquire about what data source(s) you used to form this belief?
        • rnd0 5y ago
          I'm not the person you're replying to, but I am someone who has watched the spread of covid denialism, anti-vaccination views and the the news media (which features stories such as: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177 ). It doesn't seem to me to be much of a stretch to state that people who espouse the flat earth theory also espouse other conspiracy-theory views as well. What exactly, if anything, makes that difficult to believe for you?
          • mistermann 5y ago
            The lack of data and excess of heuristics, and that no one seems to realize this, or care.
        • Toutouxc 5y ago
          Not the person you're replying to, but empirically I'd say that it's pretty accurate. I don't know a single person who's into just one conspiracy theory. It's either none or the whole package.
          • johnisgood 5y ago
            So who are those people who are only cautious about the COVID-19 vaccine? How should we call them? I am personally cautious of COVID-19 vaccines because of quick time of development, and financial incentives everywhere, but most importantly, because it would poke my immune system which usually results in flare-ups in my case, and I would like to avoid flare-ups. Plus, I very rarely go outside, so I do not pose a risk to anyone, nor am I able to catch it from anyone. That said, I have been quarantined with a COVID-19 positive person for 2 weeks or so. He was asymptomatic, and I had no symptoms at all either, although no clue if I ever got it from him. I am also in a more or less safe age group. Those are my reasons for passing. Sounds fair, or am I a conspiracy theorist? I do not mind vaccines. I got a hepatitis B vaccine a couple of years ago, twice, and I would not mind getting it again if I have to. I got all the other mandatory vaccines, too, when I was a kid. I do not think that it was a mistake.
• beebmam 5y ago
  There's a superb interview[1] with Neal Stephenson that was published just yesterday about this kind of human behavior. Here's a quote from Neal: "Another thing I’ve been reading recently is “The Fixation of Belief” by an American philosopher named Charles Sanders Peirce. He was writing in the 1870s, and he goes through a list of four methods that people use to decide what they’re going to believe. The first one is called the method of tenacity, which means you decide what you’re going to believe and you stick to it regardless of logic or evidence. ... The next method is called the method of authority, where you agree with other people that you’re all going to believe what some authority figure tells you to believe. That’s probably most common throughout history. The third method is called the a priori method, and the idea is, let’s be reasonable and try to come up with ways to believe things that sound reasonable to us. Which sounds great, but if it’s not grounded in any fact-checking methodology, then you end up just agreeing to believe things by consensus — which may be totally wrong. The fourth method is the scientific method. It basically consists of accepting the fact that you might be wrong, and since you might be wrong, you need some way for judging the truth of statements and changing your mind when you’ve got solid evidence to the contrary. What you’re seeing in the Baroque Cycle is the transition from Method No. 3 to No. 4. You’ve got all these people having what seem like reasoned, logical arguments, but a lot of them are just tripping. So a few come in, like Hooke and Newton, and begin using actual experiments and get us going down the road toward the rational world of the Enlightenment. But what we’ve got now is almost everybody using Method 1, 2 or 3. We’ve got a lot of authoritarians who can’t be swayed by logic or evidence, but we’ve also got a lot of a priori people who want to be reasonable and think of themselves as smarter and more rational than the authoritarians but are going on the basis of their feelings — what they wish were true — and both of them hate the scientific rationalists, who are very few in number. That’s kind of my Peircian analysis of where things stand right now." [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/01/10/magazine/neal-stephenson-interview.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/01/10/magazine/neal... (Nit: I think you mean "Behind the Curve", not "Beyond". But yes, really good documentary recommendation!)
  • titzer 5y ago
    Thanks, I fixed that in my comment.
  • 5y ago
• sjtindell 5y ago
  Sometimes when I get in arguments, even as the evidence piles up against me, I find myself digging in further. I get very obstinate and it takes a tremendous step back and exertion of will to say “okay, okay. I’m wrong.” Even then I often find myself tacking on something like “I’m wrong in this scenario. But…” and it really helps if the other side will concede something, anything. It’s a physical feeling of discomfort. I think I fight it pretty well. And I imagine that flat earthers and their ilk are just so deep into that feeling and so incapable of conceding that they never, ever will.
  • Aloha 5y ago
    Its why I concede something trivial and small early on in a debate to get social credit.
