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So which are craziest, flatearthers, sovcits, or ...?

The Great Zaganza said:
Well, at a party, I can just ask 2 Flat Earthers how they think Day and Night works, and walk away when they inevitably will start screaming at one another.
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What if they end up having fun batting ideas back and forth, before reaching a mutually-satisfying conclusion that the earth is indeed flat and night and day just work "somehow"?
 
theprestige said:
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that like Gell-Mann Amnesia, the Dunning-Krueger effect is strong amongst everyone.
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It is very strong with conspiracy theorists, who think they are in to something and with no relevant experience, dispute experts and fail to evidence they are correct.
 
Nessie said:
It is very strong with conspiracy theorists, who think they are in to something and with no relevant experience, dispute experts and fail to evidence they are correct.
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One thinking one is into something with no relevant experience is not unique to conspiracy theorists. Everybody does it. That's the gist of Dunning and Krueger's research.
 
theprestige said:
What if they end up having fun batting ideas back and forth, before reaching a mutually-satisfying conclusion that the earth is indeed flat and night and day just work "somehow"?
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unlikely.
the standard image of a flat earth with a sun obviously doesn't work, and neither does the "spotlight" idea.

At the very least, a seed of doubt would have been planted.
 
There are pictures of earth taken from space from every angle that make it obvious the earth isn't flat. The problem of course is those pictures are dismissed as fake.

A fun idea is to challenge flat earthers to plane hop around the world and offer them (or their next of kin :)) a huge bag of money if they fail to return to the point of departure, and also fail to capture on video the point where the plane takes the drastic maneuvers necessary to "circumnavigate" a disk.
 
theprestige said:
"Obviously."
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Yes, obviously. wrt the spotlight suggestion, the sun is obviously (without scare quotes) spheroid, because it presents a luminous circle to everybody who looks at it, regardless of viewing angles. Spotlights can't do this, as can be demonstrated at whatever cocktail party or barbecue you like by pointing out suitably-shaped objects, such as if your hosts have floodlights.

https://images.homedepot-static.com...-outdoor-flood-spot-lights-ms185r-64_1000.jpg
 
The sun is obviously spheroid, but it doesn't follow from this that "a flat earth with a sun obviously doesn't work".

All I see is TGZ handwaving at some vague received wisdom about how lighting manifests differently, and assuming that can be easily discerned in a single moment, without taking the time to do some observations and take some measurements and probably still rely on received wisdom for some parts of your reasoning.

I question the premise that anyone can empirically prove that the only way the sun could be illuminating your backyard barbecue that way is because the earth is round. If you believe it can be done - walk us through it. What measurements do you take, in your backyard? What observations do you make? What are the steps of your reasoning, from those measurements and observations to your conclusion that the earth is "obviously" round, as seen from your backyard?
 
theprestige said:
The sun is obviously spheroid, but it doesn't follow from this that "a flat earth with a sun obviously doesn't work".
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Yes, it does, because if the sun is a luminous sphere, then the FE model of night and day will not work; all the earth's surface would be in sunlight as long as the sun is overhead, and none of it would be when it is not.
 
Reformed Offlian said:
Yes, it does, because if the sun is a luminous sphere, then the FE model of night and day will not work; all the earth's surface would be in sunlight as long as the sun is overhead, and none of it would be when it is not.
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You take your party guest into your backyard, show them the entirety of the earth's surface, and say "see? Obviously round!" That's your proof?
 
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theprestige said:
You take your party guest into your backyard, show them the entirety of the earth's surface, and say "see? Obviously round!" That's your proof?
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Most flat earthers today acknowledge time zones exist. That's why the spotlight idea exists.
 
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theprestige said:
You take your party guest into your backyard, show them the entirety of the earth's surface, and say "see? Obviously round!" That's your proof?
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Oh for Pete's sake. Have him phone a friend (or his Mummy or Daddy) who lives in a different time zone, a few hundred miles East or West. Have him ask the friend where the Sun is in the sky. Repeat with friends and/or relatives further away. No Flat Earth model can provide an explanation of this curious phenomenon. A globular Earth does (and maybe a cylindrical one too -- but let's not go there).

(Unless of course, THEY are all in on it.)
 
