Are Flat-Earthers Being Serious?
livescience.comI've been perversely interested in this Flat Earth movement for a few months. There are a lot of long, stunningly stupid, vehemently argued YouTube videos out there from flat earthers. There are a couple of basic science-minded people who take them on, often with some pretty entertaining results. But one thing is clear is that the flat earthers simply aren't listening. It goes a lot deeper than misunderstandings of facts or what they see when they walk outside. It's really hard to explain such weaponized ignorance. They aren't asking questions, they don't want to know, they just want to tear down the establishment (by exposing secret inside knowledge) in whatever way they can. It's psychological and goes much deeper than beliefs.
It's not just flat-Earthers. I suspect this is reflective of some broader psychological phenomenon- what the article calls "conspiracy-theory psychology", but I don't think that quite covers it. I recently came across someone who was just as religiously convinced that JavaScript was not Turing-complete. No amount of mathematical argument could convince him otherwise. He didn't claim any conspiracy, just had an utter refusal to consider any evidence. It was surreal.
This is an interesting topic on it's own. I think it has to do with the hyper-connectivity that our modern digital world provides that allows us to self-segregate and form self-supporting echo chambers for just about anything we want to believe. So while the psychological underpinnings for people preferring their beliefs over objective truth is just human nature, I think the potency of modern day conspiracy-theory thinking is because we really can form an entire world ourselves, (print/visual media, online communities, higher ed) that supports our own thinking and it gets further embedded.
Well, the association on the article was founded at the XIX century.
I don't think it's our modern hyper-connected world.
I wasn't focusing on the genesis of these ideas, which frankly have always been around in every technological era, I was talking about how such ideas can persist in the age of limitless information, education, and technology. And my answer was as stated above. The curious thing is that as information and access to information has increased, the "intrenchedness" of some of these fringe ideas has increased as well; like an opposite and equal effect. I would have expected the opposite. So I'd say that hyper-connectivity has made community ties stronger for believers in order to survive the information onslaught. Nothing binds a small community more then direct opposition from, well, everyone.
>It's psychological and goes much deeper than beliefs.
Oh yes! And you can get into trouble trying to engage with logic, because that is not the name of the game.
>I've been perversely interested in this
Me too, and with other crankery. I recommend the book Mathematical Cranks for similar entertainment.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Mathematical_Cranks.htm...
Maybe I am interested in it because you begin to see small reflections of similar behavior everywhere once you start looking for it.
It seems rare at first, but now I think similar thinking is to be found everywhere, on lots of topics. It is really mostly a strident, emotional attachment to a point of view that is not founded on a desire to find the truth.
It is founded on a deep personal association. To deny your personal "truth" would be like tearing down your view of yourself. So instead it must be defended at all costs, which is fine because you already are certain it is "true".
Those are the people targeted by "religious/cult" like business. This is just another instance of this, it's been happening since forever.
I find it amazing that this believing blindly in something so weird so easy for some people and it's definitely not related to their brain power, I know a few instances of very smart software developers, seriously smart people that believe in crazy cult like religions with aliens and stuff.
It's amazing how the brain is spitted, the part that you use to work and live is rational, methodical and precise the part that handles your feelings can be stupid, naive and gullible to the point where is overthrows your rational brain to the oblivion and you become a "Smapid" a Stupid Smart person that is a great coworker but I simply can't start any non work, business related conversation because it drives me insane.
It's really a waste.
Reminds me of the "invisible dragon in my garage" analogy from http://lesswrong.com/lw/i4/belief_in_belief/ :
> But now suppose that we say to the claimant, "Okay, we'll visit the garage and see if we can hear heavy breathing," and the claimant quickly says no, it's an inaudible dragon. We propose to measure carbon dioxide in the air, and the claimant says the dragon does not breathe. We propose to toss a bag of flour into the air to see if it outlines an invisible dragon, and the claimant immediately says, "The dragon is permeable to flour."
"It's not a dragon, it's a basilisk"
I find these people particularly interesting, not because of the absurdity of their belief, but because of the certainty they have in their belief and how difficult it is to convince them otherwise.
The article points out that "many Americans" hold some kind of wacky belief and strongly resist attempts to challenge it: vaccines cause autism, global warming isn't real, the moon landing was faked, the earth is 6,000 years old, dinosaurs drowned in the Great Flood, ghosts are real, etc...
So rather than the Flat Earthers being anomalies, I actually think they represent the general public quite well; it's just that their crazy belief is different from mine or yours.
What I am really curious about is: what would it take to successfully convince one of these people that they are wrong? Because if you solve this problem, then you solve the problem in its generality, and you can apply the technique to the vast number of people who still believe the earth was literally created in 7 days.
