Do People Really Think Earth Might Be Flat? | Hacker News Reader

Do People Really Think Earth Might Be Flat?

blogs.scientificamerican.com

18 pointsdigital5524 comments

The survey question asked was not whether people currently believe the earth is flat. They asked, "Have you always believed it is round?" Those are not the same question, and people could be answering based on childhood/pre-school beliefs. Unless they dig deeper, it is hard to say why people gave a negative answer.

I agree, the question was just badly worded. I would answer "other" to "I have always believed the world is round." Like everyone I began in ignorance and only later was educated enough to "believe the world is round." The world looks flat at first glance. It is a surprise that the world is a sphere. It's a great lesson for all of us to review first impressions in light of other evidence.

Also, pedantically, the true shape is more accurately an oblate spheroid.

I would call an oblate spheroid "round".

I'd also call a pancake round. Terminology is important.

YouGov said that lots of millennials think the world is flat. But when Scientific American asked for the poll data, it didn't make sense – and YouGov didn't want to talk about it.

Bravo. Full summary in two sentences!

The New Yorker had a good piece about people who attend the annual flat earth convention: https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/looking-for-life-...

>> He described the modern flat-Earth community as a confluence of three strains of thought. “There’s the conspiratorial,” he said. “It’s like, ‘That’s kind of weird with the moon landing. Maybe I’ll look into it. What else could they be lying about?’ ” The second is “the scientific-minded,” people who “just want to go out and do the experiments.” The third, Davidson said, “is the spiritual—people that want to say, ‘Wait a minute, what would happen if I took the Bible literally?’ ” In style and substance, the flat-Earth movement is a close cousin of creationism.

"The earth is flat (p > 0.05): significance thresholds and the crisis of unreplicable research"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5502092/

Great link. In finance, people make trading decisions even when p is .15

So if they roll a six they go for it?

The point is that nothing is certain, and you take educated risks with appropriate management.

Seems to me they should interview a bunch of the people who gave each answer and ask they why they believe as they do. Without that we are just speculating. In fact, we might find out that for many the answer they gave to the survey didn't even mean what it seems to.

Here are a couple of images I was given by an Aerospace Engineer recently. I don't know if he was trolling me or not, so I provide them without further comment.

https://imgur.com/a/GoEzEdl

https://imgur.com/a/zZS3nti

The first one:

If you zoom in close enough, the horizon looks flat. (Alternatively, the plane is not high enough for the earth to look round with that focal length)

The second one:

All that matters is that Mercury isn't in the line between the Sun and the Earth. Take a look here [0] to see that there are times when Mercury's orbit would be visible from Earth.

Even then, I'm not sure why the Earth being flat would have anything to do with Mercury's visibility, since it would still be visible even if the Earth were flat.

[0] http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMAT6680Fa09/Yoon/EMAT%206690/Fir...

> Even then, I'm not sure why the Earth being flat would have anything to do with Mercury's visibility, since it would still be visible even if the Earth were flat.

They're trying to imply that a spherical Earth would prevent a visible Mercury at night. It's still nonsense.

The second one is pretty obviously misleading (https://imgur.com/a/zZS3nti).

It's proposing the idea that you can't see anything in a mirror that is facing around the corner from you. Venus is reflecting the Sun's light to you on the night-side of Earth, just like a mirror reflects an image to you even though you can't physically see around a corner.

Think of it as Venus orbiting inside Earth's orbit, but not directly between the Earth and the Sun at the time you can see Venus.

This explains it better than I can: https://www.quora.com/How-is-Venus-visible-in-the-night-sky-...

Ask him how it’s possible that you can see further at the top of a tower than at its base on a flat plane? Or better yet, ignore the troll/lunatic.

At least The Man Will Never Fly Society knows the Earth is round - otherwise the Greyhound buses would fall off the edge.

That's not true at all, the Earth could be toroidal, which allows for a flat embedding.

Maybe it’s worth mentioning that this flat embedding is a consequence of the Nash embedding theorem. The same Nash as in the Nash equilibrium, or in A Beautiful Mind.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_embedding_theorem

My guess is definitely Why, then, are younger people more likely to be uncertain or ambivalent? Perhaps they are more likely to offer frivolous or ironic responses, as Earther’s Brian Kahn suggests...

I think the concept of honestly answering pollsters was in decline before the Millenials came around. The idea that a statistically singifcant fraction reacted along the lines of, “why are you asking me such a stupid question, yeah sure, I have doubts, hehehehe...” seems plausible.

Yeah - I remember in the 90s loads of people put their religion as Jedi in the UK census.

People just like to take the piss.

I also think that when you have questions such as

- is shroedinger equation valid, or

- is global warming increasing over the last 100 years, or

- is genetic therapy a fact, or

- is the earth round,

I would be quite happy to state that it is actually rhomboid, since you are asking

In other words the question is so silly that people will answer silly, just for the fun of having somoene come out with a scientific analysis of the nonsensical answers.

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