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Reformed Offlian said:
Most flat earthers today acknowledge time zones exist. That's why the spotlight idea exists.
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How on god's grey earth do they explain that its simultaneously night on part of the planet and day elsewhere? Like couldn't one of them travel long distance and call another one and they could tell each other if its night or day?! Or would they think its the government intercepting the call and changing what they say, and replacing one of them with a replicant for when they meet up again?
 
lobosrul5 said:
How on god's grey earth do they explain that its simultaneously night on part of the planet and day elsewhere? Like couldn't one of them travel long distance and call another one and they could tell each other if its night or day?! Or would they think its the government intercepting the call and changing what they say, and replacing one of them with a replicant for when they meet up again?
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And that's the ultimate arrival point of any conspiracy theory: solipsism. The entire world exists just to trick *you*.
 
If a person has lasted long enough on the earth, learned to walk and talk and whatnot, you should not need to show him the entirety of the earth from the back yard, a thing he and his stupid theory also, of course, can never do.

Even a fairly strict empiricism has to allow for some elapse of time, movement in space, and even for reliance on the accounts of others.

I don't think even Hume or William James would count an inability to convince a conspiracy-addled fool of the earth's roundness from nothing more than you can see at this moment from your back yard as a failure of science.
 
bruto said:
If a person has lasted long enough on the earth, learned to walk and talk and whatnot, you should not need to show him the entirety of the earth from the back yard, a thing he and his stupid theory also, of course, can never do.

Even a fairly strict empiricism has to allow for some elapse of time, movement in space, and even for reliance on the accounts of others.

I don't think even Hume or William James would count an inability to convince a conspiracy-addled fool of the earth's roundness from nothing more than you can see at this moment from your back yard as a failure of science.
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I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I don't think it's a failure of science at all. I do, however, think it refutes TGZ's allegation that you can't help but notice the earth is round in your daily life. I think the reality is that it's very easy to go about your daily life without noticing that the earth is round, that there is no downside to not noticing the earth is round, and that it actually takes some effort to put together an empirical argument otherwise.
 
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theprestige said:
I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I don't think it's a failure of science at all. I do, however, think it refutes TGZ's allegation that you can't help but notice the earth is round in your daily life.
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TGZ never said that. I see we've gone from "gist of his premise" to "allegation".
 
The Great Zaganza said:
unlikely.
the standard image of a flat earth with a sun obviously doesn't work, and neither does the "spotlight" idea.

At the very least, a seed of doubt would have been planted.
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I am astounded that so many people in this thread remain as naive about Flat Earth and flat-earthers as they are.

You're right, typical flat-earther "models" of how the Sun and Moon supposedly work in relation to Earth's surface and all of that, couldn't physically "work". Of course they can't. They're not supposed to. Flat Earth isn't about creating a working model. It never was. Indeed, the actual aim of Flat Earth is to posit a form of Earth that can't, and shouldn't, "work", but nevertheless does.

You guys look at things like the fact that flat-earthers readily concede that other planets like Mars are round, and just laugh at this like it represents a logical blind spot or selective cognition. It's not; it's intentional, and you're missing the insight it provides into what they're actually thinking.

Flat-earthers believe other planets are round and stars are real, but the Earth is different. They have so many different theories about the granular details because the actual shape of the Earth is in reality tangential to the point, just a fun distraction; the real crux of the theory is simply that the Earth is a special case that isn't subject to physical rules that apply to the rest of the universe. Complaining about how gravity "would have to work" on a disk-shaped Earth, or asking about what's on the other side of the disk, or how the Sun could ever visibly set over such a planet, completely misses the point.

It's not supposed to be explainable, because the underlying assertion is that it only works because God makes it work. The Sun is only visible from part of the disk at a time and appears to set over the horizon because God makes it look that way. Gravity is uniform across the disk because God decides how gravity works. People can never find the edge of the disk because God chooses not to let them. Satellites and GPS work, but their designers intentionally lie about how they work in order to give the false impression of a globe because they want to make people disbelieve in God by offering them instead a universe that operates as a set of knowable and predictable chain-reactions that doesn't require a God pushing buttons and making positive decisions.

Flat Earth is a religious argument for the existence of God, not a pseudoscience. You can't prove it wrong with "evidence". You can't prove any conspiracy theory wrong to its believers with evidence, to be sure - but this is true for entirely different reasons when it comes to Flat Earth. The fact that their models of the Earth and sky "can't work" isn't a bug, it's the feature that proves to them that God has to exist.
 
