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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

This article is not a defense of flat earthers, it's an explanation for why they exist (that the educational system failed to teach them critical thinking).

Even then, I still do not think that's really it. Flat earthers are proof that some people will just obstinately believe in complete and utter horseshit. I've seen dozens of flat earth videos. These people do not listen to reason; they didn't reason themselves into the position and you cannot reason them out of it. The flat earthers doing the "experiments" keep coming up with reasons to keep on believing, even when their experiments are so blinkered and janky they show either nothing at all or that they are, in fact, wrong. (I recommend "Behind the Curve" to see some of these people in action.) Some might just get bored and move on to something else, but mark my words, some people are just seriously stupid[1] and will keep right on believing absurd crap to their graves, on faith alone. The universe will keep smacking them in the face with being wrong, but they'll only get angrier. Hopefully they get tired before they get dangerous.

[1] 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.

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I think Dan Olson (Foldable Human) nailed the real problem.

> 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

Great video, thanks for the link!

It's also worth pointing out there's a ton of talk without requisite risk. Put no-vaxers in a hospital with their check book on the line if wrong ie pay a patient's med bills. Get flat earthers to pay for a satellite to take pictures on their dime. I'll bet a large percentage will walk from the challenge or suddenly get serious when they have real downside risk. Talking crap on tv or YouTube is what? Protected first amendment rights. Nothing more.

An unfortunate portion of people really give up everything to conspiratorial thinking, and losing it all actually makes them cling even more intensely because they literally have nothing else. So I don't think it'll work the way you think it will.

The "no-vaxers" pay with their lives, self-valued at ~$10M USD. If the death rate is 1% then the expected value is $100K. Seems fairly pricey already. I'm not sure lack of skin in the game accounts for dodgy personal beliefs.

Most deaths occurred before the vaccine was available.

I don't think that's actually true. If the reported numbers are correct, the number of deaths in the US was around 250k when the vaccine became available and now it's 700k. That's 450k more after the vaccine despite being widely available for a bit over a year.

The math is fuzzy since there were several months where even though the vaccine was technically available, you couldn’t just go get it at will. It’s unavoidable, though, that the deaths after will be higher than deaths before the vaccines were available, because one of those is an unbounded range.

There's also a lot of gymnastics involved in order to count all these covid deaths, and a constant withholding of actual absolute death counts.

Most serious illnesses will compromise the immune system. A compromised immune system will make you more vulnerable to any infection. So the most common and most spread infection will then also naturally be the most common one to trigger death.

If someone has aids, which is a decease that compromises the immune system, and then dies from pneumonia. Did they die from pneumonia or aids?

Yes, the assigned cause question a problem. And add to that the concept of "excess" deaths being a more telling figure than the causality number. So looking at a model of past deaths you can predict future deaths (roughly) and so assume the excess to that prediction is caused by COVID-19. The problem with that is researchers are saying that up to a third of those deaths could be being caused by health care displacement, not the virus directly. i.e. a trauma patient can't make it into the ICU because it's full of COVID patients.

The statistics are a total mess in my opinion and any being professed with any exactitude should be taken with a grain of salt.

A year ago today on MLK day it was only available to those 75 and older. The vaccine in the US has not been available to the general public for a year! Healthcare providers yes, general public no.

More excess deaths have occurred post-vaccine and vaccine adoption is not correlated with a reduction in excess death at the national level.

https://www.usmortality.com/excess-absolute

Not everyone dies. A lot are unnecessarily burdening the medical system while paying no out of pocket costs.

Would you be equally happy if you were sick enough to be hospitalized as you are when you're healthy? If not, that's a cost. I doubt the out-of-pocket medical costs are the most important part of this decision.

You guys are missing the point. The point is that people who are anti vax clearly have skin in the game by any measure. The point is not impacted by these little details, so don't go off in some flamewar here

I think you're also missing a point: the anti people don't believe they have skin in the game. Any statistics you quote is just fake news.

The point has wooshed over your head and flown into orbit. The original context was having skin (perceived or not) in the game and if it would always impact behavior. I'm not trying to convince anti vaxers of anything, just observing human behavior in general.

I'm not sure this holds because humans in general are pretty bad at reasoning about low-probability, high-magnitude events. People will deal with a ~1% chance of $10M very differently to a guaranteed $100k. (To be clear, I also don't believe that "lack of skin in the game" totally accounts for faith in conspiracy theories.)

People will deal with a ~1% chance of $10M very differently to a guaranteed $100k.

Money is a very bad medium to talk about probability and human reasoning because doing so supposes that all dollars are worth the same when in reality they are anything but. Your last dollar is more valuable than your hundredth dollar which is more valuable than your thousandth dollar which is far more valuable than your millionth dollar. Giving someone ten million dollars does not make a hundred times as much difference to their lives as giving them one hundred thousand.

I was actually typing something like this in addition to what I already wrote, but I didn't think it was totally applicable in the context of the GP's statement. For the vast majority of folks an unexpected bill of $100k and an unexpected bill of $10M are likely to be equally ruinous.

People trade health at low and high probabilities for money all the time. That's the model that produced the $10M number in the first place.

The $10M number came from people already not taking into account low probability events.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

VSL

People are extremely bad at making decisions involving small probabilities. Plus, of course, the same people tend not to believe the data on deaths. There are even stories of people using their last breaths to again state that they do not believe viruses (or this virus, specifically) exists.

The people who refuse (or elect out of) vaccinations I've spoken to don't agree on that 1 % number. Or they think the vaccinations cause greater damage, meaning abstention is still a net positive.

Framing it as them knowingly sacrificing the equivalent of $100 k for no good reason ("belief!") is dishonest to the complexity of the problem.

Assuming everyone should make medical decisions based purely on individual or even shared monetary grounds is a type of "flat earth" thinking of it's own.

It attempts to fit a pre-conceived view onto the world, that "no-vaxers" must be dumb the same way "flat-earthers" are and this helps you rationalize away digital content you personally disagree with without having to engage with it.

The payment wasn't an argument that money is the only valid objective in decision-making. OP used it to illustrate that these believes are weakly held, "virtue signaling" for a crowd with different virtues, so to speak.

I believe unvaccinated people seeking medical treatment from the same "elitist establishment" they had nothing but scorn for is a somewhat more obvious demonstration of the same principle.

> I believe unvaccinated people seeking medical treatment from the same "elitist establishment" they had nothing but scorn for is a somewhat more obvious demonstration of the same principle.

Many people, whether anti-vax or not, would like to be able to receive medical advice and treatment from a person of their own choosing. But this is illegal, at least in most places HN commenters are likely to be found. So "seeking medical treatment from the same 'elitist establishment'" is nothing more than "seeking medical treatment, legally".

This is a nonsequitur dragging in unrelated politics, the original point is: the bulk of anti-vaxxers would not commit to a world where they are isolated and left to die if they catch COVID for all the "it's just a flu" talk. I don't agree with GP on wishing it was a thing, but this is bad arguing

They aren't weakly held, as evidenced by the large number of people who refuse to take them even when they are being fired, prevented from leaving their country or excluded from all public events.

The analogy is actually flawed for a different reason: it simply sets up a one way bias. If you want to force people to put a price on their beliefs, get rid of all the subsidies for vaccines and all the liability for the manufacturers. Make people pay for their own shots and then allow those who get injured to sue the manufacturers for damages.

Well, we could do that but actually we don't have to. We already know what the outcome is: the outcome is there are no COVID vaccine manufacturers at all, because complete legal immunity to damage claims was a mandatory criteria for them to sign contracts with governments. Liability allowed = no vaccines.

So the market spoke already, and it seems to suggest the opposite of what's being implied above.

Bingo. You got it.

It’s like when James Randi famously offered $1 million to anyone who could prove supernatural or paranormal ability [1]. Shockingly: nobody claimed the prize.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranorma...

I think this is missing the point, that there is no risk for the individual to denying COVID or vaccinations (or a round earth) because as a society we have decided not to deny medical treatment, punish lowering heard immunity (except when we do, i.e. longexisting vaccination mandates) and deny flight tickets for this virtue signaling respectively. I don't agree with GP that we should, but your point is weirdly defensive of anti-vax beliefs as well: the beliefs (not the people) are not worth engaging with, just like the ramblings of GPT1 aren't worth pondering as oracles for the purpose of stock price picking, there's nothing there to learn (engaging with the people is different)

> missing the point, that there is no risk for the individual to denying COVID or vaccinations

I would argue that there is no subjectively felt risk.

