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Comment by JackCh | Hacker News Reader

I have my own loony belief with little supporting evidence. My loony belief is that the overwhelming majority of "Flat Earthers" are joking, pulling your chain, and refuse to admit it because keeping a straight face is part of the joke for them.

Their motivations are varied. Some of them do it to make some sort of epistemological point, others do it because arguing for something that isn't true requires a form of creativity they find rewarding. Others do it because they like to get people riled up (it's amazing how easily some people can get riled up over other people being wrong about the shape of the earth, even when the reality that the flat earther isn't being sincere is staring them right in the face). Others still probably have other motivations. Probably only a very small portion of them actually believe what they say.

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> the overwhelming majority of "Flat Earthers" are joking, pulling your chain, and refuse to admit it because keeping a straight face is part of the joke for them.

There is little double that some do, but I think you underestimate just how stupid people can be in general. E.g. just using the normal distribution for IQ (mean 100, stddev 15), 9% are below 80.

Now, to be clear: I just want to stretch your imagination. There are tons of people out there who just aren't that bright. Ok fine.

The problem is people who are a nasty combination of low IQ, ignorant, and militant.

Basically, you have people who could be cured of flat Eartherism by going out just one whole night and watching the stars rotate around the pole, just one trip to the ocean with binoculars to watch a ship disappear over the horizon, just one full day of measuring the shadows of the sun and doing trig, yet they refuse and instead sit inside and watch fucking dumbass YouTube videos made by other fucking dumbasses and then will literally get in your face and irate about something they clearly have zero actual direct knowledge of. It really makes you wonder wtf.

But then again, what are you gonna do? I tell them to predict eclipses, but so far no one has taken me up on it.

> "Basically, you have people who could be cured of flat Eartherism by going out just one whole night and watching the stars rotate around the pole, just one trip to the ocean with binoculars to watch a ship disappear over the horizon, just one full day of measuring the shadows of the sun and doing trig, yet they refuse"

Somebody who's fucking with you would refuse to do this and instead laugh at you for being so naive as to not know binoculars have circular lenses, or some other nonsense excuse more creative than that. Refusal to engage in honest investigation of the truth doesn't prove somebody is unintelligent. Furthermore the incontrovertible existence of unintelligent people doesn't prove that flattists must be unintelligent people. It's very easy for a reasonably smart person to pretend to be very dumb because they consider it entertaining (or for other motivations.)

As for sincere expressions of anger, I've seen it more often from round-earthers than flat earthers. Phrases like "fucking dumbass YouTube videos" betray some strong emotion that I suspect (but cannot prove!) you aren't faking.

>But then again, what are you gonna do? I tell them to predict eclipses

Did you know the Babylonians could do this without a heliocentric model of the solar system? I suppose you could say that a working knowledge of EAE would be a demonstration of reasonable intelligence, but the lack of such knowledge could hardly be considered proof of lacking intelligence. Most intelligent people have never bothered to learn how to use Babylonian astronomy omens.

You don't need a heliocentric system to predict an eclipse. The moon rotates around the Earth. It's the one causing the eclipse.

Why can't you see an eclipse from a flat-earth?

You could. But if you're going to model the eclipse's track on a flat earth, it wouldn't match the eclipse's track on a round earth.

> by going out just one whole night and watching the stars rotate around the pole

A flat earth can also spin.

If you can explain why the sky seems[1] to rotate counterclockwise around the north pole (from the North Hemisphere) and clockwise around the south pole (from the Southern Hemisphere) with a flat Earth, I'll be impressed.

[1] Obviously, the sky does not rotate, the Earth rotates.

That would be impressive. I'm not sure, but I think if the north pole was at the center of the flat-earth disc and the disk was spinning on the axis through the north pole you would see the sky rotate around the north pole.

You would see this from anywhere on the disk, which would not be a problem if you never traveled south of the equator (decent assumption for most of the population).

I'm just putting on the flat-earther's hat for fun.

I have trouble imagining the rotation. If Earth is still and sky rotates wouldn't it still be counter clock wise at North Pole and clock wise at South Pole?

I feel the same way: "These people must be joking", but I worry that I'm falling into a Colbert Study [1] trap where my underlying assumption that the earth is a sphere lets me make the easier rationalization that "these people must be joking" than the much harder realization that some significant chunk of humanity has deeply held beliefs (and a system for establishing those beliefs) that is alien to my own.

1 - http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1940161208330904

Wrong. People thought trump and his supporters were being outlandish, can’t be serious etc. flat-weathers are very serious, very wrong and the thought process behind it is very dangerous.

> My loony belief is that the overwhelming majority of "Flat Earthers" are joking, pulling your chain, and refuse to admit it because keeping a straight face is part of the joke for them.

I'd almost lend some credence to that, if some of them weren't building their own rockets and launching themselves into the air to try to prove flat earth: https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a19587128/sel...

That guy is using the flat earthers to raise funds from them. He conveniently tied his desire to build a rocket for himself to prove some flat theory, but his motivation seems to be completely a few one.

That guy is on to something but he's literally aiming too low. I'd assert you can't really see the Earth's edges until you get out the Lagrange orbit points. :-)

Let them crowd fund a small manufacturing hub out there.

Do you honestly believe that man is sincere? Do you really think that he thought his rocket would prove anything, other than his machoism? I think he's a stunt man, in the vein of Evel Knievel (or at least aspires to be thought such a man.) Pretending to be a flat earther was just an easy way for him to get media attention for his stunt, and even get some internet funding. Did the internet flat earthers who gave him money for the stunt hand over that money with a sincere belief they were investing in a robust debunking of the "ball earth theory"? Or did many if not most of them give the guy money because they thought the stunt was neat/funny/awesome?

Flat earthers know damn well that hot air balloons exist. Even if you're in the camp of thinking flat earthers are dumb morons with IQs too low to tie their own shoelaces, it should still be apparent to all of them that hot air balloons are cheaper and safer than hydrogen peroxide rockets. But a balloon ride isn't much of a stunt, a rocket ride is.

What I found most disconcerting about that story was the number of comments throughout the internet expressing regret that Hughes survived. Saying that "Darwin failed", wishing he'd have died for the crime of being wrong about the shape of the earth. Some joking no doubt, but others saying it with enough vitriol to persuade me.

See the Church of the Subgenius for another of example of never admitting to the joke being the crux of the joke.

With the Church of the Subgenius it's a lot more obvious, though.

It's even harder to take them seriously after they said this about flat Mars to Musk: https://twitter.com/FlatEarthOrg/status/935644892721762305

Maybe if you believe that any significant number of people truly think the earth is flat despite the photos, then you’re in the same fiction club. ;) I have to admit, the irony is funny.

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