  • worik 5y ago
    You are describing cognitive dissonance
  • KerryJones 5y ago
    "Thinking in Bets" by Annie Duke describes this. One of the problems we have, societally, is talking in black and white. I'm right or wrong. It is extremely hard for anyone to admit they are wrong. In fact, a good way to push someone more strongly into their belief (regardless of what it is), is to tell them they're wrong. Her approach was to start using confidence numbers or percentages, and being less black and white. > "I'm 80% sure the it will be a sunny day tomorrow" > "You know, I'm not sure about that. Have you considered the vast storm clouds and weather reports about the incoming rain?" Both of these, by each person, make it easier to take, psychologically. You neither commit to something nor do you tell someone else they are wrong.
    • bruce511 5y ago
      There are also synonyms for "wrong" which can soften the blow. For example "inaccurate", as in something like "unfortunately your response to the question is inaccurate because since version 5 that is no longer true." By doing this I'm making it clear what is wrong, and not using the word "wrong". This separates the person from the statement, and by implication does not make their statement theirs. Contrast with "you are wrong", which makes the statement personal, and implies the _person_ themself is defective. A flat-earther has an inaccurate source of information, and has come to a misinformed conclusion, resulting in a unfortunate assessment of the current earth shape. If we start there, and recognize that (to a much lessor degree) we all have blind-spots it helps to engage with them. But the quote above is true, you cannot rationalise people out of a position they did not rationally get in to.
• intrasight 5y ago
  • woodruffw 5y ago
    All things being equal, religion (broadly speaking) has a logical justification: for the vast majority of human history, we were unable to explain just about anything about our condition. Recent history is, as Tevye says, tradition[1]. The fact that we celebrate Christmas in 202X by buying crap on Amazon instead of torturing the infidels suggests that we do indeed get tired before we get dangerous, at least on the long arc of history. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRdfX7ut8gw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRdfX7ut8gw
    • tasty_freeze 5y ago
      If that was all there was to it, then it wouldn't be a concern. The problem is that people really do believe it and promote it, even though we know a lot better about the world than when these books were written centuries ago. In Texas, the school board was populated by young earth creationists. Because of the size of the market, they could dictate that textbooks be rewritten, such as adding creationism along side evolution in science classrooms [1]. Religiously-motivated thinking is behind many important laws and denying things like climate change [2] And in some countries, a particular religious belief is all-controlling and holds political and judicial power as well. Non-believers, homosexuals, and apostates get killed. Women are possessions. I know the grandparent comment is getting down-voted because it is very broad. It is easy to reflexively downvote the edgy atheist. Of course Christianity (or choose another religion) has good aspects to it. But it isn't just atheists scoffing at what they feel are absurd beliefs: Christians of one flavor laugh at the absurd beliefs of other flavors, believing their own group is the one that got everything right. Biblical literalists get laughed at by other Christians for thinking the world is 6000 years old. Non-Catholics laugh at Catholics for thinking a consecrated Eucharist is not just a symbol of the body of Christ but becomes the actual body of Christ [3]. Mormons consider themselves Christians but many Christians do not think they are. And so on. [1] https://www.npr.org/2012/06/20/155440679/revisionaries-tells-story-of-texas-textbook-battle https://www.npr.org/2012/06/20/155440679/revisionaries-tells... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKd6UJPghUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKd6UJPghUs [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation
• tunesmith 5y ago
  I tend to believe that the "stupidest" beliefs that apparently large percentages of US Citizens have are more a form of rebellious performance art. Like, if you ask the population if they believe if Trump is currently, secretly, President, some percentage will say they believe it. But I think the actual percentage is far lower; it's just polluted with an ever-growing number of people that are lying about their beliefs just to be obstinate. Then it becomes like a game of chicken to see how far you can take it, how long can you insist on the belief before you crack. And ultimately at some point the difference doesn't really matter. (In high school, I started saying "Spiffy!" ironically, and kept saying it, and then there came a point where it didn't matter I meant it ironically, I was just the guy that said "Spiffy!")
  • wyre 5y ago
    Hanlon's Razor - Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
    • worik 5y ago
      Performance art is not stupidity. Culture jamming is not stupidity
      • IAmEveryone 5y ago
        Stupid performance art is, tautologically, stupidity. So I guess it depends? Flat earth isn't especially harmful, except in undermining trust in science, institutions, and your fellow citizen with absolutely no discernible purpose. The term for "culture jamming" when it is only disruptive is "trolling".
        • worik 5y ago
          How can there be "stupid performance art"? Performance at that I do not like, yes, tat exists.....
