Why Bad Ideas Refuse to Die | Hacker News Reader

Why Bad Ideas Refuse to Die

theguardian.com

32 pointspcrh16 comments

On the one hand, no matter how obscure one's beliefs are, the Internet enables us to find others who believe the same thing.

On the other hand, no matter how obscure an illness may be, the Internet enables us to find others who have the illness and may be able to provide help.

Among the billions of us connected and searching and sharing, the I surmise that the chances that there will be others who are also searching for the same thing are pretty close to 100%.

> Earth is really flat.

In a perverse way I like the flat earth thing. It is nice quick proxy for what a particular person believes and a testament to their background and intelligence level. In other words it quickly tells something about them.

Sometimes I wonder if flat earth is a ploy by a group of con men to spread the idea and see who believes them which, then quickly identifies those as good potential "marks" for scamming.

One can extend this to other beliefs -- Earth is only 4000 years old. There are lot of those in this country. And with Mitt Romney we almost had a President with power to launch nuclear weapons who belies some pretty wacky stuff.

It doesn't have to be religious -- anti-vax people in the same category.

Most of the people I've met who actually believe the earth is only 4,000 years old think that it was created already old [1]. They usually start with something like: Did the first created tree have tree rings?; did Adam and Eve have belly buttons? etc... They believe that the answer to those questions is probably yes, so the theory is that the earth was created similarly.

At that point they're not really making any refutable scientific claims.

Unlike the flat earth people who are making refutable scientific claims that almost anyone can refute for themselves.

[1]. I have also met people who believe that there is just not enough evidence for any kind of evolution. However, even that position is much more defensible than the flat earth position. If only because there is more evidence that the earth is round readily available to people without specialized knowledge, than there is for evolution. A layman can't observe evolution, the way they can observe that the earth is a sphere.

I am not a "flat earther", just setting context to avoid confusion.

There are everyday observations which will reinforce the fact that the Earth is not flat. Tides? Movement of Sun/Moon/Planets/Stars across the sky? Satellites? Pictures from space? That's just off the top of my head, probably hundreds more.

But, and just to play devils advocate, let's say the pictures may be fake and there is an elaborate conspiracy. Have I done any experiment myself to prove the Earth is round? There are some very simple intuitive ones mentioned here[1]. The answer is no. So while it is clear from the overwhelming body evidence that it is not flat, I have accepted almost all of that evidence without verifying it myself in any experimental way. And this is one of the simplest topics one can examine.

I haven't tracked the movement of stars across the sky, I have not been to space, I have not measured shadows or the curvature of the earth. I've been in a plane, and it does appear to be curved, so there is that.

Obviously, I cannot possibly question everything, it would be futile and exhaustive and get me nowhere. But I do believe we do not question enough the truths we take for granted because they have been presented to as truth.

And while some topics are barmy, flat-earth being one, there may be others with much shakier body of evidence to back it up, which are today presented and taught as truth. Also, I find myself more and more intrigued by a good conspiracy, and enjoy the company of conspiracy theorists, because it makes me think and re-examine why I take the presented truth for granted.

[1] http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26427/what-is-the...

Hm, aren't there 2 directly visible pieces of evidence (at least for anyone who travels)?

One is talking to someone on the other side of the planet, where the time would be different (and so day or night instead of night or day).

The other - that the stars look quite different when you go to another latitude.

It may not be possible to question and personally re-check everything, but if you make that a habit, you'll notice a pattern of which experts are usually right and in which field (besides getting a good idea of how the world runs).

From there, you can bridge the gaps in your experience with carefully placed bits of trust.

The sun setting at different times depending on longitude seems to be a pretty obvious hole in the theory. I'm curious how the flat earthers justify that, although not curious enough to actually research it.

You don't even need to go around the world... just call an East-coast friend from the West coast a couple of hours before sunset... "hey is it night there?" "yep" "OK, the world must be round then!"

Sure. I'm not arguing for flat-earth, but I've never called someone to check if the sun has set for the purpose of satisfying my curiosity about the shape of the Earth. It is, however, implied in the conversations we have every day (coworkers finishing work at different times because of timezones) so there is no need to ask some things I guess.

My point was more that we take a lot for granted, some things obvious, some maybe less so, and it is not always silly to question even the simplest of assumptions.

Why not? The Earth is flat for a four-dimensional being.

We have flatness and straightness. The 4D beings would have 3-flatness, 2-flatness and straightness.

