Comment by jb775 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jb775 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories

You know it was once a conspiracy theory to say the Earth wasn't flat. And it was once considered blasphemy to say putting leeches on your body didn't help an illness.

There's a reason why the term "conspiracy theory" is thrown around by the media so much...it's because they know a certain subset of people have been socially conditioned to bypass critical thinking if the term has any association with the underlying topic.

How is questioning and discussing things worse than blindly believing what you're told? Even when what you're told has no backing by science or logic when compared to the associated "conspiracy theory"? (for example, covid began by someone eating a bat-burger vs. the "conspiracy theory" that the Wuhan lab, with public documents showing funding signed off by Fauci, was experimenting with super-viruses, and one of the workers in close proximity caught the virus.) I'll never understand this.

> You know it was once a conspiracy theory to say the Earth wasn't flat.

Archimedes knew the Earth was a sphere. You can tell the surface of the Earth is curved by the fact that the body of a ship disappears from view before its mast.

I always ask these flat earthers to explain how we see the coriolis effect when firing long range rifles or artillery. Naw, I'm lying, I've never met a serious flat earther online or in person. I think it's a device used in lazy debate rather than a set of real breathing thinking people. Even the flat earth society appears to be just a fun group that meets socially more than scientifically.

I have also never met a flat earther, or seen any discourse online that seems like such.

I am not convinced that they exist in nearly the kinds of numbers that folks like to suggest.

Just watch this:

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

and also if you just climb a tall enough hill and look at the horizon

And he was wrong, as the Earth is flattened at the poles. Sphere is a first order approximation at best.

Yes. What people are thinking of here is Galileo and the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Nobody has ever thought the Earth was flat in any great numbers because it's obvious to anyone living in a society that has boats that it can't be true. It's some sort of garbling of what was really being debated in those times.

I think people usually give zero weight to conspiracy theories not because they're never true but because it's much likelier that the experts know better than you do.

Also, because they’re trying to compensate for biases that cause people to see patterns where none exist.

This article shows how funding and fear of losing funding might have influenced all these experts to back the wrong narrative.

That's a logical fallacy: appeal to authority. Didn't the CDC claim that masks don't help against the virus just last year? Expertise didn't prevent them from (knowingly) making a false claim back then, and there's nothing wrong with healthy skepticism now.

> You know it was once a conspiracy theory to say the Earth wasn't flat.

In the 3rd century BCE, it is documented that the Egyptians calculated the circumference of the Earth to a relatively high degree of accuracy [1].

The Earth not being flat wasn't so much a "conspiracy theory" but a challenge to medieval Christian doctrine. It just doesn't fit the modern definition of a "conspiracy theory". The essential part of a conspiracy theory is that a powerful and covert group is responsible for something not appearing as it seems.

Common examples: faked Moon landings, UFOs (as aliens, including Roswell and other such incidents), the JFK assassination (done by the CIA or whoever) or the Holocaust didn't happen.

They all tend to revolve around some Big Lie (a fact exploited by Goebbels and others) and it tends to play into human psychology that there's some grand plan or there's something you, as a believer, know that other people don't. We now live in a time that has validated people raising how they feel to having the same weight as science, demonstrable evidence and reason. So now we have people believing in stolen elections, QAnon, Covid-19 being fake and the like.

So what you're doing is attempting to conflate the term conspiracy theory by applying it to a situation any reasonable person knows as being obvious ("the Earth isn't flat") and I have to wonder why. What other belief are you trying to validate?

[1]: http://www.geo.hunter.cuny.edu/~jochen/gtech201/lectures/lec....

> We now live in a time that has validated people raising how they feel to having the same weight as science, demonstrable evidence and reason

Since you mentioned the election, how does science, demonstrable evidence and reason play into the fact that the people labeled "conspiracy theorists" were refused all of this....and the fact that no one can prove Biden won any more than they can prove Trump didn't lose?

> The Earth not being flat wasn't so much a "conspiracy theory" but a challenge to medieval Christian doctrine.

You're changing the scope of the argument. You now give credence to the then "conspiracy theorist" because you acknowledge the foresight they had (at the time) to see larger fundamental truths while living within a world of shifting power dynamics. I would certainly say this was done in the face of a "powerful and covert group responsible for something not appearing as it seems".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com