Michael Marshall, project director of the Good Thinking Society in the UK, discusses the resurgence of flat-Earth conspiracy theories, which claim that Earth is actually a flat disk surrounded by an impenetrable ring of ice called Antarctica. This belief has been around for over two millennia and has become part of an ecosystem of conspiracy theories. Flat-Earthers believe that the world’s elite are duping citizens across the globe with a “globularist” conspiracy.
The flat-earther’s argument is framed in a context where it cannot be set aside the possibility of a pervading global conspiracy. The flat-earth belief has become part of an ecosystem of conspiracy theories, driven by a push and pull of rejection from mainstream society and affirmation by a small cohort of fellow believers.
Pseudoscientific beliefs in a flat Earth are promoted by various organizations and individuals, but the claims of modern flat Earth proponents are not based on scientific evidence. Rachel Brazil explores why such views are increasingly taking hold and how the physics community should best respond.
A segment of the population believes that Earth’s round shape is either an unproven theory or an elaborate hoax. Flat Earthers believe one of the most curious conspiracy theories on the internet, and many ancient cultures subscribed to this view. By K Pahuus 2024, there is a large and growing number of people who believe in a flat Earth conspiracy, ignoring the problems with its own claims and attempting to open a debate that has been settled for more than 2000 years.
📹 Why flat earthers scare me
The flat earther community seems to be growing, and it’s beginning to worry me. It’s not just a question of lacking science …
📹 Why People Think the World is Flat
– about – Johnny Harris is a filmmaker and journalist. He currently is based in Washington, DC, reporting on interesting trends and …
I really recommend the documentary called “behind the curve” about flat-earthers. The funniest moment is when a flat-earth blogger rants about her collegues, who claim she is part of a conspiracy to discredit the flat-earth movement. She talks about how it’s unfair when people claim that you are part of conspiracy when you are not, and when they make things up about you. Then for a moment she considers “what if all those scientists I accuse of conspiracy feel the same way”… just then to add “but those guys are in fact conspirators!”
I tried my best to debate a flat earther while remaining respectful. I was unsuccessful at swaying him, but here are my best, easy to digest arguments that anyone facing the same type of situation can use: • Ships and airlines use globe coordinates to navigate. Ask a pilot or a captain and they will confirm. • If the Earth were flat you would be able to see all mountain ranges with a telescope. • Light cannot shine down in an isolated location without being visible to all those on the same plane beneath it. The flat earth map does not align with how light functions. • If we were all on a flat surface we would all see the same constellations.
False information is so dangerous and scary i actually have a friend that believes the earth is flat and i try to show him articles constantly to prove its not and he refuses to trust what im showing him thinking that the information has holes in it.Seeing first hand experience its so baffling to witness in person.
It makes me incredibly sad to think that a substantial number of people think that science is just ‘made up’ or ‘bought into’; as if everything is ‘a matter of opinion’. Conversations with those people are immensely frustrating bordering on the impossible. When rationality goes, so does safety, as history shows us time and again.
Flat earth prophets know exactly what they are doing. It’s not important whether or not they actually believe what they’re preaching but it is very important for them that people continue buying their books, going to their conferences and subscribing to their platforms. When confronted, they will double down and claim conspiracy because attacking their beliefs threatens their livelihood, and thus, their perceived right to live comfortably.
I’ve personally met a flat earther and someone else who thought that making math-inspired drawings was the same as doing maths. The problem in both cases was that they believed that they could figure this stuff out on their own. The flat earther read stuff online and was simply unable to detect bad physics because he didn’t know physics. In the process, he was ruining his life by forcing his views on others. I think that the reason why people become flat earthers is that, in their own mind, they’ve become scientists, while previously, they held or failed at jobs with much less social status.
These people are not essentially crazy, but they were left behind during the critical mental development during childhood which left their ability to reason and conceptionally represent reality with sufficient fidelity as to participate constructively within society. This creates a profound sense of incompetency and compromised social identity which motivates them to join groups which are susceptible to harmful conspiracy theories.