It isn't that we as society decided to care for these people when they fall ill. They nonetheless have a higher risk of dying from an infection with Sars-CoV-2. The risk is there - they just do not feel it, because the felt risk of some wonky chip implant or other imagined side effects feels bigger.

These people have over time constructed a world view for themselves (with lots of help from YouTube, Facebook and other places to find "inspiration" for said world view) that is not only constructed around this one fear.

To me esp. these COVID deniers feel (and I have no data to back that up) like they are grasping for straws of (felt) control in a world they feel is out of their control. They say: I do not let the state vax me. Because now they are in control of at least something. Then they need to make the fact go away that they just handed the control over to a virus. So the nearly logical next step is to either not believe the virus is real, or to believe it doesn't hit you or believe, if it hits you your immune system is fit enough to deal with it, because it isn't as dangerous as the big bad state wants you to believe.

It is a rabbit hole to go down - one fear/believe/feeling out of control leading to the next piece of the puzzle in your new world view were you are in control.

And the politicians doing the exact opposite thing that scientists recommend as well as science (by definition) not being able to provide 100% certainty and easy answers (because well life isn't made up of easy answers) are not equipped to make these people feel in control (because they are not - nobody is).

So I feel (as said - I have no data) the problem lies deeper. Either (some) humans just want/need easy answers or we as a society have not learned to teach ourselves from early on, that there are no certainties and control is a myth and how to deal with greys and uncertainty.

On the other hand - if one actually looks at the numbers, these people may seem loud and a big mass on said (social) platforms (probably amplified by the algorithms) but are a very tiny minority in reality.

Mainly agree

> ...but your point is weirdly defensive of anti-vax beliefs as well...

If this is accepted as an appropriate way of dealing with no-vaxers then the entire intellectual edifice of state-sponsored healthcare is at risk. You'll probably see some superficially surprising positions where (1) anti-vaccers are human scum willingly endangering us all and (2) it is necessary that we offer them high quality medical treatment. Note that it is a reasonable and consistent worldview, although probably not the intuitive one to someone who doesn't hold it.

I'm all for the idea, personally. People should pay their own medical costs. But it isn't a universally tolerable solution for how to handle the vaccine resistant (especially in the medical community, I assume).

I don't know if I'm fully parsing this, but there are more solutions (in my eyes, better solutions) to putting skin into the game than denying treatment or putting monetary burden for the treatment on those who refuse to vaccinate against all evidence: denial of licenses, vaccine mandates, charging those that violate quarantine and social distancing measures and then infect people with reckless endangerment...none of these are morally easy or popular, but this is a delicate issue where not doing anything is not a neutral position either.

> I think this is missing the point, that there is no risk for the individual to denying COVID or vaccinations (or a round earth)

One of the reasons I got vaccinated (despite having a fear of needles) is the fact my mother has COPD and I want to protect her. One could argue that's a selfish reason, ie. I want my children to know one of their grandmother (their grandfathers, including my father, having passed away before they knew them).

That's my personal reasoning, I also want to get out of this crisis and I don't wish it upon anyone to lose a loved one. Its a matter of compassion. I believe -perhaps naively- we all have someone to lose, one way or another. Though it may seem support for COVID-19 regulations is dwindling across the globe (and it is), the group who's firmly against is and remains an active, relatively small amount of loudmouths.

If you follow the above narrative, there's an understandable urge to that in order to defeat the problem, we can convince people to follow the COVID-19 regulations, to get vaccinated, etc. But what happens is that people double down within the cult-esque echo chamber. And such echo chamber is there in both examples (antivax and flat earth). So the urge, while understandable, we must abstain from, as its like 'energy put into a black hole'.

Funny little story: Back when I still had Facebook, I joined a Facebook group called Flat Earth Society ('we have members all around the globe'), thinking it was actually a joke, like I'd call 'The Illuminatus Trilogy'. I took me while (Poe's Law) till I figured these people actually weren't joking; they were dead serious. Its like someone who makes a terrible joke with bad taste, until you realize at some point, that they're serious about it. E.g. they really wanna eat a human being, not just jokingly.

Nah. I'm saying put your money where your mouth is. If that's too adult of a proposition, shut up. Now, while I can't make people shut up, my consolation prize is that talk is nothing but cheap symbolism. Deal with it. I mean, good lord: flat earther's and no-vax people want respect. But, honey, for what? Talking crap on tv or Youtube? I don't think so.

This feels right. And the curvature of the Earth is the perfect balance of abstract and bikesheddable. Something you can have strong intuitions about that aren't easy to disprove.

People don't become flat earthers because they actually believe the earth is flat. They start by realizing that there's something wrong with the current established systems in the world which is a fact. We're living with corrupt politicians, needless wars, starving kids, crumbling democracies, etc. In the search for a scapegoat for these problems they come across the flat earth "theory" and explain away all those problems through this lens ("If they are keeping this a secret then what else are they keeping from us? How else is the establishment trying to control us?")

Exactly. And then in their own way, some more… stupid than others, they try to recreate their own science from observation. That they’re stuck with phenomenology is no surprise - that’s more or less how all human beings have seen the world before the 1600s. Just meaning, if you look around, the world appears flat! It’s a natural default, rather than a conspiracy theory.

So if all that’s true, then who are we fooling: the real issue is the lack of ability to educate. You can blame stupidity and give up but that’s not a path forward.

To me the strangest bit is the idea that scientists are the authorities? What!? I wish!

I hate being pedantic, but before the 1600 anybody with some education knew already that the earth was round (see: Columbus, Magellan).

Funnily enough, the "flat earthers" of that time were the ones spreading the idea that the Earth was moving :D (see: Galileo)

Not just 1600 - it was fairly common knowledge since antiquity. In 300 BCE, we knew not only that the Earth is round, but also roughly its radius. Moon's distance and radius was estimated about 100 years later. Sun-Earth distance was also (incorrectly) estimated about the same time, but with enough precision to know it's much further and bigger than the Moon.

Columbus was being dissuaded from his voyage because people correctly calculated his supplies will run out way before he reaches Indies west-wards

Well sure but that's exactly my point - anybody with some education. It wasn't until around the 1600s, being generous (really the 1800s), that it even started to become common knowledge or taught in schools (or that the western world even had wide-spread education at all). The default, uneducated assumption is that the earth is flat and there must be water above the dome that is the sky, because it rains - this is what I meant by "phenomenology" - they're just describing the phenomena of the earth - which is after all a natural place for human beings to start out if not educated.

So the "earth is flat" is almost not a conspiracy, it's just a lack of education. "Someone is fooling us into thinking the earth is round" is the conspiracy part.

The "feeling of wrongness of the world" can also be rooted in other problems to which they find a reality denying escape mechanism. In Germany, many sovereign citizens (Reichsbürger) have legal or financial problems (taxes and debt), so deciding to be the king or president of your house and garden empire seems like a valid opportunity to deny all those pesky demands.

As much as I find sovereign citizens ridiculous, I do have to admit that it feels wrong that simply by being born in a place we're automatically forced to obey countless rules and laws we had no say in. None of us were consulted or gave our consent before being made subject to it all. If I decide the system I was born into violates my freedoms or that participation in it would be immoral I don't have much choice. I can't even leave my country and move somewhere with rules and laws that I find more agreeable without first clearing it with the government (They control the borders, we need passports which cost money and the application for one can be rejected for many reasons).

It's strange to think about society in those terms. Being trapped here, being forced to obey under threat of some very inhumane punishments. It does seem fundamentally unfair. While I think most of us just come to terms with it (especially since nobody has come up with a better option for a successful and functional society) I can get why some folks would feel a desire to assert their independence and freedoms. Sadly, the sovereign citizen crowd has decided to come up with some pretty insane ways to cope with the situation. I can still laugh at them, but not without also acknowledging that one injustice I and everyone I've ever met are stuck living with.

I'll happily just keep with society and deal with the indignities it forces on me, but for those who can't or won't it'd be nice if there were a lot more unowned and empty places on the planet people could go to on their own if they really wanted to "opt out" and not play by anyone else's rules. Maybe once we have space travel...

Indeed, it is near impossible to escape the rule of the nation state. It would require you to bootstrap from zero in a place where no one else rules. Those places are no longer found on earth. And once the Musk colonizes Mars, space won't be the place for freedom either - look at the Expanse series for an example on how "free" the people are who try to setup their space homestead. Perhaps a Star Trek society can offer this "freedom" again. But then, to paraphrase Life of Brian: what has ultimate freedom from society ever done for us?

It looks like sovereign citizens want to have their cake and eat it too: not to pay taxes, but travel the roads build with the same taxes. Not to pay for medical insurance, but being able to get the best treatment from the cursed oppressive state.

