Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

> We should even respect flat earthers

You lost me here. Basic literacy is a requirement for any fruitful debate

It's an interesting thought exercise to take some belief and ask yourself how you know, and asking until you get to some first principles or axioms or articles of faith. Part of that exercise could include coming up with plausible alternate explanations for what you perceive.

Flat earth is just a ridiculous version of such a thought experiment. It's a good exercise to make sure your understanding of the world around you is based on some consistent logic and not faith. Those who reject the idea of the earth being flat just because "science tells us" have no intellectual high ground over devout flat earthers, if they exist

Exactly. Believing in narrated science is no different than believing the mumbo jumbo they throw at you in scifi movies. For me the halting problem seems like common sense / basic science but it’s not for everybody. That’s where we need to recognise that what’s obvious or basic to us isn’t so for others. And that is a good thing!

I actually love flat earthers BECAUSE it forces me to actually think about how "I Know" the world is round.

I bet a majority of people who are anti-flat earthers could not actually "prove" the earth is round without immediately appealing to authority.

I've talked to flat earthers, (both probably real and some probably trolling), and it can be a fun intellectual exercise to debate.

You are allowed to appeal to authority. The "Argument from Authority" fallacy only applies when you appeal to a false authority, such as listening to your yoga instructor's opinions on vaccination.

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

There are clear cases where "true authorities", however defined, have been wrong about all kinds of subjects, so the fallacy still applies. If you can only justify a belief by appealing to the assumed superior knowledge of experts and specialists, you cannot justify that belief as strongly as someone who can argue from first principles or a clear chain of evidence. The appeal to authority is not necessarily fallacious, but it's more likely to be so.

If you can only justify a belief by appealing to the assumed superior knowledge of experts and specialists because you lack such expertise yourself, you're probably going to be wrong a lot less often when you appeal to authority than when you decide to disagree with them simply because experts are fallible.

That may well be true, depending on the quality of experts and specialists in your society (and assuming they aren't generally serving vested interests that could skew their views), but, epistemologically, you can't prove it without further appeals to authority. So it's experts all the way down!

People on HN tend to hate appeals to scientific authority, but you are right. Our resources for obtaining out own knowledge and expertise are limited, and trusting other experts is a useful heuristic that, while imperfect, is more effective than alternatives.

Anyone who claims they have the requisite expertise and resources to verify most scientific facts on their own is lying.

I don't think you or the replies to your comment are addressing the parent point. It's not a game where something is "allowed" or not. They are saying that they suspect most people would not be able to themselves demonstrate that the earth is round, and that their argumentation would end up relying on faith. Whether such reliance is "allowed" is irrelevant

(This made me think of a kind of inverse example that came up recently: I had made a point in an online discussion and offered an argument for it in my comment. Someone replied and said they looked up what I was talking about and didn't see anything about what I'd mentioned, and so didn't accept it. The disagreement was not about the merits of the argument, but that they couldn't find that argument anywhere, and so apparently instead of considering it, they just rejected it as invalid. I've seen more variations of that recently, the whole "citation needed" thing, where people think that an "authority" is automatically necessary vs just thinking about what they were told and deciding if it does or doesn't make sense)

I get what you're saying, but do you really need to "prove" it in this case?

I mean, assume that the Earth is flat, and then think through the consequences. It requires a long-running, global conspiracy at all levels of society. And all to hide the fact from... whom?

Edit to clarify: even if you can't "prove" it directly, you can probably show that it would have effects you do not observe.

Most of the time, "science tells us" means "this question is not sufficiently interesting or relevant, and human life is several orders of magnitude too short to question everything". We all resort to "trusting the experts" in almost every action we take, because there are no feasible alternatives.

Believing in flat earth is basically a result of poorly calibrated trust heuristics. People may believe in it due to lack of education, for social/political/ideological reasons, or because they are contrarians. Or due to a random chance because the question is not particularly relevant to them.

Faith and trust are subtly different things, and trust is both a skill and talent. When a poker player makes bets, one of the things they do is ask how much they trust a reading of the situation, and often times that's the best they've got. A poker player also does not rely on axioms because almost all propositions they could come up with would have no answer.

For most people, life is more like poker than math.

