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Comment by TallGuyShort | Hacker News Reader

I've engaged a few flat earthers to actually listen to their arguments and show them my own evidence that it's real (locating amateur radio satellites using data shared by people around the globe and demonstrating the doppler effect on them).

The response strikes me as being indicative of mental illness. And I don't mean that as an insult - I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis. Don't know if mental illness is going up or down - our understanding and perception of it has changed so there's hardly reliable data on it. I'd have to go through a similar thought process as this article. But I think it's a factor, beyond "new media". I suspect that the toxic politics in the US is a similar phenomenon, the way people are controlled by confirmation bias and can twist their way into believing "my guy good, other guy bad" under almost any circumstances.

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I think there is too much information around for the average person to filter and process and digest. All three are important parts of living in a society and it looks to me like even with e.g. economic issues alone, it's just very hard for (to be fair) anybody to keep up.

In turn, people reach out to conspiracy theories to simplify the world around them with obvious answers and explanations.

My theory, sort of.

this makes a lot of sense

Yeah that crossed my mind as well. People who have so little understanding of the mechanics behind it all that they think it's impossible we've put anything in Earth orbit - how could ANYONE understand that?

In one case though I had someone say that I wasn't hitting satellites, I was hitting a solar-powered high altitude plane. When I pointed out that it would have to be going at 23 times the speed of sound at sea level and flying at 120,000 km, they said of course: technology is amazing. While in the same conversation claiming that satellites were impossible. At that point I stopped believing they even had basic common sense.

My conclusion about flat-earthers is that the vast majority are just trolling. There are probably also a fair number who get sucked in by the idea, but they aren't the ones out there making the arguments for it. The frustratingly persistent people who can come up with one outlandish argument after another are too smart to actually believe what they're saying.

I am not a mental health expert but I do not think of this type of persistent trolling as healthy behaviour. At the very least it is shitty and disrespectful behaviour towards someone trying to make a point using facts.

They've probably been just improvising.

They become quite good at it as it follows simple rules.

This thread also summarizes my experience pretty well.

To take this even further: I encounter in my day to day many instances of people making claims that are easily refuted with a quick online search. I have realized that correcting people over their lack of scientific knowledge is perceived as nitpicking and inappropriate. We got our incentives backwards. If we cannot speak up over misinformation to our peers, then they will spread faster than the truth.

Sadly, I've had to accept that in order to be perceived as a much stronger source of truth, I have to correct people less.

People often shut their minds if you try to prove they are wrong. It is much easier to ask to stop topic.

And truth often is boring. It is only one. At first I've told my son only truth how it works (Feynman style). Now I engage in making fantasies (Diskworld style). I present all fantasies (theories) as equal, some can be constructed by physics laws. The game is to find which one. All sorts of interesting questions arise.

What is the difference between plane and satellite?

Can airplane flew that fast through air?

Is meteor burning? What is its speed?

> 120,000 km

That's third of a distance to the moon. Not sure how you got it

I have a similar vein of thought;

Any sufficiently advanced technology (knowledge) is indistinguishable from magic -- Arthur C. Clarke

So people just see competing ideas as a choice between two forms of magic. Add in identity politics and hey presto, changing their mind means denying themselves (a rather difficult thing for most to do). Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence. My evidence is better because your evidence is just your opinion.

> Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence.

No, this isn't true. References to Dunning-Kruger need to die. I haven't seen a case yet where using Dunning-Kruger to explain behavior is not misinformation.

Dunning-Kruger's data actually demonstrated that the more confident someone is in their ability, the higher their ability, statistically. There was a positive correlation in people's ability to judge themselves, in the experiments. The only question was why the correlation wasn't higher.

https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...

> Dunning-Kruger's data actually demonstrated that the more confident someone is in their ability, the higher their ability, statistically.

It also demonstrated that the worst-performing individuals estimated themselves to perform MUCH better than they did, while the best-performing individuals expected to perform slightly worse than they did.

This comports with the average reference to the phenomenon ("stupid people think they're smarter than they are, smart people think they're stupider than they are").

The article you linked for some reason makes this comparison:

> So the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. [...] they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good.

This is just categorically false, and the chart linked not one paragraph above completely torpedoes it. The bottom quartile of people thought that they would perform at around the 57th percentile. They clearly expected to perform better than more competent individuals.

Perhaps the author meant to write "not that [they] think they're better than competent people do", which would be correct, but the rest of the conclusions seem to follow off of this flawed reading of the data.

> The bottom quartile of people thought that they would perform at around the 57th percentile. They clearly expected to perform better than more competent individuals.

I think you’re misunderstanding what Dunning & Kruger presented, which is precisely why references to this paper need to stop. You cannot read literally into the graph as saying that the bottom quartile of people believed they were at the 57th percentile of ability, that’s not what the experiment measured.

Have you read the actual paper? The respondents were 1- all Cornell undergrads volunteering for extra class credit, 2- asked to rank themselves, not to rate their abilities, 3- asked about such “skills” as the ability to get a joke. It seems pretty wild that anyone ever took this paper seriously. The conclusions that it makes in it’s wordy prose are not supported by the data they present.

Take a little more time to understand Tal’s primary argument - that this paper most likely is measuring regression to the mean. Because these kids were asked to rank themselves, and they didn’t know how good their peers were, there is good reason to expect a correllation less than 1. Because the authors were barely out of undergrad school themselves at the time, and not studying statistics per se, there is plenty of reason to suspect that the methodology isn’t perfect ... beyond the fact that it wasn’t a random sample of the population, it studied all rich kids who (self-selected) needed extra credit, it included no difficult mental skills, and that followup papers have shown a complete reversal of whatever effect is there, when applied to more difficult skills like law or engineering.

There was research last year that showed that cynicism is a way for less intelligent people to protect themselves from being taken advantage of. Basically, if you know you're not smart enough to figure out if other people are genuine or out to scam you, defaulting to assuming that all strangers are lying is a winning strategy.

