Hacker News Reader

You are covering these people with a cloak of ideas that they don't have.

FEs do not have ideas. They are not examining anything. They are not courageous.

What they have is a cult of inconsistent, disingenuous rhetoric. They contradict themselves constantly. They are not reasoning, they are jumping from over verbal attack to another. They have decided that the best response to a life empty of "winning internet arguments"... is to just pretend they won.

This is a social cult of people telling eachother that their empty word blocks amount to ideas. Telling eachother that their refusal to think is intellectual integrity. That their refusal to consider is superior knowledge. That their willingness to purport to believe in nonsense, is somehow radical and valuable.

Don't humor them. It won't change anything. They can't magically become smarter, especially if they value the 'feeling of knowing', more than learning.

It’s like the FE who designed an experiment that he said would conclusively prove whether the earth was flat or spherical. It seems he actually designed a legitimate experiment, because its results showed that the earth was spherical.

To your point, of course his and his followers’ response has been to try and identify the error in the design of their experiment. I suspect a few months from now we will never hear of this experiment and it will go down their memory holes.

It's already happened, they purchased a 20,000$ laser gyroscope, measured the spin of the earth to be 15 deg / hr. And quietly hit the results. They aren't after truth. They're about furthering the lie, and profiting off merch / etc.

While much of what you say is undoubtedly true, it also clearly applies to a very large number of political bodies, not to mention religious groups, academic societies and businesses.

My read of this comment is both that the ideas and the people who espouse them are not respectable. Half of that is on point, but half of that is not feasible. There are too many people in the world who are wrong about things to start disrespecting people for being wrong. Groups of people command some level of respect, even when they are being actively foolish.

> nobody 30 years ago believed the earth was flat but they probably couldn’t articulate why they believed that

I'm not sure that this needs to be a requirement. Cultural axioms like this have value; there's a lot of knowledge to be had in the world, and not enough time or space in the mind to derive it all. I don't need to prove to myself from first principles every time I have a headache that aspirin will help.

There's danger, sure, if the wrong axioms take root, and we need to keep an open eye for new data that show we might be wrong. But it's unreasonable to expect that every individual person can cogently argue one side or the other of something with such overwhelming evidence that it has been accepted as a fact.

I think this gets at the difference between knowledge and understanding. Simply knowing a fact (like the Earth is round) is different from understanding why we think that. Perhaps what's even more important than understanding is the ability to come up with experiments and arguments questioning our understanding.

Questions of understanding lead to scientific research and analytical thinking, and that's exactly what a large fraction of the human population lacks. I'd say that's the only goal of education: to create people who can think for themselves.

You're right. In fact I think the ideal is even a step further up the abstract ladder: not every person in the street needs to be able to off-the-cuff explain the evidence for the earth being round.

But they should know how to get the resources they would need to make that explanation.

>coolest part of the documentary

I'd actually describe that as the worst part, at least insofar the way you contextualized it. That's literally a moment where they are faced with overwhelming evidence against their "theory" and still cannot accept they are wrong.

This isn't something to be admired.

That guy is still a flat earther. He kept trying the experiment again and again until he was able to get the opposite result (by messing around with the set-up enough to make results meaningless).

It even says this after the documentary...

I feel like it's part of an anti-intellectual trend and not something to laud. Asking genuine questions is a good thing, but I don't believe them to be genuine questions, it's more of a 'if "you" can't answer this question to my satisfaction, then I'm right'.

yeah, no. it's way worse than you portray it here.

these people refuse to question their beliefs, exactly the opposite of your claim. they believe that the earth is flat and nothing can get them to change that, no laser gyroscopes, no movies from rockets going to space, nothing. it is a thing of their identity to believe that the earth is flat, they feel special about it and to lose that belief is to be expelled from their social circle.

this is neo-cargo-cult-tribalism at its worst.

The don't actually do experiments. The setup experiments then manipulate them to get the results they need throwing out all the results that don't fit what they think is correct. One can simply check out the FECORE youtube channel and website to see how they do "experiments"

They also enforce group think by removing people who ask them hard questions and who don't just accept what they say. Since FE appears to be about the only community some of them belong to it makes it hard to ask tough questions.