Instead of learning more about physics (geophysics, astrophysics, thermal dynamics, fluid mechanics, etc.), flat Earthers want to take the limited information they possess and match that with what their senses tell them – the logic of sight, sound, touch/feel, etc. Problem is, that’s not how reality works. Also, this fits into a narrative of a creator, which is appealing for some with a faith-based mindset. Really difficult to argue against when they don’t trust science (hard to trust what you don’t understand) and it conflicts with their beliefs.
“They’re trying to figure out how nature works” (6:27) — No, they’re not. I know this is a segway to the ad but this is the whole problem. Flat Earthers begin with a conclusion and then try to justify it, much like religious people. They aren’t interested in observation except to selectively prop up their pre-existing assertion.
Intellectual laziness and the availability of immediate gratification in their own believes is what I fear is the reason stuff like this will always persist and reoccur throughout time. As long as bad or wrong thoughts and behaviour gets rewarded or left without consequences, education in any form of medium kinda falls flat.
I have a private pilot and space enthusiast and my father-in-law in Iowa talk about aviation and space all the time for the first 10 years of our relationship. One day he got a new smartphone and I introduced him to YouTube. Told him I had really good articles on space flight and aviation. 6 months later he became a complete flat earther. True fucking story. One day I had asked him if he had seen the SpaceX launch and then he told me it was bulshit it took me a good full hour to realize that he wasn’t joking around with me and that he had seriously changed his mind about everything. Thank you internet.
I suspect the primary reason for the uptick in people perusal articles of flat earthers is not a growing acceptance of the idea, but a morbid curiosity about who could believe such a thing, as well as the average person’s desire to feel superior to others. Almost everyone is the intellectual superior of a flat earther, so it’s like crack for common minds that need to know they are at least not at the bottom of the barrel.
There’s a massive motivator left out of this in my opinion. I feel like (based on many many interactions with them) a huge reason Flerfers believe what they do is fuelled by a desire to be special. Not interesting or educated? How about figuring out a global conspiracy few have been able to crack? Career not going well and still unmarried? What if you unlock the secrets of the universe? Now all your peers (other flerfers) will think you’re amazing and wow, look how interesting you are. All of this fuelled by social media and its algorithms.
When you made that initial article Sabine I already had the understanding that you are now coming to, and it’s been a real brewing problem for much longer than I have understood it to be one too.What you really missed the first time around was how the actual belief system and structure works. For most of them, the ones who really believe, it’s not a simple issue of just doubting science, it’s a fundamental philosophical shift away from believing in truth and reason, from scientific concepts. This is why you see flat earthers nearly universally become wider conspiracy theorists too as it is basically an entirely different worldview. There have been some great articles about it that I am not doing justice to, but what fundamentally tends to underpin their beliefs is that there is some special plan for them in particular and that they are the ‘in’ group, and that necessarily there is an ‘out’ group that is the majority and who are controlled by others plotting against them. For most of them, especially in the US, it is directly tied to religion too, and the system of beliefs itself is a religion, independent of anything else. It’s frankly very scary and is hard to do anything about. This is the very same set of fundamental beliefs and mentalities that ‘power’ the other conspiracy stuff such as “q anon” and anti-vax disinformation, it’s just that flat earth is one of the most extreme examples where to beleive it you really have to have fully ‘bought in’ already
Conspiracy theories in general are very attractive to many people because they offer simplistic explanations to many things that are difficult to understand, and they particularly avoid the anxiety that many people feel when faced with a world, and a universe, which is really difficult to completely understand
The thing is with a flat earthers is that you can give them undeniable evidence that the Earth isn’t a flat disc yet they will still completely ignore it. I’d imagine you would have an easier experience getting a toddler to understand what string theory is than getting a flat earther to admit the Earth isn’t a disc
The lady is right. When a grown man comes up with the idea that our planet is a flat plane and that the governments around the world are keeping it a secret for some reason and still manages to get thousands of followers, there is definitely something wrong with our world. What is it that makes all those people gullible.
