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Comment by hydrogen7800 | Hacker News Reader

That's a bit too much to ask of these folks, I'm afraid, but I did boil it down for him by saying that the real question is understanding why he is inclined to believe its a hoax, rather than trying to pile up evidence in front of him. I suppose that's what "street epistemology" is, though. Nice to have shorthand terms for these ideas.

I also included a thought experiment for him:

Imagine you take a conspiracy influencer and actually put them in the spacecraft with the astronauts so they could see the whole thing with their own eyes and wouldn't be able to deny it. They return to earth to tell their followers that it's all real. Do you think everyone will be convinced, or would they say he's now in on the conspiracy and find a new person to lead the conspiracy theory?

(I wonder if there is a sociological shorthand term for this?)

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> Imagine you take a conspiracy influencer and actually put them in the spacecraft with the astronauts so they could see the whole thing with their own eyes and wouldn't be able to deny it. They return to earth to tell their followers that it's all real. Do you think everyone will be convinced, or would they say he's now in on the conspiracy and find a new person to lead the conspiracy theory?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Experiment_(expediti...

"The participating flat Earthers all admitted that the midnight sun was a real phenomenon. The larger flat Earth community has largely rejected the results and accused the participants, including the flat Earthers, of having faked the expedition and of being part of a larger conspiracy to promote the spherical Earth model."

Ha of course! Entirely predictable.

The Final Experiment (https://www.the-final-experiment.com/) essentially did this by inviting "prominent" flat earthers to Antarctica to witness 24 hours of daylight. Very few did, but they are now shunned by the true flat earthers.

So what is it really? A social club? A church? A religion?

Church/religion. Flat-earthers believe in a very literal interpretation of the Bible which dictates that the earth is flat.

When I was doing my student teaching, one of the teachers in my department was a creationist, but he didn’t seem to have read Genesis 1 at all because when I asked him about the firmament in the heavens separating the waters above from the waters below, he had no idea what I was talking about. At least the flat-earthers know enough scripture to follow their dogma all the way to its absurd endpoint.

"Flat Earth"[0] is more like a cult[1]. One introduces a significant barrier to entry. New members learn the approved vocabulary/jargon that identifies "in group" and "out group" people. Outsiders tend to reject new members[2]. New members tend to stay due to the "sunken cost" fallacy. The high barrier to entry and cost of leaving (losing your community - because you will be shunned for doing so) prevents people from leaving or associating with people who have left.

Notes:

0 - https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Flat_Earth

1 - https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Crank_magnetism

2 - This is why religions such as Jehovah's Witnesses require members to proselytize (including going door-to-door) because outsiders are so adverse to the members that the other insiders remark things like "those outsiders are so depraved, that's why you can only be with 'true believers' like us".

I believe that is the same event as in my comment.

> the real question is understanding why he is inclined to believe its a hoax, rather than trying to pile up evidence in front of him

This is one of the primary techniques of SE. People are open to answering questions and with some skill with Socratic questioning, you can get results. Dumping data just causes cult/hoax members to feel threatened because you're attacking some core beliefs and they will try very hard to avoid losing a sense of self value[0].

Notes:

0 - "What I believe is wrong" -> "I am wrong" -> "I am a bad person".

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