The idea that the Earth is a sphere was all but settled by ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle (384–322 BC), who obtained empirical evidence after travelling to Egypt and seeing new constellations of stars. Eratosthenes, in the third century BC, became the first person to calculate the circumference of the Earth. Islamic scholars made further advanced measurements from about the 9th century AD onwards, while European navigators circled the Earth in the 16th century. Images from space were final proof, if any were needed.
Today’s flat-Earth believers are not, though, the first to doubt what seems unquestionable. The notion of a flat Earth initially resurfaced in the 1800s as a backlash to scientific progress, especially among those who wished to return to biblical literalism. Perhaps the most famous proponent was the British writer Samuel Rowbotham (1816–1884). He proposed the Earth is a flat immovable disc, centred at the North Pole, with Antarctica replaced by an ice wall at the disc’s outer boundary.
The International Flat Earth Research Society, which was set up in 1956 by Samuel Shenton, a signwriter living in Dover, UK, was regarded by many people as merely a symbol of British eccentricity – amusing and of little consequence. But in the early 2000s, with the Internet now a well-established vehicle for off-beat views, the idea began to bubble up again, mostly in the US. Discussions sprouted in online forums, the Flat Earth Society was relaunched in October 2009 and the annual flat-Earth conference began in earnest.
A lot of physics is about choosing the right model for a task. Keep it as simple as possible, but still accurate enough to carry out the calculation you wish to perform.
Since most people aren’t global transport engineers or something like that, there is little to no use to have people think that earth is a sphere. Different than being anti-vaccine, this one here doesn’t really hurt anyone. I don’t see why there’s so much outrage about this.
Flat earth is so boring. If you are going to make stuff up really lean in. Go full Pratchett and say we live on the disc world with the disc rotating on the back of four elephants who stand on the back of mighty A’Tuin the world turtle, who swims infinitely through space
I would like a sponsored trip in the Kite to debunk my spherical-Earth beliefs, please.
It’s not gonna be the right answer, but you know I’m gonna choose Ridicule as my response to flat-earthers, anti-vax people and similar morons.
Flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers and any other anti-common sense stupidity should be publicly shamed. No reason to be nice to the people who purposefully and are willfully ignorant. Uninformed and uneducated are fine, but these people pride themselves on being idiots. They belong in the trash bin of history.
the only people who belong in the trash bin of history are the people who needlessly shame other people for no good reason; these people haven’t hurt anyone.
Anti-vaxxers have hurt many people, but maybe you didn’t mean them when you said these people".
Flat-earth belief likely has secondary unwanted effects, like how all conspiracy theories eventually funnel into anti-semitism. It’s also a huge opportunity cost.
Flat-earth belief likely has secondary unwanted effects, like how all conspiracy theories eventually funnel into anti-semitism.
Correlation is not causation
I don’t know what point you were trying to make
I am saying flat earth believes attract a lot of conspiracy nuts, and a lot of conspiracy nuts also believe in anti-semitic conspiracy theories.
That doesn’t mean flat earth believes cause them to be anti-semitic.
I’m pretty sure it’s a pretty well known phenomenon that conspiracy theories funnel down into antisemitism
no i didn’t mean anti-vaxxers with “these people”
Problem is, there’s a lot of overlap between those two beliefs, in their causes and the people affected.
We should encourage people. Welcome them to submit falsifiable hypotheses, and experimental findings that are repeatable, let them publish their data.
People going against the grain is totally fine, they just need to be experimental and prove it. Engaging with people in rhetorical debates is not productive. Say that’s interesting, I’d love to see your data, what experiments have you done?
This is idealistic, but I think for most people conspiracy stuff is filling an emotional need. If the experiment fails, the emotional problems remain. Thus the theory will be updated to uphold the feelings.
So like if they see a photo of the earth from space, they’re more likely to say it’s a fraud. Truth doesn’t matter. Feelings do.
Anyone who cares about facts on this topic would have left flat-earth after a short while on wikipedia.
So the question is: what emotional need is this filling, and how can it be met more safely?
wow was not expecting decency, respect, and logic. thought this was where we mocked people
Do we have data on the prevalence of Flat Earth beliefs?
from the article:
polling data by the firm Datafolha, for example, indicate that 7% of the Brazilian population – some 11 million people – believe that the Earth is flat
Do we have multiple points to establish a trend?
An interesting read, thx.
Flat-Earthers seem to have a very low standard of evidence for what they want to believe but an impossibly high standard of evidence for what they don’t want to believe (Lee McIntyre, Boston University)
This sums it up perfectly, for me. And not just for those flat-earthers. They don’t want to discuss their ideas, they want to be right. There is no way we can have a sincere debate with any ‘believer’ (of whatever).