My best guess? Ask them, "What would it take to convince you otherwise?" The problem isn't that most people are incapable of learning the truth — it's that they don't want to learn the truth. Take for instance someone who believes dinosaur bones were planted in the earth by the devil. I have a hard time imagining that if you handheld them and took them step-by-step through the scientific method (e.g., starting with archaeological sites), that by the end of a year's worth of research, they would still disagree with the mainstream scientific view.
And that's the cool thing about science: you don't have to take anyone's word for it! You can check what people are saying all by yourself. Go out there with ice core machines, thermometers, and satellites, and trace through the same steps that the climate experts have taken. After years of following their own work for yourself, there's no way you couldn't believe in global warming.
I think what it really comes down to is that most people would rather live with a comforting or reassuring lie than an uncomfortable truth, and even given the opportunity and resources for discovering the truth themselves, they would prefer not to.
The big thing is you can't convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. They have already made up their mind, dug in their heels, and are willing to fight to the death.
In some cases they would consider themselves a bad person if they didn't defend their ideals to the death. This is especially true if there is a religious aspect to their view. They don't call it a "reasoned position" on religion, it is belief. Belief is strongest when you keep it despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is a core tenet of Christianity and I suspect most other religions as well. Your faith will be tested by "deceivers" constantly and you must keep it.
It's impossible to use logic or science to convince someone of something when they think logic and science are tools of the devil.
It's also the Amiga effect. When a community grows smaller the remaining members are the most ardent. Once you are down to just a handful of remaining members all that is left are the die hard fanboys. All of the reasonable people left a long time ago.
"Belief is strongest when you keep it despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is a core tenet of Christianity and I suspect most other religions as well."
Huh? This isn't true at all.
"Core tenet" overstates the case a bit, but credo quia absurdum has a long history in Christian apologetics.
To your point, the first step is to make them want to be convinced. For the irrational, changing beliefs is about many of the things we might consider heresy: appeals to authority, ad homonym attacks, etc. But much more often, I have found the key is if the person feels connected to you or the people making the counter argument.
You can not use logic to dissuade someone of a belief they arrived at emotionally. Instead, if you actually want to do it, you have to use emotion. It's our poor thining that makes us to try reason with the unreasonable.
Fideism plays an important role in some sects of Christianity, but is considered heresy in others. It is not mentioned in any of the eccumenical creeds.
That being said, there has always been a strong minority pushing for it, and one interpretation of the doctrine "Sola Scriptura" (which is a core tenent of Protestantism) would be that anything contrary to scripture is wrong (hence young-earth creationism).
1 Cor 15:14-19 is very clear that if Jesus did not raise from the dead, then Christian beliefs are in vain.
You are describing a cult not a core tenent of Christianity.
Luke 16:22 - Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake
Peter 4:14 - If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you.
Matthew 10:22 - and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.
Not all the exact same thing but the concept is fairly common in Christian scripture and teaching. Basically people will denounce you, hate you, oppose you, and ostracize you for your beliefs, but if you stick to it, you're blessed or favored by God.
Like anything regarding scripture and religion you can interpret this in plenty of ways. Maybe they don't specify what aspects of the faith you must always hold in spite of all else, but the way it's often taught (and as it was presented to me growing up in a Christian community), you must hold to your beliefs in the existence of a God, whose son was Christ, who rose from the dead, and all of the related supernatural implications laid out in the core beliefs of Christianity. People will argue against your beliefs and even persecute you for holding them, but if you want to really prove the strength of your faith and your worthiness as a Christian, you need to stick to your guns.
Either way, it's a matter of debate whether this is a core tenet or not so I'll agree with you there. Still, it's definitely a strong "principle" of many Christian teachings for as far back as the religion has resembled its modern form.
The thing is, I don't think the "What would it take to convince you?" discussion is generally actually fruitful for beliefs like these. For example, Bill Nye posed this exact question to Ken Ham during their Evolution/Creationism debate and essentially his response was "Nothing, this is my belief and I'm sticking to it."
So, it seems like your best option is just to ignore those with decidedly unscientific opinions for the moment and attempt to instill more genuinely curious/less dogmatic thinking into those who have not already made up their minds.
I have a theory that climate change denial is an example of a cargo cult, not thought much about the motivations behind your other examples.
I suspect that the followers of a cargo cult don't spontaneously all decide to believe whatever it is at the same time, someone will lead it and the rest will join in afterwards. I'm also guessing that the leader will be someone who has been a leader in the past and that the nature of the misunderstanding that is at the heart of the cult will reflect how that leader came to prominence previously.
I started wondering about this as I was trying to work out why the main group of climate change denyers in the UK had rented office space in the same street [1] as the Royal Society and other scientific bodies.
