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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

I used to be a flat earther. No, I didn't actually believe the earth was flat, but I loved the outrage it provoked and the attention I got when I told people I was a flat earther. I also enjoyed trying to defend my position and call out (valid) logical fallacies round earthers were making. It really forces you to improve your debate skills when you have to defend an impossible position. Lastly, there was a social aspect of it, a camaraderie with other flat earthers that made me feel like I belonged to a "secret" organization that was fun and influential. I eventually outgrew that hobby.

I'm sure there are many "genuine" flat earthers, but I suspect there are a lot of flat earthers like me as well. Of course, part of the "game" is pretending you really believe it, so good luck proving it.

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My headcanon is that most people that proclaim to be flat-earthers are like you - they don't actually believe it.

From the Ancient Greeks to the 19th century, people believed the world was round. That story you heard in history class about how people in the 1400s were afraid to sail west because they'd fall off? Not true. They were afraid to sail west because they didn't know that the Americas existed, and without those they knew there was no way they'd survive a trip to China.

Flat earth in modern discourse was a strawman from the start. There may be some true believers - there always are - but it hasn't been a serious worldview in 2000 years or more.

I wouldn't be so sure, more likely people who make money of it are all BS masters.

Leader of the 'movement' selling books, youtube ads etc.

I had only once a pleasure to talk with flat earther, and apart from his flat theories, his view of how world works could be called... interesting, if not naive.

It reminded me of conversation with my primary school friends (back when we were 10), we tried to invent invisibility cloak by mixing 'chemicals' like sulpher, mercury and melted titanium (since those were the coolest substances we come up with) and coat a cloth with it. Kids stuff.

That was when we were around 10, this guy was close to 30 and was basically using same level of understanding of how to do things.

Its hard to believe sometimes bu a lot of people grow up never questioning or poking at the reality surrounding them.

You don't need that to grow up and get by in life, but then you end up not being able to distinguish reality from snake oil.

And all of those snake oil salesmen know exactly what buttons to push.

"Secret knowledge", "hidden truth", offer them glimpse into world that secret cabal never wants them to see. Convince them how much smarter and cleverer they are for "figuring out" the reality that other are blind to.

And then the 'blind fools' come to try to convince them that the earth is round...

I wonder if you had a strategy for reconciling the theory of the flat moon with flat Earth?

Believing in both at the same time is extra-tricky, and that's what caused me to get banned from the Facebook flat-Earthers. If the moon is flat, perspective distortion should make it disk-like, and nobody's observed a disk-like moon. So either the moon is round (and the fact it only shows us one face is some extra-fancy trickery with mirrors or lenses or something), or the moon is a flat disk facing Earth, but the Earth is a ball rotating under the moon.

(Clarification: none of this is things I believe. I spent time debating flat-Earthers as an exercise in logical consistency and alignment with observational evidence).

Even if the moon were a disk, the angle it makes relative to a normal vector coming out from ground demonstrates a spherical earth.

You don't even need to factor in the moon, this can be done with the stars. In a flat earth, the same stars would be visible when you're in the southern too of south America as in the northernmost top of north America. This isn't the case since the earth is spherical.

Heck, even just the timing of a sunrise is sufficient. In a flat earth the sun would rise simultaneously across the globe... er, disk. But of course that's not the case. It's daytime in half of the world at any given time.

I have no clue about any arguments flat earthers make, but I am curious how they would object to some of the fundamental concepts like you provided. I suppose it doesn't make much sense that they would use science to refute your points...

Personally I think that it's just the limits of geometric understanding for some peole. Personally I hit that limit when I tried to understand quaternions. Some people hit that limit with calculus. I guess others hit that limit when they try to understand perspective from a sphere.

The gist of that is in the article. They never need and rarely do object to "fundamental concepts". Rather, they object to what they perceive to be your belief in them. That way, they never have to address anything directly.

They invent new scientific rules. With two caveats: first, the new rules are not independently tested by experiment (maybe they are vaguely justified by thought experiment; thought by them); second, their rules are just qualitative, nearly never quantitative, so that they basically everything can be true.

So, measuring angles is off limits. Then they admit you cannot see things that are far away and close to the horizon, but not by curvature. By perspective: perspective laws, they say, mandate that far away objects become very small, too small to be seen. Do you basically can see only a limited part of the sky, at a sufficiently high angle from the horizon on the flat earth. That is why you can't see the whole sky.

>It really forces you to improve your debate skills when you have to defend an impossible position.

I've been on the opposite of this debate. I don't know how much it compares to being on the wrong side of the debate, but I'd still say it noticeably honed my debate skills and it's humbling once you realize that you don't actually learn that much in school about how we can actually prove the earth is round and how to explain some of the discrepancies flat earthers use as arguments.

Being a troll is good fun, however, I think at some point if you keep the charade going long enough, it does infect the psyche.

To summarize, would you say you were a great troll? I apologize if I interpreted it that way...

Why apologize? They literally said they came to it for the outrage it caused. That's pretty much the definition of a troll.

I found it confusing that he still openly identified to be part of the flat Earth group, even outside of his trolling persona. If I pretended to be religious for the purpose of trolling evolutionists, I would never say I was at any point a creationist. Surely Santa Clause at the mall doesn't believe he's Santa Clause, nor would he seriously identify as him, but he trolls kids every year to put a smile on their face. I suppose I found it a bit bizarre to still seriously identify as a flat-earther, and from that, I didn't want to offend.

Well, there's an identity based on belief system and an identity based on group. I took his statement to be that he was part of the group, but not part of the (true) belief system.

If you joined a group of YECs and participated in the community, you might consider yourself a YEC (group member) even though you never truly believed, but only argued and trolled. I do agree that it's a bit bizarre, but knowing many contrarian and troll types this seems a pretty consistent part of their MO.

I believe polite people call us "contrarians" while everyone else calls us "assholes". But yeah I get it, I truly enjoy taking opposite sides of arguments against people that are passionately arguing their position for much the same reasons you have described above.

I think everyone has a bit of a contrarian inside them. I used to express it more readily, because, let's face it, it's fun! But I noticed that increasingly I was just encouraging "true believers", so I stopped. The reality check for me was that, starting a few years ago, increasingly frequently when I started to try to make up ridiculous sounding arguments and not even logically sound ones, people on both sides would think I was being serious. The world doesn't need me adding to the insanity.

The straw that broke the camel's back was when I tried to make up an obviously ridiculous constitutional legal argument as a joke and accidentally hit something where a court clerk told me sovereign citizens actually use the argument. If you can roll a d10 for the Bill of Rights and a conclusion you want and land on something that someone actually tries to argue, then... well, that's today's reality.

Or perhaps this is exactly what belief is.

Maybe in fact you are the consummate true believer.

To possess something to the point it is the total sum of your knowledge, would that be belief? Or would that merely be a lack. No belief is required when there is no alternative.

So let us then imagine how many people 'believe' in exactly this same way about human rights or freedom or democracy, and perhaps suddenly the state of the world at any given time becomes much clearer.

At least there’s something to be said for your honesty now.

Though having both witnessed and perpetrated the very real human damage that dishonest/irrational/delusional belief systems can and will do, you’ll forgive me if I do not congratulate you on the rest.

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