That's just a general statement of people who feel disenfranchised.

People are smart enough to know when they're being "lied"* to by the tv/teacher. Especially when the reply is "it just is stop asking"...

These same people are unfortunately often not driven enough, and/or in a position where they're able to disentangle the fact that "all of this _evidence_" on the internet, (which is deliberately written at an overly accessible level vs actual science) is ultimately incoherent nonsense. Unfortunately on topics like this, the answer from science and describing reality is actually quite complex and requires time and effort to understand the details and implications.

*A lie of omission, or failing to acknowledge "I don't know" and replying with only solid certainty of "I've been told by someone" is akin to teaching from the bible and offers nothing toward scientific literacy. (Deliberately drawing a line between this and theological debates)

This is with all easily disproven conspiracy theories. Yes, there are many stupid people that believe these things because they saw a video and it was a simple explanation that appealed to them or because someone they like said it once, but some of the flat earthers are smart.

Heck, I have seen some pretty outlandish comments on hacker news that aren’t much better and I assume everyone here is smarter than I am.

People believe things for emotional reasons. People often, for example, find religion after the death of a loved one. People also want to believe what others in their community believe, so belief can take hold easily once seeded into a community.

We all like to think we are rational, we are not.

There's a superb interview[1] with Neal Stephenson that was published just yesterday about this kind of human behavior.

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!)

Thanks, I fixed that in my comment.

Interesting. Would the original author place the "influencer" crowd as the authoritarians for method 2 I wonder?

Belief is a keyword here. Most of "spherical earthers", alas, also believe what they are told. They happened to pick the right set of beliefs - kudos to them - but there's no critical thinking whatsoever.

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.

When you say, "layman like me can check what is the shape of earth?" Like reviewing satellite footage? I mean this seems ridiculously easy, unless you mean like can you prove it from your front yard.

This is slightly beyond what an average layman can do, but it's not terribly hard or expensive to receive images of our globe from NOAA weather satellites [1]. Generally the most costly part is a ~$120 USD antenna. It's a super fun and rewarding project if this is the kind of thing that interests you.

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

The problem is that then you aren't verifying it yourself, and a flat earther can claim you're just using one of the propaganda sources created by the government.

You can also use the ESA earth observation program, which provides free downloads of earth observation data every ~5 days. Look for Sentinel-2. It still won't prove that earth is round though :).

Yeah I think they mean the latter. Satellite footage could be doctored after all, unless you're launched the satellite.

It's not really that hard to estimate the circumference of the earth and prove that it has to be spherical. But most methods I know of require quite a bit of driving, or friends that are far away and can take a measurement at exactly the same time.

I'm not a flat earther but I do want to do my own measurement of the earth's circumference one day for fun.

> and prove that it has to be spherical

To be precise, the earth is not spherical. It's unfortunately not even an ellipsoid: I live well above the sea level yet my home is like 20 meters below the surface of the WGS84 reference ellipsoid.

A flat earther would tell you the "satellite" photos are faked, and could provide you with faked photos of their own.

The question is how you distinguish the two: always go mainstream? Always counter the old-fashioned ways? Trust the best credentialed person? Distrust credentials achieved during brainwashing, go with independent self-taught thinkers? Independently verify every claim, replicating experiments from first principles?

But they can always say anything is faked. They can say that my eyes distort what I see and that math can’t be trusted either.

The only way you could really prove it is to define a set of axioms that you some how convince them to agree to. And then get them to agree to logic. And then construct an experiment using those rules whereby if the Earth is round then they die. And see if they are willing to test it. And if they don’t then you win. And if they do it and die then you also win.

More like a geometric method used in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29975544

The simplest way I could come up with while discussing the issue with my kids, was to call a grandma on the other side of the globe and ask here when did she have a sunset. It still could mean that the earth is a hemisphere, but at least it's not pancake-style flat.

Or that there is more than one sun. Once you are willing to throw all science out the window there are a lot of options.

There is a simple experiment to show curvature that was actually done by some flat earthers, and it proved curvature, but then they somehow classified it as an interesting but not conclusive result. Here's the experiment: take 3 wood planks, make a hole at the same eight in each of them. Then put them standing in the soil making sure that all have the same height (meaning that the hole is at the same height for all of them). Now use a laser to have a straight line of light (you can observe by other means that a laser beam is a straight line). If the wooden planks are far enough form each other, the laser will not e able to pass trough all 3 holes, despite them being at the same height from heart's surface. This implies curvature.

That's too prone to terrain irregularities, and I can't imagine that there's a single area of land on earth that's remotely as smooth as the surface of an sphere. Further, even if you assume perfect instrumentation, how would one account for gravity?

> I can't imagine that there's a single area of land on earth that's remotely as smooth as the surface of an sphere

Salar de Uyuni - "As a result, the variation in the surface elevation over the 10,582-square-kilometer (4,086 sq mi) area of Salar de Uyuni is less than 1 meter (3 ft 3 in) normal to the Earth's circumference".

That's less than 1 in 6371000 - pretty smooth, no?

> That's too prone to terrain irregularities

Nah, it's still doable, especially on that^ salt flat - if you have two close holes and a 3rd one 55km away, a flat earth will let you line up the laser through all three with less than 2m of adjustment. By my rough calculations, on a spherical earth, the laser will be ~250m above ground at 55km - pretty obviously proving the hypothesis incorrect, no?

That's a great example, thanks!

Sorry, I fail to see what would be the problem with gravity here. Do you mean we should consider that gravity curves the laser beam?

Laymen can use Eratosthenes of Cyrene's method from the mid 200's BCE.

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/big-history-project/s...

For those who don't know it, in brief: Put a vertical pole in flat ground at noon and measure the length of the shadow. The next day, drive an hour or two directly north or south and do the same measurement at noon again. With a bit of trigonometry, you can estimate the earth's circumference - or for our purposes, at least prove to yourself that the earth is not flat, as the shadows will be different lengths with the sun in nearly the same position both times.

Of course, there is a separate discussion about whether we should consider light trigonometry within the bounds of what modern laymen should be expected to handle.

As the article also states, the ancients observed that as ships passed below the horizon, the hulls disappeared before the masts - this is also within reach of most laymen.

>For those who don't know it, in brief: Put a vertical pole in flat ground at noon and measure the length of the shadow. The next day, drive an hour or two directly north or south and do the same measurement at noon again. With a bit of trigonometry, you can estimate the earth's circumference - or for our purposes, at least prove to yourself that the earth is not flat, as the shadows will be different lengths with the sun in nearly the same position both times.

Sure, but a flat earther will just argue that the sun is much closer than scientists claim, which explains the difference in shadow length. And again, what's a layman to do?

The best experiment to prove the earth is round that I've thought up involves the Coriolis Effect and a rifle fired at different points both north and south of the equator. Unfortunately that requires international travel with firearms, making it legally difficult to try.

Personally, I like multiple Foucault pendulums as this demonstrates rotation and curvature. I think the part that is missing in everyone's explanation is how to prove it is a sphere and not a hemisphere. Obviously, going to the "edge" would immediately shows this is false. But I think the only way to do this without moving too much is to record lunar eclipses and do the math to figure out that you would eventually see straight edges in an eclipse if the earth was not completely spherical.

Interesting idea! The sun would have to be about 6'000 km away I think. The full moon / new moon / solar eclipse proves that the moon is much closer than the sun. The moon would have to be dangerously close. Then, we know that the moon causes tides, and we can measure them as well on different cities. Being so close, the sun would have to cause tides as well, unless it is very light. It would have to take some time to calculate all that...

The only thing that is missing here is that the different lengths don't matter by themselves. The explanation could be that the rays of the sun are not parallel. Of course, this would put the sun closer than the moon but we are assuming we cannot use extraterrestrial knowledge. To complete the logic, you need to measure in multiple locations and note that the shadows do not change as expected if there was no curvature of the earth.

Totally true. More in general, it is a relatively simple mathematical fact that a sphere without a point is homeomorphic (even conformally!) to a plane. Therefore, it is impossible to prove that the Earth is spherical unless you either do measurements and run numbers (like you propose) or visit every single location of it (including all the seas and both poles; particularly the south pole, which for some reason flat earthers tend to assume it is missing). The only way to do the latter, as far as I can tell, is to be in a sufficiently polar orbit for enough time (or at least have a satellite in orbit), and few people are able to do that (directly, i.e., without trusting somebody else).

It is interesting that is not uncommon for flat earthers to be more "scientific" that many spherical earthers in recognizing that many spherical Earth arguments are not sufficient by themselves. Of course the spherical earthers happen to be right, while the flat earthers then proceed to invent completely implausible theories to support their beliefs, but they deserve some recognition for the first stage.