The comment to which you responded mentioned the documentary "Behind the Curve," in which a group actually does experiments. The experiments obviously do not support a flat earth, so they then hide the results, admit quietly that things aren't looking good, and then try to change the experiments to get the results they want.

The experiments in question are actually the second time they tried to do the laser experiment. The videos detailing the experiment on Jeranisms channel got taken down when it was pointed out that they showed the curve of the Earth.

When they make an active effort to hide the result I don't consider it a valid experiment.

HBomberguy's "Flat Earth: A Measured Response" [0] is also an interesting look into the present-day flat earth "community".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gFsOoKAHZg

I didn't not get the same take-away from that documentary. My takeaway came from looking at the status-seeking and power games this little artificial pond carved out of the internet with the help of gullible people and people with mental conditions.

That one guy at the end seemed like the only one who legitimately wants to do experiments and improve their knowledge... the vast majority of the people in the film were completely caught up in the glow of attention they get from saying the ridiculous things they say.

I'd be curious to see if the guy at the end has moved on after this experiment, or if their in-group status has convinced them that maybe some mystical force interfered with their experiment, like the other person who was trying to actively keep quiet the false results of their gyroscope experiment.

The during-credits scene shows the "researchers" doing a livestream where they explain away their "anomalous" findings with various hand-waves. They didn't want to find the actual answer, they wanted to reinforce their belief

I sympathize with your argument, to a certain degree. The problem, however, is not that fringe or crackpot stuff exists on YouTube, but that it actually gets a disproportionate amount of bandwidth.

There is an inherent bias in the phenomenon. Say I am the only one on earth who thinks that pigs can fly. If I succeed in convincing one other person, I have doubled my peer group. If I do it a few times I have a crowd and may start to host conferences etc. That's a pretty big incentive. If, on the other hand, I do not think pigs can fly, why the hell would I bother convincing people?

> but that it actually gets a disproportionate amount of bandwidth.

I get the impression that people are merely overreacting to this, so I'm curious about this - do you have any source to back this up? We must also consider that perhaps the same set of flat earthers consistently watch such videos so bandwidth isn't a great metric, viewers is what you want really.

True! It would be interesting to contrast the number of flat earth movies vs. round earth movies. There is no easy way to do that. If I type in "flat earth" on YouTube, the first 50 results contain only one defence of flat earth, the rest is debunking.

This might be because 1 in every 50 people believes in flat earth. It might be because for every crackpot clip there are about 50 clips debunking it. It also may be the case that debunking flat earth is popular nowadays. It may even be because YouTube already tweaked their ranking algorithm.

However, when I search for "hollow earth", I get almost no debunking clips in the first 50 results. That makes me think that the first two hypotheses I came up with probably don't hold water.

It's not "nonconformism" it's a mix of stupidity and childish negation

It's one thing to look at the other side of the coin and disagree with it, another to just mindlessly negate something "because I said so".

The world needs more of the former type but it's abounding with the latter type.

But it doesn't just stop with flat earth theory: the conspiracy mindset is contagious and spreads to other aspects of life, such as health, where obviously false information becomes dangerous because suddenly people aren't getting the medication they need.

you can say the same thing about hypothetical people who assert 2 + 2 = 5. there's nothing cool about it, or people experimenting and starting to doubt that 2 + 2 = 5. nothing would be lost if nobody believed the earth was flat. this is not admirable.

But people who believe that earth is flat will always exist, it's just a question of how to deal with them. Letting people doubt and experimentally prove fundamental ideas is healthy (and how many a revolution in physics started). We just have to ensure these people don't get shut in echo chambers.

Letting people doubt and experimentally prove fundamental ideas is healthy

Asking, "How do we know the Earth is round? Can we test it?" is very, very different than asserting, "The Earth is flat and I'll prove it experimentally."

On the contrary, having an initial spark of curiousity (or even doubt) about 2 + 2 = 5 is a great way of engaging with critical reasoning, mature mathematical thinking, proofs, etc. Given the number of times human civilisation lurked forward because someone revisited earlier assumptions, training more people to think critically and be courageous about their conclusions would, I believe, be a net benefit to us all.

