Well put.

Yeah, a lot of people have this idea that you fight misinformation with calm, collected, rational argument.

Well, I guess I need to prepare a cold, calm, collected rational argument about how that isn't at all effective, heh.

Google doesn't return any meaningful results for this. Is this your quote? It's really good and I'd like to duplicate it for regular use.

Edit: Aha I found it by relaxing the query params: probably Jonathan Swift.

Only if you can prove that birds are real.

A friend of mine said:

You can't logic your way out of a crazy box.

(Referring how to treat with people who are somewhat mentally Disturbed)

There may be a sub-group that just wants to be open-minded. I'm 100% a science guy, but I refuse to put the probability of flat earth at 0%. Maybe 0.00000000000000001%, but not 0. :-)

I used to work with an engineer that assured me he had looked into flat earth theory and it was "legit". This same person told me he could re-write Terraform in a day, so my view of him was skewed.

However, I was genuinely surprised to find a real flat-earther in a technical role.

I kind of like flat earth because it uses all the bad argument techniques that people I can't criticize on HN without getting downvotes use. Thus, it provides a good example cases for most common bad arguments used in online debates, especially science related debates.

Somebody should put together a dictionary of informal fallacies with examples from the flat earth movement because it is not politically incorrect to criticize them while it is to criticize other movements that are more popular that regularly employ these fallacies.

One more thing: speaking of people believing they're Christ, a random guy in China in the 1850s started to believe he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ and started the biggest civil war in world history.

That’s what I thought about QAnon too. Turns out, there’s a boatload of morons out there. I have extended relatives that were QAnon fools, and are now flat earther fools.