  • katzgrau 5y ago
    This is closer to my opinion of flat earthers. It pisses people off and that's hilarious so keep saying you believe it. You probably don't believe it but who cares anyway. I sometimes argue the opposite of what I believe if I'm dealing with someone who's getting way too worked up over it. I kind of like the mental exercise of defending an opinion I don't agree with and the entertainment that goes with it.
• Aloha 5y ago
  I'm convinced that some folks cannot be taught critical thinking skills, some folks I think are just missing the relevant hardware to perform the needed computing, they might be able to get there in a round about way, but not on every topic. Ideological blinders, presuppositions, a bunch of things, get in the way.
  • SavantIdiot 5y ago
    I'd say 99% of folks based on my 50+ years of experience on- and off-line. I think I've only known a handful of people who can think critically about their opinions.
    • visarga 5y ago
      I think causal/critical reasoning is not natural to humans, it has to be learned and can only be applied in limited fields. Humans by nature have survival thinking, not critical thinking. Of course survival depends on taking the correct decisions and that tends to correct some errors in thinking, but not all. Interesting, the same applies to GPT-3. It just memorizes the surface of things without critical understanding. But that means it's just doing what the average human does, while being compared to the idealized critical thinking human.
  • lukifer 5y ago
    See also, the work of Robert Trivers [0] on the evolutionary utility of strategic self-deception. Sometimes we deceive ourselves so we may more effectively deceive others (or more charitably, perhaps to signal in-group loyalty). Ironically enough, I think this can even take the form of an irrational belief that humans are innately rational, when empirical observation tells us otherwise. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Folly_of_Fools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Folly_of_Fools
  • somenameforme 5y ago
    I don't think it's about the computing, but about the entire shift in worldview required to accept that what you perceive to be true isn't necessarily so. This is much more of an emotional issue than a logical or analytical one. It also naturally trends towards Betrand Russell's, "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." It's one thing to state you understand this and another altogether to live it. It's not pleasant. And I find many who even claim to have adopted this sort of worldview are instead just as cocksure of themselves, but instead of meeting other notions with rejection, they meet them with 'compassionate condescension.'
• chowells 5y ago
  I think Dan Olson (Foldable Human) nailed the real problem. > Flat Earthers are not otherwise-empty vessels who believe one kooky thing. They believe that thing because it suits their purposes. [...] it says something they already believe about the nature of the social world. Flat Earth is a thing people want to believe because if it were true it would be irrefutable proof of everything else they believe. Folding Ideas, In Search of a Flat Earth ~29 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
  • titzer 5y ago
    Great video, thanks for the link!
  • scrubs 5y ago
    It's also worth pointing out there's a ton of talk without requisite risk. Put no-vaxers in a hospital with their check book on the line if wrong ie pay a patient's med bills. Get flat earthers to pay for a satellite to take pictures on their dime. I'll bet a large percentage will walk from the challenge or suddenly get serious when they have real downside risk. Talking crap on tv or YouTube is what? Protected first amendment rights. Nothing more.
    • KittenInABox 5y ago
      An unfortunate portion of people really give up everything to conspiratorial thinking, and losing it all actually makes them cling even more intensely because they literally have nothing else. So I don't think it'll work the way you think it will.
    • greesil 5y ago
      The "no-vaxers" pay with their lives, self-valued at ~$10M USD. If the death rate is 1% then the expected value is $100K. Seems fairly pricey already. I'm not sure lack of skin in the game accounts for dodgy personal beliefs.
      • ipaddr 5y ago
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Critical thinking is just plain HARD. Let's face it, it is lacking as much on HN as it is on any social media site. That's because it requires a Vulcan-like lack of emotional investment in an opinion or worse, a belief. Critical thinking requires dissociation, detatchment from the subject, and a lots and lots of research from varied sources. Not just a few websites, but actual focus with the intent to accept an answer that goes against the current opinion or belief. This idea of "teaching critical thinking to kids" is valuable, but I think grossly underestimated in difficulty. Especially when parents have a vested interest in NOT raising kids to think this way.
  • titzer 5y ago
    I think critical thinking isn't that hard, unless it comes up against someone's sense of self or value because they've invested a lot in a belief. Maybe Vulcan emotional detachment isn't the answer (it might be even be part of the problem in some circumstances, since Vulcans invest so much sense of worth into their own logic). Rather, I think humility and a sense of wonder and joy about finding things out. Think of kids! When kids are excited to learn they have absolutely no problem finding out what works and what doesn't. They haven't invested their whole egos into something yet. They just got here, after all. We shouldn't be overly critical of kids and expect performance out of them at every turn. It kind of....crushes them little by little. I wanna be a kid again. It's fun. Instead of "oh man, I f'd up here, I hope no one finds out..." it's "whoops, that didn't work, let's try something else!"