>I find these people particularly interesting, not because of the absurdity of their belief, but because of the certainty they have in their belief and how difficult it is to convince them otherwise. The article points out that "many Americans" hold some kind of wacky belief and strongly resist attempts to challenge it: vaccines cause autism, global warming isn't real, the moon landing was faked, the earth is 6,000 years old, dinosaurs drowned in the Great Flood, ghosts are real, etc...
I hate to point this out, but one of these isn't quite like the others: the one about ghosts. The problem with that one is that you can't prove a negative; it's impossible. There might be ghosts; there's simply no way for you to disprove it, no matter how much evidence you amass. You can make the case that it's highly unlikely because you haven't been presented with any sufficiently-compelling evidence yet, just like it's highly unlikely that pink unicorns live on the Moon in underground caves, but you can't disprove it, and with ghosts you can't even amass decent evidence against it (like by going to the Moon, searching for underground caves, and if any exist, looking in them for pink unicorns and coming up empty). Personally, I don't believe they're likely to be real, as I've never seen any good evidence, but lots of other people have claimed to, so while I don't put much stock in it, I think it is a bit different from the others, because the others have strong evidence countering those claims. There's plenty of evidence that vaccines don't cause autism, that climate change is real (the main debate is the source: AGW, but even here there's plenty of evidence that it's man-made), there's literally tons of evidence of the Moon landings, there's enormous evidence that the Earth is much older than 6000 years (and that human civilization predates this too), etc.
>Take for instance someone who believes dinosaur bones were planted in the earth by the devil. I have a hard time imagining that if you handheld them and took them step-by-step through the scientific method (e.g., starting with archaeological sites), that by the end of a year's worth of research, they would still disagree with the mainstream scientific view.
The problem is that religious people like this actively disbelieve in science. You can show them all the evidence you want and educate them about the Scientific Method and it won't help. After all, here again, you cannot disprove their assertion, that "the devil" planted this stuff. After all, science basically assumes that some intelligent force isn't involved in faking the evidence, so that when you carry out experiments they'll come out the same way every time because the laws of the Universe are constant. What if there's some higher force (or "Force"...) that can change the laws of the Universe at will to subvert your scientific experiment?
Of course, here you have to ask, why would someone believe this silliness? It's not that much different from the ghost thing, except that here instead of a relatively benign belief that disembodied souls are wandering around and occasionally doing odd things to give us the willies (like knocking objects over or slamming doors), it's a much more detailed belief that some evil being is screwing with us just so that somehow we won't get into eternal paradise because we don't believe some silly creation tale that has no supporting evidence. Of course this also seems to go hand-in-hand with being a member of some crazy church and needing to give them a significant portion of your income....
The explanation is a lot more simple I think.
Back in the old days, the way you showed you were better than everyone else was owning the nicest car, having air conditioning, or having a powered mower.
Now that more or less everyone has more or less everything, the only ways we can fulfill the basic instinct to be better than our neighbors is engaging in these kind of "all the sheep think this happened, but really..." ideas. Psuedo-intellectualism at it's finest.
You could show these people facts all day, it doesn't matter. Hell if you took one of them up in one of those Space Jets they'd probably swear you were faking it somehow, because the longer you hold onto a belief, the more invested in it you are, the more it's going to wound your ego to admit you're wrong. Most people would rather take a bullet than admit they were wrong (especially Americans and Brits) so that's how we end up with the Flat Earth people.
I think you're onto something. Most people I know who want to appear smart find it necessary to be contrarian. Most of what they say is can be rephrased as "ordinary people just believe everything they're taught, but I've learned how to think so (9/11, illuminati, global warming, anti-vaccine, and so on but only one madness)".
I have always suspected that the Flat Earth society was a put-on - a joke. There is a certain very British kind of humor where you assume some absurd position and stick to it with a straight face no matter what - you never crack a smile or break character. The pet store owner in the Monty Python parrot routine is a good example.
I recall when I was a kid, a Flat Earth guy was interviewed on TV after John Glenn's orbital flight. The interviewer pointed out that Glenn could see the round earth out his window and he could see he was passing over the entire circumference of the Earth every ninety minutes and ground stations around the world could track him coming over the horizon and passing overhead and ... etc. etc. The flat earth guy earnestly explained that Glenn was just circling around the edge - the perimeter - of the flat Earth, don't you see? - all the while making circular hand motions around the edge of the the flat table top where he was seated. I figured even then that the flat earth guy was just putting on the interviewer, daring him to say what he was no doubt thinking: "Oh for pity's sake, come off it". But both of them played along, neither of them let on that he thought the whole interview was just a joke.
I've been getting a kick out of the flat Earth thing. I've figured it as a "guerrilla ontology" or "alternate reality" prank in the tradition of Robert Anton Wilson, the Church of the Subgenus, the Incunabula Papers, etc. Either that or it's a skeptic troll of the "alt media" community.
