My Father Firmly Believes the Earth Is Flat, How to Help | Hacker News Reader

My Father Firmly Believes the Earth Is Flat, How to Help

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Facts don't convince people. That's the problem with flat earth and trump and 1001 other issues. If your father believes in flat earth, explain how upset you are by that then get him some friends so he doesn't need to join fringe groups for a sense of belonging.

This is pure speculation on my part, as I haven't looked into any data to back this up, but I also believe that a lot of conspiracy theorists become conspiracy theorists, whether they realise it or not, for the sense of belonging and community that is perhaps lacking in other areas of their life.

I mean think about it - if you don't have a satisfactory social group, what better way to fill that void than by joining a group of hundreds or thousands that all think and feel the same way as you, and will gladly welcome you with open arms.

It's not about logic, it never was. It's about belonging. A strong enough emotion trumps rationality, just as people refuse to evacuate before a natural disaster because "it's their home".

>if you don't have a satisfactory social group, what better way to fill that void than by joining a group of hundreds or thousands that all think and feel the same way as you

...kthartic posted on HN...

We just have to encourage each other to think and feel differently. More disagreements are good for healthy discussions..?

I agree. After watching 'Behind the Curve' [1], this is the feeling I got from the whole thing.

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8132700/

This is true. When you are younger and inexperienced, you believe fact will change people's minds. This is just not true. I didn't figure this out until I was in my 50's.

It is very important for some people to convince others that their ideas are correct (which they very well might be).

Let go of this "I need to convince people to agree with my view." Instead, love your father for his other qualities and allow him to have his harmless ideas.

It feels insidious that "harmless" ideas like flat eartherism and creationism have crept to include broader conspiracy theories that actually do harm people. We know that at least one think tank[1] has had extensive effects on American policy by casting doubt on science -- starting with the fact that smoking is harmful.

That creates a large population of people primed to expect scientists to be lying to them. Flat eartherism is harmless in itself, but I suspect that the OP's father also believes several other conspiracy theories -- and votes according to them.

That doesn't change the OP's problem, or your observation that you can't fix it. But if you can't even solve the readily-demonstrable fact that the earth is round (just phone a trustworthy friend a few timezones away and ask where the sun is), how are you going to get people to agree about things that actually cause harm?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartland_Institute

> Instead, love your father for his other qualities and allow him to have his harmless ideas.

The problem starts when some ideas are not harmless. For example idea that covid is dangerous. Some people don't see evidence of this around them (myself included, I don't personally know anyone who had covid), so they don't believe experts, so they don't protect themselves and others. Some people even have idea that they are in the right, experts are lying and they need to actively prove that experts are lying in any way they can, even misrepresenting facts.

> I didn't figure this out until I was in my 50's.

What changed your mind? :)

I must have read something - maybe on hacker news. :-)

“Figured out” was a poor choice of words because I didn’t have an epiphany, “learned”would be more accurate.

I was curious, but it was more a joke :)

Aah, I see what you did there. :-)

Plenty of people have their mind changed by facts, they're called scientists. The rest are usually uneducated laymen. How do you change their minds? You don't, you educate their children to prevent the entrenchment of idiocracy.

This comment is so incredibly smug. People change their minds all the time, even "uneducated laymen". You just may not know the foundation of their belief and show evidence against something peripheral. It takes time, effort, and understanding in order to change someones mind and a level of openness and vulnerability that may end in you changing your mind yourself. Also, if you think that scientists or highly educated people are somehow immune to holding onto a false belief in the face of opposing evidence, you're deluding yourself.

>That's the problem with flat earth and trump and 1001 other issues.

I would add some of those 1001 other issues include things Well educated and common sense folk “know” to be sound, backed by evidence and scientific research. I would cite the reproducibility crisis which is not limited to just social science but endemic in academia and corporate driven research. Further I would hi-light the “fake news” situation is not ideologically limited nor is propaganda or any individuals personal biases leading to a kind of myopia to counter examples and challenging ideas. Suffice to say it’s easy to throw stones at flat earth and trump but if you think somehow your primate brain is not as broken or fallible as the next person then you’ve surely been had.

Everyone gets fooled sometimes. It's choosing to continue being fooled that's the issue.

Saying "facts don't convince people" is a way of saying "begging the question doesn't convince people", I think.

"begging the question"? I'm not sure i understand...

Edit: I get it now. To be clear: I'm not presenting proof, I'm just making the observation.

To beg a question is one of the ways to skip over the weak part of your argument. There are other ways. Begging the question is a way that leaves a remainder that must be true because it's true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Ah, thanks, I've never heard that used that way!

Call this a meta-conspiracy theory if you will, but I'm not convinced that flat-earthers actually exist in any kind of meaningful numbers. It strikes me as the kind of thing that's designed to stoke the fire of people on social media, which causes the "fight against flat earthers" to feature highly in everyone's consciousness, and make everyone believe that there's actually a movement when there isn't.

Add that to the number of people who will use it to wind people up, and answer "yes" on any survey just for a laugh, and I think you have what we have here.

I have no empirical evidence to back this theory up of course. How ironic!

Meaningful numbers?

There are billion of human beings, and then a fraction of these people with internet connection, and fraction that speak of the same language. The internet allow people to organize communities that would otherwise be impossible on a local level, giving to rise to possibly hundred of thousand or million of people who believe that the Earth is flat.

Is that 'meaningful' amount of people? I like to think it is enough to form movements, even if they can never get anywhere.

You still have the unsolvable problem of working out if they mean it or are just winding you up however :)

I have met a flat earther. Before that I thought it was just a joke.

"SOMEWHERE or other—I think it is in the preface to Saint Joan—Bernard Shaw remarks that we are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and as an example of modern credulity he cites the widespread belief that the earth is round. The average man, says Shaw, can advance not a single reason for thinking that the earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth-century mentality.

