Proving Earth is a globe
mctoon.net
mctoon.net
Essentially, professing absurd beliefs is a sort of shibboleth to demonstrate in-group membership. The absurdity is the point, because it differentiates them from outsiders. Normal people make true or factual statements all the time, that's not a good differentiator! The statements need to be false and/or absurd to function for their intended purpose.
The Flat Earth mythos isn't even that outlandish compared to mainstream religions, and well within the same wheelhouse as the type of beliefs used to identify the in-group in cults. Scientology comes to mind, but there are many others.
I highly recommend watching the entire video, because there is a lot more to the phenomena than I initially suspected.
The book included a cartoon showing a man eating a hamburger at a church picnic, with a thought balloon that said something like "I can pretend to love Jesus for a free hamburger!".
Requirements like tedious rituals you must regularly attend or various intrusive rules you must follow your personal life impose a significant cost on joining the church. The guy who will pretend to love Jesus for a free hamburger might think twice if the deal is that he has to forgo sex until marriage for free hamburgers.
The idea then is that the rituals and rules impose a high enough cost that it isn't worth it just for the benefits and support the church provides. Only people who actually believe--the kind of people that would join even if they weren't getting a social network and physical benefits from it--will put up with the rituals and rules.
It (likely) had a non-trivial causal impact on breaking down the NFT hype cycle which we now see to be largely dismantled.
A good pic of it. https://www.flickr.com/photos/derewecki/21429018995
You might protest this doesn’t really show anything. Here of the project organizers discusses the difficulty of comprehending it from a photo.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BurningMan/comments/3n4nux/does_any...
It was probably best experienced by biking along the entire thing.
The same group of folks has been making bigger and bigger art for years. One of them (I can’t remember) said “we made art so big it disappears.”
When your mind is made up already, you can always find a way to reject evidence you're wrong.
1. Flat and round are not a dichotomy. Flat is just the limiting case of round as the radius approaches infinity.
2. Carl Sagan got it wrong in Cosmos when describing the reasoning used by Aristarchus. It is not enough to observe different shadows in different locations. To show the earth is round you also have to show that the sun is very far away. Aristarchus actually had some evidence for that, but his estimate of the distance to the sun was off by a factor of 20. In any case, Aristarchus obviously did get it right, but his argument at the time was not the slam-dunk that Sagan makes it out to be.
3. There is a slam-dunk argument that the earth cannot be flat: time zones. Flat-earthers explain time zones by saying that the sun shines its light in a sort of cone pattern, but this cannot account for the fact that the sun sets below the horizon at different times in different places. On a flat earth, if the sun goes below the horizon, that has to happen at the same time for all observers.
Reminds me a lot of Asimov's "The Relativity of Wrong":
> Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-Earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the Earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-Earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long.
[...]
> The curvature of such a sphere is about 0.000126 per mile, a quantity very close to 0 per mile as you can see, and one not easily measured by the techniques at the disposal of the ancients. The tiny difference between 0 and 0.000126 accounts for the fact that it took so long to pass from the flat Earth to the spherical Earth.
[...]
> To put it another way, on a flat surface, curvature is 0 per mile everywhere. On Earth's spherical surface, curvature is 0.000126 per mile everywhere (or 8 inches per mile). On Earth's oblate spheroidical surface, the curvature varies from 7.973 inches to the mile to 8.027 inches to the mile.
> The correction in going from spherical to oblate spheroidal is much smaller than going from flat to spherical. Therefore, although the notion of the Earth as sphere is wrong, strictly speaking, it is not as wrong as the notion of the Earth as flat.
-- Isaac Asimov, 1986
I don't find the first point about infinite radius to be relevant to this debate though. It's a true statement, but what flat earthers are talking about is whether the earth is flat in all directions or a curvature can measured and observed by humans, not abstract concepts of infinities.
And it’s not a question of abstract infinities. How would you experimentally distinguish between a flat earth and a round one with a radius of (say) one light year?
However, flat earthers have a flawed understanding of several concepts. Differences in lense focal point and mirages in particular are the biggest misunderstandings they carry which they will berate you until you give up.
Here's an even simpler experiment. There's a flight from Perth Australia to Santiago Chile. On a round earth the flight time works, it doesn't on a flat earth.
The old adage goes: when you wrestle with a pig, you get muddy.
Where is the energy coming from? Why isn’t the atmosphere stripped away? Why isn’t earth white hot or achieving relativistic speeds? These problems can be dealt with enough special pleading and creative physics. They can stay one step ahead of their critics, forever.
I got very into studying flat earthers for a while. The fundamental contradiction is that they claim to be resisting authority but for their claims to work you have to take more and more on faith and accept that there are unresolvable mysteries.
Which is actually what they’re more comfortable with! They are usually in some sort of cult, or an authoritarian version of a mainstream religion.
>“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
The issue with a group that plays idiot, is they attract a lot of idiots.
It's quite a drastic change from that to anti-semitism.