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Well, if you’re going to say that the Sun moves in a circle above the clouds, but to be too dense to notice that the setting Sun often illuminates clouds from underneath - impossible with a flat Earth model - then you might as well say God just bends the light or something.

It’s crappy theology to make God out to be a liar that way, but a lot of people who insist He exists act as if He doesn’t exist, certainly not in terms of accountability for misrepresenting Him.

I can’t really judge the seriousness of flat-Earthers. You don’t meet many in an aerospace career :)
 
Same difference.

Ever since Creationism, religious zealots thought they can use science against itself for their purposes.

But a flat earth is way too far out there - evolution is a much easier target, and they failed there.

Unless you invoke pure irrationally/ cognitive dissonance, the fact that the average person has an easy time explaining day/night on a sphere and no hope at all on a flat earth shows that, yes, it's obvious to everyone, everywhere, all the time.

Unless the point is being right no matter what.
 
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theprestige said:
I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I don't think it's a failure of science at all. I do, however, think it refutes TGZ's allegation that you can't help but notice the earth is round in your daily life. I think the reality is that it's very easy to go about your daily life without noticing that the earth is round, that there is no downside to not noticing the earth is round, and that it actually takes some effort to put together an empirical argument otherwise.
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Of course history abounds with examples of people able to function in ordinary life while holding entirely erroneous beliefs. Up to that point I agree. But I do not think ignorance is the same as denial. An ordinary person not taught things may never know them. This is hardly the same as holding an insane belief in an unworkable world run by a massive cabal that has expended untold amounts not only to teach error but to fog the minds of millions of pilots, astronauts, cartographers, astronomers, etc., not to mention just plain old travelers.

There is a difference between not noticing something and denying its existence. In some sense I do not notice the existence of Russia. I've never seen it, only pictures and maps and of course some people who claim to be Russian. And I could go about any number of versions of a daily life without ever going to Russia or dealing with it directly. And yet, I think it would be unequivocally crazy if I were thus to deny it exists.

In any case, though the forum is slow tonight so I haven't managed to navigate all the way through the thread, I do not see TGZ saying you can't fail to notice the curvature of the earth in your daily life. I don't think anyone is suggesting that our paleolithic ancestors, for example, were crazy or stupid because their cosmology was sketchy.

What I did see him say was that you can perceive its consequences if you understand what certain things mean, and that once those things are learned, the conclusion that the earth is round should become obvious. Of course that requires not only a lucid teacher but a willing pupil, the latter of which is almost certainly absent from the imagined scene.

Because, of course, an adult in our time who asserts a flat earth has already openly, readily (or shall I say just for old times' sake "arrantly") acknowledged that he will not believe what you say.
 
Good post by Bruto, which I think explains the point I've been trying to get at, perhaps better than I have.

It's entirely possible to go through your daily life without noticing the existence of Russia. Denying its existence won't really impact on your daily life either. But the mental contortions necessarily implied by that belief do extreme damage to your epistemology.

The same is true of the flat earth view. You might not notice the curvature of the earth directly in your daily life, but the implications of a flat earth lead to extreme mental contortions necessary in its actual belief, including but not limited to positing a global conspiracy.

There's a similar issue face by those who deny the validity of General Relativity. Again, nothing in their daily life will directly contradict their view. But as is often pointed out, GPS makes adjustments based on GR, and it would be wildly inaccurate without those adjustments. To put it another way, if GR were invalid, those adjustments would cause the GPS to become inaccurate very quickly. In order to both disbelieve GR and believe in the accuracy of GPS it's necessary to posit something to square this circle, for instance that these adjustments aren't actually done. But once you start believing in these kinds of massive conspiracies (to cover up the falsity of GR?) your credence in other conspiracies will increase as well. Suddenly conspiracies about all sorts of things become likely explanations for minor inconsistencies.
 
Checkmite said:
Flat-earthers believe other planets are round and stars are real, but the Earth is different.
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Thank you for this illuminating post. As for the part I quoted, this is from an interview with Steve Mirski, who has engaged with flat earthers extensively:
Mirski said:
There's a myriad of different versions of the flat earth and the universe beyond it. So some will believe that we're flat. But the universe around it is pretty much as is, that's quite a niche belief in the flat earth world.
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Flat Earthers: What They Believe and Why

I get the distinct sense there's nothing one could say or demonstrate that would bring a flat earther to realize reality.
 
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I don't understand the advantage in making people erroneously believe the Earth is round? What's to be gained?

