In defense of flat earthers (2020)

Clearly, it is much too late for that.

Here's a quote from Neal:

"Another thing I’ve been reading recently is “The Fixation of Belief” by an American philosopher named Charles Sanders Peirce. He was writing in the 1870s, and he goes through a list of four methods that people use to decide what they’re going to believe. The first one is called the method of tenacity, which means you decide what you’re going to believe and you stick to it regardless of logic or evidence. ... The next method is called the method of authority, where you agree with other people that you’re all going to believe what some authority figure tells you to believe. That’s probably most common throughout history. The third method is called the a priori method, and the idea is, let’s be reasonable and try to come up with ways to believe things that sound reasonable to us. Which sounds great, but if it’s not grounded in any fact-checking methodology, then you end up just agreeing to believe things by consensus — which may be totally wrong. The fourth method is the scientific method. It basically consists of accepting the fact that you might be wrong, and since you might be wrong, you need some way for judging the truth of statements and changing your mind when you’ve got solid evidence to the contrary. What you’re seeing in the Baroque Cycle is the transition from Method No. 3 to No. 4. You’ve got all these people having what seem like reasoned, logical arguments, but a lot of them are just tripping. So a few come in, like Hooke and Newton, and begin using actual experiments and get us going down the road toward the rational world of the Enlightenment. But what we’ve got now is almost everybody using Method 1, 2 or 3. We’ve got a lot of authoritarians who can’t be swayed by logic or evidence, but we’ve also got a lot of a priori people who want to be reasonable and think of themselves as smarter and more rational than the authoritarians but are going on the basis of their feelings — what they wish were true — and both of them hate the scientific rationalists, who are very few in number. That’s kind of my Peircian analysis of where things stand right now."

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/01/10/magazine/neal...

(Nit: I think you mean "Behind the Curve", not "Beyond". But yes, really good documentary recommendation!)

Like, if you ask the population if they believe if Trump is currently, secretly, President, some percentage will say they believe it. But I think the actual percentage is far lower; it's just polluted with an ever-growing number of people that are lying about their beliefs just to be obstinate.

Then it becomes like a game of chicken to see how far you can take it, how long can you insist on the belief before you crack. And ultimately at some point the difference doesn't really matter.

(In high school, I started saying "Spiffy!" ironically, and kept saying it, and then there came a point where it didn't matter I meant it ironically, I was just the guy that said "Spiffy!")

> Flat Earthers are not otherwise-empty vessels who believe one kooky thing. They believe that thing because it suits their purposes. [...] it says something they already believe about the nature of the social world. Flat Earth is a thing people want to believe because if it were true it would be irrefutable proof of everything else they believe.

Folding Ideas, In Search of a Flat Earth ~29 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44

Let's face it, it is lacking as much on HN as it is on any social media site. That's because it requires a Vulcan-like lack of emotional investment in an opinion or worse, a belief.

Critical thinking requires dissociation, detatchment from the subject, and a lots and lots of research from varied sources. Not just a few websites, but actual focus with the intent to accept an answer that goes against the current opinion or belief.

This idea of "teaching critical thinking to kids" is valuable, but I think grossly underestimated in difficulty. Especially when parents have a vested interest in NOT raising kids to think this way.

As are people who blindly support "democracy" and the subsequent actions that are taken by the people elected (typically re-elected) "by the people". Maybe flat earthers are dumber on a relative scale, but it would be interesting to see how things look on an absolute scale.

> I mean something specific about stupid. Not just wrong, not just ignorant, but actively and self-assuredly wrong, often to their own detriment. Beware stupid people in large numbers.

And more important than their relative intelligence: who causes more harm in the world (say, measured in body count in foreign military adventures)?

After all, you haven't built rocket and didn't fly to space to see it for yourself.