The same kind of logic fuels conspiracy-minded people. The one thing they all have in common is that they reject the mainstream view, they reject the consensus. And in turn, they embrace outlandish explanations, and the communities around those, because it gives them a false sense of superiority. They know something the rest of the sheep don't!

So these two psychological defense mechanisms interact with each other, and when the information flow in society is increasing, the threshold for how smart you need to be to keep up also increases. So people in general probably aren't getting stupider, but they're getting more and more overwhelmed, which looks the same.

That makes a lot of sense. I'd be curious for a link or reference to that research if you remember any details.

On cynicism: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014616721878319...

On conspiracy beliefs: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550611434786

>There was research last year that showed that cynicism is a way for less intelligent people to protect themselves from being taken advantage of. Basically, if you know you're not smart enough to figure out if other people are genuine or out to scam you, defaulting to assuming that all strangers are lying is a winning strategy.

That narrative is ridiculous - what does intelligence have to do with it ?

I guarantee you you are uninformed on so many issues and you could easily be taken advantage of no matter how intelligent you were by someone who spent time preparing/specialising in deception - especially if the negative outcome is less then the cost of investigating the issue. Nobody has the time to investigate every choice so by your logic cynicism should be a default strategy for everything you're not an expert in.

> That narrative is ridiculous - what does intelligence have to do with it ?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014616721878319...

"Further studies demonstrated that cynicism is more likely to be a worldview endorsed by individuals with lower rather than higher levels of education (Haukkala, 2002; Stavrova & Ehlebracht, 2018) and intelligent individuals’ behavior was shown to be more likely to depart from the norms of self-interest (Solon, 2014). Higher levels of education and com-petence in a broader sense might help individuals detect and avoid potential deceit in the first place, thus reducing the probability of negative social experiences, which might in turn contribute to a more positive view of human nature (Yamagishi, Kikuchi, & Kosugi, 1999). Indeed a number of studies showed general cognitive ability to be negatively related to cynical hostility (Barnes et al., 2009; Mortensen, Barefoot, & Avlund, 2012) and positively related to trust (Carl, 2014; Carl & Billari, 2014; Hooghe, Marien, & de Vroome, 2012; Oskarsson, Dawes, Johannesson, & Magnusson, 2012; Sturgis, Read, & Allum, 2010)."

>Following this reasoning, high-competence individuals might hold adaptable attitudes and recur to cynicism only when it seems warranted, while their less competent counter- parts might show more cognitive rigidity and—relying on the “better safe than sorry” heuristic—tend to endorse cynicism indiscriminately. Consistent with evolutionary principles, such a “better safe than sorry” strategy can prove efficient when one lacks the ability to correctly identify the relevant features of the sociocultural context one is confronted with and determine whether cynicism is warranted or not (Brumbach, Figueredo, & Ellis, 2009; Gross, 1996). In this sense, at lower levels of competence, holding a negative, cynical view as a default (assuming that people are guided by self-interest unless proven otherwise) might represent a more viable strategy than holding an overly positive view of others’ morality.

So the narrative is about competence and intelligence is a factor as it correlates with competence.

Consider substituting some words and the argument holds. Instead of 'intelligent' say 'uninformed in relevant areas' which would work well to defend non-tech-savvy seniors.

> cynicism should be a default strategy for everything you're not an expert in

This would indeed follow, but if we allow for a small number of trusted sources can mostly be resolved.

> cynicism should be a default strategy for everything you're not an expert in.

Cynicism is not the same thing as skepticism. Cynicism encompasses an abstract and often moral judgment about motivations and machinations, permitting you to draw conclusions without evidence. Skepticism is more about coming to terms with the contingent nature of truth, and can be a difficult skill to employ, particularly when you're presented with concrete choices and have to make real decisions--as opposed to merely opining on matters.

That doesn't follow. If I have to make a consequential decision involving finance or some other important commitment, I research it first. I'm not generally moved by the specter of opportunity costs or indeed sunk costs.

> cynicism is a way for less intelligent people to protect themselves from being taken advantage of. Basically, if you know you're not smart enough

I think "know[ing] you're not smart enough" inherently excludes you from belonging in the category of "less intelligent people".

One of the most defining characteristics of stupid people is that they think they're smart.

I think many neurotypical people suffer from the same information overload, in that they treat mainstream media news the same way that many conspiracy theory enthusiasts treat their "news": zero skepticism (someone I trust said it is true, so I will accept it as true, regardless of the quality of or existence of evidence).

Now obviously there's a significant difference in degree of accuracy between the two worlds, but then one shouldn't forget that they're not dealing with equally difficult stories to investigate, or have access to the same investigative resources. Regardless, the same illogical behavior can be observed in both types, and an overload of complexity & information sounds like a very reasonable explanation.

I think this theory is missing a component: the erosion of respect for experts. It at least seems like pre-internet, when people didn't understand the world around them they would default to trusting what scientists/doctors/researchers told them was true. But today, we've gone so far down the disinformation "fake news" rabbit hole that a large portion of the general public, at least in America, just straight up doesn't trust what actual experts have to say on many topics.

This is not just because of disinformation though. Now, it's easier than ever to second-guess your doctor and any other expert (and I know because I've done this, and even been right on occasion).

For example, every time someone worries about their health, they can sort through all possible diagnoses online, and convince themselves they have a certain sickness just because the symptoms match. A doctor will use Bayesian reasoning and conclude the problem is really a very common infection or something, but when the untrained mind is overwhelmed with information, Occam's Razor doesn't hold.

The same goes for everything else. Information is dangerous for those who don't know how to reason about it carefully and properly, which is most of us, in most fields.

well the experts were saying in March, 2020 that masks do not work and are not recommended.

I was basically attacked at work as being xenophobic and insular for saying if we are going out we should wear a mask. so where were your experts on that one? sure f*#!ed up that one.

> well the experts were saying in March, 2020 that masks do not work and are not recommended.

As I recall, at the time experts were saying "Don't recommend that everyone wear a mask, we have a shortage and need to save them for health care workers."

