When Having Friends Is More Alluring Than Being Right

I lost my dad to this. So far, nothing helps. I have no idea what the solution is. It only works when THEY want out.

But why would they?

We're brutally, brutally mean to people like this.

Every time somebody dunks on a flat earther or their ilk, puts somebody down to defend the superiority of their own worldview, they've added a brick to the wall that keeps these people from feeling like they can rejoin society.

The first time they pop out of the cave, feeble amateurs in the world of normies, they slip up just a tiny bit and get their head bitten off. There is nobody there to to say "if you tried, we'd have you". For most of us, it isn't true.

It seems like few people realize that this is part of the residue we unwittingly leave on the world. That the cost of performative intellectual superiority, even if you're actually right, is the burning of rungs on their ladder back up.

Needlessly dunking on misguided people worsens a world that we ourselves are stuck with.

Be nice.

It's not merely "lonely being wrong." It's lonely and you face a wall of open hatred and abuse for merely disagreeing or even wondering out loud if maybe the dominant view isn't 100% right and might have some holes in it.

That's completely unnecessary and also often openly breaks a lot of social rules, but people will justify their terrible behavior, the majority will have their back and tell the target of the abuse that they deserve it, it's their fault and the abuse will promptly stop if they will just "stop spouting nonsense."

Only it probably won't. Caving to the demand to pretend to agree will probably be permission to continue to be awful perpetually to someone who once openly disagreed.

The most abusive people typically claim they are being scientific, only they aren't. Because actual science is founded on the idea that we can't really prove anything. We can only disprove things and our current science is all the stuff we have some degree of confidence in because it has yet to be disproven and overturned by something better.

A good example of this is Bigfoot. There are people who believe strongly that Bigfoot absolutely doesn't exist and anyone who allows for the possibility that Bigfoot might be real gets treated like an idiot and a lunatic, never mind that you cannot prove a species absolutely doesn't exist and new species get discovered all the time.

Bigfoot Anti-Believers are typically far more fanatical than Bigfoot Believers, far less rational and far more out of line with scientific principles, yet will justify their terrible treatment of Bigfoot Believers -- or even people who say "I dunno. Could be." -- with claims that anti-belief is scientific.

As an egocentric self-righteous narcissist who spent their 20s making friends by being "right", I'm slowly starting to learn that isn't a fun way to live. I think it's the same thing as when someone you care about is "complaining", you don't always have to help them solve the problem, sometimes they just want to talk.

This article gets close to the heart of flat-earthism, bad sadly doesn't quite take the plunge over the edge. The origin of flat-eartherism is people like this author, and his wife's need to convince others that they are wrong in their beliefs and get them in line with the correct beliefs. It's hard to remember at this point, but think back to about 15 years ago, the idea of a flat-earth was held up as the shining example of how clueless people in the past used to be and how far we've come. That story was fake by the way, people have known the earth was round since ancient Greece, in fact they even had a pretty accurate measure of the earth's circumference. In between there were surely less knowledgeable groups of people, but it's hard to find any concrete cases of large scale belief that the earth was flat, rather than people not really understanding what was meant by "the earth" on a planetary scale, vs. their local perception of the earth around them which did indeed appear to be fairly flat. Except for today of course, where each passing year we hit a new watermark of belief in a flat-earth. How did we get here? Like I said, articles like this give you a good insight into that path, when you're constantly barraged with articles whose entire point is to define a group of people and call them dumb it repels people, and some small number of people get caught up in that repelling force, they start to wonder if maybe this barrage of meanness is actually hiding some deeper truth. Over time these people form into their own group and settle into a symbiotic relationship with the first group. As the group gains steam there's more and more evidence that people are dumb, and need to be called out as such, giving the author of this article and others more ammo, which in turn repels more people into joining the group. And around, and around they go, where it stops I have no idea.

Edit: I should add, this article is among the most civil and charitable articles of its type. I don't mean to pick on this author in particular.

This goes way beyond flat earth and the other beliefs he listed. People will laugh at you if you claim that rocks grow out of dead birds, but almost no-one really convinced themselves of where rocks come from or where dead birds go and that it's not the same place. We trust authorities but we don't think it through or investigate it for ourselves. It's much easier to trust authorities because that's what everyone else is trusting too so you get automatic agreement and friends without having to think for yourself. We also have no idea that the Earth isn't flat except from trust in authorities.

What is kind of strange is that even though some wrong beliefs are mocked by people who don't agree (eg flat-earth, Scientology), others are put on a kind of pedestal of respect, such as Islam and native rituals. The justification I can think of is "Let those poor savages have their special beliefs because they're weaker than us and maybe that's all they have to cling onto so we shouldn't hold them to the same high standards that we hold ourselves to." Scientologists and Christians are part of us and have no excuse for being "wrong" so we're more openly critical of them.

I think this article indirectly highlights why mob rule and direct democracies are so potentially dangerous: people need to feel accepted, and will take many ideas on faith, even dangerous ones, than to risk having an opinion that causes them to feel the scorn of their peers.

Sadly, being wrong DOES affect others. My fellow citizens vote and I am compelled by the laws they enact. Every friendly attempt to alter their worldview is ignored and every unfriendly attempt drives them further into a rabbit-hole of unreason. I'm left with only one choice- to isolate myself from the consequences of their actions, either forcing them out of my world, or leaving them in theirs.

and that's why I don't speak with my extended family anymore.

I don’t like this false dichotomy. It’s a truism “you can be right or you can be happy”. You can be right and happy. In my experience yes-men are often sad and keep shallow company. If you’re getting a lot of pushback from the group you’re in you might be in the wrong group.

This was a fun read (until the grim conclusion I guess), but what is the word for this phenomena? Tribalism? Religion?