I’m late to the party here, but I recall reading (or watching) about one flat earther devising a somewhat novel, and actually very solid experiment for determining the roundness of the earth. Unfortunately, they thought their methods or testing apparatuses were flawed when the results indicated that the earth was in fact pretty roundish. They’ll be back with a fresh experiment, no doubt, to confirm their pre-existing notions.

We watched some time ago a why-do-we-think-earth-is-flat movie with friends and I asked: okay, so what's wrong with their explanation? For an extra credit: how a layman like me can check what is the shape of the earth?

And suddenly it turns out that these questions are a bit harder than it seems.

Using Occam's razor, I posit that these videos exist because there are too many people watching them; not because there are too many flat earthers out there. I am yet to meet one in person.

They genuinely luck awareness how stupid they are, to what degree, and which contexts. Furthermore, in my speculative and limited observations this people are genuinely insecure and unhappy in sense.

More than "some". I think, by default, we're not protected against mental viruses that travel from mind to mind and get spread by the internet/media. I also think that the ridiculous lies embedded in these mental viruses are a feature, not a bug. I see this pattern everywhere from successful ad campaigns to politicians to conspiracy theories, and so on: the more cognitive dissonance is invoked my the message, the deeper it gets embedded in the "infected" mind. In cases where the falsehood / cognitive dissonance trigger comes equipped with the mechanism of its own spread, it can become the most dangerous and infectious virus. This has happened a few times in human history.

It really scans. A lot of the crazy far right stuff seems to have originated with 4chan trolls having a laugh and idiots taking them seriously.

It seems to be a pattern for a lot of the troubling thinking of the day: unreasonable information spread for laughs being picked up by people unable to tell the difference and the idea takes on a life of its own eventually building up a class of people who know better figuring out how to make money from it and a class of people who don’t eating it up and spreading it.

I think they ARE thinking critically - about what most people consider established knowledge, what most people don't even consider doubting.

> you cannot reason them out of it.

Just so. I for one can't be reasoned out of thinking the earth is round; I (and I presume you) have these beliefs, and trying to convince us otherwise is pretty much impossible. I wouldn't want to try and argue a flat earther out of their beliefs, because they are set in their beliefs.

"Flat earth" seems to be an example of an entire class of "big lie" beliefs. The "big lie" idea is that if you tell a big enough lie, with enough elaborate entailments, people will give up on critical appraisal because it becomes such hard work. Apparently a large proportion of QAnon believers are educated high-achievers. These beliefs are not caused by a failure of education.

* Our lizard overlords

* Alien kidnappers

* Area 51

* Illuminati

* Xenu (or almost any organised religion)

> actively and self-assuredly wrong

That is how I like to use the word "ignorant" - these are belief-systems that require active effort to sustain. To go along with them, you have to deliberately close your eyes.

Once you pick it up, you'll start to notice it for a lot of things: racism/sexism, welcoming immigrants, climate change is a hoax, I'm a busy person, my boss is terrible, I just love to do < hard thing >, capitalism is bad, I'm concerned by the planet...

E.G:

I have a friend who keeps insisting she prefers women, has a lesbian dominated social circle, but mostly have sex with males. She is joining protests for all things hurting migrants, but one was sleeping in a car in our street, and after getting her bike stolen, she decided with no proof he was the culprit and called the cops on him and got him deported.

I know a vegetarian that eats meat when he travels, because nobody can see him.

I had a flatmate who was writing her memoir on the way women were badly treated in India. She eventually dated our Indian other flatmate, and took great care of cleaning his _disgusting_ bedroom and doing his laundry without any reciprocity, for the entire relationship.

I know 2 guys that, if asked, will declare they are for peace and think war lords are a bad thing. I mean, who doesn't ? Both considered working for weapon dealers, one actually accepted, and the main clients are the Emirates.

All those persons are people I love very much: humans are weird creatures, full of contradictions, doing plenty of bad things. I'm sure those flat earthers can be good friends too, maybe even great citizens for some things I'm terrible at.

