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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

The flat-earth community is actually kind of fascinating. Someone recently paid to fly some flat-earthers down to Antarctica to witness the 24-hour sun which is impossible under most flat-earth models [1]. The trip was extensively documented, and one of the flat-earthers who made the trip actually changed their position. The result, predictably, was that this person was ostracized from the community. The intellectual backflips that the flat-earth community are making to try to debunk this experiment is simultaneously fun and disturbing to watch.

The easiest way to debunk the flat-earth model is simply to observe that that 1) the sun sets below the horizon and 2) this happens at different times in different locations. On a flat earth, if the sun is seen at the horizon in one location it has to be seen at the horizon everywhere.

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[1] https://www.the-final-experiment.com/

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Not sure "fascinating" is the word I'd use. While there might be some people that are genuinely confused, the flat Earthers that I've seen debate people who went on the Final Experiment are nothing more than pathological liars.

When prominent flat Earthers heard about and were invited to participate in the Final Experiment, none of them were excited that the globers would finally see the Sun isn't up for 24 hours. They attacked the flat Earthers that did agree to go. All of the globers bought new equipment with their own money and sought out experiments to do and record. The flat Earthers were essentially dead weight, none of them actually planed to record a sunset.

> nothing more than pathological liars

Maybe. But I think there's something deeper going on. The flat-earthers-are-nothing-more-than-pathological-liars hypothesis fails to explain why they cling to this particular lie with such vehemence.

I don't mean to get political here, but Donald Trump is a pathological liar. He lies about everything, and he flits effortlessly from lie to lie. He never even offers the pretense of an argument or a justification. He simply proclaims that, say, they're eating the dogs because he read it on the Internet. The flearthers by way of very stark contrast have a laser-focus on this one lie, and they put a lot of effort into coming up with plausible-sounding justifications for it.

Yes, it is true that it is clear that at the end of the day the flearthers don't actually believe their own rhetoric. But it is still, to me, a phenomenon distinct from pathological lying, and which survives despite being so violently at odds with observation. I find that fascinating.

The original Flat Earth "movement" was an exercise to show that it is impossible to prove anything without some leaps of faith about the nature of the Universe or interpolating between gaps in definite knowledge..

There is always an assumption that can be denied. Turtles all the way down.

Later it grew into to a haven for a certain kind of mentally ill person and grifters that profit from them, illustrating the philosophical Problem of Subjectivity: malice cannot be reliably distinguished from stupidity.

It's a little more nuanced than that. The flat earth movement originated with Samuel Rowbotham who actually conducted an experiment in 1838 whose results (he claimed) demonstrated that the earth was flat [1]. I think it's arguable that he was engaging in the scientific method in good faith.

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

At least of the people who've been on the debates, the motive is quite clearly money. They all have apps, merch, blogs, or Youtube Channels they make money from.

Sure, you could say the same thing about most religious leaders. That doesn't necessarily mean that they don't sincerely believe what they're preaching. Flat-earth doesn't seem to me to be a particularly lucrative scam, the audience is too small. If money was really their primary motive I would think they'd find greener pastures elsewhere.

> The result, predictably, was that this person was ostracized from the community.

This one sentence probably explains why the vast majority of humans don't change how we behave. The fear of losing almost all of the people we love is SO strong.

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