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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

The counter-conspiracy is that flat earthism is larger than it actually is. It's basically a meme about making fun of them, when I reckon in reality there's not a lot of them; I would bet there's a percentage of flat earthers well below the lizardman constant of 4%.

So in effect, the Flat Earth theory is popular purely because of people making fun of it. There are no more flat earthers than people who hear voices or that believe they are actually reincarnated Jesus.

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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 should have added, re-write in Powershell. Scary.

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.

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. :-)

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