I'm certainly an asshole competing in several categories, believing idiotic things, pretending to believe others.

I think people who see themselves differently have huge blind spots which help them go on the hate train.

We all suck. Even when taught critical thinking, which I manage to abuse regularly for terrible results.

True, we are not all at the same level on the Gaussian idiocy curve. At least according to ourselves.

Yet, in my experience, education works only if freed from contempt.

So let's have compassion for "stupid people in large numbers."

There are 7 billions of them.

But you have to remember it's extremely laborious for us to do so, especially since these accumulated knowledge exceed anybody's ability to learn it within their lifetime.

I don't think it's a flaw per se to focus on the facts, knowledge, and concept at the expense of scientific thinking, but we all ought to acknowledge that much of our knowledge of the world essentially relied on faith.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...

I generally agree with you, but also recognize that most people would probably be better served accepting consensus - even if I’d rather everyone be capable of critical thinking and reason/rationality.

If you made the opposite argument -- that flat earthers exist because in the US we teach conceptual frameworks and not rote memorization, I would be more persuaded.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes

That's also a claim without much in the way of evidence and plenty of evidence against. The whole rather slight piece is based on this unexamined idea.

I dunno about anyone else, but my Western, public-school education taught specific methods of deriving the roundness of the Earth and it's size (and when they had first been historically recorded as being used, as well), repeatedly, as part of all of the history, math, and science curricula.

It also taught the more general methodology of exploring any issue of material fact.

I think Flat Earthers and Pastafarians both provide an excellent service to society: they demonstrate many persons' inability to argue from agreed-upon premises to a widely held belief. I.e., they demonstrate that many of our emperors have no clothes. Unfortunately I'm not seeing this triggering the major educational rethink that I think it warrants.

It's possible, I suppose, that teaching people to discern and derive some domain of facts might coincidentally produce a broader cultural "in-group" of people that value social cohesion with others like them, but underneath it all this is all culture/counter-culture dynamics, not whether or not people have the tools to figure out the curvature of the Earth based on basic science and mathematics.

There still exist religious scientists. Heck, I even know creationists who fully understand how carbon and uranium dating work, and yet they're still creationists. Getting them to abandon their creationism is at a minimum a matter of getting them to be willing to overcome the in-group judgement of their family, their friends, their extended social circles, etc. Unsurprisingly, outside of specific trauma they're not likely to embark on such an upheaval.

People mostly behave like the people they're around. Being shunned or ostracized is (or used to be) an effective mechanism for social cohesion for this category of issue. The trouble at present is that social media makes it much more difficult (for better or worse) for shunning or ostracizing to improve that flavor of cohesion because it allows the universe of the shunned and ostracized to find cohesion amongst themselves, so the local fringe morphs into the global mainstream.

Where I live (New Zealand), high school questions are graded based in large part on the methodology used and/or how well you demonstrate grasp on the concept. You could get every physics question wrong on an exam, but still get an above average grade if the way you articulated understanding of the topic was very in-depth.

In contrast, I’ve heard that in places in the USA for example (don’t know how regional this is, but even big stuff like the SAT), multiple choice questions are commonplace.

I don’t think I encountered any marked work with more than one or two multiple choice questions, and even then you were still graded on your work not just your mark.

The system I’m used to emphasises clearly understanding of the topic, multiple choice does not. Your marked work was also returned to you, and you could apply to have it re assessed if you felt it wasn’t fair.

(We were also allowed to smoke on campus. Those were the days!)

As an example, I have a friend that dropped out of high school relatively early to do a trade, and now he is keen about science and watches many videos on space and the like. One time he was theorising to me about how electricity in a wire makes a magnetic field, and that if you put it near a magnet then it would move. I said, that's what an electric motor is, lol. He probably would have learned that if he did better and stayed in school longer, but he wasn't interested back then.