No, they said they didn’t work. They lied to get people to stop buying them. Look one level up thread.

Experts haven't exactly done themselves any favors.

--------

"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus"

U.S. Surgeon General, February 29, 2020 [0]

--------

"Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself. Let's really underline that. Stigma is the most dangerous enemy."

Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of the World Health Organization, March 2nd, 2020 [1]

--------

Have the experts always been like this, and it's simply more obvious now that the world is much more interconnected? Or has the quality of experts gone down dramatically? Both?

[0] https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...

[1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcr...

I was very surprised to read your quote attributed to the U.S. Surgeon General, as it doe sound like a rather stupid thing to be saying.

So I Goggle it and sure enough he did say as much.

However, you did not post the full statement which means the context is lost.

With the full quote and the resulting context the statement makes perfect sense:

Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!

With the full quote, the statement not to buy masks makes sense. There is no context that "They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus" makes sense outside of lying to the public, or gross incompetence.

How does that work when flat earthers actually weave elaborate "theories" about the physics and mechanics leading everyone else to conclude that it is round? It's not like they say it's flat and stick their fingers in their ears. They respond with plausible-sounding retorts that, while obviously untrue, often make sense in isolation. For everyone else, the explanation of "the earth is round and gravity goes brr" is far less cognitively intensive than all the mental gymnastics flat earthers engage in.

I don't think there is too much information. There are plenty of very busy people with very good grasps on the world. I think it's more that people don't give time to information, and prefer entertainment. People in the U.S. spend on average 4 hours a day watching TV, not reading newspapers.

I don't think that acting weirdly when confronted with your own irrationality is a sign of mental illness. Accepting that you were wrong is generally a hard thing. Admitting to someone else that you were wrong is similarly hard.

If you get totally and irrefutably proven wrong by someone you are having a heated argument with, that is doubly hard. In order to respond correctly you need to, within a very short time-span: - Realize the argument makes sense - Accept your entire world-view, with a great many other related things, is wrong - Admit that you were wrong to someone who just a minute ago you were angry at, who you thought was making bad arguments, and someone you felt was attacking you.

Doing that in the span of 10 seconds is really hard. I could easily understand how someone would fail, and instead get even angrier at the person making the argument. This certainly is irrational, but it is not a sign of mental illness. It is a form of irrationality that I am ashamed to admit I also have sometimes.

I think a big deal in the on-line space. Is that there is barely a way to re-engage after a cool-down period. You can't come back to a discussion a few days later, having had more time to process.

Especially with conspiracy theories, the shift in worldview that is required to accept that it is wrong is massive, that isn't going to happen over the span of a minute. Heck, it seems unlikely to happen over the span of a day.

Yeah I could understand that. Depending on the forum though, I seem to see people have the same conversation repeatedly, like they're just as confident as they were before. Vicious cycle if that is what's happening - that they believe what they believed harder because it didn't feel good to feel wrong.

But why has one "felt was attacking you" and was "angry"? It is about arguments not personalities. Better be wrong than ignorant.

> Better be wrong than ignorant

I think this is a hard mantra to put into practice sometimes. I definitely think many people who are not mentally ill sometimes do not abide by this mantra.

Whilst I agree that it is better to be wrong to be ignorant, there are plenty of times where I hate being proven wrong. Sometimes that does get the better of me.

I meant perception from outside. Person who is wrong and changes his mind is smart, brave.

Person who is making obviously unbelievable arguments still is wrong but also dishonest. It is fine for fun or trolls but if it meant to be honest discussion it gains nothing but distrust.

My opinion is this is due to a reduced level of trust that we place in either each other or large companies/organisations. It is known among the business industry that trust is lower than it was historically. Companies and people are increasingly seeming to engage in shadier and shadier practices, or we're becoming more aware of it. This erodes the level of trust we place in each other, research bodies, governments, policing and science etc.

In addition, where someone with an extremist view might be considered an outgroup, historically their views might have been suppressed among their peers or shutdown. Now they can engage online with thousands if not millions of other people who believe in the same out group ideas, potentially strengthening their view point.

One of the interesting psychological discussions is around people with extremist views such as flat earthers. These individuals are often minorities or outcasts of society and as such, many of those with extremist views form bonds with like minded people and their relationships and well-being are tied to those relationships. What this means is that not only are they less likely to respond pragmatically to opposing viewpoints, but that they would struggle to actually change their ways given that their relationships are tied with this belief. And if they were to believe differently, they would have to say goodbye to those bonds.

Not only that but those with out-group positions are great for those with agendas and willing to play along. Anti-vaxers are fodder for anyone looking for angry nuts to turn loose on their enemies etc.

> anyone looking for angry nuts to turn loose on their enemies

Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786278

(although he puts his cutoff point at 25% of the angriest part of the population, with no value judgements on nuts. In the age of social media, it ought to be easy enough to generate memes along the lines of his survey questions to see who forwards them.)

I think if you look at the brain as a neural network then it's easy to see how this happens. Not everyone is born to educated parents and receives high quality education. If a lot of the information your brain received growing up was bad, then you can easily reach bad conclusions. The collapse of institutions makes it worse because now no one trusts anything. So to many the information on the internet is as valid as the information in the textbooks. Then if you keep feeding the brain bad information it starts generating bad information. Lately I've been thinking of information as a "substance" that has been diluted by the internet. So the whole "organize and make all information easily accessible" motto of big G and the web in general has had the consequence of diluting the concentration of good information.

Yeah, I think our schools have long done US students a disservice in underemphasizing “information quality” — how to deal with incomplete, ambiguous, questionable, and bad info. A very large fraction of tests in school reinforce that every question has only one right answer. The notion of minimizing error is seldom even imagined. Instead it's taught that all learning must seek only one goal: “knowing the one and only truth”. Yet all too often, competing facts are not mutually exclusive and can change with time.

And don't get me started on the poor coverage of concepts like “necessary” and “sufficient” in judging evidence in support of an assertion or model.

