One would assume that some basic education is enough to debunk such crackpot ideas yourself.
On the other hand, saying the Earth is flat and scientists, media, school books, etc have been lying to me is a testimony to big distrust in society.
We should all be asking ourselves where such big distrust is coming from.
I think this continuum between knowledge and belief is where these crackpot ideas are coming from. The average person doesn't know how the things they depend on actually work on a deeper level (e.g. the internet, cars, indoor plumbing, seasonal weather, the stock market). And upon researching the inner workings of these day-to-day mysteries, people realize that the mechanisms aren't 100% clear or they don't fully understand them. I'd wager this is the diverging point: most people give up on learning the mechanisms and accept that they work on belief while a small portion of people come up with alternative hypotheses and/or reject the mechanisms.
A recent episode of This American Life discusses this (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/630/...).
Persistence in the belief in a flat earth can't be a matter of simple ignorance and lack of faith in the status quo. Understanding the rules of basic arithmetic is more difficult than understanding why the earth is round.
[0]http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/09/21/who-disco...
Well, I would say it starts with basic things early, like Santa Claus brings the presents. Later you find out, oh a lie.
And so on with many things. Church, all loving god, nice and caring government, war only for peace, health corporation's only make good medicine, etc. etc.
And then things like Kennedy and 9/11. I don't know what happened and I also don't care so much, but the more I looked into it, the less convincing became the mainstream truth.
Or less controversial lies, like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and so on.
No wonder people then start to believe in more goofy things like the moon landing hoax, or climategate - or ultimately, flat earth.
They have just been lied too often by their authorities. And then make the stupid assumption, everything opposite must be true then.
Unfortunately, this explanation seems all too plausible to me.
Seems to be pretty unique to America - climate change deniers, flat earthers, anti-vaxers, etc are no where near as prevalent in any other first world country.
They're the ones suffering the effects of climate change.
Living in Brazil, a "third world" country, I have a feeling that people can't be bothered to feed this bullshit theory about flat-earth, because it just doesn't make any sense.
So, the only thing left to assume is that they make things for popularity and/or funding.
Certainly not. You just have to not believe what you read.
You certainly don't believe everything you read, but well established knowledge from centuries ago isn't something some lunatic came up with.
So if someone dismisses gravity as a hoax, are we to support him because he is a critical thinker and start jumping off cliffs trying to fly?
When schools make a duty of learning by rote instead of learning to learn and exercise thoughtful criticism, only distrust can emerge.
Consider yourself lucky though, because you will grow gray hair quickly when venturing down into that labyrinth.
But like every philosophical and religious institutions getting extreme believers and followers, Science Skeptics have also reached that point.
This is very much like an Atheist seeing Atheism as a religion itself. Being Skeptic also means you gotta be ready to fix your belief when you get an alternative that could seems rational or right, if you are not ready to do that, you are not a skeptic
Personally, I like reading FE stuff if only because it gets me thinking about "how do I know what I actually know". I like trying to think up simple experiments that test my underlying trust in standard scientific explanations. Like, if I deeply mistrust data that's not my own, how could I convince myself that space has no atmosphere to speak of?
You are right though, we need to understand how so many people still believe that the Earth is flat.
What you'd need is a wide angle rectilinear lens not normally found on light weight cameras.
He shouldn't expect much from 1800 feet tough in terms of seeing the curvature. It won't be pronounced. I think he just wants to fly.
I agree that he's making claims in bad faith and just wants to fly.
He isn't trying to prove the earth is flat. He just wants to ride a rocket. Everything else is oddball marketing to get some funds.