In defense of flat earthers (2020)

This article is not a defense of flat earthers, it&#x27;s an explanation for why they exist (that the educational system failed to teach them critical thinking).<p>Even then, I still do not think that&#x27;s really it. Flat earthers are proof that some people will just obstinately believe in complete and utter horseshit. I&#x27;ve seen dozens of flat earth videos. These people do not listen to reason; they didn&#x27;t reason themselves <i>into</i> the position and you cannot reason them <i>out of</i> it. The flat earthers doing the &quot;experiments&quot; keep coming up with reasons to keep on believing, even when their experiments are so blinkered and janky they show either nothing at all or that they are, in fact, wrong. (I recommend &quot;Behind the Curve&quot; to see some of these people in action.) Some might just get bored and move on to something else, but mark my words, some people are just seriously <i>stupid</i>[1] and will keep right on believing absurd crap to their graves, on faith alone. The universe will keep smacking them in the face with being wrong, but they&#x27;ll only get angrier. Hopefully they get tired before they get dangerous.<p>[1] I mean something specific about <i>stupid</i>. Not just wrong, not just ignorant, but actively and self-assuredly wrong, often to their own detriment. Beware stupid people in large numbers.

I think the author of the post is on to something. It isn&#x27;t that he&#x27;s saying flat earthers have evidence or are saying something reasonable. He&#x27;s saying that the Western education system teaches people to memorize facts such as the roundness of the Earth without teaching process methodology to derive the roundness of the Earth.<p>Anyone who begins to question some of the facts they have been indoctrinated to memorize: (1) will not have a methodology for coming to a conclusion, past &quot;hypothesis&quot; and anecdote (2) will not have peers and close contacts who are able to refute the hypothesis, outside just insisting on the fact themselves, which itself isn&#x27;t credible or scientific.<p>One claim that the author makes is that this is a flaw in Western education systems. It would seem to me that Western education varies significantly. And I am not familiar enough with other types of education to know what alternatives are working better in different cultural contexts.

The thing that&#x27;s interesting about &quot;flat earthers&quot; to me is that they largely do not exist. I&#x27;ve never met one or even know anyone who has met one, but the level of discussion about them is insane. It&#x27;s blown way out or proportion to the actual number of actual flat earthers (you gotta exclude all the ones that are just doing it for debate and to make stupid videos online).<p>Ultimately, there&#x27;s really no flat earthers at any meaningful level.

I must have gone to a pretty great school. We did experiments to prove the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell and we spent an entire 2.5 hour chemistry class on deriving avagrado&#x27;s number and proving it was correct.<p>And this was public school in LA county in the 90s.<p>I see a lot of posts about &quot;I&#x27;ll bet you never saw&#x2F;did&#x2F;learned this in high school!&quot; and almost every time the answer is, &quot;yeah, actually I did&quot;. Like we were taught that Colombus massacred the locals, and we were taught that Native American&#x27;s were treated poorly by European settlers.<p>So I guess I should be thanking my teachers for doing it right.

It goes beyond a lack of scientific knowledge. To be a flat Earther, you also need to believe there is a vast conspiracy to cover up the fact that the Earth is flat. NASA and other countries&#x27; space agencies, astronauts, pilots, astrophysicists, geologists, meteorologists, and anyone whose job requires taking into consideration the spherical nature of the Earth (so: GPS systems engineers, flight guidance software programmers, ballistic weapons systems engineers and operators, and I&#x27;m sure many more). They&#x27;re all in on it for... some reason? They somehow stand to gain from tricking the sheeple into believing the Earth is a globe? And none of these conspirators have defected and blown the whole thing wide open?<p>It&#x27;s not like there is roughly equally compelling evidence on both sides and these people just lack the mental tools to determine what is right. People become flat Earthers for the same reasons I believe people fall for many conspiracy theories: it&#x27;s nice to feel special because you see the truth everyone else is blind to, and it&#x27;s exciting to think there is a big conspiracy happening for who knows what end.

I used to be scared by the proliferation of conspiracy theories.<p>I was scared by the chaos and uncertainty, and the by the potentially grim political consequences.<p>These days I tend to view all this as a relatively painful transitory state, people are inquiring and making mistakes, but we&#x27;re collectively learning.<p>Access to information is power, we&#x27;ve been like a child with powerful new toys, but humanity is growing up, in the grand scheme of things it happens quickly.<p>Generations before us have been much crazier and gullible than we are.<p>The only problem I see at the moment is the over-reaction of the so-called elite, they are a bit too scared and they are making mistakes that will undermine their credibility and power in the mid and long term.