See also: the human consciousness (circa 2023, Western culture style) train.
Gaze in amazement at all the confident claims of "fact" in this thread, that are derived from the imagination of the claimant.
Oh, but of course, everyone is "just expressing their opinion", of course. And the question of whether each person was conscious of it at the time shall not be discussed, because that would be "pedantic", "sea-lioning", "not the purpose of this forum", etc.
This planet is surreal.
It must be exhausting being them.
Anyway, it was ringing crackpot alarms almost immediately. I didn't even have to scrutinize the claims (they don't hold up even a little, natch), the way the claims were presented was sufficient. I wonder what it is that makes some people deaf to the heuristics most of us are able to employ against this kind of nonsense.
> The issue with a group that plays idiot, is they attract a lot of idiots.
Well, that depends on whether one is "measuring" on a relative or absolute scale, and a subjective or objective one....and also: whether one is able to think in these higher dimensions, that are all around us (and inside us) all the time.
Take HN for example: on a relative scale, this is a highly intellectual forum. But on an absolute scale, I wonder how impressive it is.
It's not clear why gravity needs to be "explained" in such a manner though. Nothing about our current theories of gravity requires the gravitational body to not be flat
On the contrary the bulk behaviour of the source matter demands an ellipsoidal Earth: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrostatic_equilibrium#Deriva...>.
One might attempt to banish magma, lava, and other indicators of fluid flow (the oceans, the atmosphere, planetary differentiation generally) and imagine an infinitely rigid lipped/walled plate underneath. However, then:
An eternally-accelerating flat plate does not generate the Weyl curvature tensor which a set of plumb bobs or zero-length springs can measure.
Even before General Relativity, such measurements were undertaken and characterized as smooth functions of distance from the Equator less than sixty years after Newton e.g. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clairaut%27s_theorem_(gravity)>.
Not only do you both get muddy, but the pig wins with the benefit of experience
Mark Twain
I did a similar thing but with legal crackpots instead of science crackpots, as a source of material to practice legal research on in law school.
Namely the Sovereign Citizen [1] and Tax Protest [2] movements.
(Note that tax protestors are different from tax resistors. The latter refuse to pay tax as a protest against government policies. The former refuse to pay because they believe that it is not legal for the government to tax them. It is only the tax protestors who are crackpots).
None of their material stands up long to scrutiny. When you go look up the cases or statutes they cite, they often don't even exist. If they do exist what they quote from them often isn't there. And if it is there, it isn't there for what they say it is. An example of that I've seen one quoting the Supreme Court as unanimously saying that income tax is unconstitutional, but the quote wasn't actually by the Court. It was from a brief from the side that lost, so it was actually something the Court unanimously rejected.
At least with these things I can kind of understand. If you claim that people don't have to pay taxes, or register their cars, or have a driver's license to drive on public streets, people will pay for your book or to attend your seminars.
That's something a con man can work with. You can even point out that you've been selling your books and running your seminars for years and have never gotten into trouble for tax evasion or driving without a license and let the rubes infer that this proves your methods work. No need to tell the rubes that the reason you don't get in trouble is that you quietly actually do pay your taxes and do carry a driver's license when you drive.
Flat earth is a bit more puzzling. I would have expected that to be harder to make money on.
Telling someone you are going to show them how to stop paying taxes is promising something that will make a major difference in their life.
Telling them the Earth is flat doesn't seem like something that would make much difference--offhand I can't think of anything I would actually do different if I believed the Earth was flat--so I'd expect there to not be much money in it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement
I would think that buying into the Flat earth theories could be a way to identify marks for the other profitable theories.
One cool device I discovered is the Gyrotheodolite. It's a north-seeking gyrocompass, used in mining where GPS is not available and a magnetic compass would be too inaccurate.
The north-seeking effect happens only because the earth is round and rotates the way it does. Without this rotation, the gyrocompass would not work. Hence the earth is round and it rotates. QED.
It's possible to cobble a simple one together out of pretty basic parts, or even scrap. It's just a turntable set at an angle, which you can mount some kind of pointer/viewfinder/camera on.
The demonstration comes in that it has to be set up so that the axis of the turntable is at an angle to the ground equal to your latitude (at 0°lat it has to be horizontal, at 90°lat vertical), and the direction of the tilt is towards a pole (north in the northern hemisphere, south in the southern). You can then fix your webcam or whatever to the turntable, pointing at any celestial object (star, moon, sun - but don't look directly at the sun!) and see that you can follow any of them at a constant rate of approx 15° per hour, for days. You can follow when and where the object goes below the horizon, and predict when and where it will rise above the horizon again.
All of those requirements, from the tilt angle being equal to your latitude, to the requirement to point the tilt north/south, to the constant rate of rotation, and the direction of rotation depending on whether you're in the north or south hemisphere, are easily explained by the shape of the earth, and make no sense in any flat earth model. And they're easily checked. You might need a few collaborators to check the results at different latitudes, but there seem to be plenty of flat earthers out there.