You totally don't have to be stupid to believe completely insane stuff. Though they can employ logic, brains aren't logical; from what I've read and observed, it seems a person's response to new information is a function of how well that information fits into their existing belief structures with modification by their emotional state.

I'm not interested enough in the flat earthers to have looked into what keeps them in their beliefs. However, thanks to someone's comment in a cognitive dissonance thread here a few months ago, I do have a deep personal interest in doomsday cults. Turns out people of all backgrounds can believe the craziest shit if they were groomed to believe it from birth, or if believing the crazy shit is easier than believing that the majority of your information intake has been straight lies, or if your entire social network is predicated on believing.

The only thing someone being a flat earther tells you is that at some point, their cognitive biases catastrophically failed them. There's a whole world of phenomena that could be the cause.

Dawkins and his memes should have been worthy of mention as well as Hawking with his model-based realism. The flat-earth folks just have a different model of how the universe works. It has sufficient predictive power for their purposes and, as a meme, apparently performs a function or it would have been eradicated long time ago by evolutionary pressure. That's probably true for many of the zombies. They have managed to carve out an evolutionary niche that allows them to survive for centuries. Which is rather impressive.

The short answer - because they are memes, and memes inhabit brains. Only when physical brain running the specific idea is dead, only then spreading of the idea is stopped. The bad thing, meme can be reimprinted into brain by reading a book. Think of books as cyst containers for memes. So you have to eradicate wrong books too if you want to stop bad ideas spreading. The question stays - is it worth it? Ah, yes, 21st century... You have to kill all webpages with bad ideas, including search engine caches.

Given that the Guardian still pushes Marxism: Mote. Beam.

Marxism is a good meme, useful for survival of the society. Just have a brief look at China.

China hasn't been Marxist in decades. Authoritarian, yes, but not Marxist. Note that they didn't become a significant international player until after they scrapped the Maoist stuff. Before that they were having famines. Just as Venezuela is now having a famine.

And yes, I'm aware that on some level China still describes itself as Marxist, just as the United States still describes itself as a democratic federal republic.

This seems to draw a few too many conclusions from what is probably a movement primarily populated or at least driven by people who are mentally ill, probably mostly paranoid schizophrenia. There's several major such memesets, including the "hollow Earth" set, the "aliens are in control of the government" sets (plural, there are multiple massively contradictory such sets), and any number of sets that have attracted no other adherents but are equally epistemologically closed, such as the Time Cube.

We often celebrate Occam's Razor, and it is certainly a valuable heuristic, but one of the appealing things about science is how deep it goes and how complicated it can be while still producing correct predictions. For instance, it is difficult to imagine how the science of genetics could possibly be completely false and yet for it to continue producing the results it does. I think a lot of this stems from a mindset that simply can not engage with complexity and sees the world fundamentally from a simplistic perspective, and from that point of view, anything goes. I think a lot of people here will know what I mean by the idea that you can explain anything with "God did it" or "God wills it". But that's not really a "religion problem", it's actually a cognitive problem that when combined with religion produces that. It can easily be combined with other things as well to produce an epistemologically closed system in which ultimately everything boils down to "That is true because I momentarily rationalized it to be that way as a simple answer to maintain my pre-existing belief."

You can't disprove that the Earth is flat to somebody by taking them up in a spaceship if they truly believe they are "really" on the ground and everything outside is just a Hollywood movie beamed on to the windws, and they simply don't know, understand, or even care what the acceleration meant. You can't even prove anything by contradiction if somebody refuses to hold more than one thing in their head at a time. There's "cognitive dissonance" and then there's not even being able to hold multiple ideas in their head at once in the first place.

This isn't new, it isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and if there's an interesting story here I don't even think it's about how it's becoming more popular (at the very least I'd need to see some stats), but about how the Internet allows such people to find each other.

But to the article's credit, it at least avoids the usual trap most articles of this ilk fall into and doesn't contain a "bad idea that deserves to die" in its list that is probably true. I could quibble with "the efficient market hypothesis caused the market crash"; I'd say it's a lot more along the lines of "A economic modeling paradigm that happens to contain the idea of the efficient market hypothesis caused the economic crash (and for that matter the utterly failed subsequent recovery)", where the primary problems with the model profoundly probably lie elsewhere, but it's at least still in the neighborhood of "a bad idea that deserves to die".

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