Now, Shaw is exaggerating, but there is something in what he says, and the question is worth following up, for the sake of the light it throws on modern knowledge. Just why do we believe that the earth is round? I am not speaking of the few thousand astronomers, geographers and so forth who could give ocular proof, or have a theoretical knowledge of the proof, but of the ordinary newspaper-reading citizen, such as you or me."

This is by George Orwell, who goes on to explain his reasons for thinking the earth is round.

"It will be seen that my reasons for thinking that the earth is round are rather precarious ones. Yet this is an exceptionally elementary piece of information. On most other questions I should have to fall back on the expert much earlier, and would be less able to test his pronouncements. And much the greater part of our knowledge is at this level. It does not rest on reasoning or on experiment, but on authority. And how can it be otherwise, when the range of knowledge is so vast that the expert himself is an ignoramous as soon as he strays away from his own speciality? Most people, if asked to prove that the earth is round, would not even bother to produce the rather weak arguments I have outlined above. They would start off by saying that ‘everyone knows’ the earth to be round, and if pressed further, would become angry. In a way Shaw is right. This is a credulous age, and the burden of knowledge which we now have to carry is partly responsible."

Of course, this was before pictures of the earth from space...

Samuel Eliot Morison, writing of Columbus, points out that every sailor knew that the world was round from seeing ships hull-down on the horizon. Aristotle--who counted for an awful lot in the Middle Ages--inferred the roundness from the earth's shadow on the moon, as I recall.

A lot of what we believe to be true is based on trust rather than in-depth understanding and verification. This is not a failing of people. Even the most educated person can only have so much understanding. We must use proxies such as credibility to determine who to trust.

This reminds me of the time that I discover a discrepancy of facts about when variolation was discovered. One source said 11th century, and the other is 15th century. Which is true? Unfortunately, I wasn't able to ascertain the truth of the matter, for I am not a historian and don't possess infinite time for fact verifications. I was only able to do the most superficial of fact checking, seeing if the sources agree with each other and that was time consuming enough.

The ancient Greeks figured it out with basically layman's knowledge though. They noticed 1) Ships disappear over the horizon hull first mast last, suggesting the Earth is bent 2) The shape cast on the Moon by the Earth's shadow in lunar eclipse is a circle.

This is what the linked Quora question says?

I strongly recommend watching this[1] video about flat-earth belief. It starts with a very impressive direct observation of the curvature, but that's not really the point since flat earth is not a belief based on facts and logic. The video follows the actual history of modern flat earth belief and how it is currently acting as a "gateway drug" into QAnon! (I'm oversimplifying a LOT for brevity)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44

(re: [1] - This is yet another example of algorithmic stupidity: YouTube decided to provide "context" (from wikipedia) about "flat earth" on a video that experimentally disproves the concept. -sigh-)

There are two different issues: (a) when you walk, drive or run, your experience the flat nature of the Earth. (b) whether experience is veridical or whether whatever experience in the world mirrors the reality of that world?

There is no need to be critical of those who believe in the flat earth theory, because their experiential evidence supports their theory. How to change such flat Earthers? Well, you need to set up an experiment involving them. Probably take them to space station, then they can get convinced. Otherwise, it is an issue of believing authorities.

There is nothing wrong in believing some scientist. However, when one enters in a dispute with scientists, one should become a scientist himself.

If you get him on a flight that goes above 35,000 on a clear day you can visually see the curvature. Perhaps you could do that? I guess you guys could build a small home made rocket with a camera if you can get it over 35000 that might convince him.

Small homemade rockets with a camera do not go to 35k feet. My brother is into high-powered rocketry. It takes hundreds of dollars just to purchase the motors to get that high.

If you heavily optimized for weight and left out parachutes/trackers/cameras it might only be 100-200 dollars instead of 300+.

You don't need to send anything to 35k feet; you only need a camera with a decent telephoto lens and a long lake on clear day with calm winds. From one shore of the long lake, view objects at the far shore from normal standing height using the camera+lens. If you then carefully lower the camera to the ground, you can watch objects (boats! people! small buildings!) dissapear behind the curvature of the lake's surface.

Dan Olson ("Folding Ideas") demonstrates this experiment in the video[1] I recommended in an earlier post[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24637001

He is right in a different way; but not in the literal/ physical sense:)

That's why we call our planeT as earth plane. It's a plane of existence.

This is a tangent, but judging from the other comments here, I feel like everyone in HackerNews read the same set of articles saying facts don't matter - people are 100% emotional, and now never try to convince others of their beliefs.

This is obviously false, if it were true we, humanity, would have never developed and accepted new ideas. If it were true we wouldn't have communist, we wouldn't have advertising or propaganda or marketing or most fiction books.

The truth is as usual more nuanced, yes, with some effort you can convince your father that the Earth is in fact not flat, just like with some persuasion and skill you can convince people of anything you want, little by little.

It just isn't easy or fast and you cannot make appeals to authority.

>This is a tangent, but judging from the other comments here, I feel like everyone in HackerNews read the same set of articles saying facts don't matter

good luck convincing them any different.

Depending on his age - it may be a sign of early-onset dementia.

If so, my condolences - and best of luck.

People aren’t logical they are emotional.

You can rarely change their minds.

Almost everyone believes the color of the sun is orangy yellow when its real color is the furthest thing from that. And again, facts will not convince them.

My Father attended a bizarre ceremony where he ate flesh and drank the blood of a Jewish guy.

How to Help?

He's probably just winding you up.

I suggest you go out of your way to be nice to your mother, he will be so appreciative he will cave in and agree with you.

However, that approach is unlikely to work with Global Warming.

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