But at the other end of the spectrum, the first person I really heard about flat earth from happened to be someone I went to highschool with. This was at our 10 year reunion (and was nearly 10 years ago now), and he had gone on to become a geologist, but had recently jumped onto flat earth. So, it's quite mind boggling to think about what was going on in his life that lead to that conclusion.

And 1 more thing about learning, I don't recall any schooling regarding 3D space, like how to think about it, approach it, etc. And then when talking about viewing/measuring space from the perspective of earth, you also have to consider your position on the globe, and how that relates to other objects. Even now I struggle with this aspect, and my job for nearly 20 years has involved 3D modelling on computers (although my work is 3D, it is all "planar" though, which is different to bodies in space).

Generally speaking when I see “western whatever”, it seems to be a lazy way to express something about the United States, without naming the country.

He's in that group of people who have been fleeing the tradition platforms[1] that you and I probably frequent because flat earth views tend to overlap with other extreme far-right viewpoints. I bet that's probably why we don't see them around as much.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/01/06/1070924133/how-dan-bongino-is...

99.99% of Flat Earthers are internet trolls that succeeded in creating a moral panic similar to Momo or the Blue Whale Challenge. The rest are legitimately insane people that don't normally participate in society.

The thing that worries me about society is the amount of people that believe Flat Earthers are real.

If not, then I’m pretty sure you were making some circular assumptions. The number was a purely theoretical unknown quantity to Avogadro himself, based only on the assumption that a fixed volume of gas should contain the same number of ‘molecules’ regardless of its composition.

Oh and then there’s history. Wow, you honestly believe that just because you were taught the trendy woke parts of history that you got the whole story. I’ll pick an innocuous example. How much do you know about the Salem witch trials, and how much of that was taught from primary source evidence?

Also have felt the same about those "things they don't teach you" posts. I may have done terribly in history because I suck with remembering names and dates, but I still can say for sure that we were not given a version of US history that made it all look perfect.

I did countless science labs throughout school, and they all followed the scientific method: We were given a question, formed a hypothesis, performed experiments, analyzed the results and evaluated the correctness of our hypothesis. But this was never really described as the scientific method, or presented as some general framework you could apply to things in your life. It was just the series of steps you had to follow in science labs.

Now, some kids might be able to bridge the gap between this process and the facts they read in textbooks. When you're presented some fact in biology class, it's because people have followed that same process iteratively to reach that conclusion. But in my experience, bridging that gap was left up to the student. Some kids figured it out, but I'd wager that most didn't.

It's easy and very middle class to just say "oh these dumb people believe dumb things" and much harder and less comfortable to consider there's a growing issue with trust and - ultimately - legitimacy.

In psychology, for example, a theory might have been validated in only a small experiment and fails when replicated.

Meanwhile, something like Maxwell's Laws of electromagnetism are replicated trillions of times a day. Every time your cell phone or wifi works correctly, that is another replication indicating that Maxwell's equations were correct.

When the science becomes engineering and we can build functioning things based on the theories, that is a good indication that they are correct.

Maybe you didn't personally verify that the Earth is round, but the people who built the GPS system used that fact. If the Earth were flat, the GPS wouldn't work. So far, no flat-earthers have built a functioning GPS based on the Earth being flat.

This is true from a practical sense in that most people don't validate scientific assumptions that are widely accepted for themselves. But the reason why we are able to reliably take them on faith is the interesting part to me.

Peer review and the scientific method allow for incentive to "prove each other wrong" as well as to have the ability to replicate (or try to) the results for yourself. When I ask my Catholic friend why he believes the Christian God is real, and he says his evidence is that he feels the holy spirit. I have no way to disprove that and no way to replicate or prove that evidence. Therefore it's not really a reliable way to have faith in that fact.

You require zero faith to trust in the scientific community, because you can "spot check" what you learn at any point, if you decide you want to. It takes a lot less effort than you may initially think, to independently verify certain aspects of even complex scientific advancement.