What were really talking about is epistemology – how do we know what we know.<p>What the author is saying is that much of what we call science are actually facts that we take on faith.<p>Middle school science are experiments we can all confirm, like observing protazoa under a microscope, or basic chemistry experiments.<p>College (and beyond) science delves into things that we have to trust others to perform on our behalf.<p>90% of western understanding of cosmology, anthropology, physics, molecular biology, etc all rely on us taking others’ observations on faith alone. And many are merely models or theories with no modern observation.<p>Moreover, the researchers who are making observations, are themselves using complicated apparatus designed by another person, like an electron microscope. The researchers are putting faith that the apparatus is producing an accurate &amp; informative signal.<p>Your ability to observe and understand the world requires a lot of faith in that system.<p>Just remember that the entire system is built upon people, who have biases and are vulnerable to groupthink. There have been misunderstandings in the past, which are glamorously called “scientific revolutions”. Even small-scale misunderstandings should remind people to remain intellectually vigilant.

Here is a documentary Johnny Harris made (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=IwJzsE8CvzQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=IwJzsE8CvzQ</a>). In the documentary, he concluded (start at 14:55) that &quot;The Flat Earth movement is not totally about the shape of the Earth ... What it does has to do with is been skeptical of big institutions that are probably watching you, that are probably controlling your life, that are probably feeding you bad information to retain power...&quot;<p>Simply put, it&#x27;s a trust issue, and not a completely groundless one. You can&#x27;t fix a trust issue with information produced by the very institutions that they don&#x27;t trust. This is why Mike Hughes build that rocket, he wants to see it for himself instead of &quot;blindly trust&quot; NASA and &quot;big company&#x2F;governments&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s not just education I&#x27;m afraid. The trust problem must be resolved first somehow.

It&#x27;s a pretty nonsensical article to be honest. Experiments to demonstrate that the earth isn&#x27;t flat, like Foucault&#x27;s Pendulum happen in plenty of schools, in fact pretty much every physics, biology or chemistry class does plenty of experiments to show kids rudimentary science.<p>Flat-Earthers can disprove their own flat earth theory in ten minutes if they wanted to with high school science. The reason they don&#x27;t is because most of them are insane, have like the author a pathological resistance to justified authority (which has its place in science as well), or just want to prey on gullible people which often is pretty lucrative financially.

It jives with my own broader observation that most people who are (forgive generalization) &quot;anti-science&quot; have a different basic definition or perspective - whereas I think of &quot;science, yay!&quot; as a method, a way of thinking, an approach to things ; they think of it as &quot;body of knowledge approved &#x2F; disseminated by The Man&quot;. It <i>can</i> enable a starting from point of agreement - you <i>should</i> be skeptical, you should look for proof or consistency. But just because any given theory or hypothesis may be flawed, I have not personally found a better method to discover things. (I await Poppers and Khuns to attack me with appropriate zeal :-)

Flat Earth is true in the most important sense, which is our direct experience. Although we regularly use technology which relies on the standard scientific understanding of the Earth and Solar System, our everyday experience and all our planning is based on a mental model of a flat earth.<p>When you go for a walk, you act as if the earth is flat. When you plan a journey, you act as if the earth is flat. It is a valid approximation that works.<p>I think that some of the rise of Flat Earth belief, is a rebellion against being told very strange, abstract and foreign things that directly contradict our everyday experience.<p>In this sense, Flat Earth theory is &quot;true&quot; in a limited Phenomenological sense. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Gg0i-4m2L0g" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Gg0i-4m2L0g</a>

&gt; The main problem is that most of the facts we are taught in school are all just things that were read in a book or told by an authority figure. We don’t come to them from scientific investigations.<p>I think it’s also a byproduct of having so much information persisted through generations. We want to “wow” students with the new, exciting information and end up skipping over or glossing over the “trivial” stuff that humans figured out a hundred or more years ago, treating it more like something to be memorized rather than discovered.<p>And if you don’t memorize it (out of inability, or distrust in authority, etc.) then the conclusions might seem unbelievable.<p>Imagine just seeing the last 10min of a movie, it would seem pretty confusing and unbelievable in many cases. But if you filmed the movie or edited it, it would probably seem pretty realistic and predictable.

Ha, anybody who thinks memorization is a Western thing hasn&#x27;t experienced Indian schools.<p>Isn&#x27;t Flat Earthism an American phenomenon? If so, the school system wouldn&#x27;t explain why Europe doesn&#x27;t have it.

I was educated in the 1970s. My physics, chemistry and biology classes didn&#x27;t verify every single thing that&#x27;s taught but we did do experiments that verified directly quite a bit of it (including ordinary and AP classes). Has this changed? I can google that AP biology still does labs.