That's not really how high level poker is played -- it actually is all about the math. That's why top poker players are ALSO top players online where you can't see the other players.

No, it's not all about math, and there is a disparity between online play and real life tournament play.

If poker were all math then we'd see far more mastery by poker bots beyond just heads-up play. If the only thing you have in your pocket is math, then you are missing out on advantages.

In online poker players may purchase large databases of player histories. But constructing advantages from player history is ultimately a psychological theory notwithstanding whether math is employed. The reason is because mathematical axioms do not provide insight into how player history should translate into player futures.

Literacy does not imply believing in the round earth. Proving the earth is round to yourself without trusting outside influences is not a trivial pursuit.

These days all you need is someone with a phone and a stick in another country to perform Erastosthenes's experiment, right?

Doesn't Erastosthenes's experiment merely allow you to calculate the size of the earth if you already accept that it is spherical? As I understand the experiment it does not (nor was it meant to) prove that the earth is a sphere.

Can flat earth explain the phenomenon in a parsimonious way?

It's probably going to depend on what you mean by 'the phenomenon'. Do you mean that the sun casts shadows at different angles at the same time of day based on your location? Then yes, it absolutely does. In fact some believers in the flat earth theory use the experiment to establish the distance of the sun from the earth.

If you mean something else, then I have no idea. I'm not a proponent of the flat earth theory, nor am I a mind reader.

The experiment you proposed does not disprove the theory of a flat earth though, parsimoniously or otherwise.

It sounds like you may have rejected the notion of a flat earth purely on faith after all?

What distance do they find? My googling yields nothing. The results must also be consistent with the "circumference" of the earth.

And yes, I reject all other evidence but this.

The thing is that functionally speaking, the flat Earth movement isn't about proving whether the Earth is round or flat. It's about camaraderie in the quest for the hidden knowledge that "they" don't want you to have.

Take your next vacation at the sea, watch ships approaching the Harbour not just growing in size but also appearing to rise up from the water. Voilà

If you drop water onto a flat sheet of glass, surface tension will give its surface a lenticular shape.

If that's all it takes to prove the earth is round it seems consistent to accept Fata Morgana as proof that gravity can fail once you get far enough away from the coast.

Fairly trivial: https://www.astro.princeton.edu/~dns/teachersguide/MeasECAct...

Unfortunately, atmospheric effects make it hard to completely remove doubt. This is definitely evidence that round earth is true, but not conclusive.

It also requires you being able to derive those equations which is more than many people would be comfortable with.

Especially if you think that "they" are lying to you, this could be a repeatable but cherry-picked piece of evidence that has a requires a more complicated explanation.

The point is that there are many relatively straightforward ways to calculate curvature, from the sunrise/sunset technique to Erastothenes to watching sailing ships dip below the horizon and many more.

The math may be beyond some people but the effects at play cannot be explained by a flat Earth.

Part of the overall thread was along the lines of we should respect flat earthers, they improve rigour. It seems to me that the only sensible responses to that are the counter illustrations of just easily disproved a notion it is.

Far more effort goes into supporting this ridiculousness than did into establishing rough shape and size.

It's much harder to prove the Earth is flat. You run into really basic questions like, where is the edge, and why does no one find it?

The theory only "holds together", with the assumption that everyone that works in any field even vaguely related to travel or communication is part of a conspiracy to hide the truth.

It's a rather enlightening exercise to work out how and why the earth is curved purely from the perspective of a human able to see maybe a small patch.

This is directly analogous to how general relativity models spacetime as being intrinsically curved, and you need to be able to do the same sort of thinking without being able to immerse the manifold in a higher dimensional space.

So it's not exactly stupid to pretend to be naive.

Also, why and by how much is the sun bigger than the moon? How far are they away from earth? We've known for thousands of years. It's not exactly obvious to derive this purely from geometry.

You're saying you should only respect literate people. I say all people are fundamentally worthy of respect.

Why? Why shouldn't respect be earned?

In my opinion respect should be granted by default, and rescinded if the person has earned that

Why?

Seems like the decent thing to do

Are you saying there's nothing anybody can do to lose your respect?

To many, though perhaps not most, organized religion is seen as equally ridiculous as flat-earth theory. Are religious people illiterate or not worth debating or worthy of some basic respect?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com