Why don't they all just get together and walk over to the edge of the planet and see if there is a cliff or not. Seems like a really easy "theory" to prove. A coupe hundred people walking together while live blogging there attempt to the world should be save from secret NASA police.
Why bother? why would they want to prove themselves wrong?
Why don't you keep walking in one direction then tap them on the back when you've gone the whole way to prove tou're right?
When you argue against people who have no interest in evidence, it's really very tricky
I am trying to think of a way to prove without a doubt that the earth is not flat. I thought about sending them into space, and having them look through a window at the round earth suspended in the black. But then I almost know what they would say; the window is somehow distorting the true appearance of the earth. If it doesn't conform to their view, they will create reasons as to why. There are so many similar examples of people rejecting new information/evidence within our world now.
Don't be so hasty, I think sending them into space would be a good start.
Measure your shadow at solar noon, fly south and measure your shadow at solar noon there. (Solar noon may differ from 1200.)
Essentially, just repeat this ancient experiment: http://www.juliantrubin.com/bigten/eratosthenes.html
That only works if the people you are trying to convince believe that the Sun is far enough away for its rays to be essentially parallel at the two measuring locations.
Do flat Earth believers believe in a sufficiently large solar system for that to be true?
Is this not easy to prove its false? Just take a flight from the southern tip of Chile to South Australia. If the earth is indeed flat, the flight would take 24+ hours. But since they would fly over Antarctica, it only takes ~10.
I suppose one explanation could be that the 747 flight they are in somehow gained the ability to go faster than a F16 at maximum thrust.
I suppose they would say something along the lines of "it does take a long time, but everyone's clocks are built by the conspiracy". As for why the amount of fuel used is the same for a similar trip around the arctic, that's a good question.
FTA:
> [The theory is that] "GPS devices are rigged to make airplane pilots think they are flying in straight lines around a sphere when they are actually flying in circles above a disc."
my reply has to do with the unexpected time difference, not the GPS. When a flight (according to the flat earth) should take 24 hours and only takes 12.
A circle is longer than a straight line, so it would explain the time difference too.
It's interesting to me that they use language superficially similar to the language of rationality and science to justify their beliefs. The belief is ridiculous, but how many people have opinions that they rationalize as scientific that aren't so ridiculous but still unjustified? It's easier to convince yourself that you're 'rational' than it is to be 'rational'.
The entire field of "alternative medicine" is just like this: scientific-sounding, rationalized as scientific, but in reality not at all.
The absurdity of this intrigued me and I dropped by their site. Read a few threads and it seems like they're not fond of satellite photography and rely on their senses almost exclusively. So here's a little question for them: why does a ship seem to "sink" into the ocean the further it gets?
It practice ships disappear into optical obscurity before you can see that only the top half is visible. And even that could just be a big wave, right?
Not really. A big enough ship combined with a clear day and a set of binoculars works pretty well. As for the big wave, repeat the experiment enough times to filter out the noise.
I love that there's a Flat Earth Society of Australia and I wonder whether they think they're on top or below the disk.
In short, we have a crisis of epistemology in our culture, and facts (empirical, repeatable, independent measurements) don't win arguments any more.
Yes, and that's why western (or at least American) civilization is likely doomed to being eclipsed by the Chinese before too long. Irrationality like that just isn't compatible with being a leading, technological society.
What makes you think the Chinese aren't equally irrational?
Because I don't see a Creationism Museum or a bunch of megachurches over there, or a bunch of loony conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, moon-landing-deniers, etc.
I've always said there are people who are so set in their wrong beliefs about something that if they believed the sun rose in the west you could point them east in the morning and they would still persist in ignoring the reality.
Their model is surprisingly waterproof for tinfoil hatters. Genuinely elegant.
I just loved how, instead of simply rejecting gravitation (why would they need it?) they rationalized an incredibly more contrived explanation out of General Relativity.
I'm still not convinced they are serious.
I find Flat-Earthers belief as surprising as an educated person believing in God.
-1 for steering this towards a religious debate.
I'm not religious and don't believe in a god, but who's to say there isn't a god? We still don't have an explanation for how we're here. Until then, I'd say it's as fair a theory as any. Folks who believe in a god simply have a reason to believe, and that works for them.
I'm not making any judgements either way. I simply stated and the other commenter agreed that there are similarities.
I'm almost with you on this one. I would equate it more to the concept of religion, then the concept of God. There are a number of ways to easily prove the Earth is not flat, but no real distinct way to prove a god does not exist.
The main difference is that the Flat-Earthers are a very small group, whereas those who believe in God is extremely large. The small group is seen as ridiculous, but since the larger group is popular belief, is not seen as absurd.
It is actually more absurd to me that a huge number of people still follow religions, than the fact that a super subset of people believe the Earth is flat.