Consider even something as simple as ibuprofen; you're "spot checking" modern medicine when you take it and verify it reduces your fever or lowers your pain.

Or when you make a phone call with your cell phone. You're "spot checking" a whole host of physics just be reliably receiving and sending signals from your cell phone; if any of the theory were wrong, your phone would not work. That's not faith, that's trust, because you have direct evidence of accuracy in what you've been told. It's probably not even worth getting into how much you're "spot checking" science by simply opening up Google Maps and seeing how accurately it determines where you are!

I must repeat; zero percent of western understanding of hard or soft sciences require faith of any kind to be useful.

My understanding is that cult leaders teach their followers to be prepared for those trying to convince them of anything outside of the leader's teachings. The leader has carefully planned out all "teachings" such that when someone comes along to convince a member to leave the cult's teachings, the member already has a long series of prepared counter-arguments to every rejection of the teaching. No matter how carefully reasoned the rejections may be, the counter-arguments will defeat them, and, critically, the member will view anyone trying to convince them to leave the cult as a mortal enemy trying to harm them.

Apply this to flat-earth and it is why I believe it to be cult-like.

I really wish that someone who studies cults from a psychology perspective would take a very serious look at the flat-earth communities. My personal experience with someone I knew for over a decade was seeing this person felt that everything I thought I knew was actually a clever deception and that I and everyone else is out of touch with reality, and they are the few that have been able to see through the deception. It can make even casual discussion exceptionally difficult.

When I have gone through YouTube videos "debunking" flat-earthers, what I usually see is the person or group making the video are not respectful of all claims being made, even on a scientific basis. For example, in one video a local group of flat-earthers was contacted for performing an experiment to test their theories. An agreement was made as to how to perform the experiment, and one of the items was the experiment must occur before a specific time in the morning. No surprise, the people who put the experiment together didn't show up to the experiment until several hours after the agreed upon time, invalidating the experiment. Of course, they proceeded to perform the experiment at the invalidated time and post a video disproving flat-earth theory, but the result of this is to embolden the flat-earther, because of course the reason for showing up late is to trick everyone into continuing to believe the deception. Nearly always, the people trying to disprove such theories will use this to show how crazy the flat-earthers are, and not see or publicly admit they have made the problem worse with their actions.

Similar results are achieved with science-based videos put out by science or engineering-based YouTube channels, where the person making the video is, frankly, disrespectful to the flat-earthers. This never helps, but it does get the person making the video more than usual views for probably less than usual effort.

Also, a lot of discussion and content will be in regards to the cult leaders. Part of the attraction to the leaders is they are the lone sane ones fighting against the hordes of crazies. Instead, people should ignore the leaders and focus on the members. You can never get a con-man to admit what they are.

    have like the author a pathological resistance to justified authority 

I don't think this is unique to anti-science people, but the majority view. Increasingly, the narrative pushed by pro-science factions (whether media, politicians or even academia), are increasingly eroding and morphing "science as a way of thinking" into "authorities who claim to be scientifically oriented". This can be observed in the premature and vigorous pushes for consensus, and silencing of scientists who disagree with some mainstream narrative, and a lack of openness to debate. So I agree with the post that we do have a crisis. Personally, I'm much more concerned with the quality and integrity of actual science than about those on the fringes who reject it.

I do agree that accumulated knowledge through generations is a factor. There's so much of it and we are so far removed from its inception and wonder

Rote learning is certainly taken to an extreme in the Indian system, though it has been improving a bit over the past couple of decades.

I still think it’s a form of trolling to make people mad. And it works. A form of “fuck you” to the ellite.

1. Flat Earth Conference, All Gas No Breaks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H110vCGvTmM

A creator of the earth would be a foregone conclusion and atheism would be an extremely fringe position. They'd be the ones clinging to theories like "The surface is curved because gravity keeps bending our surface back on itself... But, iron asteroids impact the earth from beneath, attracted to go up and into the inner planar ridge along the lines of the great divided magnetic ring field of our fractured south pole, and the energy from these impacts keep the earth from smoothing out into a sphere! But as asteroid impacts begin to decline, it will close into a sphere shape one day, and when it is you'll all be sorry!".