After working in science for the past 15 years (drug development), I've come to appreciate how little in medicine we know in absolute terms. With any system as complex as the human body, generally the best you can hope for is to be less wrong.

Aristotle’s Physics is a good example how common sense ridiculed in our society while it

> is to be properly understood as the physics of objects immersed in a fluid, air or water [1]

Kindergarten children can engage in physics, construct their theories. And only much later learn that space bodies move differently and how that knowledge can be applied to the world around us.

Trust experiment not authority.

[1] Aristotle’s Physics: a Physicist’s Look https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/157866135.pdf

Generally speaking, humans have always been (and will always be) irrational.

Even the most rational among us make plenty of irrational decisions or have contradictory beliefs.

We've replaced religion and witches with aliens, new age beliefs, flat Earth, reptile conspiracies, etc. I don't think it was that different a couple of centuries ago. I read in the book Supersense by the neuroscientist Robert Hood [1] that in a study that is repeated every year for the past decades, the percentage of people having irrational beliefs has remained constant. I don't remember the exact percentage but it was rather high. Something like 75%.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/SuperSense-Developing-Creates-Superna...

> We've replaced religion and witches with aliens, new age beliefs, flat Earth, reptile conspiracies, etc.

I think you are understating the problem. Aliens, new age beliefs, flat Earth, reptile conspiracies, etc. are fringe beliefs in our current society, and are recognized to be fringe beliefs.

Religion and belief in witches, in the societies you are referring to that had those beliefs, were not fringe beliefs; they were mainstream. The people who were believed to be on the fringe in those societies--the people who were viewed in those societies the way we today view, say, flat Earthers--were people who did not believe in the mainstream religion and all of its claims. For example, in Salem, Massachusetts in 1695, people who said witches did not exist were the ones who were believed to be on the fringe.

So the problem is not that individual people can have fringe beliefs. The problem is that an entire society of people, minus a few outliers, can have, and act on, beliefs that are later shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, to be not just wrong, but delusional. So the question we should all be asking ourselves is not, what is wrong with today's flat Earthers, but which of the mainstream beliefs we have today will end up being like the belief in witches in 1695?

> For example, in Salem, Massachusetts in 1695, people who said witches did not exist were the ones who were believed to be on the fringe.

Indeed, but those people were highly religious Puritans that emigrated to the New World because they were prosecuted in England.

https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/puritanism

When you put those kind of people in isolation and a high stress situation you get those kinds of behaviors.

> So the question we should all be asking ourselves is not, what is wrong with today's flat Earthers, but which of the mainstream beliefs we have today will end up being like the belief in witches in 1695?

Totally agree. For example, climate change denial.

> When you put those kind of people in isolation and a high stress situation you get those kinds of behaviors.

The Puritans were by no means the only people of that time who had mainstream beliefs that we now consider delusional. You'd be hard pressed to find any significant body of people of that time who didn't.

> For example, climate change denial.

I would also say, climate change alarmism. Which, if you are inclined to disagree (you might not be, I don't know, but I suspect at least some people reading this will be), illustrates another aspect of the problem: it's hard to improve mainstream beliefs when there is not general agreement over how to improve them--which new beliefs should take the place of the ones that are claimed to be wrong.

> The Puritans were by no means the only people of that time who had mainstream beliefs that we now consider delusional. You'd be hard pressed to find any significant body of people of that time who didn't.

We will be mocked for sure in 300 years but OTOH witch hunts maybe weren't as mainstream all over Europe as you might think.

For example, in Europe between 1450 and 1750 35,000 witches were executed. Of those, only 1,000 were executed in Spain, Italy, and Portugal in 300 years which for sure were religious countries (I'm from Spain).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt#Early_Modern_Europe

I'd be surprised if there wasn't some debate as to what caused those witch hunts. Was it societal paranoia or was it just a way for the church to exert their power?

> I would also say, climate change alarmism.

I don't know what you consider alarmism in this case, but the situation is certainly dire. I don't think it's far fetched to think that if we continue in business as usual, modern industrial civilization could be at risk.

As a small example, consider the wildfires of Russia in 2010 which triggered an increase in the global price of grain and many experts believe that fueled the Arab spring revolutions of 2011.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/world/europe/06russia.htm...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/17/bread-f...

> witch hunts maybe weren't as mainstream all over Europe as you might think

I didn't say they were. I didn't say all societies of that time had the same wrong mainstream beliefs as the Puritans. I just said they all had some wrong mainstream beliefs.

> the situation is certainly dire. I don't think it's far fetched to think that if we continue in business as usual, modern industrial civilization could be at risk.

I disagree (to be clear, I disagree about the "civilization could be at risk" part, I'm not saying I'm in favor of just continuing business as usual--I think there are certainly things we could and should do better). But I don't want to hijack the discussion into a debate about climate change and what we should do about it. My only point here is that there is significant disagreement on this point, and the various sides (there are more than two) can't all be right since they hold beliefs that are inconsistent with each other, so clearly some widely held belief in this area is wrong, we just have no consensus on which belief it is, so society as a whole can't make a correction.

> So the problem is not that individual people can have fringe beliefs. The problem is that an entire society of people, minus a few outliers, can have, and act on, beliefs that are later shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, to be not just wrong, but delusional

Even more interesting, a very similar thing can be observed in the manner in which people evaluate the veracity of "religion", with their not perfectly logical tendency to see only the bad, and overlook the good, all the while holding a strong self-perception of being purely rational and right thinking. Human beings are truly quirky creatures, if only they didn't like fighting so much.

Don't conflate 'religion' with 'arbitrary beliefs'.

Of course within religion there is going to be a lot of 'arbitrary belief', but that's not what it is essentially. 'Parables' etc. are a function of how it's communicated and propagated, ironically, for the 'dumber folks' who 'need something material to believe in' and for whom more abstract concepts don't provide solace.

Religion is a metaphysical perspective of existence, one based on spirituality from which we develop our humanity, morality etc. and none of that is irrational.