Be sure to stop and consider: would YOU give up all your friends in search of the truth?

The author appears to lump anyone of opposing views together.

Flat earth - trivial to disprove, ok Anti-vacation - not trivial, but a huge amount of work has been done to show anyone who isn’t totally shut down the glaring before/after situation of vaccines, so ok

Men’s Rights? Seriously? Is the author saying men have no rights? Some of the things that fall under the men’s rights umbrella are the draft, lack of help for homeless men vs women, biased family court, little recognition when a victim of domestic violence (interestingly the CDC recognizes that), biased prison sentences, vastly higher rates of on the job injuries, etc.

So is the author saying anything that happens to a man his own fault?

Is there a specific men’s rights subgroup the author is referring to that’s very loud and just goes around saying men never do anything bad?

This is like saying “civil rights” people are a bunch of angry people with no reason to be angry.

I’ve been thinking of starting a cult. Not a real cult. It would explicitly be a fake cult, and it would have rules to prevent all the evil stuff cults do. But there’s a reason that people join and become very committed to them (or religions). They provide a community, a sense of common purpose, and a support network. Artificially replicating that while cutting out the bad stuff, and scaling that to the level of the Catholic Church or Islam would be the biggest thing one could do to improve human happiness in developed countries in my opinion.

Are we witnessing the birth of a new idea, something like "there is no right or wrong if it hurts people's feelings"? will "non binary truth" emerge as law?

You have the right to say anything that's wrong, and nobody can say it's wrong because that would be discriminatory, but if you say something that's right, nobody should say it's right because it would be binary thinking and discriminating? yet you can say it's wrong, because it's hurting your feelings.

Let's try to abolish logic! It will surely lead to immense happiness.

We're at the tipping point where Idiocracy becomes real (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/)

I thought of tweleve step programs reading this article.

Things get culty. But what community doesn’t look inclusive and strange to an outsider? Sports? Reps/Dems? Any system not your own?

I think its a lovely article. Spurs up alot of thoughts. Especially when being wrong is considered so bad in the US.

That's why education is so important. If as kinds those people would analyze the evidences of both - flat and sphere earth they would be immune to flat-earth nonsense.

After kinds lose their natural curiosity and gain political views it's nearly impossible to convince them to something different than they believe.

How about agree with them? And connect with them?

I don't necessarily mean to agree that the Earth is flat.

But maybe if you think that we don't know all the answers and finding out things we don't know is fun, you could find common ground even with flat-earthers.

Probably 99% of humanity has one element of common ground: we all want to be happy.

So start from there and work outwards. How does believing the Earth is flat make them happier? As you discover the answer to that (one of which is certainly community as the OP points out), maybe there's other shared common ground.

This could apply to almost anything. Even racists want to be happy. They think that they'll be more happy by holding people different from themselves back, but likely part of this is they hold a relative sense of success (are they better off than their neighbors) than an absolute sense (are they better off than they could be). Maybe compare those two pictures of success, and show that even if someone different from them gets successful by getting a good education and curing cancer, they will directly benefit by not needing to worry about cancer.

And connection matters a lot too. Pretty much every instance I've seen of racists dropping their racism was a direct result of direct interactions with people they demonized that they realized they had more in common with than they'd believed (and in some cases more than their racist buddies).

To me the saddest part of the movie was the cross cuts between the science meetup and the flat-earth meetup. Those two groups would actually have got along pretty well, if they focused on shared passion for the unknown and not their differences.

Besides - with everything we are learning about how consensus across entangled observers may be deterministic of the resulting reality (quantum Darwinism, which is supported by recent experiments but not yet proven), perhaps flat-earthers, by abandoning recognition of a shared consensus of the rest of the world, have in fact created a mostly overlapping Venn-diagram sort of pocket reality where the Earth being flat is as real as the notion it is not for the rest of us. And if we adopt that belief we can enter into that reality, and if they adopt the scientific method's application to their premise they'd necessitate returning to ours (perhaps the scientific method is exactly that - a process to evaluate disparate realities and converge to a norm).

In fact, maybe that's what cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias really are -- a desire to stabilize our version of reality by way of consensus. Almost like a psychological gravity both of an equal but unobservable entanglement.

So it stands to reason the only way to get a fringe reality to reconnect with the rest of the herd is to start from consensus and work to re-entangle the detached observations from there.

all of this said can also be true for any kind of community, even extrapolated to religion, leftist ideas, fascism, fad diets.

There is nothing inherent in flat earthers, most communities outside of academia (and sometimes inside it) that is not about the feeling of belonging somewhere. It is stronger than truth and facts. Always.

[I'm deleting this, I don't think it is spurring constructive conversation]

I think oftentimes in human interaction you can either be right or be liked. It might seem like a great injustice but oftentimes, being right comes at the expense of another being wrong. The problem is that there is nothing wrong with being wrong and yet a lot of us still take this very personally. Everyone is wrong until someone tells them what is right.

It wouldn't be such a big deal if these "wrong" communities didn't seem to be so outrage driven, but they tend to be more about the anger than pursuing their "truth".

Acts of "proving" oneself to the community gain a person favor, which ends up being the stuff that effects us "normies", rather than their mere existence.

> "And if it was just flat-earthers, I’d say fine, it’s harmless. But you’ve got anti-vaxxers and Men’s Rights Advocates and anti-global warming folks and TERFs and incels out there, all fueled by one central pivot point of humanity – namely, that it’s lonely being wrong."

It seems quite odd that he lumps "Mens rights advocates" in there. Are they crazy?

The internet allows misfits to find a place where they can feel accepted. This is the other side of the coin.

On a different note, being right is overrated anyway. Being wrong is a great way to learn... if you're willing to accept it, of course.