Since my school days I always thought Theory of Knowledge was the most important and underrated class. That&#x27;s where you talk about the scientific method and how we discover facts. Somehow it was only worth a tiny portion of the international baccalaureate.<p>Basically this essay is correct. Science is taught the wrong way. It should all be a mix of history (of thought) and experiments that guided that thinking. Something like that Bill Bryson book, a brief history of everything. Instead of telling kids the end result, tell them how we got there. Basically, follow the method that you say you use. If you understand science, you know the end result is tentative anyway.<p>Speaking of everything, there&#x27;s probably too much content as well. Too many insignificant details that people have to cram, and that they&#x27;ll never need to know, and if they do, it won&#x27;t take them long to find. People need to know the large movements, not lots of specific reactions and equations.<p>The content is also missing a rather important ingredient: what are the open questions in each field? Why turbulence? Teaching kids that we don&#x27;t know everything is an antidote to science denial, however strange that may sound. The objection people have to science is often that it&#x27;s arrogant.

It’s actually ironic but the author claims the problem is that we don’t teach science, when in reality their complaint is that we don’t teach the history of science. They just don’t seem to realize it.<p>And they are probably right. We should maybe teach less science&#x2F;math concepts, and spend more time discussing how those concepts were created. What were the motivations of the people who came up with these concepts. How a certain individual came up with 1 concept and that was refined by another, etc to the point we got what we have today.<p>The true problem is that we don’t have enough social science about science&#x2F;math.

The only flat-earth article&#x2F;video you need to read&#x2F;watch - more or less the same argument, but much better presented: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;backreaction.blogspot.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;flat-earth-science-wrong-but-not-stupid.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;backreaction.blogspot.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;flat-earth-science-...</a><p>&quot;... This is why I think scientists should take flat earthers’ philosophical problem seriously. It’s a problem that any scientifically advanced society must address. It is not possible for each and every one of us to redo all experiments in the history of science. It therefore becomes increasingly important that scientists provide evidence for how science works, so that people who cannot follow the research itself can instead rely on evidence that the system produces correct and useful descriptions of nature. &quot;

i have a different take. i&#x27;m very glad flat earthers exist. in general i would hope the population of people who believe an idea be proportional to the probability of its truth. so even the wildest ideas should have some modicum of support. consider a world without this. i would imagine it would necessarily have to be thought-policed. i believe this is how we should frame this discussion.<p>what i think is the issue is that we have a broadcasting machine (social media, news, etc) that works on sensationalism. so you are always hearing about fringe ideas and given no signaling to the size of the population that supports it.

The one thing I don&#x27;t get about Flat Earthers is who benefits from promoting a globe? I haven&#x27;t see a conspiracy theory that didn&#x27;t have someone benefiting from the conspiracy. Who exactly benefits &#x2F; profits off people believing in a globe instead of a flatland? The motivation escapes me.

From what I can tell from engaging with Flat Earthers, it&#x27;s actually 50&#x2F;50 people who reject everything reasonable they&#x27;ve been told, and people who are playing a game.<p>The game is fun and simple: pretend you believe in the Flat Earth to piss people off. Refute their scientific facts with questioning and amusing statements, like &quot;I never said it wasn&#x27;t a circle&quot; or &quot;How do you really know Australia exists if you haven&#x27;t been&quot;, etc. You win the game if the other person gets mad and truly believes you believe in the Flat Earth. You lose if either they don&#x27;t believe that you believe this, i.e. if you&#x27;ve given it away with your facial expressions, or if they manage to actually present convincing evidence (e.g. like Carl Sagan&#x27;s sundial shadows) that cannot be refuted.<p>I have conversed with both kinds. The latter can be highly amusing people to talk to, the former are legitimately strange and I can&#x27;t fathom how they come to exist. The linked post may be correct; I think some people simply have the innate urge to reject everything they&#x27;ve been told and to look for a countercultural answer instead, regardless of the subject matter. At least this is a safe direction to channel their madness into.

People are too quick to laugh at flat earthers. Instead, it&#x27;s a great opportunity to learn about the world. Anyone who has laughed at them before, have you first entertained the &quot;what if it&#x27;s true&quot; stance? It&#x27;s an easy one to entertain and disprove yourself, so it&#x27;s great for practice. If the earth is flat, what is their model for the planet? Why is that model impossible?<p>At the very least, it helps you uncover some of your false assumptions of the how the world is by understanding your own model better.

In &quot;Behind the Curve&quot; (Netflix doc about flat earther&#x27;s) the thing that became very clear is that it&#x27;s not just about believing the earth is flat for these people, it is about belonging to a community of like minded people all fighting the same good fight.<p>A sense of community. A sense of purpose. I think that is why they so doggedly stick to their guns. Without sticking to the belief, there is so much to lose (friends, partners, purpose, etc).

Statements like “Schools, as they exist in most Western countries today, do not teach science as such” are wonderfully tautological. Has the author done a study? Are there findings to be shared? What is the definition of “teaching science”? How long is the “now”? What is the “west”? A person understanding the scientific process might ask similar questions, find them not having clear answers and thus not make sweeping statements.