Our earliest civilizations often confounded civic norms, civil law, religion, faith, cultural history etc. into the same sphere, from that you get things like the Torah for example (i.e. 'The Law') which is like a legal code, moral code, civic code, national history rolled into one.

Since the Common Era (i.e. about Jesus' time) religion has developed into a more strictly moral and spiritual sphere, less so the core civic stuff, but it still lays at the foundation of all of our institutions ... especially ironically our University system, and partly medical systems depending where you're from.

Our current scientifically materialist 'belief' whereupon we are all merely bags of tiny particles, randomly interacting in accordance with a few 'known forces' - which almost by definition denies the very existence of things which we otherwise believe exist - like 'life', 'love', 'intelligence' etc. is a pretty bizarre bit of irrationality that we somehow don't bother ourselves much about.

Barack Obama along with the majority of our leaders of all kinds are religious and not in the Machiavellian 'fake' sense whereby he 'need to appear religious to get elected', so let's not write them off as idiots and contemplate maybe our crude and easy dismissal is too often misplaced.

Yes, ideological conformism and orthodoxy are going to appeal to certain groups, and that's nice point, but it would be confusing the issue.

And of course ... we all have some truly irrational beliefs.

> Religion is a metaphysical perspective of existence, one based on spirituality from which we develop our humanity, morality etc. and none of that is irrational.

Humans have been naturally selected to cooperate over millions of years. Religion only exists because we yearn the feeling of community which is biological and it only makes sense that a unified culture makes a group most likely to survive.

Also, any belief based on magical thinking (very present in religious people) is intrinsically irrational.

"Religion only exists because we yearn the feeling of community "

No, community is only part of it, and frankly, that we lived in communities beforehand is not relevant.

Religion is the 'foundational philosophy concerning nature of who we are' that transcends most other subjects - i.e. it's metaphysics at it's core.

The 'community' part arises only in the same way secular civic and legal issues arise in our own communities.

The misunderstanding is partly evident in your comment about 'very religious people'.

You're conflating 'people who say they are hardcore believers in XYZ' with necessarily 'very religious' people.

Fred Rogers - a trained priest, started 'Mr Rogers Neighbourhood' and did that for 50 years to help communicate more intelligent ideals to children. He didn't mention the word 'God' a single time on air, you wouldn't know directly that he was 'deeply religious'.

Fred was not 'anti science' or someone we might normally conflate with 'hyper religious'.

As I indicated, Barack Obama is religious. He literally worked for the Church for a few years at the start of his career. One might argue his whole career was a bit missionary. Certainly Jimmy Cater's life - and Presidency - was that.

They're also not what we would consider 'super religious' bent on 'magical thinking' - but Fred Rogers, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama are who I would think of for example when contemplating who are 'the most religious people'.

So in a way, the nature of the comment implies a kind of 'straw man' - plucking out those with the most specific and material orthodox 'beliefs' about a system, the kind for whom the parables are meant to be understood more literally because maybe they're not so capable of the more enlightened bits - and having them representative of 'the most religious' - which is a little unfair. The plebes are going to be prone to 'magical thinking' no matter what happens.

'Scientific materialism' as it applies to the nature of life etc. is a constant stream 'magical thinking' - the dissonance between 'physics' and 'morality' is a chasm completely too wide for anyone to seem to cross with sound thinking.

And finally - every modern politicized subject, even those adhered to by 'intelligent people' is chock full of 'magical thinking'.

> Religion is the 'foundational philosophy concerning nature of who we are' that transcends most other subjects - i.e. it's metaphysics at it's core.

Not at all. Religion is simply a set of practices and beliefs.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/religion

I'm sure some practitioners have developed a philosophical understanding of it just as you can do with anything in life.

> You're conflating 'people who say they are hardcore believers in XYZ' with necessarily 'very religious' people.

It's the other way around. 'Very religious' people are 'hardcore believers'.

I suspect the root of blind belief is the same in both cases though. Most likely biological in nature.

In case it's not clear, I'm not saying religion is inherently bad, and I don't think religious people are completely irrational. What I'm saying is that religious belief is indeed irrational and fanaticism is bad (religious or not).

Also vanity. There is something really comforting into thinking that YOU have it all figured out and know the truth and you’re smarter than everyone else around you. And if someone proves you wrong, well then you have to face the hard reality that maybe you’re not that smart. And that’s hard to accept.

> I've engaged a few flat earthers to actually listen to their arguments

I found the best thing to do is stop there. Just listen, observe, try to understand. Be patient.

Unless someone comes to you asking a question, you're unlikely to change anyone's mind immediately, and even if they are asking opinions often change slowly if at all.

When we tell people they're wrong, we push them away a little, and our sphere of influence diminishes.

The problem is actually economical IMO; Fools don’t have a skin in the game, and don’t lose anything from having false beliefs. They would be perfectly capable of discerning the nonflatness of Earth if their lives depended on it.

My favorite way to end an argument is usually prompting a bet...

I always assumed the flat earth thing was more of a troll/protest than a genuine belief, basically people just want to assert that "you can't force me to believe a certain thing". Even if in this case that certain thing is in the class of completely irrefutable facts, it doesn't really matter because they're just asserting their power to disagree. Like a toddler that gets in a mood where they just say "no" to everything. Trying to reason with that type of response is useless and it's also beside the point, the point is that they just want to exercise their free will. And they also probably are enjoying that it is frustrating other people.

A mental illness framing is kind of interesting though, I've never really thought about it like that. It implies that it could be treatable, which I'm not really sure is true. Can you "treat" a troll?

I think it's a failure of leadership.

I believe that stupidity is and has always been widespread and in normal times the more intelligent ideas have the widest subscription, even among the stupid. But when leaders fail to [be open, be objective, act in good faith, stick to the truth], then even the stupid can detect that they are being played and they rebel and seek alternative facts. So my theory is that leaders are currently gaming the populous rather than leading them, and that this is so obvious to everybody that trust in leadership and institutions has gone out the window.