Just like how all the mainstream media attacked MLK and the government treated him like a domestic terrorist. Now we lionize him.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29973075

I've come to believe that 10+% of any given population is insane (i.e. the fringe). I find it true almost regardless of what defines the group: professionals, academics, regular folks, ...

The charm wore off after a short time when I realised that playing private games is not conducive to productive relationships with people.

    I can't fathom how they come to exist. The linked 
    post may be correct; I think some people simply 
    have the innate urge to reject everything they've 
    been told and to look for a countercultural answer

Others take a look at the status quo of our society, and perhaps reasonably, decide that it sucks. Our society has a lot of shortcomings, and has let a lot of people down. So they reject the institutions they view as being responsible for what they consider this poor state of affairs. In other words they are not blindly opposed to the concept of authority; but they have come to the conclusion that the current set of authorities that govern us kind of suck.

I don't think their opinion of society and the institutions that shape it is necessarily wrong, though I most certainly believe that rejecting our accumulated scientific knowledge is most definitely mistake. A true "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" situation.

Also, aside from issues with authority, it's just kind of cool to feel like you have some sort of special and secret knowledge that (most) others lack. A very seductive prospect. Especially if you are lacking in intelligence and/or education and don't get a lot of opportunities to feel that way. After all, we tend to place such people on a pedestal -- folks who figured things out before others and were eventually proven correct. Adopting a fringe theory like Flat Earthism lets people feel they're part of the special/chosen few.

I was an Econ professor in the past and this was quite literally the first thing I spoke about in introductory courses. This is the analogy used to describe what the science of economics is, the study of the allocation of scarce resources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_circumference#Histor...

They used some pretty low-tech means to do so, which you could probably reproduce if you were so inclined.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bHqBy92iGM

If you care to observe the stars, moving only a couple hundred km on the north-south direction is enough to see the change with bare eyes.

It sounds like a critique of the persons who detect those patterns. But if/how one could refute that such patterns exist, or are meaningful, seems to hinge on the meaning of that quote.

In a recent season of The Expanse, there was a religious women (sorry, can't remember the character). Someone (perhaps herself) said that "she sees patterns that other's don't". That claim makes sense to me, because it doesn't rely on somehow knowing whether or not the patterns she sees are noteworthy.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/039331071X/

  "When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." -- Isaac Asimov

You probably mean the earth can appear flat in some locations from the point of view of the observer, which at best is only subjectively true and still doesn't contradict the premise that considering the earth to be spherical is scientifically invalid. You're just playing semantic games in that case, and arguing that ignorance and knowledge are equivalent due to linguistic vagueness. The science is still firmly on the side of "sphere and not flat" when the terms are used in the context commonly understood.

On one hand I agree that variety of thoughts and opinions and ideas make things FUN.

But we live in an interconnected society. The person next to me who thinks vaccines are tools of the devil that will install chip, or who believes climate change doesn't exist and God has promised to never again destroy the earth so we are fine, or the guy who believes homosexuality is a sin, or that earth is flat... They Get the same vote I do and their efforts impact me and others, and the only way I can see forward is education. So we can debate things which are value oriented and subjective but dear Gawd let's at least agree on basic facts :->.

Or to put it differently, to what degree is true heart-felt belief in flat earth a predictor or sign of a belief system axiomatically different than mine - which again is super fun in casual philosophical chat with coffee way, and truly terrifying when they are e.g. in position of authority. To use example you've put forward, people who truly fervently believe ib a literal god can be lovely people on individual basis, but on average are likely to act in ways which terrify me.

To put it another another way - a random person from another country being a flat earther is fascinating. My minister of science being a flat earther is not :-P