I don&#x27;t disagree with the authors point, yet I would contend that it&#x27;s practically impossible for education to happen without indoctrination. Philosophy itself has a heck of a time proving anything is true in the face of radical doubt besides maybe some elementary notions such as that thought exists. Never mind proving anything as complex as the shape of the earth.<p>Trying to prove to a radically sceptical flat earther that the earth is a specific shape is folly, you will never successfully demonstrate such proof against a sufficiently prepared opponent. You CAN demonstrate that it cannot be proven that the earth is flat, but that&#x27;s about it. One of the most absurd thing about flat eartherdom is how &quot;round earthers&quot; don&#x27;t seem to truly understand the limits of their own knowledge but are eager to get into arguments with other people, whereas flat earthers range from those who are equally inept to savvy people playing a prank on those who wrongly consider themselves knowledgeable.<p>I see the entire phenomena to be a great public lesson on philosophy and science, as well as the futility of imposing your views on other people.

This is where classes that teach the HISTORY of science and how discoveries were made can be so valuable. I was recently reading Bill Bryson&#x27;s &quot;A Short History of Nearly Everything&quot; and he does an excellent job of explaining how each discovery led into the next. He also describes how some discoveries just took a long time because either the apparatus to make that discovery didn&#x27;t exist yet or the right person didn&#x27;t have the right idea.<p>As a personal example, in a college &quot;History of Economics&quot; class, the professor described the &quot;Diamond&#x2F;Water Paradox&quot;. Prior to understanding how the intersection of supply and demand could lead to a market price, very smart people were perplexed how diamonds, which were rare but basically useless, were so expensive but water, a critical element to life, was so cheap.<p>In hindsight, it all seems so obvious but explaining this history of the concept helps add an intuitive understanding of &quot;it&#x27;s not just what an item does but how available it is that helps define the price&quot;.

I mean the difference with flat earth and other sorts of conspiracy theories is that you can directly observe the fact that the Earth is not flat. I’ve been flights, a few on clear days at ~40,000ft and you can definitely make out the curve of the Earth with the naked eye. It doesn’t require any special tools or leaps of logic, you can simply look out the window.

Question: Does anybody actually have a good quality reference point of &quot;This is how I know the earth really is a sphere&quot;? Like, something more <i>direct</i> than <i>indirect</i> (I know you&#x27;d need a fairly massive conspiracy, but that&#x27;s <i>indirect</i>). Previous googling and so forth didn&#x27;t really yield particularly good results for me.

PSA on how to prove to yourself the Earth is a.) not flat b.) specifically not a disc with balls circling overhead, easy edition:<p>1. Watch a sunset. The Sun goes <i>over</i> the horizon (not around in circles overhead).<p>2. Clouds high in the atmosphere stay lit longer at sunset (and light up earlier at sunrise) than clouds lower in the atmosphere. It&#x27;d be the opposite with a &quot;Spotlight sun&quot;, which would project a cone of light onto Earth, wider at the base than the top.<p>3. The Sun&#x27;s apparent diameter never changes. It can&#x27;t be a little ball flying around in circles overhead, because it&#x27;d get smaller when it&#x27;s farther away.<p>4. Watch a lunar eclipse. The shadow of the Earth is curved.<p>5. If you are in the Northern hemisphere, find Polaris, i.e. the Norh Star. At night, <i>all</i> the stars go counterclockwise around it. Its angle off the horizon is exactly your latitude. Go to the Southern hemisphere. <i>No Polaris</i>, it&#x27;s over the horizon ffs. But there is a south pole point you can find by using the southern pointers. <i>All</i> the stars go around the south pole...<i>clockwise</i>. [1]<p>6. Like Polaris, the constellations disappear over the horizon as you move south.<p>7. Go to the <i>ocean</i>. Watch a ship sail away. It <i>disappears</i> hull first over the horizon. Use binoculars. You can see <i>more</i> of the ship if you are higher above the water. The ocean is <i>curved</i>.<p>8. Watch the Sun for a year. It moves through the Zodiac (i.e. against the background stars). That&#x27;s because the Earth orbits the Sun, duh.<p>9. Take a flight from South America to South Africa. Take a stopwatch if you don&#x27;t believe clocks are real. Planes would have to be supersonic to fly the greatly exaggerated distance of a disk Earth.<p>10. Look through a frickin telescope. Literally every planet and star and moon we see is round. Why would the Earth be different?<p>11. Swing a pendulum for 24 hours. It won&#x27;t just rotate back and forth. Foucault showed a free-swinging pendulum will rotate in a circle because of the rotation of the Earth. You can even compute your latitude from the speed at which it processes.

Hypothesis for why there could be an actual &#x2F;defense&#x2F; for the existence and even utility of flat earthers and similar groups: They act as a continual, low-grade chaos assault on scientific institutions, thus encouraging the institutions to maintain resiliency and not stagnate. The more you simply shut these groups down without tackling their actual arguments, the less benefit you&#x27;ll receive, and the more likely it is to take on the magnitude of a true threat. On the other hand, too much of this would lead to significant wasted effort.