Scott Adams has recently asserted that about 90% of what we are being told is not true. I'm don't concur with Scott on that figure, but clearly even smart people have lost trust in leaders/institutions. When the news refuses to report on 25% of newsworthy stories because they either make Trump look good or Biden look bad... when the news claims it's perfectly safe to protest BLM issues in the streets during a coronavirus pandemic... when even judges are clearly acting in bad faith (Julian Assange extradition case, Michael Flynn case)... when the Supreme Court becomes (or is perceived as becoming) the arm of a political party rather than an objective trustable institution, then the populous loses faith in the leaders/rules/institutions and we get widespread rioting, violence, a hell of a lot of stupid ideas, and perhaps hopefully some positive changed buried within all that somewhere.

> leaders are currently gaming the populous rather than leading them, and that this is so obvious to everybody that trust in leadership and institutions has gone out the window

I agree with that assessment. My limited and probably wrong interpretation of history indicates that in general, behavior will now tend towards revolutionary.

> The response strikes me as being indicative of mental illness. And I don't mean that as an insult - I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis.

You may find these resources useful:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-s...

https://jamesclear.com/why-facts-dont-change-minds

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/words-matter/201810/...

https://ed.ted.com/best_of_web/hI9YSFHW#review

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont...

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/this-art...

One thing I have come to include in my mental model when interacting with people online is the existence of people who deliberately keep up the "stupid" facade, either with the intention of trolling (think 4chan) or with nefarious agendas, such a government-sanctioned trolling farms that we keep hearing about. This at least helps me rationalize away the worst parts of Twitter, Reddit, or Whatsapp shares.

Confirmation bias also explains a lot. I remember seeing many anecdotes about Trump before the 2016 election that felt quite possibly true but turned out to be false on further investigation. As if the true things were not exciting enough.

Moreover, I suspect that much of our perceptions, esp. on topics that we don't directly seek out, are based on just glancing at the continuous stream of clickbaity article titles that cross our feeds everyday without even clicking them. In isolation, they'd be harmless, but if the same articles appears across HN, FB, and Twitter, they make a mental impact. And these half-digested impressions then color our opinions when those topics come up in debate or discussions.

I'd guess there was a time in the US when if insisted the earth was flat it could have possibly gotten you committed to an asylum.

It's interesting to me that you categorize irrationality with mental illness. I feel wuite the opposite. people make decisions based on many factors: logic, yes, but also past experience, common heuristics, mood, and situational context.

A lot of what education is supposed to do is shape your instincts towards what is productive: there's no particular reason that reading history in my spare time should _feel_ productive, but it does. That feeling was shaped by my education.

We've all been trained to think of arguments as logic. They're not; they're a conflict of mindsets, fully fleshed out states of being.

Arguments are a facades on beliefs - states of being. That's not an illness; that's being human.

> I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis.

The way i've heard it explained that makes the most sense to me: "people are convinced (rightly) that there is something wrong with our world and society, they just don't know what it is. Conspiracies provide answers and a framework to accommodate that feeling."

The opposite of knowledge isn't no knowledge, it's bad knowledge. The creation of a parallel reality is not so unreasonable response to nothing nothing about our current reality.

We all need something to hold on to.

Or maybe it could be that, given their prior beliefs, the reactions to your arguments are, in fact, _rational_ in a Bayesian sense?

I think, with Bayesian probabilities, you can have a setup where, given the same data and two different prior distributions, you end up with two wildly different posteriors after updating the initial beliefs. Unfortunately, i don't have an example at hand but i remember there is a very interesting passage on this phenomenon in E. T. Jaynes "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science". Can anyone else expand on this?

Throughout most of history people have believed wildly incorrect things, yet civilization carries on.

Unless you're an astronomer or involved in some pursuit in which the shape of the earth is of material consequence, it just doesn't matter.

Flat earthers find community and identity amongst other flat earthers, and that to them is of much higher significance than whether the earth is actually flat or not.

> Throughout most of history people have believed wildly incorrect things, yet civilization carries on.

Society has mostly been run by autocratic systems. If we are determined to make democracy work, conspiracy and anti-fact ideologies are existential threats.

Democracy has worked in the past because most members of said democratic societies believe largely the same things. They don't have to be the correct thing, they just have to be the same thing. This was easier when information was more tightly controlled and curated. The internet has opened us to a Babylonia of different belief systems, which is not so good for functioning civilizations. Free speech was easier to defend before the internet when it wasn't quite so free.

> The internet has opened us to a Babylonia of different belief systems

With all due respect, there is nothing 'new' about QAnon. It's the same recycled theories about santanic pedophiles tweaked slightly to fit new surroundings. I would argue a new banality of evil that Facebook/Instagram/Twitter provides, where dangerous lies reside right next to actual news and photos of people's kids.

I've engaged a few flat earthers...

Let me rephrase that for you: "I've been trolled by a few of the world's most obvious trolls..."

Really, man. The internet has been around. We've been around the internet. There's this kind of stupidity that's almost...meta stupidity, you know? Like, do you really not realize the flat earthers are putting one on? Maybe you're putting one on right now...because, how can you seriously be that naive?

Isn't it wonderful? :)

Although, sometimes the irony seems just a bit too rich to be true...perhaps a Matryoshka troll?

I really wish that you were right, but you should consider the possibility that it's you who is being naive. I've met a real-life flat-earther (a relative of mine, actually) who definitely was not trolling. From sufficient distance flat earth beliefs are not really that different from anti-vax. Both employ the same questioning of conventional science and fall back on plausible-sounding but discredited theories. Yet, I don't think anyone would call anti-vax a troll movement. There's also a political dimension to these movements that should not be overlooked. If you have time, I highly recommend this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44

I'm not going to deny that trolls are definitely involved in Flat Earth, but I suspect that most of the adherents actually truly believe in it. The key thing to realize is that modern Flat Earth isn't just about Flat Earth; it's basically a (very heavily) syncretized modern Gnosticism. By that I mean that it combines several beliefs:

* Absolute dualistic cosmology: there is an Absolute Good and Absolute Evil locked in a titanic struggle in which humans are the pieces. The forces of Absolute Evil are expending every effort to knock us off the narrow path to Absolute Good.