But here's the problem with this logic; I've never been presented with any credible arguments that suggest Earth is not round, and in fact have been able to use this knowledge of Earth's roundness to understand and accurately predict facts in my real life on a semi-regular basis.

* When I see my flight plan, I understand why it's curved.

* When I see clouds that a radar says should be a certain distance away, I understand what makes me able to see them.

* Where weather is moving, how it's moving, and why certain weather patterns even exist at all.

* When I see a landmass on water I can accurately guess how far away it is, and I can understand why moving even a small amount upwards lets me see so much more (and why it was such an advantage on ships to have a vantage point only 20 to 30 feet up in the air).

* How stars move in the night sky is predictable.

* Why the "north" star exists and is accurate as a directional indicator.

* Where constellations are, and how they're different depending on what latitude I'm currently observing the night sky from.

* The fact that tides exist, and how they work.

* I understand how and what satellites are, when I can see them, and I can predict when I'm going to lose signal from them given certain circumstances.

* Every other planet I've observed is round. The moon is round. The sun is round.

None of this works if Earth isn't round, and that's just off the top of my head. The point here is that so many things stop making sense if you don't accept the fact that the Earth is round, and so you're constantly failing to predict or understand a whole host of problems that, yes, do come up in my daily life.

This isn't about "happening to pick the right set of beliefs", it's about matching what you're told with what you're observing and noting a singular and profound consistency across disciplines, uniformly converging on one single, basic fact; the Earth is round.

> * When I see my flight plan, I understand why it's curved.

Just came off the plane yesterday. I remember the earth on the flight map was perfectly flat. The path was weirdly curved though...

The path is curved because that's the straight line over the surface of a sphere, and if you project that straight line over to the Earth on a flat screen, it'll look curved.

EDIT: Wait, didn't get the sarcasm, my bad. :P

Yeah lol.

Flat-earthers should be suing airlines for flying them further than needed. Make them put their money where their mouth is.

The problem is these can all be refuted without too much trouble:

1) Flight plans only look curved because you are using a map projection that assumes a spherical globe. If you use the right flat earth map you will find that flight paths follow straight lines.

2) Clouds and distances still exist in a flat earth and the clouds float above the earth. This is why they are detectable by radar.

3) Weather patterns exist on the flat earth because the sun moves across it and heats it unevenly.

4) An ant on a perfectly flat desk can also see much more from an elevated vantage point. Are you claiming desks are also spherical?

5) No one is claiming the stars nor the flat earth is stationary. Both can rotate around various axes and the resulting movement can be predicted.

6) The north star sits slightly above the plane of the flat earth and far to the north so that it appears north from any vantage point on the earth. This is just because of its distance.

7) The constellations differ depending on latitude because of the refraction of the atmosphere. This bends the light rays.

8) Tides are caused by the pull of the moon as it traverses above the flat earth and attracts the water in the ocean.

9) The other planets are also flat and only appear round because they are tidally locked with respect to the earth.

This is a good comment, because it illustrates exactly what I'm talking about w/r/t predictability. If what you've written here can help you accurately predict the answers to questions you don't know, then you might be onto something.

However, there is no predictive value in any of what you've written here, so while they may be, to some, "refutations", they are not in any way useful.

If there were actually any flat earthers who cared about reason, because of the lack of predictive value (not to mention the contradictory/unprovable nature of what you've written here), they would not remain flat earthers for very long.

I usually propose a rather simple, albeit not cheap, experiment for this.

1. Find a sufficiently large "shallow" body of water. 2. Build a number a number of masts/poles in a straight line, all with an identical height over the water.

Now when standing at the shore and looking at the masts I predicts one of two things.

a. you can see all masts in their entirety with a telescope, or b. you can see less and less of the masts the further away they are.

There are actual places with power lines that satisfy this requirement. For b. you can use high school math to reason about the curvature needed to explain the results. There is no such sound logic (to my knowledge) explaining this for a flat surface.

You can also watch any sailing vessel on its way towards (or away from) you.

A wise man in ancient time did this by comparing shadows in different places. Can't remember his name though. But he was quite close with his calculations. It doesn't need to be expensive. Just wait for noon. Then hop in a car/bus/train/whatever and do the same at the same time next day somewhere else. It helps if the shadow-casting thing is the same height.

That was Eratosthenes of Cyrene:

The simplified method works by considering two cities along the same meridian and measuring both the distance between them and the difference in angles of the shadows cast by the sun on a vertical rod (a gnomon) in each city at noon on the summer solstice. The two cities used were Alexandria and Syene (modern Aswan), and the distance between the cities was measured by professional bematists.[16] A geometric calculation reveals that the circumference of the Earth is the distance between the two cities divided by the difference in shadow angles expressed as a fraction of one turn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes#Measurement_of_Ea...

Here's Philip Morrison showing how to do a similar experiment, from the 1980s TV series "The Ring of Truth". https://youtu.be/yRY2SkMTafc?t=567

They found a road that was almost due north and south (US 183 from Bassett, NE to 370 miles south in Coldwater, KS). They measured the elevation of Antares at its zenith one night, then again the next. From that they get the change in latitude. Combined with odometer data and some estimates for wiggles, and end with a result about 5% larger than the best-known solution.

Their measuring instrument was a Ryder van dubbed "The Van of Eratosthenes."

As an aside, later in the same episode is when I learned about GPS. https://youtu.be/yRY2SkMTafc?t=2968 . "This is the future of mapping."

What I don't like about this argument is that it assumes the sun is very far away, which I've heard flat-earthers claim it isn't.

You need to be careful with this though. I don't fully understand the reasons, but you have to consider bending of the light. See the wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Level_experiment

I haven't done the experiment, but this brings it back to trusting scientists (light bends just above the water, but doesn't 4m above the water). I would need to do additional experiments to understand the refraction.

Yes, I believe it was Feynman that said something along those lines: Anyone with an imagination can come up with an idea about how the world is. The extreme difficulty is in ensuring it is consistent with everything that has been seen before.

Flat earthers care about firsthand observation more than reason. Reason is simply defeated by relying on false facts aka “believing”. This is why that crazy rocket dude ended up dead in the Nevada Desert last year, he was literally trying to see for himself what the shape of the Earth is.

I -believe- the earth is round. But the intellectual honesty I’ve taken from The flat earthers tells me I have delegated my source of truth on that topic to others whom I am trusting to relay the truth. Maybe one day I’ll get into orbit and see for myself. With my own eyes. But that is beside the point of what I learned from them. I learned any time I outsource what I think is true to third parties, there is a risk of me believing a lie. Because people lie sometimes. And sometimes they draw conclusions based on assumptions and conjecture. My thought process is non-binary or more honestly, tri-state. I have true, false, and I have not observed that to be either true or false.

But I haven't delegated my source of truth! I have done first hand observation!

1. I regularly do video conferences with friends and colleagues on other continents; I can see if its light or dark in their windows. I have personally verified that some of my friends and colleagues and their places exist.

2. I have seen many ships disappear behind the horizon, and I have seen mountains disappear behind the horizon from ships; I have verified the accuracy of Vesselfinder (by comparing transits through lines in Vesselfinder with what I can see) and checked that it is at the expected distance. (I was curious about the delay.)

3. I have watched the ISS (once even trailed by the ATV) and it was right where HeavensAbove said it would be. And 90 minutes later I did it again. I have personally verified the basic math behind circular orbits.

4. I have experienced changing radio band propagation conditions consistent with a day/night cycle that is different in different places. Such as grayline DX, which is good propagation along the day/night line. Which implies the day/night line is real. And based on the reports I received I know it matches the map. I have built some transmitters and receivers myself.

5. I have flown between continents, been jetlagged and changed my clock's time (or maybe changing my wristwatches time is changing the sun and causing the jetlag?). I have watched the entire flight through windows, so I know I traveled very far.

6. I have seen the motion behind Foucault's pendulum over enough time (I've been to the museum long enough to verify that the pendulum plane rotates as expected, and I saw nobody messing with it in any obvious way.) We also did the same experiment in school. In school, we did the math for the Coriolis force, and talked about how it comes up as a significant factor in unexpected places (e.g. railway). Someone would talk.

7. I've observed the direction of the toilet swirl, and whirlpools in lakes.

8. I've experienced tide levels and swum with/against tide currents (sometimes even in the same place). I have also seen the moon in the sky and I think if it would be inconsistent someone would've noticed by now.