  • BlueTemplar 5y ago
    > Vulcan-like lack of emotional investment Using a weird pop culture cliché probably hinders you here ? I would say what needs to be trained is instead emotional investment (this is probably redundant : no investment without at least former emotions ?) into trying to figure out the/a truth. For instance being bothered when some propositions seem to conflict each other. And at least a bare minimum of investment into your beliefs is kind of required (though I guess that this is already what differentiates them from opinions ?), other way lies insanity.
  • denton-scratch 5y ago
    > Critical thinking is just plain HARD. I don't think so; but it does require training. If you graduate with a batchelor's degree, you're supposed to have demonstrated at least some skill in critical reasoning. Secondary school/high school, not so much. Once you have the skill, it can become a habit; obsessive, even, the "default mode", easier than falling off a log. I find that I increasingly question everthing I'm told. Is this pundit incentivised to lie to me? Does what he's telling me even make sense? What about the things I tell myself? Am I deceiving myself? Do my own beliefs make sense? (Many of them don't, and I've had to make more than one jarring course-correction in my life)
• mistermann 5y ago
  > Flat earthers are proof that some people will just obstinately believe in complete and utter horseshit. As are people who blindly support "democracy" and the subsequent actions that are taken by the people elected (typically re-elected) "by the people". Maybe flat earthers are dumber on a relative scale, but it would be interesting to see how things look on an absolute scale. > 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. And more important than their relative intelligence: who causes more harm in the world (say, measured in body count in foreign military adventures)?
  • alexvoda 5y ago
    > As are people who blindly support "democracy" and the subsequent actions that are taken by the people elected (typically re-elected) "by the people". Very well, I'll bite. What do you propose as an alternative? How does your alternative solve the current issues?
    • goatlover 5y ago
      Depending on the exact democracy: better voting methods, more relevant political parties, more independent judiciary, reduced monetary influence, more transparency. That would be admitting that modern liberal, representative democracies have flaws and need some reform.
      • DonHopkins 5y ago
        I'm sincerely curious: What do you think of Popehat's Law of Goats? ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29975362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29975362
      • alexvoda 5y ago
        That is still democracy! Complaining about individual pain points is helpful. No past present or future democracy is perfect. There is plenty that can be improved. Complaining about democracy means you want to bring about totalitarism or theocracy or something else.
• vl 5y ago
  Science, at its base, is inherently axiomatic. It means that you had to commit to set of certain shared beliefs to derive your logical scientific conclusions. If you commit to different beliefs, you will get different explanations. After all, you haven't built rocket and didn't fly to space to see it for yourself.
  • bckr 5y ago
    > Science, at its base, is inherently axiomatic That's a way of thinking about science, but I would argue there are more useful ways. Question-Hypothesis-Experiment is a more useful way of thinking about it if you want to generate new knowledge (do science). > you had to commit to set of certain shared beliefs to derive your logical scientific conclusions This is more of a description of math than science.
    • circlefavshape 5y ago
      > Question-Hypothesis-Experiment is a more useful way of thinking about it Two-word description of the scientific method: Guess. Test.
      • bckr 5y ago
        Yep. I like breaking "guess" into 2 distinct parts, though, because finding the right question is generally understood to be the harder and more critical part of the whole thing.
    • vl 5y ago
      >This is more of a description of math than science. But it is description of both (after all, all our science is based on math). But it comes even in more basic forms: with any scientific endeavour you take a lot of things for granted and do not validate them. If you try to validate them, eventually you get stuck (as an exercise, try to devise experiment determining curvature of the Earth from the first principles). On top of that, fundamentally, theories cannot be proven, but only disproven. All this requires tremendous amount of goodwill and consensus to make any progress. You laugh at flatearthers, but they are just a fringe example of how entire system works. At the edge of physics essentially everyone is in the similar position. Many, if not most, substantial physical advances were done by heretics working against the status quo. Of course, I think flatearthers are wrong, but I would rather have flatearthers than all alternatives from mainline eliminated.