* Gnostic notions of revelation: the path to salvation is mostly, if not entirely, dependent on the knowledge of the revealed truth of the universe. Acquiring this knowledge is difficult, and (following the above point) the forces of Absolute Evil are trying their best to prevent you from gaining it. But fortunately, those who have come before us can help us in the acquisition of knowledge.

* Evangelism: once you acquire the knowledge, you must (as a good person should!) turn around and save as many people as you can by educating them on the revealed truths of the universe. And if they look at you like you're a rambling lunatic or try to "fix" your knowledge, then clearly they must be agents of Absolute Evil trying to drag you down with them.

* The actual cosmology: [insert a mishmash of the cosmology [1] of several disparate religions here] and the Earth is actually flat.

These kinds of belief systems, with a variety of substitutions for the last bullet point, have been around for millennia. Flat Earth isn't even the first such system in my short Millennial lifetime. The actual beliefs of these systems are less important than the fact that you have the revealed knowledge, which is also why people seem to be able to move very quickly from one system to another (as Flat Earthers basically all jumped ship to Qanon).

[1] One of the things to draw attention to, from what I can tell, is that these sorts of beliefs tend to extract only the cosmological and supernatural beliefs from religion and ignore the moralist beliefs.

it is generally agreed that the modern environment can cause people to have depressive symptoms, and that in most cases these will never progress to full clinical depression.

seems at least worth considering that the same is possible with psychotic symptoms.

i think some conspiracy theorists might just have a kind of low grade mania or psychosis. not enough to stop them from functioning, but enough to make them see patterns that aren't there and have a hard time thinking logically about certain topics.

this would also explain why many conspiracy theories nowadays no longer even pretend to be rational. With JFK or the moon landing, they would at least try to present evidence and make arguments, however distorted.

But if you talk to a QAnon believer or many flat earth people, their arguments do not even have internal coherence -- it's just free association.

All this being said, I think there should be a strong norm against trying to diagnose specific individuals with mental illness over the internet. But it's hard for me not to contemplate this as a possible explanation.

Have you considered as an explanation the concept of "epistemic learned helplessness"[0]?

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...

I would not be surprised to learn that flat earth theories started as satire online, but it slowly turned into a theory for people who didn't know any better. I would also not be surprised to learn that QANON simply started out as trolling and morphed into the weird following it now has.

In the case of q-anon, that is exactly what happened. 4chan trolls were throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what would stick. Q-anon happened to stick, and off the rails it went.

There's been a bunch of people who have had "control" over Q in the past few years. The current Q, Jim Watkins, is thankfully the laziest and most boring of them, and hopefully the entire thing fades away after the election.

> 4chan trolls were throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what would stick. Q-anon happened to stick, and off the rails it went.

It's just like how 100% of the memes are created on 4chan, the mechanism is the same, applicable from cat pictures to political propaganda. Since 2016 or so, there has been much talk about "weaponized memes" on 4chan that was mostly a meme by itself initally (I was a witness there in 2016), but based on the situation by now it's unfortunately surely a real thing, and even MIT Technology Review has an article [0]. It feels surreal. What an interesting time to be alive! A bunch of random grassroot web dwellers can create something out of nothing by natural selection and genetic exchanges, and by attracting conspiracy zealots in this process, it will eventually become big enough to make an impact on national politics.

20 years ago, it was a Sci-Fi plot. Although Usenet already foreshadowed many social aspects of online communities (I could find conspiracy materials even from the early ARPA archives), but nowhere influential.

One comment mentioned the changed perception of free speech before and after the 2010s, and this is an important contributing factor. Perhaps the society will learn to better adapt the new meme order in another decade.

[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/24/132228/political...

An old 4chan truism says,

> Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.

- DarkShikari, Hacker News - in a comment on 4chan, 2009, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011498

A decade later, it still applies...

Since then, this has always been one of the most overused 4chan memes, with more than 100 variants of cute image macros. I always assumed it was a 4chan meme, and it was a huge surprise for me when I realized it actually came from Hacker News... Top 4chan meme from Hacker News?! It was beyond my imagination, I obviously underestimated the richness of cultural exchanges online.

And it was from a well-known x264/ffmpeg developer...

Also see the Rule of Goats: Even if you fuck goats ironically, you're still a goat-fucker.

There is also an old 4chan truism from the 2010s for that, "It's Still Shitposting Even If You Are Being Ironic", also one of the most overused 4chan meme of all time, with hundreds of cute image macros [0].

Speaking of 4chan, I found its trolling and politics are extremely objectionable, yet there's a lot of psychology and sociology to be learned here, especially the mechanisms commonly found in an online community. QAnon is an excellent case study on how a self-organized online community can create an influential meme that eventually affected mass psychology.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-still-shitposting-even-if...

This thinking is dangerous. You open the doors to labelling every opinion that isn't considered rational or part of the status quo to be a product of mental illness.

e.g I find those AI generated pictures of people that look like real photos to be mildly disturbing. It is clearly irrational, however I don't think people could claim I am mentally ill because of it.

Currently there is a push to make racism a mental illness. I see no evidence of that at all. I've spoken to some people that have gone on the "Iron March" and they aren't mentally ill (tbh they are just losers IMO but they are pretty harmless as most of them are NEETs living with their parents).

I have the same experience with Republicans.

I don't mean to attack you, but I don't think you are approaching this the right way.

There are exactly zero people who believe the earth is flat. Some join conspiracy groups because they are social outcasts who enjoy being part of a tight-knit group, while for the most part they are being isolated and rejected (sometimes, admittedly, because of faults of their own, unrelated to being flat-earthers).

They aren't insane, they are desperately lonely.

> There are exactly zero people who believe the earth is flat.