The question I always come back to is, “what do I expect to be true”? If I believe that the earth is a spheroid, then I expect that satellites rely on orbital mechanics. If I learn about orbital mechanics, I expect to find math that describes orbits. If I learn about that math, I expect that it’s based on the geometry of circles and ellipses.<p>I don’t have to have firsthand knowledge of these things. I can just build a network of expectations based on other things I know. And when something I observe doesn’t match my expectation, I can shake the tree a bit and figure out why. Individual assumptions can always be challenged with experimental evidence, and the knowledge network only becomes more complete as a result.<p>Every conversation I’ve had with conspiracy theorists suggests that they can’t (or won’t) do this. For them, knowledge is an accumulation of discrete units. Facts need not be built on other facts. Each wild belief is essentially a different Russel’s Teapot: Falsifiability is optional, and contrary evidence is easily waved away as propaganda. Bold predictions don’t need to ever come true, as there are always bolder ones to take their place.<p>I think it comes down to different goals. Their goals are not to make dispassionate predictions about the world, but to fit the world into a mold that matches their emotional state. And to signal to others that their feelings aren’t just valid, but real— Explained by forces that the rest of the world dismisses as “crazy”.

I actually like flat earthers as an exercise in epistemology.<p>We all know that the earth is not flat, there are countless evidence, and a lot of them easy to try for yourself. And flat earth is not a dangerous idea. The only thing you risk by believing and trying to spread the idea is ridicule. It is the perfect playground for trying &quot;alternative&quot; ideas.<p>So go look at all the flat earthers arguments and try to take them seriously. Some of them are actually great. There is even one that mirrors general relativity: the earth is a constantly accelerating disk, this is what creates gravity. Of course they are all wrong, but disproving them require actual thinking.<p>When you have trained yourself on the flat earth, you have completed the tutorial and you can now move on to the real subjects: climate change, vaccines, quack medicine, etc... Here you have actual believers, and they have ideas that can be convincing and dangerous. People die because of quack medicine.

To those who say that flat earthers don’t exist in reality…<p>There’s a guy who drives around town where my parents live in Arizona with his flat earth position writ large on the side of his pickup truck. He will stop to debate with you even if you’re next to him at a traffic light. [1]<p>I think flat earthers do exist but the majority of them may not admit it openly if they’re still sufficiently “there” to fear the social ostracization (word?) that might follow.<p>I agree to some extent with the original article under discussion and I would point interested folks to an interesting video by Sabine Hossenfelder which makes some tangentially similar points. [2]<p>I would also add that the western school system teaches us to fear being wrong and finally letting go of this can be a liberating and empowering experience. After that it seems to become a little easier to believe the next similarly counterfactual thing that comes along.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;InfowarriorRides&#x2F;comments&#x2F;gow054&#x2F;moon_man_prescott_az&#x2F;?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=ios_app&amp;utm_name=iossmf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;InfowarriorRides&#x2F;comments&#x2F;gow054&#x2F;mo...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=f8DQSM-b2cc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=f8DQSM-b2cc</a>

Honestly, I don&#x27;t care if it&#x27;s flat or not, and I will happily make the argument for it being flat, just to annoy people who can&#x27;t let others just be wrong.

One big motivator I&#x27;ve seen for flerfers to hold their belief is a desire to feel significant. Many of these people appear to be frightened by the thought that humans are just a blip compared to the vastness of space and time. It ties in very closely to them wanting to believe that we are so significant to their deity that we were made in its image. These people will probably never be convinced that the Earth isn&#x27;t flat.

I personally enjoyed that early flat earth momentum.<p>It forced me to check the working of great science thinkers that came before me. I learned a lot about the earth in general attempting to prove the flat earth trolls wrong.<p>Its like you are offering a conjecture, a thought experiment where you are forced to ask could this model be possible.<p>I remember a story about Euler I believe, suggested the thought experiment that the earth was hollow and has a central sun, to explain a interesting observation in the magnetosphere.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bigthink.com&#x2F;strange-maps&#x2F;85-inside-the-hollow-earth&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bigthink.com&#x2F;strange-maps&#x2F;85-inside-the-hollow-earth...</a><p>The earth is not flat, but the universe might be, according to Inflation theory, if the universe is flat the earth could be a holographic projection.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Inflation_(cosmology)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Inflation_(cosmology)</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Holographic_principle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Holographic_principle</a>

You could also draw parallels to programmers, in that we used to have to figure things out the hard way, by experimentation, or by reading the documentation (gasp!), whereas nowadays people just go to StackOverflow for answers.<p>People aren&#x27;t used to building their own understanding of things, but instead allow for an excessive amount of outside influence to slowly mold that understanding, without having control over it yourself. I recognize this often in myself, starting to think of a concept or problem, and giving up too soon when facing a complex train of thought and instead resort to trying to search for a solution online, or at least someone who&#x27;s thought about the problem before. This Sucks™.<p>We&#x27;re using our conceptualization skills less and less. I remember a time where you were able (or forced) to ponder a concept for minutes, or hours, or days&#x2F;weeks (depending on the scope of the problem) since there wasn&#x27;t an all-knowing web of information, whereas nowadays it&#x27;s easy to just hit the &quot;I give up&quot; button and find a solution online.