I am a spacecraft dynamics and control engineer. I spent many decades working on NASA and US DoD programs. I recently came across a suggestion that flat-earthers should be sent to space to see for themselves that the earth is round. Since then, I have promptly converted to flat-eartherism in the hope that I will get a free ticket to space. 😀😀😀
One rather important point that wasn’t mentioned here is the fact, that a lack of scientific education is not the only reason for people to start believing/ comprehend the world in/ through conspiracy theories. A large number of these people develop a kind of need for recognition as they get older. They want to make themselves heard, to set something in motion in their lives. It often doesn’t matter to conspiracy theorists whether they are right or wrong. They often know very well that what they are saying is not true. It’s more about finding supporters who give you a feeling of validity, rightness and, above all, importance.
My neighbor is a massive conspiracy theorist. No conspiracy is too wild for him. The recent total eclipse went right over our city, and he shut his family in the garage the whole time. As soon as the partial phase of the eclipse was over, the garage door opened and the 3 kids came running out. I consider this tragic.
I saw the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. I challenge Flat Earthers to come up with a model that does all of the following: -Explains why solar eclipses occur -Explains why eclipses don’t happen at every new moon -Explains why we can also get annular solar eclipses where the Moon doesn’t fully cover the sun and leaves a “ring of fire” around the edges If you can’t come up with a self-consistent flat earth model that explains all of the above (which I know you can’t), then that means that all the Flat Earthers are wrong. However, the globe earth explains all of these perfectly: – The Moon orbits the Earth and the Earth orbits the Sun. The Moon’s orbit occasionally takes it directly between the Earth and the Sun, briefly casting a shadow on a portion of Earth’s surface. -Solar eclipses do not happen at every new moon because the Moon’s orbit is tilted about 5 degrees relative to the plane of Earth’s orbit around the Sun. This means that the Moon often does not pass directly between the Earth and the Sun at the new moon; solar eclipses only happen when a new moon occurs near one of the points where the Moon’s orbit intersects the plane of Earth’s orbit. -The Moon’s orbit isn’t quite a perfect circle; therefore the Moon’s distance from Earth is not constant. When the Moon is near perigee (the point when it is closest to Earth), its angular size in the sky is larger than when it is at apogee (when it is farthest from Earth). When the Moon is near perigee, its angular size as seen from Earth is slightly larger than that of the Sun; we can therefore get a total eclipse.
You can’t reason someone out of a belief that they weren’t reasoned into. If their beliefs are not based on evidence, then evidence isn’t going to change their beliefs. There is an emotional/psychological need that these beliefs fulfill. It’s something inside of the person, not in the external world. You need to address the psychological needs to change a person’s beliefs or behavior. (This is how it works in general, not just for conspiracy theorists.)
I was born on the coast of South Africa. I watched ships of all sizes come and go from Cape Town and witnessed first hand what my school’s teachers were saying about the earth being round. When I was 16 I went on my first airline flight with a window seat, and we were high enough up at 10 kilometres to see the curvature, which just confirmed what my teachers had been saying all along. Furthermore, I didn’t even have to have all those experiences to show me this as I was fortunate enough to also learn that there had been so called experiments to prove that the earth was indeed flat but none of those theories stood up to any real scrutiny. Besides, world governments can’t agree on the smallest fact or details so how would a conspiracy the size of this one even get off the ground?
Here’s the wild thing, I’m old enough to remember when the flat earth society forums were a SATIRE forum. You didn’t break character or you were banned. Whether or not this is the same sites you’re referring to, I don’t know. But I REMEMBER it was one big JOKE on the internet back when the internet was young. Part of me wonders whether this is one of those things where satire becomes reality when people stop realizing it was a joke.
I remember VERY CLEARLY the beginnings of the movement. Thing is: this was just a bunch of graduate students, engineers and mainly people from academia taking a piss and developing concepts, models and theories, which would accommodate the „flat earth”, as a pastime and for giggles, thought exercise, amused by the outrageous stupidity of the idea, while cosplaying that they believe in it. But the groups grew, they grew quickly and soon people who were there for innocent fun, got bored and displaced by masses. And then, the terrifying thing happened, and things are, where they are now. (And of course: sorry about this)
I think there’s a larger problem. The basic vulnerabilities of the human cognitive system (which includes psychological components), … is actually kind of scary. It isn’t simply an issue of more science education. This affects issues such as climate change, electoral politics, etc. Flat earthers is just an illustration of how far one can go in clinging onto a perspective.