And why should we? Why should we do the work to prove them wrong knowing they will blissfully ignore any demonstration that does not end in ‘omfg! You were right all the time! The Earth is indeed flat, and hollow, and reptilians are our true overlords, and the only time NASA send anyone to the moon is when they were all high!’
Why not let them do all the work themselves, instead? They seem to be so willing. I would even happily see some public money used to fund their ‘space exploration’ probes if I did not know for sure that the instant their stupid ideas would be proven wrong by their very own probe, the fact that any public money would have been involved in making it, they would argue it’s one more irrefutable proof of the conspiracy against their (unshaken and unshakable) truth.
Imho, the real issues is not those people believing their moronic ideas. There always have been a bunch like them. Flat-earthers, doomsday believers, anti-vax, conspirationists of every single type you can imagine, and so on. We should be fine with them holding to their believes. Why? Because they should not matter, they should remain the statistically insignificant minority they are, no matter how loud. Also, we should not be afraid to call them for who they are.
Have we really become afraid of calling them by their name? Amusing morons at times, but morons nonetheless, and shameless assholes for those among them that take advantage of those people’s gullibility for their own personal profit.
Have we become that fragile ourselves that we’re afraid to simply ignore them when we’re not frankly laughing out loud at their ‘theories’? Because if we have, that bunch of eccentrics and their theories, is certainly not the issue I would worry about. We are.
Because they should not matter, they should remain the statistically insignificant minority they are, no matter how loud.
I think the problem is, they have become far more than a ‘statistically insignificant minority’. Anti-intellectualism is becoming more rampant at a horrifying speed
I think the problem is, they have become far more than a ‘statistically insignificant minority’. Anti-intellectualism is becoming more rampant at a horrifying speed
I do wonder if we have any data regarding that? I mean isn’t it also, next to this quick rise of proud idiocy I’m not denying, a lot more noise made by them, and around them? Say, for example, by our dear media willing to do their worst in order to sell more paper/get more page views?
Not specifically flat Earthers, but there’s a ton of data about the increase of anti-vaxxers as compared to in the past. Seems pretty undeniable that their numbers and influence have gone up, the question is what we can do about it.
Isnt what you are doing by dismissing flat earth believers anti-intellectualism? You are dismissing the chance they are intelligent enough to change their mind.
There is no way we can have a sincere debate with any ‘believer’ (of whatever).
That’s no way to talk about gravity believers.
Show any “gravity believer” any object failing to accelerate to earth at 9.807ms^-2 and they will stop believing in Newtonian gravity.
It’s been 337 years and nobody has done it, so at this point it does seem unlikely.Edit in case of pedantry: within 1% of 9.807 due to gravitational variance on earth’s surface
Are you a solipsist?
I thought it’d be pretty clear I’m an empiricist when it comes to epistemology. Solipsism is intensely unuseful. Why do you ask?
Well you said belief is bad, so drag assumed you believed nothing.
Two problems with that comment there. Firstly, solipsism isn’t belief in nothing so the outcome of your assumption is ill informed. The second, and pretty glaringly huge problem is that I didn’t actually say that, or anything like it. Be honest, now…are you honestly engaging in good faith? Hmmm? Maybe you’ve just mistaken me for someone else.
Yes, drag mistook you for Lib.
I consider the Earth more of a watermelon shape; complete with seeds
If they are so numerous we cannot ignore them, we must create scenarios where anti-intellectual leaders must successfully implement a different method of accomplishing something in physics or engineering, and when they cannot and are shown their errors, we have to discuss what that means and then have them disseminate that info to their sheep. Anti-intellectual cults only listen to their leaders, but also often will abandon leaders if they switch perspectives, which that is then a hopeless endeavor.
“It’s not really an education thing,” she says. “It really is about distrusting authorities and institutions. [It] seems to be based on both a conspiracy mentality and a deeply held belief that looks a lot like religiosity but isn’t necessarily specifically tied to a religion”.
[…] Their lack of trust in authority includes not just scientists but scientific bodies such as NASA, all of whom (they think) are part of a massive conspiracy to prevent the flat-Earth truth being revealed. “[They] view the world through this really dark filter where [they] assume that all authorities and institutions and corporations are just there to exploit you.”
Yeah that really resonates with me, an anarchist. You can’t trust authorities, you have to find out things your own way. Especially this part:
Oddly, Landrum says that many flat-Earthers may distrust scientists, but they are not against the scientific method. “The majority of them put a lot of faith, for lack of a better word, in science. There’s a lot of curiosity and a lot of scepticism and a lot of the really good qualities that make scientists.”
how the physics community should best respond
These people haven’t hurt anyone. Why won’t you just let them believe what they want to believe?