• yeetaccount4 5y ago
  > 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’m late to the party here, but I recall reading (or watching) about one flat earther devising a somewhat novel, and actually very solid experiment for determining the roundness of the earth. Unfortunately, they thought their methods or testing apparatuses were flawed when the results indicated that the earth was in fact pretty roundish. They’ll be back with a fresh experiment, no doubt, to confirm their pre-existing notions.
  • bckr 5y ago
    You might be talking about an experiment shown in "Behind the Curve". The experiment, which consists of shining a laser at a target many meters away. The person holding laser lifts and lowers it. When it is lowered, the point of light on the target disappears, because it is obstructed by the land "in the way", due to the curve of the earth. The experimenter says "hmmm, that's weird!" and then proceeds to conclude that his ingenious experiment was in fact flawed.
    • avar 5y ago
      The experiment is flawed and doesn't prove anything either way. There's no way[1] to know that whatever landscape they tried this on doesn't have a subtle upward curve that might just as easily "prove" the flat earth hypothesis. It's amusing in the context of that documentary because they do a 180 in real time because of the results they get. But just because the experiment showed the correct result doesn't mean it's well designed. 1. No way that a flat earther wouldn't dismiss, there's no way they'll trust say a USGS survey.
      • titzer 5y ago
        IIRC they did the experiment on a large lake in California.
  • 5y ago
• sacrosantimonis 5y ago
• AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  Belief is a keyword here. Most of "spherical earthers", alas, also believe what they are told. They happened to pick the right set of beliefs - kudos to them - but there's no critical thinking whatsoever. We watched some time ago a why-do-we-think-earth-is-flat movie with friends and I asked: okay, so what's wrong with their explanation? For an extra credit: how a layman like me can check what is the shape of the earth? And suddenly it turns out that these questions are a bit harder than it seems.
  • kenjackson 5y ago
    When you say, "layman like me can check what is the shape of earth?" Like reviewing satellite footage? I mean this seems ridiculously easy, unless you mean like can you prove it from your front yard.
    • eminence32 5y ago
      This is slightly beyond what an average layman can do, but it's not terribly hard or expensive to receive images of our globe from NOAA weather satellites [1]. Generally the most costly part is a ~$120 USD antenna. It's a super fun and rewarding project if this is the kind of thing that interests you. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_Operational_Environmental_Satellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_Operational_Envi...
      • NateEag 5y ago
        The problem is that then you aren't verifying it yourself, and a flat earther can claim you're just using one of the propaganda sources created by the government.
      • kavalg 5y ago
        You can also use the ESA earth observation program, which provides free downloads of earth observation data every ~5 days. Look for Sentinel-2. It still won't prove that earth is round though :).
    • squeaky-clean 5y ago
• tapan_jk 5y ago
  > I've seen dozens of flat earth videos. Using Occam's razor, I posit that these videos exist because there are too many people watching them; not because there are too many flat earthers out there. I am yet to meet one in person.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Too 5y ago
    My belief is that every flat earther is just out there to be trolling everyone else. There is absolutely no way anyone can be that blind to reality and making up excuse after another, after all failed and debunked “science” experiments they make.
    • cryptoz 5y ago
      I used to think that, but no longer. Many of them are true believers in flat earth, and also, are convinced of hundreds of other things that aren't true either. Sure lots are trolls. But there are lots and lots (majority of the movement) are real believers.
• neatze 5y ago
  > [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. They genuinely luck awareness how stupid they are, to what degree, and which contexts. Furthermore, in my speculative and limited observations this people are genuinely insecure and unhappy in sense.
• 0xBABAD00C 5y ago
  > Flat earthers are proof that some people will just obstinately believe in complete and utter horseshit. More than "some". I think, by default, we're not protected against mental viruses that travel from mind to mind and get spread by the internet/media. I also think that the ridiculous lies embedded in these mental viruses are a feature, not a bug. I see this pattern everywhere from successful ad campaigns to politicians to conspiracy theories, and so on: the more cognitive dissonance is invoked my the message, the deeper it gets embedded in the "infected" mind. In cases where the falsehood / cognitive dissonance trigger comes equipped with the mechanism of its own spread, it can become the most dangerous and infectious virus. This has happened a few times in human history.
• cdirkx 5y ago
  With flat-earthers, anti-5G, anti-vaxxers etc. I have always thought about it like the efficiency-stability tradeoff: From a "survival of the group" perspective, it is usefull risk-spreading to have a small percent of your population act different from everybody else, against the current wisdom. It is of course not the most efficient, but if some unforseen catastrophe happens (e.g. the new 6G update accidentally makes everyone sterile) not everything will collapse and at least a few contrarians might survive.