I don't think this is true. At any rate, if it is true, there are certainly a significant number of people who are giving an extraordinarily convincing imitation of believing that the Earth is flat. So convincing that it's hard not to allocate at least some probability to the hypothesis that they actually believe what they say they believe and aren't giving an imitation at all.

> I don't think this is true. At any rate, if it is true

I'd be more inclined to follow this line of thought if this was about anything else. "The earth is flat" is not a claim that's false upon closer inspection of the available data, it's a claim that's prima facie false, it's in the same category of "the moon is made of cheese" rather than "we didn't land on the moon".

> "The earth is flat" is not a claim that's false upon closer inspection of the available data, it's a claim that's prima facie false

No, it isn't. We view the claim as absurd today only because we have the benefit of millennia of collection of evidence and arguments and theory that has established "the earth is round" beyond a reasonable doubt. But for a person who either does not have access to all that evidence and arguments and theory, or who simply refuses to believe them (and, as someone else upthread noted, it can be a valid heuristic strategy for some people to refuse to believe claims by other people that they can't understand for themselves, in order to avoid being taken advantage of), the claim that the earth is flat is not absurd, which means it's not prima facie false.

> We view the claim as absurd today only because we have the benefit of millennia of collection.

This premise is just historically false. Ancient civilizations knew full well the earth was not flat. More people in the history of mankind have known the earth is round than how to multiply.

> Ancient civilizations knew full well the earth was not flat.

Some did. Not all of them. The first one I'm aware of is the Greeks. Do you know of any earlier ones?

Also, the fact that particular intellectuals knew the Earth was round in a society does not necessarily mean it was common knowledge in that society, much less that it was such common knowledge that the average person would think it absurd to question it and would be able to explain why. The books we have from the ancient Greeks that give good arguments for the Earth being round were probably not read by more than a tiny fraction of the population. The earliest example I can think of of the roundness of the Earth being taught in a widespread fashion is the Christian church after it accepted the roundness of the Earth as dogma and taught it as such.

(edit to answer the edit)

There's evidence in some Sanskrit texts that early Indian civilizations did, but they are probably contemporary to the Greeks.

But again, even superficial observations are sufficient. You don't really have to "trust" anybody or research anything. If anything, it's the belief in flat earth that requires extremely convoluted and unintuitive rationalizations.

Again, I understand this stuff is frustrating, because unwillingness to change one's mind in front of overwhelming contrary evidence is one of the worst possible behaviors.

They might believe the claim in the sense they'd pass a lie detector test, but I doubt it's because they find the argument genuinely convincing.

> early christians

This isn't true, either. Some early Christians might have stuck to a literal interpretation of the sacred texts, but the Church has strongly opposed that belief since the very beginning. I don't have any particular axe to grind, but this is really just a myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

> even superficial observations are sufficient

That depends on what you consider to be superficial observations. The fact that there is plenty of evidence for ancient civilizations before the Greeks believing the Earth to be flat (for example, descriptions in their mythology) indicates to me that the observations needed to figure out that the Earth is round are not superficial. Sure, it seems like they are if you live in a society that already has the belief and can teach it to you. But that doesn't mean they actually are.

> this is really just a myth

The myth referred to in that Wikipedia article (which I fully agree is a myth) has nothing whatever to do with what I said, or with early Christians. You are attacking a straw man.

What I said, in fact, is stronger than the statements made in that Wikipedia article. The article only says that "scholars have supported" the view that the Earth is round since the 600s AD. I said that the Christian church had taught it since it accepted it as dogma, and that, AFAIK, was several centuries earlier than the 600s AD.

> They might believe the claim in the sense they'd pass a lie detector test, but I doubt it's because they find the argument genuinely convincing.

Of course it's possible that they are trolling or something more or less equivalent. I find it hard to believe that anyone is that good at trolling, but I admit I find it less hard to believe after spending years on the Internet. :-)

I don't feel attacked :) Some of these folks have indeed been randos from the Internet. Some of them are people that I've known well in real life and I'm convinced they genuinely think this. I could be fooled - I wouldn't know - but on my list of possible explanations, a desperate need for more attention than they otherwise get is high on the list.

I would suggest that it's possible this need is subconscious, and if they're believing nonsense because that need is so great, I'd consider that a mental illness.

> I would suggest that it's possible this need is subconscious

It's definitely possible. I'm saying I'd be more inclined to believe the "need" in question is a social need, rather than bad media/"fake news" influence.

Bingo. A study I can't find after trying on Google took people with objectively wrong opinions and payed them for accuracy. Magically, people corrected their own opinions when they had a financial incentive to do so.

I'd be curious about the inverse though: does the rate at which a random sample of the population is willing to tell you something incorrect if you paid them change significantly?

Look at how the Soviet Union functioned. You got a government salary as long as you looked the other way and pretended that obvious lies were the truth.

Works for a while, not forever.

> Bingo. A study I can't find after trying on Google took people with objectively wrong opinions and payed them for accuracy. Magically, people corrected their own opinions when they had a financial incentive to do so.

Interesting. I'd like to read that study, if you ever figure out which one it was.

Meanwhile, I wonder if this was a case of people figuring out what the testers wanted to hear, rather than actually altering the beliefs they held.

So this is an interesting point and shouldn't be dismissed, it may be at the heart of irrational beliefs.

People can 'come to believe' what benefits them.

If an idea is truly exciting or engaging, or makes people feel special, or part of a 'group' esp. of 'special people' - it's just more likely we believe those things as 'factual'.

So in a way - though they would 'pass a lie detector test' and 'truly believe in a flat earth' - it's predicate upon all those things - it's an impassioned or subjective kind of belief.

They would act almost perfectly rationally if you asked them about some completely mundane subject like rocks rolling down a hill.

Our egos tend to believe it when we're told we are good, and tend to be dismissive when we are told we're bad at something, that right there is evidence we're not very objective about taking in data to begin with.

Yes, this is a better way to phrase what I was trying to say. They might actually believe it, but it's not because they find the arguments convincing. It's a "meta" issue.

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