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Comment by jabretti | Hacker News Reader

This is fine as far as flat Earthism goes, but flat Earthism is a ridiculous outlier even among ridiculous fringe theories.

By making your prototypical example of a dubious minority opinion the flat Earth theory, I think you risk falling into bad mental habits. If you go round thinking "people who disagree with me on subject X are just like flat Earthers" then you're doing both them and yourself a disservice -- yourself because no matter who you are it's certain that on some issues it's you who are wrong.

What I'm saying is that flat Earth is a bad example because it maps poorly onto just about any other real-world disagreement.

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It's an extreme example, and therefore does invite a tendency to easily dismiss non-mainstream thought, but that's intentional within Wikipedia.

The 'how to reply' sections make it clear what most fringe theories try to rely on to convince editors, but Wikipedia is not a place for convincing - it is a catalog of what's currently, broadly accepted.

>Wikipedia is not a place for convincing - it is a catalog of what's currently, broadly accepted.

That's true, and it should be the case. But how do we distinguish between "that which is currently broadly accepted" and "that which is currently the leading theory but other theories are also quite widely accepted" and "that which is probably the leading theory, by a narrow margin, but then again might not be, because nobody does polls on this stuff, so we're basically just going by what wikipedia editors reckon"?

What, for instance, should we do if 80% of people believe theory A and 20% of people believe theory B? (Suppose this is one of those rare cases where we're fortunate enough to have actual polls).

You present both, as long the 20% one is actually represented by reliable sources, and then you balance the article appropriately. There're quite a few subjects on Wikipedia for which there is yet no scholarly consensus but different viewpoints exist.

It intends to be what’s currently broadly accepted. It’s success in achieving that goal relies on a labor model that may or may not be well suited towards that end.

Alternatively, it's a great example because it makes the points so obvious. It takes practice to recognize these ways of arguing and thinking, and learning to see the most obvious form first can be followed more easily by identifying subtler forms.

However, i fail to see what the big deal about it. I have yet to meet a flat earther irl, and i doubt they have great influence over our society.

They are a curiosity at best.

We have way more dangerous and widespread believes.

Like: did you know there is a way to cure malaria ? Cause i had malaria for years and everybody i knew, including my doctors and myself, believed it couldn't be cured.

And then i meet a guy from the pasteur institute (in france you can't get more serious than that, they are the nasa of biology) who told me that they had a perfectly fine protocol to kill the parasite in the liver for years. And using nothing more that regular malaron. So i went to the institute and indeed, they do.

Our society is working on a pile of false informations, obsolete data, incomplete thruths and lies. All with major consequences. It's human nature.

Flat earth it the least important of it. I'd say it's even a good thing cause it helps revealing very confused people or flaws in our educational system.

I have met one serious flat-earther (working as a QA engineer funnily enough) and I think they may be more common than you think. The person had clearly easily impressionable personality as well as a 'there must be someone behind this' sort of personality which as we've recently seen, is quite common in western society. Furthermore, he at least had an intellectual confidence to share this view ("I know this sounds ridiculous but you should check it out") and many might not. I guess what I mean is flat-earthism is just a symptom of something quite common.

When i lived in mali, a cab driver told me he wasn't afraid of aids cause it was well known you could be cured by making love to a virgin. There is no mysterious mechanism here. Just human nature.

How does one find these virgins and then make love to them? Does it involve force?

Unfortunately yes, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_cleansing_myth

People are so screwed up.

Do you have a link to more information on that protocol, or a name for it or something? I'm striking out trying to find it. Thanks!

You won't, that's my point. Malaron is sold as a preventive drug, not a curratvie one. However, i can give you the contact of the tropical disease specialist that i saw, which in turn may give you more informations.

From the WHO's "Guidelines for the treatment of malaria", third edition [1]:

"Radical cure. This term refers to both cure of blood-stage infection and prevention of relapses by killing hypnozoites (in P. vivax and P. ovale infections only)." (p. 4)

"The objective of treating malaria caused by P. vivax and P. ovale is to cure both blood-stage and liver-stage infections (called radical cure), thereby preventing recrudescence and relapse, respectively." (p. 61)

"The recommended treatment for radical cure of P. ovale relapsing malaria is the same as that for P. vivax, i.e. ACT or chloroquine combined with primaquine (total dose, 3.5 mg base/kg bw). [...] P. malariae and P. knowlesi do not form hypnozoites and so do not require radical cure with primaquine." (p. 290)

There's nothing there about P. falciparum, the major malaria parasite, but my understanding is that that also doesn't have a hypnozoite stage.

A recent paper "Challenges for achieving safe and effective radical cure of Plasmodium vivax" [2] suggests that this approach is well-accepted, but not yet a slam-dunk in the field.

[1] http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/162441/1/9789241549...

[2] https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1...

Not really, it's just a prototypical example of a fringe conspiracy that gets pushed and the lead of the essay explicitly notes that you're unlikely to come across them. The point is that the tactics of argument presented would be the same. It's all tied back to due weight.

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