  • monus21 5y ago
    So nature is essentially hedging bets. I wonder if this is unique to the human species?
• visarga 5y ago
  The same persistence in face of failure is celebrated in our greatest inventors and scientists. So maybe it's necessary that a part of population has such emotional reasoning, to increase exploration even when there is no clear benefit. Because sometimes the benefit comes much later than the cost of exploration, sometimes the path to discovery is a maze and you only get the prize at the end.
• colechristensen 5y ago
  I heard this story once where someone claimed to know originators of flat earth nonsense were college kids trying to be funny by keeping a straight face claiming something absolutely absurd (the earth is flat) to each other and people around campus and the whole thing started that way eventually spreading to people who weren’t in on the joke. It really scans. A lot of the crazy far right stuff seems to have originated with 4chan trolls having a laugh and idiots taking them seriously. It seems to be a pattern for a lot of the troubling thinking of the day: unreasonable information spread for laughs being picked up by people unable to tell the difference and the idea takes on a life of its own eventually building up a class of people who know better figuring out how to make money from it and a class of people who don’t eating it up and spreading it.
  • TomMckenny 5y ago
    A variation on Poe’s Law essentially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
• Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  > (that the educational system failed to teach them critical thinking) I think they ARE thinking critically - about what most people consider established knowledge, what most people don't even consider doubting. > you cannot reason them out of it. Just so. I for one can't be reasoned out of thinking the earth is round; I (and I presume you) have these beliefs, and trying to convince us otherwise is pretty much impossible. I wouldn't want to try and argue a flat earther out of their beliefs, because they are set in their beliefs.
• GTP 5y ago
  I still think that critical thinking has an important role here. You say "they didn't reason themselves into the position and you cannot reason them out of it". This is correct and is actually what critical thinking is about: reason about something instead of blindly believe in something. If they were capable of critical thinking, they would have reasoned about it instead of blindingly believe in it. And while they could still reach the wrong conclusion, you could still try and reason them out of it.
• denton-scratch 5y ago
  > Flat earthers are proof that some people will just obstinately believe in complete and utter horseshit "Flat earth" seems to be an example of an entire class of "big lie" beliefs. The "big lie" idea is that if you tell a big enough lie, with enough elaborate entailments, people will give up on critical appraisal because it becomes such hard work. Apparently a large proportion of QAnon believers are educated high-achievers. These beliefs are not caused by a failure of education. * Our lizard overlords * Alien kidnappers * Area 51 * Illuminati * Xenu (or almost any organised religion) > actively and self-assuredly wrong That is how I like to use the word "ignorant" - these are belief-systems that require active effort to sustain. To go along with them, you have to deliberately close your eyes.
• BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Another thing is that people defending a believe don't necessary hold it true deep inside. But it's part of their identity, so they play their role, and defend it. Once you pick it up, you'll start to notice it for a lot of things: racism/sexism, welcoming immigrants, climate change is a hoax, I'm a busy person, my boss is terrible, I just love to do < hard thing >, capitalism is bad, I'm concerned by the planet... E.G: I have a friend who keeps insisting she prefers women, has a lesbian dominated social circle, but mostly have sex with males. She is joining protests for all things hurting migrants, but one was sleeping in a car in our street, and after getting her bike stolen, she decided with no proof he was the culprit and called the cops on him and got him deported. I know a vegetarian that eats meat when he travels, because nobody can see him. I had a flatmate who was writing her memoir on the way women were badly treated in India. She eventually dated our Indian other flatmate, and took great care of cleaning his _disgusting_ bedroom and doing his laundry without any reciprocity, for the entire relationship. I know 2 guys that, if asked, will declare they are for peace and think war lords are a bad thing. I mean, who doesn't ? Both considered working for weapon dealers, one actually accepted, and the main clients are the Emirates. All those persons are people I love very much: humans are weird creatures, full of contradictions, doing plenty of bad things. I'm sure those flat earthers can be good friends too, maybe even great citizens for some things I'm terrible at. I'm certainly an asshole competing in several categories, believing idiotic things, pretending to believe others. I think people who see themselves differently have huge blind spots which help them go on the hate train. We all suck. Even when taught critical thinking, which I manage to abuse regularly for terrible results. True, we are not all at the same level on the Gaussian idiocy curve. At least according to ourselves. Yet, in my experience, education works only if freed from contempt. So let's have compassion for "stupid people in large numbers." There are 7 billions of them.