Letting people believe what they want to believe gets people killed, unfortunately. You cannot just make up alternatives to chemistry, medicine, and physics.
Mixing brake fluid and bleach isn’t magic, but it does produce a lot of magic smoke. It also can permanently blind or kill you. People have turned shit like this into real products, take Radithor for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor
This product led to a revision in medicine after the patient died due to alternative medicine. Another example for flat earthers is flying.
Planes fly routes based off fuel calculations, because fuel is heavy and it takes fuel to fly with fuel. If you are a flat earth pilot, and you fuck up your fuel calculations because you don’t account for the curvature of the Earth, you and the 300 other unlucky bastards on the plane might crash into the ocean before reaching your destination. God forbid a flat earth programmer mess with fuel calculations for entire fleets of planes. It might be a one day mistake, but there are tens of thousands of flights all over the world.
I never advocated for people to develop useless or harmful products. I merely suggested that the average person will do exactly 0 (zero) developments in their life which require them to know that the earth is a sphere. So that’s what i meant with “let them believe what they want”, as long as it doesn’t hurt somebody.
The antivax movement is a very good example of how unscientific beliefs and credulity can harm others. Flat earthers, antivax, etc are all symptoms caused by the same reasons.
Oddly, Landrum says that many flat-Earthers may distrust scientists, but they are not against the scientific method. “The majority of them put a lot of faith, for lack of a better word, in science. There’s a lot of curiosity and a lot of scepticism and a lot of the really good qualities that make scientists.”
There are many experiments that can be done by a single person to prove that the Earth is a sphere. Some of these experiments have been known and performed for millenia. If flat-Earthers were truly scientific, they would have changed their minds based on those experiments. Instead, they willingly blind themselves to the obvious and come up with ever more elaborate theories as to why their experiments returned a result they disagree with.
Certainly there are many experiments that can be done by a single person to prove that the Earth is a sphere, but who really has the time (and motivation!) to perform them?
They have their theory. It’s compatible with their experiments. They’re not being “unscientific”. What they believe makes perfect sense given their very strong priors against the possibility that the earth is round.
If you want to criticize them, criticize they way they obtained those extremely strange priors. Do not call people “unscientific” for doing science based upon different prior believes then yours. If everyone have the same believes, there would be no scientific progress.
Science does not HAVE any prior beliefs. It seems like you don’t quite understand what the scientific method entails.
Are you denying Bayesian statistics now? I’d argue that is even more “unscientific” than denying the earth is round.
Bayesian statistics
Given its irrelevance to the basic concepts regarding the shape of the Earth, I fail to see the connection
Under the Bayesian way to do science, you start off with some beliefs (”priors”) about what your trying to understand. You then devise experiments that either confirm or deny those believes. You then update your priors based on the data you see from the experiment.
A normal person might start off with, say, 70% belief that the earth is flat. They then look at some data (take an airliner around the world, look at pictures of earth taken by satellites, do some of those curvature measurement experiments, …). Each time they update their priors, and soon enough it becomes a 99.99% belief that the earth is NOT flat.
A flat earther, for some reason, starts off with a 99.99999% belief that the earth is flat, along with a 99.99999% belief that the government is trying to hide the fact from them. You show them some experiments, they might update their priors to a 99.999%. To convince them the earth is not flat, you would need a LOT of data. You might tell them to look at previous experiments done on this, but due to the 99.99999% belief that the government is lying, they would only have a 0.00001% confidence in the data reported by scientists. So it takes a lot more to convince them that the earth is not flat.
Now why did they start off with such strange priors? They’re probably conspiracy nuts. You can criticize them for that. But don’t call them unscientific if they are still doing experiments and updating their priors.
But there aren’t any corners, you know, like the bible says.
gawd i love Cunk. best series’s i just watched. i love not taking this stuff too seriously. like why would anyone, on any side, take this seriously. just laugh and enjoy life.
yeah that’s what i’m thinking; this topic isn’t a reason to fight, it’s a topic to agree to have different perspectives. like, the model that earth is flat is out-right valid in certain situations. lots of people don’t need unnecessary complexity.
lots of people don’t need unnecessary complexity.
There’s nothing complex about ‘The earth is a sphere’. There’s a LOT of unnecessary complexity in ‘The earth is flat, and the entire world is in on a conspiracy to make me believe otherwise’.
If you keep slightly rotating yourself as you go around the Earth, and are personally measuring from your perspective, the Earth is overall flat isn’t it? Just like how doing a frontflip causes the entire earth to orbit u.
Disclaimer: I just watched Cunk on Earth and now I know the ways of science