Yes, 2 + 2 does not equal 5, but we need more people who can explain and think about _why_, and not simply repeat "just because". If someone cannot debunk a misconception as rudimentary as that, how can we expect their arguments against a flat earth theory to be sound and persuasive?

I really don't believe the flat earth phenomenon is about genuine curiosity. An important part of such a conspiracy theory is to generate more and more elaborate reasons why data must be rejected. That's not curiosity.

If you're interested in the effects of conspiracy theories on society, it is a fascinating watch.

You see how people get pulled into the theory, get marginalized by society and how their family ends up becoming the flat earth community (even though they've never met).

You also see how hard it is for scientists with overwhelming evidence to convince them, it's a sobering watch.

Except they are not the same things at all. #1 numbers and math are a very different domain from hard facts, such as the shape of the earth as humans experience it.

In fact, you could probably create a number system, or a mathematics where 2+2=5 (simple example would be a number system the same as we have now, but the symbols for 4 and 5 are swapped). There are interesting ideas to be gained in thinking about what numbers mean, and imply based on questioning that.

However, once you’ve accepted all the definitions, and the number system, and the rules of the system you’ve accepted necessarily imply 2+2=4 then insisting that 2+2=5 is nonsensical. That’s the level at which the flat earth era are operating.

I don't think these are the same. If you get 15 marbles, arrange them into groups of 1,2,3,4,5 and give them the proper labels, you can trivially prove that the sum of two groups of 2 equals 4 and not 5.

The proofs for round earth are not as trivial. People have varying degrees of skepticism. Some are genuinely curious and are convinced by demonstrations while others are just contrarians. If you've ever heard Eddie Bravo talk, it's clear he doesn't care about understanding what shape the earth is and just likes to spout conspiracies.

There's a difference between scientific engagement and brain washing.

Science is always cool. Brain washing not so much.

It's reasonable to start from a point of "I think the earth is round, but why is this true?" Flat earthers, much like many conspiracy theorists, are generally not interested in logical reasoning, and prefer to invent elaborate explanations to hold on to their delusions.

It's unreasonable to start from a position of "all scientists are forced by boogeyman governments to say that the earth is flat", which is not a strawman and something you can in fact see them argue.

The trick is to distinguish between the two. The only known way is to allow all points of view to compete, unless you have a better idea? (Which, of course, you are allowed to articulate even though I'm sure there isn't one;)

But how much is lost when for-profit enterprises curate and censor the most prominent avenues for speech?

Exactly! I don't understand why they want to censor this, it shows how people can actually accept a scientific method through experimentation...

Alternatively it shows how people can reject well-established scientific fact based on no scientific analysis whatsoever.

The "main" flat earth research organization if FECORE which kicks out members who ask hard questions and deletes comments from their videos that detail flaws / misstatements of fact in their reports and videos. They don't care about getting the correct answer, to them they already know the correct answer so anything that goes against that answer is ignored.

The amount of basic science you have to reject to believe in Flat Earth theory is mind boggling. Let’s keep in mind that these are not even non-spherical earth believers, who could probably conjure up a shape, in higher dimensions that may be able to explain basic observations. These are people who believe in a flat earth, which can be disproved by simple science and logic, such as ships appearing from a horizon, looking at a mountain at a distance, seeing the shadow of the earth during a lunar eclipse, or the simple fact that every other planet we see is spherical. There may be an interesting thought experiment to see what sort of shape we could conjure up that would explain the facts as we know them but that’s not what they are doing.

It's not censoring, just changing the algorithm according to relevance. You could argue that other people were censored first so that youtube would suggest FE theory videos before their own which may have been more relevant. But it seems youtube's current algo is 'this is a conspiracy video, here's another conspiracy video' instead of 'this is a 9/11 video, here's another 9/11 related video'.

Except they don't. Belief in flat earth is an ideology, it's not based on science. All of the evidence clearly shows the earth is round. You have to completely ignore the scientific method to believe the earth is flat.