9. I've seen the shape of day/light boundary on the moon. Now that's the moon, but that one's clearly spherical, which is one data point.

10. I had a trusted fried, but he's got a PhD in astrophysics now, so he must be in on it and we cannot be friends anymore. /s

And I'm just some nerd, I haven't done too many experiments. I'm sure I could still extend the list, but of course there's no point since neither of us believe in the flat earth "theory".

There's no intellectual honesty in coming up with fake experiments like flat earthers do (if they even go to the trouble).

Before 2020, I thought flat earth like conspiracies were harmless fun (and I still think that a significant number of flat earthers are just having fun), and maybe they are. But after spending several hundred hours "discussing" many conspiracy theories (people I know and care about started believing very outlandish ones, like chemtrails and 5G causing covid) the last two years, and first hand witnessing intellectual incompentence (complete math illiteracy down to calculating a percentage, complete rejection of the concept of mathematical proofs, zero concept of scale e.g. of organizations and communities, complete refusal to read original research, insisting on "reading between the lines" to interpret texts claims made in texts into the opposite) I have come to see conspiracy theories and fake or un-intellectuality (is that a word?) as very dangerous (the "can cause death" type of danger).

If you care to actually look into it, you'll find that flat-earthers have accounted for most/all of these. I'm not a flat-earther, but it's worth looking into before stating things that "obviously can't be accounted for with a flat earth.

1: There are time zones in the flat earth model. The earth is a flat disc with antarctica (or is it the north pole?) at the center, and the sun moves around it in a circle, so the places opposite the sun are in nighttime

2: Believe it or not, flat-earthers believe light only travels so far, which is why things disappear "over the horizon"

4: I don't actually understand this one, but I suspect they'd handwave and talk about the same point in (1)

5: Same as (1)

I don't think flat-earthers have accounted for Foucalt's pendulum however.

"If you care to actually look into it, you'll find that flat-earthers have accounted for most/all of these. I'm not a flat-earther, but it's worth looking into before stating things that "obviously can't be accounted for with a flat earth."

That does not match my experience. I did looked into it and I found no consistent model of a flat earth. Lots and lots of words and sometimes even with consistent logic at times - but build upon completely false assumptions and flawed logic and therefore worthless. (you can proof anything, if your basic assumptions are made up)

"I don't think flat-earthers have accounted for Foucalt's pendulum however. "

And some of them tried and believe they did, but only when ignoring other facts and used twisted logic.

Like some parent poster had said - it is not about proof, but way more about ideology.

Otherwise they could very easily have a real proof, by sending up a weatherballoon, or organise a boat trip to the end of the world. But since they always refuse to do so (I challenged quite some with that concept) or even really think about it - they likely suspect inside that they are wrong, but rather not confirm for real, because then they would have to abolish a lot of their other ideology like chemtrails etc.

> 7. I've observed the direction of the toilet swirl, and whirlpools in lakes.

this is not an indication of a round earth. the coriolis effect on this is negligible.

4) An ant on a perfectly flat desk can also see much more from an elevated vantage point. Are you claiming desks are also spherical?

Not true. From any non-zero height above an infinite flat desk you can see the entire desk.

How do you you know that light travels in straight lines? Maybe it travels in curved lines! In fact, that's how mirages form.

(A good response to this, of course, is to ask for a model for how much the light curves. A vague description is not a predictive, scientifically-testable model, unless it's a very wrong description.)

Now you are shifting the goal posts. From the difference between a sphere and a plane assuming light travels in straight lines to questioning whether light travels in straight lines to begin with.

How do you you know that light travels in straight lines? Maybe it travels in curved lines!

You turn on a light source and look at how the light spreads. Light does not - besides a tiny bit of diffraction - bend into the shadow area behind obstacles.

In fact, that's how mirages form.

You obviously have to perform your experiments under control conditions, so pick a time and place with negligible variation in index of refraction of the atmosphere. Or measure and account for it.

> Now you are shifting the goal posts.

I don't know that I am; you were the one to bring up the implicit “light travels in straight lines” assumption with your claim about ants on a flat table. Obviously if I think the earth is flat, I don't believe that.

> Light does not - besides a tiny bit of diffraction - bend into the shadow area behind obstacles.

It depends how much distance you give the light. Shadows are noticeably blurry if your hand is close to the light source.

> You obviously have to perform your experiments under control conditions, so pick a time and place with negligible variation in index of refraction of the atmosphere.

You're never going to get a situation where the air temperature is consistent enough for this; it varies by height (as does pressure). And, again, unless you can show me that “index of refraction” is a thing that applies to air, I'm not going to believe something as ludicrous as Snell's Law. (After all, isn't the speed of light a constant? The whole derivation rests on the assumption that it varies depending on the medium!)

I don't know that I am; you were the one to bring up the implicit “light travels in straight lines” assumption with your claim about ants on a flat table.

I would argue that it was implied before I first commented. Without any assumption about the way light moves, you can not answer visibility questions on spheres and desks. The first comment talked about a spherical earth and certainly assumed light behaves as commonly accepted, the response did not question this either. Only after it has been pointed out that the response was not valid, the behavior of light entered the discussion.

It depends how much distance you give the light. Shadows are noticeably blurry if your hand is close to the light source.

Use a point light source or account for the size and shape of your light source.

Make up your mind. Does light move in straight lines or doesn't it? Does a medium influence light traveling through it or doesn't it? If, how? You questioned light moving in straight line, it is beyond me why you would now also question light moving not in straight lines. Or is it just the mechanism that you are questioning? And nobody claims the speed of light is constant, the speed of light in vacuum is constant.

And in order to cut this cat and mouse game short, just present your complete theory of how the world works upfront. There is no point in such a discussion if you keep changing what you believe or say every time an issue is pointed out.

> Without any assumption about the way light moves, you can not answer visibility questions on spheres and desks.

Yeah you can: light moves the way it actually moves in real life: the way you can see with your eyes.

> Make up your mind. Does light move in straight lines or doesn't it?

I was assuming what you said to be true, and showing that it wasn't sufficient to rule out what I was saying.

---

In reality, I understand how light behaves (not quite as simple as “straight lines”, but that's a good enough approximation to explain mirrors). I know that you do, too. You aren't demonstrating that, though; you're just name-dropping facts without showing why they have to be true, why that's the only way the universe can work because if it didn't work that way, observations could be made that cannot actually be made.

I have not got a complete model of “flat earth cosmology” to present you, because I believe such a thing doesn't exist. I did have a consistent, incomplete model in mind when I was writing those comments, though: one where light curves upwards in a manner that causes the surface of a plane to appear spherical. (However, objects on the horizon would be a different size to on a real sphere, which could be used to falsify my model by comparing it with real-world observation.) I wasn't moving the goalposts.

Most desks have enough dust in certain areas or objects on them that you cannot see all the way across without an elevated vantage point.

What about this one:

A flat shape is impossible because the gravitational field would be vastly different on a planar body than on a spherical one, as I go further from the center of mass the further I go towards the edge.

And how gravity works can easily be demonstrated in a lab setting.

Flat-earthers already "changed" the physics of light propagation. I guess they would have no troubles bulls*tting their way out of gravity as well because none of them has actually the math/physics/etc basics to prove themselves wrong (what's a lab anyway, a brainwashing tool of the lying elite?).

Can it actually be demonstrated in a lab that gravity non-planar? One interesting explanation I've seen by the flat earthers is that gravity does not exist, instead the flat earth is simply under constant acceleration at 9.8m/s^2.

Yes. Very precise measurements of gravity on Earth have shown that, although it always points to the Earth's center, the force of Earth's gravity varies by latitude a tiny bit[1] (because Earth is a rotating oblate spheroid) and by elevation (because gravity varies by distance between center of masses). Neither of these can be accounted for on an accelerating disk Earth.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/science/gravity-physics/Accelerat...

Day length in Helsinki, Finland today is 6 hours, 53 minutes. It is now noon.

Day length in Melbourne, Australia today is 14 hours, 25 minutes. The sun just set half an hour ago.

If you know someone who lives in those places, you can call them for confirmation (unless they're part of the conspiracy).

How do you explain the observations with flat earth?

The explanations I've seen are akin to a lamp above shining onto a desk. The lamp moves across the plane of the desk and moves closer to the desk as nears Finland and further away as it moves toward Australia.

The problem is - explanations for each of these demand different flat earth models. Often several different flat earth model for several cases of one of these points.

For example to make 10 different flight paths over the pole make sense on flat earth you need 10 different flat earth maps contradicting each other. The only way to make all the flight paths make sense is round Earth.