&quot;What does it mean to be indoctrinated in “science” class? Let’s think back to an example that most of us learned growing up. If I asked you, “What is the mitochondria,” you, like me, would probably say “it’s the powerhouse of the cell,” or some similar concept.&quot;<p>&quot;Lies to children&quot;. Sir Terry Pratchett&#x27;s words. That&#x27;s how education works. You start off with lies and you compound them and compound them until no one even knows what on earth is going on but there is a narrative from A to B. Lucy Worsley calls them &quot;fibs&quot; and I agree.<p>That&#x27;s good enough for most people. It&#x27;s slightly better than Just So stories and ideally avoids people doing something terminal. Sometimes, someone brought up on this nonsense looks really deeply into something and writes a paper on it. You never know, it might fly.<p>Flat earth? What a complete pile of bollocks. Imagine how gravity would work on a disc. If you have snags with gravity as a concept then I&#x27;m mad.

I&#x27;m still not sure that flat-earthers aren&#x27;t part of some major prank like the &quot;Birds aren&#x27;t real&quot; group - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Birds_Aren%27t_Real" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Birds_Aren%27t_Real</a>

I&#x27;ve been looking for the comment to explain what I see as the most significant factor in flat earth belief, which would be - missing respect for scientific authority.<p>It&#x27;s possible to be a flat earther if you don&#x27;t see how much your day to day life depends on the work of scientists and engineers - regular people who just focus their energy differently to you. But if you care a little about those brainy sorts, and have enough trust for the prominent ones who communicate well such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson, you would come to accept that there are millions of us who depend on the knowledge of the shape of the earth (almost directly) in our day to day life.<p>It might be the case that given enough bad science teachers and a lack of decent &#x27;nerdy&#x27; people in your life, you never gain that respect, and a flat earth becomes a real possibility.

&quot;These people tend to be more suspicious, untrusting, eccentric, needing to feel special, with a tendency to regard the world as an inherently dangerous place,&quot; Hart said. &quot;They are also more likely to detect meaningful patterns where they might not exist. People who are reluctant to believe in conspiracy theories tend to have the opposite qualities.&quot; - Joshua Hart [1] discussing their research [2] of 1,200 American adults.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedaily.com&#x2F;releases&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;180925075108.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedaily.com&#x2F;releases&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;180925075108.h...</a><p>[2] Joshua Hart, Molly Graether. Something’s Going on Here: Psychological Predictors of Belief in Conspiracy Theories. Journal of Individual Differences, 2018; DOI: 10.1027&#x2F;1614-0001&#x2F;a000268

I think I&#x27;m effectively a flat earther because I wasn&#x27;t able to generalize Bostock&#x27;s &quot;Command Line Cartography&quot; [0]--totally got stuck trying to work out projections for different shapes. I notice that no other comment has brought up the challenges of calculating different projections, does it just come naturally to other people?<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@mbostock&#x2F;command-line-cartography-part-1-897aa8f8ca2c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@mbostock&#x2F;command-line-cartography-part-1...</a><p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spatialreference.org&#x2F;ref&#x2F;epsg&#x2F;nad83-california-albers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spatialreference.org&#x2F;ref&#x2F;epsg&#x2F;nad83-california-alber...</a>

I agree completely with the article.<p>It is actually a very natural thing to believe and when all we have are beliefs some people are simply wired to distrust consensus. I think having outliers is a survival strategy as a species, although it usually goes wrong against the individuals.

We just went through the previous four years of this from the highest level, it&#x27;s obviously not a real belief, just something to &quot;punk the system&quot; where being contrarian is somehow profitable financially, emotionally or mentally to some people.<p>And it&#x27;s not really a belief any more than &quot;believing&quot; drinking bleach won&#x27;t kill you. It&#x27;s a contrarian denial of obvious facts when again, it&#x27;s profitable even on just an ego-level to think&#x2F;say so.<p>However this post made me think of this which if true, is fascinating:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;gallery&#x2F;s5drf0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;gallery&#x2F;s5drf0</a>

Most of science and math taught in school is useless to students who doesn’t pursue a STEM career. However we desperately need a percentage of students to peruse a STEM career for society to function. And we don’t know ahead of time who those students will be. So we force all students to try to learn it. The result being a large percentage of students feeling that they are wasting their time and that “science is useless”. Which it is for <i>them</i>.

If schools taught the scientific method universally it would be harder to indoctrinate them with things like social &quot;science&quot; that dont stand up against that kind of thinking.