Also the slightly different rotational speeds needed to track the sun (~1°/day) and the moon (~4°/day) vs that of all of the stars also follow from the heliocentric model of the solar system, and not whatever alternate bonkers cosmology someone has pulled out of their ass.
Though the construction of this experiment reminded me of this historic attempt to prove the flatness of the earth I should probably remember to replicate on my boat next time I pass through. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Level_experiment
In fact, round earth theory is holding science back. The Earth only appears to be curved because spacetime under the flat plane is curved by gravity. This is how there can be four simultaneous days in one 24 hour day. Flat Earth/Time Cube Dual Unification Principle will revolutionize physics, as any true FETCDUP believer will tell you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8cbIWMv0rI&ab_channel=carls...
If you presume the Earth is flat and the Sun not that far away, Eratosthenes was calculating the distance to the Sun.
Here's the truly ironic point. By the numbers FAR more people argue against it, largely for clickbait and views, than advance the notion. And what does that mean? It means that "flat earth" IS the argument against it, if you get my drift. If everyone just stopped talking about it, no one would care at all. In fact it's all the people arguing with it that make it a thing.
Let's just stop.
But cool article. No dig on the author. Just something to think about.
I'm a bit surprised that "usual" factor for it works so well.
It doesn't harm the result though. If the earth was flat then there should be pretty much no refraction if the level is always 17ft
What's the basis for calling him a grifter? I don't know anything about the guy, but grifting usually involves tricking people for money, which includes both receiving money and knowing you're being deceptive. Just based on this story, his behavior is consistent with a guy who is wrong but refuses to admit it, even to himself. That's not a grifter, that's something much more common!
And while I know nothing about this particular guy, it's relevant because calling people names and making fun of them usually just makes them more entrenched in their position. It makes them less likely to admit they were wrong. If the goal is for the guy to say "yep, I've been making a huge mistake" and then try to get him to help spreading the correct information to the people who listen to him, then there needs to be room for him to do that safely, with a minimum of public humiliation.
I just don't like the tone of mocking and condescension. "Interesting" could be a good start for someone changing their mind, if handled right.
I'd venture that someone who believes in a flat earth - despite an abundant array of evidence which doesn't require advanced science or abstract thought to interpret - has already passed the point of no return and they're either 1) horribly deluded and only therapy can help them or 2) a grifter and nothing will get them to change their stance as long as they can milk it.
> calling people names
At some point, there isn't anything else you can do but call someone "deluded" or "deceptive". If you knew someone who went outside every day and said the sky was neon green[1], despite all the evidence and your entreaties, you'd soon give up and retreat to one of those two positions, no?
[1] I'm hoping there's no medical condition which transposes colours in a synaesthesic-type fashion. But that would be obvious in other situations...
You can walk away. Name calling isn't the default stance.
There are a lot of scammers and con artists in public life nowadays. The internet has sadly made it really easy for them to monetize. Whereas previously cranks and con artists could make some pocket money peddling newsletters through small ads, it's much easier today to parlay that sort of interest into a fandom that provides significant revenue. This is kind of a problem, summarized in the truism 'those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.'
I'm all for giving people the benefit of the doubt, but when someone is very savvy in marketing and self-promotion area, the probability that they're just struggling with a cognitive blind spot gets lower and lower with time. If you can never admit the possibility or probability that someone else is dishonest, then you are a sucker.
If the latter: what information source(s) have you used to acquire these alleged facts, and how did you go about fact checking them (for example: things that may go on that you have no way of acquiring knowledge about)?
Personally: I think there is an even bigger (potential) conspiracy going on that underlies all of this: educational curriculum (both what's included and what isn't) in Western nations.
And there is plenty of room to allow people to change their position, to test science via hypothesis and measurement.
But when a person is a speaker at flat earth conferences telling people that science lies to them about everything, they just might be a charlatan. I believe the movie 'Behind the Curve' covers this, but must admit to not having watched it. From the synopsis of the movie the flat earthers perform experimentation proving the earth is a globe, then discard the evidence never to bring it up again. So yes, if this is the case, the tone is demanded.
Most of these guys sell merch to the gullible - make money by speaking at conferences - sell books etc. Given that he is making money by defrauding people with something he likely does not even believe himself - grifter might be an appropriate term.
There’s this weird HN obsession with high minded Aristotlesque norms of inquiry when the plain fact is that these people lie for money and do actual damage in the process. cf every Covid “doctor” selling garlic / HCQ / IVM / whatever else will make them millions of dollars.
Isn't it interesting? You'd think that tone would come more from the "flat-earth" side, but as I've gotten older I have noticed the most vehement opinions come from globe-earth side. It's like an antibody response to a virus.
Just take a look at the comment at the bottom of this thread, flagged and downvoted for _entertaining_ the idea that globe earth may be an illusion of perception. The Agent Smith effect [https://i.redd.it/dlhfz4az7oh41.jpg] is real, and this is a perfect example of it in the wild.