Interesting point of view. That'd explain flat earth and other oddities.
Totally not a parody.
I encourage you to go to a flat earth meeting or conference. Ask questions with the intent to listen and without judgment.
Your mind will be blown.
I used to think that data-driven scientific and analytic thinking was something that anyone could do if they wanted to. I no longer think that.
Selection bias. Of course the trolls wouldn't bother going to such a meeting. The proportion of true believers at a conference says nothing about the proportion of true believers in the general public.
But yeah, Poe's law n all -- tough to tell sometimes.
The primary common aspect is distrust of the word government.
There are very inquisitive and scientific people in the Flat Earth community that simply distrust particular sources, but simultaneously jump to conclusions that are opposite of that source. So they are interested in proving or disproving the same thing, but they are handicapped because they can't simply reproduce existing scientific research, they have to categorically reject that too simply because the state was involved in funding or agreeing with the research.
Eventually they do run interesting experiments that undermine their flat earth theories, but they are still trying to prove the earth is flat, instead of trying to prove the shape of the earth and accepting where-ever that leads them. This is distinct of how science is supposed to be done, but some of their experiments are clever.