Oh! I already knew high school textbooks were the worst, and have been for some time. (I&#x27;ve even read stuff by Feynman criticizing them).<p>But yeah, <i>of course</i> that has real consequences!

I don&#x27;t believe many genuine flat earthers exist, I think &#x27;conspiracies&#x27; like the flat earth and the moon landing being a hoax are a massive psyop to make conspiracy theories seem completely insane to the average Joe so that people are less inclined to believe in other conspiracy theories that are a bit more grounded. After all, you don&#x27;t wanna be lumped in with those crazies that think the Earth is flat, right?

I haven&#x27;t met anyone who believes in a flat Earth. I&#x27;m also wondering if anyone here has. Or if anyone anywhere has. I wonder if they really exist. My current theory is that the belief is a wildly successful joke which has created a community in which they can all share in. Maybe the flat Earth people are the good ones.<p>ETA: Which also means I screwed up a great opportunity to continue the joke by posting information on why the world really is flat.

I do not believe that flat earthers exist.<p>The only people I&#x27;ve seen claiming to believe the earth is flat are youtube celebrities seeking attention or big name celebrities saying it in jest.<p>I have yet to see a non-celebrity (or celebrity wannabe) who believes the earth is flat. Similarly, internet randos don&#x27;t count.<p>As far as I&#x27;m concerned, the whole thing is a 4chan joke gone too far. I certainly don&#x27;t think it has anything to do with our education system.

Someone who is a flat-earther is probably also someone who isn&#x27;t concerned about getting a 100% A+ on their homework and tests.<p>The kids who question the system of schooling are the ones who are doing it appropriately. We don&#x27;t need to make a 100% A+ incorporate questioning indoctrination, we need to make people not so concerned about getting 100% A+.<p>In the UK, 80%+ comprehension is considered an A.

I miss the times when idiots were really into ideas that had absolutely no chance of causing any meaningful harm.

Good point. I wouldn&#x27;t know how to answer most of the tik tok girl&#x27;s questions but I wish I knew.

One request from writers, please avoid mentioning “western world”. It kinda gives impression that you know rest of the “western” world (in many cases you don’t) and that the west is something special.<p>Be specific, if it is your country, just mention that.<p>Nothing specific to the author of this but in general. :)

He had me at „powerhouse of the cell“. But I also remember mitochondria have been separate organisms once that we basically adopted into our own DNA. Hat’s why mitochondrial DNA is used a lot for determining the evolutionary distance between organisms.

In a previous job, the shuttle driver to our office was a flat Earther and would always be trying to convince the engineers that the Earth was flat. No punchline, just good times.

Much of Flat Earth is populated and promoted by Discordianism. Ha ha only serious and all that.<p>The great thing about it is that I can tell you that and it doesn&#x27;t affect a thing. Hail Eris.

Flat earthers are no more preposterous than [insert religion], though... so how comes that we can laugh about flat earthers, but non about christians, muslims etc?

I think the Flat Earthers are really referring to the Masons Firmament which is the Masons way of suggesting they control everything.

The interesting part is, however, that more than 99.99999% of the earth&#x27;s population answer the question whether the earth is flat or a sphere incorrectly.<p>The only correct answer is: &quot;Both&quot;.<p>I personally find it kind of ironic that the vast majority of people who think they are on science side and &quot;sphere&quot; is the correct answer are also wrong.

Here&#x27;s a neat video where flat earthers spout their Truth and reveal themselves to actually be antisemites: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=H110vCGvTmM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=H110vCGvTmM</a>

It&#x27;s amazing the misconceptions that children and adults can form and than maintain, even when a concept is explained to them.<p>I was once teaching a class about balancing forces, and was using skydivers as an example. I asked them to think about the change in forces on a skydiver when she opens her parachute. Most of them could regurgitate a basic explanation of the changes in forces, but one child chipped in to ask why the skydiver flew upwards? I explained that they continued to fall, but he and several other children all disagreed with me and they had video evidence to prove it as well, showing the skydiver flying upwards from the perspective of their buddy. It took a hastily conducted experiment with small weights and plastic bags to convince them otherwise.<p>A friend of mine once asked me why it was that when the shadow of the Earth is falling on the moon to give a crescent shape, how is it that we can still see the moon sometimes when the sun is rising, and there can&#x27;t possibly be a shadow. Again, my explanation was insufficient to persuade him, and so I went home and created a computer 3D model of the solar system, so he could see the changes in the moon from different camera angles.<p>This is why we used to do &quot;experiments&quot; in science labs. You could easily describe diffusion, but then how do the learners know that it&#x27;s real and not just another thing they are being told is the truth. Have them slowly dissolve iodine crystals in different temperatures of water, and even though they and you know what the outcome will be, at least they have the proof of their own eyes.<p>Maybe the pressure on results, lack of time and lack of money is preventing some teachers from spending time conducting experiments with their children, but more need to be done to prevent them from sucking in &#x27;evidence&#x27; from YouTube channels about the flat earth, 5G networks causing covid and vaccinations being poisonous. They need proof that their teachers are telling the truth more than 50% of the time, so they can have trust that what else remains is also the truth.