Same with weather, day-night and seasons - you can get some of them with different flat earth models, but these models contradict each other. To get all the daily and yearly patterns at the same time you need round Earth.

As for tides I'd like to see even one good flat earth model where moon is visible in the correct place on the sky at the same time looking from equator, north hemisphere and south hemisphere. Most flat earth models put moon 180 degree away from "center of flat earth" opposite of the sun, which is obviously wrong (cause you can see moon and sun at once in many places).

And there's such problems with each point. But that's not a problem, because flatearthers don't want to have a consistent model of reality, they just want to think The System is out there trying to deceive them. So it's fine having 100 different contradicting models that explain one thing each.

> 9) The other planets are also flat and only appear round because they are tidally locked with respect to the earth.

Much harder to argue for this these days now that amateur telescopes/decent camera optics have become reasonably cheap and cameras too. Jupiter has a rotation period of only ten hours, so one can easily see it rotate within one night. The sun takes a bit longer since it has a rotation period of 25-38d (depends on the latitude which is quite interesting) and if there are no sun spots it's kind of hard to tell.

If you end your sample at N=1, sure, it might seem like “spherical earthers” just happened to pick the right set of beliefs by chance. But if you also consider things like 5G microchips, and chemtrails, and the moon landing, somehow the “spherical earthers” consistently pick the right beliefs.

Sure, there’s no critical thinking for a lot of it, in the same way that I don’t think critically about all the physics and engineering before I step on an airplane. The entire point of living in a society is that you don’t have to do everything yourself — you can outsource a lot of that critical thinking to other people who (are paid to) care more than you. You can just go with the flow and actually have a pretty good track record for believing the right things.

I don't know about flat-earth specifically, but lots of people only believe a few conspiracy theories. There are lot's of "spherical earthers" who believe the moon landing was faked for example. A very large fraction of the US believes in at least one of the major conspiracy theories associated with QAnon (several of which predate QAnon), but a much smaller fraction is actually involved with QAnon.

You can check the shape of the earth by replicating the early experiments performed by ancient scientists who discovered the earth was spherical in the first place. Detailed and very easy to follow instructions for this also appear on YouTube

For me, this was "notice that Orion is upside-down in Australia"

Draw a 6 on the ceiling, and the person opposite you in the room will see a 9. That doesn't mean the room floor isn't flat.

Orion isn't directly overhead. In your analogy I'd be drawing a 6 on the wall, and the other person would have to bend over backwards to claim it's a 9.

I mean, I guess they could, but they'd clearly be bending over backwards to make a logical fallacy.

> Orion isn't directly overhead.

Maybe not for you :)

In my example the number need not be directly overhead either. It could be drawn in the middle of a very long room where you and the other person are at opposite ends. You're both looking at it at an angle and both still seeing different numbers, although in a very skewed perspective - I don't know how flat earthers account for perspective and projection in their skydome or whatever.

Well, flat-earthers appearently believe that Australians are all actors paid by NASA to convince everyone the earth is a globe. I'm not going to waste much time listening to them.

The Orion-is-upside-down-here thing was the first time I noticed something that drove it home to me that we live on a sphere.

You do not even need to trust the established science. There are experiments done by flat earth believers which proves that earth is actually not flat at all.

I think this is right, in the same way that you can't ever really "prove" anything. (Direct proof relies on firsthand experience, and human perception and memory are infamously faulty. QED. Alternately, even the strongest experimental conclusion can be chalked up to the most extreme of coincidences.)

However, to move forward in life, we must accept certain axioms so that we can be effective and productive. (Prove food is nutritious, prove I won't die in the next 5 minutes, prove my parents are benevolent actors, prove my children are actually mine). At some point, you can litigate anything you want, and the real decision is, what hills are you willing to die on. For me, that's determined strongly by impact to my life, and also partly by interest.

What I'm saying is, don't argue that the flat earthers are wrong. Argue that they are useless because what they are arguing about doesn't matter.

Sometimes when I get in arguments, even as the evidence piles up against me, I find myself digging in further. I get very obstinate and it takes a tremendous step back and exertion of will to say “okay, okay. I’m wrong.” Even then I often find myself tacking on something like “I’m wrong in this scenario. But…” and it really helps if the other side will concede something, anything. It’s a physical feeling of discomfort. I think I fight it pretty well. And I imagine that flat earthers and their ilk are just so deep into that feeling and so incapable of conceding that they never, ever will.

Its why I concede something trivial and small early on in a debate to get social credit.

You are describing cognitive dissonance

"Thinking in Bets" by Annie Duke describes this. One of the problems we have, societally, is talking in black and white. I'm right or wrong. It is extremely hard for anyone to admit they are wrong. In fact, a good way to push someone more strongly into their belief (regardless of what it is), is to tell them they're wrong.

Her approach was to start using confidence numbers or percentages, and being less black and white.

> "I'm 80% sure the it will be a sunny day tomorrow"

> "You know, I'm not sure about that. Have you considered the vast storm clouds and weather reports about the incoming rain?"

Both of these, by each person, make it easier to take, psychologically. You neither commit to something nor do you tell someone else they are wrong.

There are also synonyms for "wrong" which can soften the blow. For example "inaccurate", as in something like "unfortunately your response to the question is inaccurate because since version 5 that is no longer true."

By doing this I'm making it clear what is wrong, and not using the word "wrong". This separates the person from the statement, and by implication does not make their statement theirs.

Contrast with "you are wrong", which makes the statement personal, and implies the _person_ themself is defective.

A flat-earther has an inaccurate source of information, and has come to a misinformed conclusion, resulting in a unfortunate assessment of the current earth shape. If we start there, and recognize that (to a much lessor degree) we all have blind-spots it helps to engage with them.

But the quote above is true, you cannot rationalise people out of a position they did not rationally get in to.

Makes me think of this clip I saw recently from Joe Rogan. https://twitter.com/springspringb/status/1481638495172972552...

Critical thinking is just plain HARD.

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.

I think critical thinking isn't that hard, unless it comes up against someone's sense of self or value because they've invested a lot in a belief. Maybe Vulcan emotional detachment isn't the answer (it might be even be part of the problem in some circumstances, since Vulcans invest so much sense of worth into their own logic). Rather, I think humility and a sense of wonder and joy about finding things out. Think of kids! When kids are excited to learn they have absolutely no problem finding out what works and what doesn't. They haven't invested their whole egos into something yet. They just got here, after all. We shouldn't be overly critical of kids and expect performance out of them at every turn. It kind of....crushes them little by little.

I wanna be a kid again. It's fun. Instead of "oh man, I f'd up here, I hope no one finds out..." it's "whoops, that didn't work, let's try something else!"

> Vulcan-like lack of emotional investment

Using a weird pop culture cliché probably hinders you here ?

I would say what needs to be trained is instead emotional investment (this is probably redundant : no investment without at least former emotions ?) into trying to figure out the/a truth. For instance being bothered when some propositions seem to conflict each other.

And at least a bare minimum of investment into your beliefs is kind of required (though I guess that this is already what differentiates them from opinions ?), other way lies insanity.

> Critical thinking is just plain HARD.

I don't think so; but it does require training. If you graduate with a batchelor's degree, you're supposed to have demonstrated at least some skill in critical reasoning. Secondary school/high school, not so much.

Once you have the skill, it can become a habit; obsessive, even, the "default mode", easier than falling off a log. I find that I increasingly question everthing I'm told. Is this pundit incentivised to lie to me? Does what he's telling me even make sense? What about the things I tell myself? Am I deceiving myself? Do my own beliefs make sense? (Many of them don't, and I've had to make more than one jarring course-correction in my life)

I heard this story once where someone claimed to know originators of flat earth nonsense were college kids trying to be funny by keeping a straight face claiming something absolutely absurd (the earth is flat) to each other and people around campus and the whole thing started that way eventually spreading to people who weren’t in on the joke.

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.

A variation on Poe’s Law essentially

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

I'm convinced that some folks cannot be taught critical thinking skills, some folks I think are just missing the relevant hardware to perform the needed computing, they might be able to get there in a round about way, but not on every topic. Ideological blinders, presuppositions, a bunch of things, get in the way.

I'd say 99% of folks based on my 50+ years of experience on- and off-line. I think I've only known a handful of people who can think critically about their opinions.

I think causal/critical reasoning is not natural to humans, it has to be learned and can only be applied in limited fields. Humans by nature have survival thinking, not critical thinking. Of course survival depends on taking the correct decisions and that tends to correct some errors in thinking, but not all.

Interesting, the same applies to GPT-3. It just memorizes the surface of things without critical understanding. But that means it's just doing what the average human does, while being compared to the idealized critical thinking human.