As for the original question, I vote Qanon. At its heart, a deeply irrational paranoia, fear and hatred. The kind of "provoked mental illness in a healthy person" that cults are made of.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
Well, at a party, I can just ask 2 Flat Earthers how they think Day and Night works, and walk away when they inevitably will start screaming at one another.
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Well, if you are at a party where there is two Flat Earthers, walking away is a good idea in any instance. :rolleyes:

Hans
 
theprestige said:
What if they end up having fun batting ideas back and forth, before reaching a mutually-satisfying conclusion that the earth is indeed flat and night and day just work "somehow"?
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If you already walked away from them, what does it matter?

Here's a thought: I'm also tempted to argue with flat-earthers, but as many of us have experienced, it's to no avail. So, since their belief is largely harmless, at least to others, why actually bother?

Don't wrestle with pigs.
Don't feed trolls.
Don't try to convince Flat Earthers. ;):p

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
If you already walked away from them, what does it matter?

Here's a thought: I'm also tempted to argue with flat-earthers, but as many of us have experienced, it's to no avail. So, since their belief is largely harmless, at least to others, why actually bother?

Don't wrestle with pigs.
Don't feed trolls.
Don't try to convince Flat Earthers. ;):p
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I also dismissed flat-earthers as by and large harmless until I read Checkmite's post, and then delved further. Check out the link in post 143. The movement (such that it is) is on the rise. And once you buy into one bat-**** crazy CT, that opens pandora's box. Like, NASA is the work of the devil. There are lizard people. The Jews are behind it. Etc.
 
It is.

No one is a flat Earther because of observations.
They believe in a Conspiracy to cover something up and the something is for some a flat earth. For others it's (((shapeshifters))).
For many it's both.
 
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varwoche said:
I also dismissed flat-earthers as by and large harmless until I read Checkmite's post, and then delved further. Check out the link in post 143. The movement (such that it is) is on the rise. And once you buy into one bat-**** crazy CT, that opens pandora's box. Like, NASA is the work of the devil. There are lizard people. The Jews are behind it. Etc.
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I think that is basically inevitable with the flat earth. The conspiracy is so vast that it makes almost any other conspiracy seem trivial. I also can't get over the motive. What is the motive for the conspiracy to cover up the flat earth? Just gaslighting on a mass scale for the lolz?
 
theprestige said:
No it isn't. 90% of what you're touting as empirical observations is just received wisdom about how to interpret what you're seeing. Like STS's nonsense about the sun illuminating the undersides of clouds. I can debunk that claim in ten seconds with a tabletop, a piece of paper, and a floor lamp.
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What do you think empiricism is? An empiricist asserts that experience is real, not that we're forbidden to understand it.
 
ahhell said:
I think that is basically inevitable with the flat earth. The conspiracy is so vast that it makes almost any other conspiracy seem trivial. I also can't get over the motive. What is the motive for the conspiracy to cover up the flat earth? Just gaslighting on a mass scale for the lolz?
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Knowing secret knowledge makes you superior.
 
bruto said:
What do you think empiricism is? An empiricist asserts that experience is real, not that we're forbidden to understand it.
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I apologize if I'm using the wrong terminology. By empirical observation I mean you actually go out and take the measurements yourself, reason through to a conclusion yourself.

The guy who figured out that the earth must be round because of the correlation of shadows of perpendicular objects distant from each other made an empirical observation for himself.

If you then come along and say, I know the earth is round because someone proved it from the correlation of shadows of perpendicular objects, that's great, but it's not you making an empirical observation and figuring it out for yourself. It's just you pointing at a shadow and repeating a claim someone else made that you believe but (probably) haven't bothered to verify. That's what TGZ is doing. All his easy, obvious proofs amount to saying, "I heard that someone else proved that the phases of the moon mean the earth is round" and similar things.
 
varwoche said:
Thank you for this illuminating post. As for the part I quoted, this is from an interview with Steve Mirski, who has engaged with flat earthers extensively:


Flat Earthers: What They Believe and Why

I get the distinct sense there's nothing one could say or demonstrate that would bring a flat earther to realize reality.
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Correction. Mirski is the interviewer. The interviewee is Michael Marshall.
 
8enotto said:
How does one use this secret knowledge and superiority to any advantage? Besides invites to backwater forums and discussion groups of like minds.
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Taking a broad view here, they gain the support of the President of the United States and actively help to move the country into a fascist theocracy.
 
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