Agh, another site delivered over HTTP

There are no flat earthers.<p>You&#x27;ve been trolled.

I think the earth is flat AMA

while it&#x27;s easy to poke fun on flatties, it&#x27;s uncomforting in what flat earths we mainstreamies tend to believe. Growth to name one. Or Economy. There&#x27;s a lot of flat earths that glue our day to day life together. Obey. Consume.

yeah, simply put &quot;repeat after me&quot; is no comparison to talking to a learned elder...<p>Fed up of most of the problems in the west having been preventable had we actually invested in the education and public health systems about 30 years ago and didn&#x27;t let certain groups become so disenfranchised as to become pointlessly political. (I understand why schools did, they thought they&#x27;d get treated better by a left-wing political parties, but in reality other than platitudes they&#x27;re not really any better off)

I think the key point the post tries to make is that your average Western education student is primed to memorize and take facts at face value, without interrogation. Overall, besides the assumption that Western education is hardly homogeneous, a point already made by several commenters, this seems somewhat valid but incomplete. It&#x27;s not as if _all_ flat Earthers come to their belief by accepting it at face value. There&#x27;s the people from the Netflix doc Beyond the Curve [1] and that guy who&#x27;s trying to build a rocket [2], so it seems to me that there&#x27;s at least some evidence that contradicts the original point - there are conspiracy theorists who not only proceed to interrogate their beliefs, but test them in a way that _should_ lead them to the correct conclusion. It&#x27;s not so much a problem with memorization so much as it&#x27;s a problem with the interpretation of results - any test that contradicts a flat Earth must be from a mistake. This is a much more subtle problem than the one introduced by the post, this is not just a case of mindless sheep doubting one memorized system and switching to some other memorized system, these are rational people deriving their beliefs in a rational way, but for several different reasons, arriving at the wrong conclusion.<p>I don&#x27;t want to type up a massive wall of text, but some other problems I have are: 1. The fact that education isn&#x27;t occurring in a vacuum, even if &quot;Western education&quot; was constructed to teach all facts by rationally deriving the facts, we can&#x27;t deny that there&#x27;s a religious element to Flat Earth, and if you&#x27;re taught from an early age that the Bible is both true and literal, then they&#x27;re going to ignore that rational education anyways (I have nothing against religion, but the literal interpretation I was taught at an early age led me to believe that the Earth was only 6000 years old). This is also important because a conspiracy theory does not come from nowhere, there has to be a narrative. Otherwise, there&#x27;s no reason to doubt what you&#x27;ve been taught. There&#x27;s no anti-mitochondria conspiracy. 2. There&#x27;s going to be an element of memorization, if not the conclusion (&quot;the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell&quot;) then the observation, and so what happens if they doubt the experiment they&#x27;ve been taught? At _some_ point the student has to have faith in the teacher, and faith in the scientists who came before us. We can&#x27;t just dismiss all memorization as inferior to frameworks and rationality, there&#x27;s a need for a distinction to be made here. 3. Reducing belief in conspiracy theories to an inadequacy in education seems to be ignoring the underlying problem of doubt. We can lampshade this and say that teaching people to accept things at face value causes them to accept other things at face value as well, but ultimately there&#x27;s no system under this framework for explaining _why_ a person may privilege one belief over the other.<p>I overall agree with the point that education seems to focus too much on memorizing disparate facts that almost feel like trivia at points, but the post seems to assume that providing the tools to interrogate our beliefs will lead us to the right conclusion, but these tools can still be misused and the underlying assumptions under which we apply our rationality are still important. Understanding these underlying assumptions seems far more important to me than trying to pin down a complex issue on a single, equally complex thing as education.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;flat-earthers-tried-to-prove-the-earth-was-flat-and-it-did-not-go-well-2019-2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;flat-earthers-tried-to-prove...</a> [2]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=32X88HMae0I" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=32X88HMae0I</a>

(2020)

&gt; Schools, as they exist in most Western countries today, do not teach science as such. Mostly, they are simply a system of indoctrination.<p>This needs to be repeated and understood. Public schooling is an outgrowth of state&#x27;s needs for productive patriots, not any sort of noble pursuit.

I found it highly amusing how much people care about what other people think, as if the earth is really going to physically change its shape if some people believe it to be another. It&#x27;s like believing the world is created by a god, or believing the universe isn&#x27;t expanding, or believing there are finite amount of prime numbers. So what? These beliefs are descriptions, not ideals. They are believing in the earth is flat, not the earth should be flat (oh but I hope so much there&#x27;s someone believing in the earth is round but we should flatten it). I personally prefer to live in a world where people have absurdly different beliefs on things that won&#x27;t make a difference in everyday life.