See also, the work of Robert Trivers [0] on the evolutionary utility of strategic self-deception. Sometimes we deceive ourselves so we may more effectively deceive others (or more charitably, perhaps to signal in-group loyalty).

Ironically enough, I think this can even take the form of an irrational belief that humans are innately rational, when empirical observation tells us otherwise.

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

I don't think it's about the computing, but about the entire shift in worldview required to accept that what you perceive to be true isn't necessarily so. This is much more of an emotional issue than a logical or analytical one. It also naturally trends towards Betrand Russell's, "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

It's one thing to state you understand this and another altogether to live it. It's not pleasant. And I find many who even claim to have adopted this sort of worldview are instead just as cocksure of themselves, but instead of meeting other notions with rejection, they meet them with 'compassionate condescension.'

There may be something to this; Slate Star Codex referred to it as cognitive developmental milestones. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/03/what-developmental-mil...

I came across this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjYc8h3xt-E) where-by a former flat-earther goes into why they (and formerly, he) believed in the Flat Earth model.

I tend to believe that the "stupidest" beliefs that apparently large percentages of US Citizens have are more a form of rebellious performance art.

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!")

Hanlon's Razor - Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

Performance art is not stupidity.

Culture jamming is not stupidity

Stupid performance art is, tautologically, stupidity. So I guess it depends? Flat earth isn't especially harmful, except in undermining trust in science, institutions, and your fellow citizen with absolutely no discernible purpose.

The term for "culture jamming" when it is only disruptive is "trolling".

How can there be "stupid performance art"?

Performance at that I do not like, yes, tat exists.....

This is closer to my opinion of flat earthers. It pisses people off and that's hilarious so keep saying you believe it. You probably don't believe it but who cares anyway.

I sometimes argue the opposite of what I believe if I'm dealing with someone who's getting way too worked up over it. I kind of like the mental exercise of defending an opinion I don't agree with and the entertainment that goes with it.

I think there are likely at least two flavours of flat earther, the ones you describe and the true believers.

> a form of rebellious performance art

Theory: Describing it as performance art could be personally offensive enough to said people that they may stop the activity that has become described as performance art.

Along the lines of "wow, how did you manage to keep a straight face the whole time?"

> (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!")

I started saying 'ta ta' instead of 'seeya' or 'bye' in an ironic effort to be posh, and then one day I realised that 'ta ta' had become my default goodbye.

Having had this experience of irony becoming reality does make that 'game of chicken' seem like a plausible reality for the greater populace.

> there came a point where it didn't matter I meant it ironically, I was just the guy that said "Spiffy!"

About 10 years ago I was in a clothes shop in London looking at jeans. There were a couple of younger guys, early 20s maybe, looking as well. One of them held up some bright pink jeans and asked his friend "do you think I could get away with wearing these ironically?"

What flashed through my head was "You'll still be the guy wearing pink jeans. If you like pink jeans, buy the pink jeans, wear them and be happy...". Irony is not visible to observers!

i may be misremembering didn't the flat earth movement pretty much spawn from obama invoking a comment about 'the flat earth society' in regards to climate change policy? i always took it as a political middle finger that also happened to attract a few sad true believers who get tracked down for any documentary on the subject.

No, these people have been around forever. The big change was that the internet helped them find each other.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/13719-we-are-what-we-preten...

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." -Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Popehat%27s%...

Popehat's Law of Goats:

He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker.

He claimed he was just pretending to be racist to trigger the social justice warriors, but even if he is telling the truth, Popehat's Law of Goats still applies.

Unfortunately this is a similar mentality to that which can cause kids of one race to not hang out with kids of another race.

I have absolutely no idea what you're getting at, or what you could possibly mean by that vague statement. What mentality is that, and why would kids act that way? Can you explicitly explain what you mean, and provide some citations, please?

I don't follow, at all. Can you explain?

Science, at its base, is inherently axiomatic. It means that you had to commit to set of certain shared beliefs to derive your logical scientific conclusions. If you commit to different beliefs, you will get different explanations.

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

> Science, at its base, is inherently axiomatic

That's a way of thinking about science, but I would argue there are more useful ways. Question-Hypothesis-Experiment is a more useful way of thinking about it if you want to generate new knowledge (do science).

> you had to commit to set of certain shared beliefs to derive your logical scientific conclusions

This is more of a description of math than science.

> Question-Hypothesis-Experiment is a more useful way of thinking about it

Two-word description of the scientific method:

Guess. Test.

Yep. I like breaking "guess" into 2 distinct parts, though, because finding the right question is generally understood to be the harder and more critical part of the whole thing.

>This is more of a description of math than science.

But it is description of both (after all, all our science is based on math). But it comes even in more basic forms: with any scientific endeavour you take a lot of things for granted and do not validate them. If you try to validate them, eventually you get stuck (as an exercise, try to devise experiment determining curvature of the Earth from the first principles). On top of that, fundamentally, theories cannot be proven, but only disproven.

All this requires tremendous amount of goodwill and consensus to make any progress. You laugh at flatearthers, but they are just a fringe example of how entire system works. At the edge of physics essentially everyone is in the similar position. Many, if not most, substantial physical advances were done by heretics working against the status quo. Of course, I think flatearthers are wrong, but I would rather have flatearthers than all alternatives from mainline eliminated.

I mostly agree with you.

> all our science is based on math

I disagree with this. A great deal of our science is based on math. Physics is certainly extremely mathematical. Building theories in physics is very axiom-based.

But mechanics is not the only kind of science. Much of science is highly empirical. We don't reason out our experiments from first principles. We have some assumptions and we try to address them.

An example of what I mean is the study of microbiology. Of course there are examples of fundamental ideas, like selection pressure, but "axiom" is a term of art that I just wouldn't apply here.

> Flat earthers are proof that some people will just obstinately believe in complete and utter horseshit.

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.

> Hopefully they get tired before they get dangerous.

Clearly, it is much too late for that.

For the flat earthers? How are they dangerous?

Defined as dangerous because:

https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anythi...

What's the harm in a post-truth society? It's a memetic virus that is spreading. Misinformation was weaponized before flat earth took off. However flat earth is the embodiment of 2 + 2 = 5.

Because nowadays, anyone gets called a conspiracy theorist if they challenge establishment narratives. You get conflated with them, just like you got conflated with extremists/terrorists if you were antiwar (think invasion of Iraq).

Covid policies are extremely authoritarian but you can only challenge them to require MORE security theater, not less. Else, you're labeled and, as OP said, you're dangerous. Your IDEAS are Dangerous. Just like when reading communist books made you dangerous. Several dictatorships knew it was necessary to disappear such dangerous people with their dangerous thoughts.

Anti intellectualism is at its all time high when it comes to "not questioning 'the science'" (The gov/Big tech/state health institutions/state media)

I still think that critical thinking has an important role here. You say "they didn't reason themselves into the position and you cannot reason them out of it". This is correct and is actually what critical thinking is about: reason about something instead of blindly believe in something. If they were capable of critical thinking, they would have reasoned about it instead of blindingly believe in it. And while they could still reach the wrong conclusion, you could still try and reason them out of it.

> I've seen dozens of flat earth videos.

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.

My belief is that every flat earther is just out there to be trolling everyone else.

There is absolutely no way anyone can be that blind to reality and making up excuse after another, after all failed and debunked “science” experiments they make.

I used to think that, but no longer. Many of them are true believers in flat earth, and also, are convinced of hundreds of other things that aren't true either.

Sure lots are trolls. But there are lots and lots (majority of the movement) are real believers.

> (that the educational system failed to teach them critical thinking)

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.

The same persistence in face of failure is celebrated in our greatest inventors and scientists. So maybe it's necessary that a part of population has such emotional reasoning, to increase exploration even when there is no clear benefit. Because sometimes the benefit comes much later than the cost of exploration, sometimes the path to discovery is a maze and you only get the prize at the end.

With flat-earthers, anti-5G, anti-vaxxers etc. I have always thought about it like the efficiency-stability tradeoff: From a "survival of the group" perspective, it is usefull risk-spreading to have a small percent of your population act different from everybody else, against the current wisdom. It is of course not the most efficient, but if some unforseen catastrophe happens (e.g. the new 6G update accidentally makes everyone sterile) not everything will collapse and at least a few contrarians might survive.

So nature is essentially hedging bets. I wonder if this is unique to the human species?

> Flat earthers are proof that some people will just obstinately believe in complete and utter horseshit

"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.

> [1] 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.

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.

Another thing is that people defending a believe don't necessary hold it true deep inside. But it's part of their identity, so they play their role, and defend it.

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.

> These people do not listen to reason; they didn't reason themselves into the position and you cannot reason them out of it. The flat earthers doing the "experiments" keep coming up with reasons to keep on believing, even when their experiments are so blinkered and janky they show either nothing at all or that they are, in fact, wrong.

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.

You might be talking about an experiment shown in "Behind the Curve".

The experiment, which consists of shining a laser at a target many meters away. The person holding laser lifts and lowers it. When it is lowered, the point of light on the target disappears, because it is obstructed by the land "in the way", due to the curve of the earth.

The experimenter says "hmmm, that's weird!" and then proceeds to conclude that his ingenious experiment was in fact flawed.

The experiment is flawed and doesn't prove anything either way.

There's no way[1] to know that whatever landscape they tried this on doesn't have a subtle upward curve that might just as easily "prove" the flat earth hypothesis.

It's amusing in the context of that documentary because they do a 180 in real time because of the results they get. But just because the experiment showed the correct result doesn't mean it's well designed.

1. No way that a flat earther wouldn't dismiss, there's no way they'll trust say a USGS survey.

IIRC they did the experiment on a large lake in California.

> They’ll be back with a fresh experiment

Scientists do this all the time. Scientific paradigm shifts take a generation; you have to wait for the old scientists to retire or die, before new theories can displace old ones.

> Flat earthers are proof that some people will just obstinately believe in complete and utter horseshit.

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)?

> As are people who blindly support "democracy" and the subsequent actions that are taken by the people elected (typically re-elected) "by the people".

Very well, I'll bite. What do you propose as an alternative? How does your alternative solve the current issues?

Depending on the exact democracy: better voting methods, more relevant political parties, more independent judiciary, reduced monetary influence, more transparency. That would be admitting that modern liberal, representative democracies have flaws and need some reform.

I'm sincerely curious: What do you think of Popehat's Law of Goats? ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29975362

That is still democracy!

Complaining about individual pain points is helpful. No past present or future democracy is perfect. There is plenty that can be improved.

Complaining about democracy means you want to bring about totalitarism or theocracy or something else.

> Complaining about democracy means you want to bring about totalitarism or theocracy or something else.

Are the members of "something else" similarly distasteful to "totalitarism or theocracy"?

I propose that a grassroots initiative is started with the intent to develop a new system for implementing democracy, the goal being to run in parallel with the current system and then one day replace it.

And since "people are too dumb" for us to adopt direct democracy is a legitimate complaint, it might be a good idea to address that problem simultaneously. Teaching epistemology and logic to the masses would yield massive benefits across the board imho.

> I propose that a grassroots initiative is started with the intent to develop a new system for implementing democracy, the goal being to run in parallel with the current system and then one day replace it.

You backpaddled. So you still want democracy? What you actually want is to organise a coup. A shadow government that one day replaces the official one. You want a coup.

In your initial comment you complained about democracy itself therefore signaling you would prefer a totalitarian regime. Wanting a coup and a totalitarian regimes goes hand in hand.

> Teaching epistemology and logic to the masses would yield massive benefits across the board imho.

Very well, do it!

Maybe then you will realise this last comment is word salad.

> You backpaddled.

No, I didn't.

> So you still want democracy?

Actual democracy, yes.

> What you actually want is to organise a coup. A shadow government that one day replaces the official one. You want a coup.

coup: a sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government.

Technically, you are dealing with your imagination of what I want - I do not desire this, and no such claim exists in the text that I wrote.

> In your initial comment you complained about democracy itself therefore signaling you would prefer a totalitarian regime. Wanting a coup and a totalitarian regimes goes hand in hand.

Consider carefully this word: "signalling". What does it mean in this context, precisely?

>> Teaching epistemology and logic to the masses would yield massive benefits across the board imho.

> Very well, do it!

How am I doing so far?

> Maybe then you will realise this last comment is word salad.

This sounds like a fun epistemological exercise: do you have the ability to articulate why that comment "is" "word salad"? Do you mean this in a comprehensive sense...it "is" "word salad" to all observers, or do you actually only know that it appears that way (as opposed to "is") to yourself?

Ok, let's take this step by step.

1. By backpedalling I mean that at first you said "As are people who blindly support "democracy" and the subsequent actions that are taken by the people elected (typically re-elected) "by the people"." and afterwards you said "develop a new system for implementing democracy". If you claim that people blindly support democracy, you imply that democracy is a bad thing and afterwards. Furthermore, by using "democracy" and "by the people" in scare quotes, you are implying you are not satisfied with election results. Afterwards, you claim you are actually in support of democracy. If you are against representative republics and prefer direct democracy, then say so and don't complain that people blindly support democracy.

2. "grassroots initiative is started with the intent to develop a new system for implementing democracy, the goal being to run in parallel with the current system and then one day replace it" There is no conceivable situation in which a government would accept a paralel government to function. The only plausible way for governance to switch is abruptly, either peacefully (a monarch abdicating, a change following a referendum, etc.) of by force (a coup or a revolution). The notion that a government would create a situation in which all state institutions would answer two masters is absurd. And I believe it shows that you do not understand what a government actually is.

3. I should not have used the word "signaling". I forgot it is a loaded term in English. I meant "implying". And I believe that your initial comment (in which you compare democracy believers with flat earthers in terms of dumbness, you complain about the validity of elections and blame military incursions on them) paints a clear picture. Based on the military adventures part you are referring either to the USA, Russia or China. Since we can rule out China as undemocratic and Rusia as a non-functional pretend-democracy that leaves only the USA. In this case, since you are using the scare quotes with regards to elections, you are implying that you are unhappy that Biden won over Trump. You are implying you believe the election was stolen.

4. "Teaching epistemology and logic to the masses" how are you doing so far? I would say zero progress. I am ridiculing the idea that you find it feasible to propose such a thing. If teaching anything to the masses would have been anywhere close to easy, humanity would not be in the mess it is today. You truly believe you can teach ... TO THE MASSES. Go for it. If you succeed that will earn you at least a Nobel prise. I believe the existence of flat earthers proves the opposite. It is possible to teach many people, but not the masses. Some people are immutable in their determination to not learn.

5. This is what I meant by word salad. You display a lack of understanding about governments and about the ease of teaching people which leads you to propose absurd solutions.

6. If what you want is actually a transition to a direct democracy in which the citizens assume responsibility, that is actually plausible to achieve. But not by creating a shadow government and not through a pie-in-the-sky teaching project.

Seems like someone doesn't like you and I discussing this topic in this way (I'm referring to both of our comments being [flagged]).

Stranger, can you articulate why people shouldn't discuss this aspect of reality? Are there some specific ideas in here that you'd like to keep out of public discourse?

That's an excellent point. Flat-earthers as a group are an easy target because their 'belief' is essentially harmless and they're a small enough group that they really don't and can't cause any trouble; they're not, and never likely to reach, a critical mass that can alter society's momentum. Their argument also isn't compelling and cannot act as a crutch or focal point of blame for a perceived societal ill.

Racism and xenophobia on the other hand...

On democracy, I really like this quote: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Democracy gives equal merit to the intelligent, the stupid, and the wilfully ignorant. This is the best we can do?

If you want a somewhat uniquely American critical-thinking-eschewing topic: Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism. That's a land mine I like to step on occasionally to gauge the current sensitivity.

> Racism and xenophobia on the other hand...

Also: war and economic dominance conducted by democratic countries, decade after decade, whose citizens seem to exist in some sort of a state of hypnosis where they seem fascinated by trivial matters like flat earthers, but have little more than platitudes or "nothing can be done" when it comes to actual harm, which their tax dollars and political complacency support, indefinitely.

Incredibly well said. How trivial the media-selected "outrage of the moment" issues are in comparison to various hideous behaviours that have somehow become accepted by society as normal.

> “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

~~ Winston Churchill.

> And more important than their relative intelligence: who causes more harm in the world

You are much more likely to die on the toilet than you are to die of a gunshot wound. This does not mean guns are safer than toilets.

> You are much more likely to die on the toilet than you are to die of a gunshot wound.

That's because people spend more time on the toilet than at gunpoint on average.

Yes. The point is that lower-case-d democrats have done more harm in the world than flat earthers, mostly from being more numerous, even while being less dangerous.

Damage = Dangerousness * Number

Lowercase-d democrats have also done more good in the world than flat-earthers, and caused more change in the world with unclear value.

Nobody "blindly" supports democracy. It happens to be a system with an obvious mechanism for continuous improvement or at least self-correction. It's also empirically quite successful at avoiding war and fostering prosperity.

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