You can prove the flat Earth model wrong with the most simple tests. Facing south in the southern hemisphere on a globe, everyone would be facing roughly the same direction. On the flat Earth model, everyone is looking in totally different directions. Facing south, people all see the same constellations therefore the globe is confirmed. Another way is to look at latitude and longitude lines. They line up perfectly with the sizes of the continents on a globe since globes have smaller diameter heading toward the poles. On flat Earth the diameter gets LARGER heading toward the south pole which doesn’t work. To confirm the Earth is a sphere and spinning, one only need to look at equatorial mounts on telescopes. A mount like that couldn’t work on the flat Earth model. Even the fact that the sun stays the same size throughout the day or that the sun falls below the horizon at full size proves the flat Earth model wrong. On a side note, more searches for flat Earth doesn’t really mean much. I do a lot of searches surrounding flat Earth because I think it’s hilarious. That doesn’t mean I am a flat Earther. I would bet a substantial percentage of the views on flat Earth articles is by people perusal for laughs.
I once tried to explain where a flat earther made a mistake in his thought experiment, that he came up with to disprove the globe, and he was too stupid to understand. His idea was if you are on a merry-go-round, and keep looking at a fixed point off that merry-go-round, then it looks different when viewed from each of the cardinal points, which proved that the earth is not a globe. I explained that he forgot to account for the fact that a person has to also rotate to keep that point in view, but he didn’t get it. I think that was the day I gave up on him.
I find that the best way to deal with a flat earth believer is to claim that nothing outside your home country exists because you’ve never seen it yourself, then as soon as they say they know you’re wrong because they’ve been outside of that region, treat them exactly the way that they treat legitimate scientists. Make them disprove their own claims at a scale they can understand.
You say it is a matter of lack of basic knowledge, it certainly is, but I say something more concerning: it is a matter of trust, first. It means the institutions showed flaws to the point some ppl are so deeply upset and hurt in their trust that they can’t believe anything coming from an institution.
The problem with the internet is that most people have no filter and cannot distinguish between “NASA photographed black hole” and “Evidence for existence of angels found”. And conspiracy theories are religions. Might as well try to convince the Pope that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. He cannot consider that because it’s one of the foundations of his worldview.
My main problem with flat earthers is that they give a bad name to skeptical people in general. The push by authorities to censor social media because of “misinformation”/”desinformation”/”malinformation” is getting stronger. This starts silencing anyone who might have good reasons to counter official narratives, because you are put in the same basket as flat earhters.
The most basic thing that breaks down under flat earth is time zones. I watch a streamer on Twitch who lives in Australia. When she starts streaming, it is 8am for me and 11pm for her. If the earth were flat, you could see the sun from anywhere. They never answer my question on that. Another thing that breaks down is gravity. One person claimed that what we call gravity is essentially just buoyancy and that there is some great container around our atmosphere. He flat-out (pun intended) claimed that the gravimetric model of the universe is false. He still didn’t explain orbits
I have on many occasions asked flatheads why “Teh Conspiracy” would hide the “true” nature of the planet, but none of them have given me any real answers. Usually I see responses like “control” or “to hide God,” and one guy said “I don’t know, I heard there’s more land beyond the ice wall.” I think most of the flatheads are more interested in the fight than the actual topic.
I work with a flat earther and there is no amount of evidence he will accept. My theory is that these people think that they are ‘special’ because only they and a few others know ‘the truth’. This is important because most of them have done nothing special in their lives and this makes them feel good about themselves.
When I was studying Electrical Engineering at Penn State, we used to play Dungeons and Dragons. The Dungeon Master was a Math/Physics Major who created an interesting world – created by Aliens it was a rotating cylinder that tapered to a close at each end. One end had a huge fusion reactor that provided heat and light. Accordingly, it was always daytime, there was no sky, and the opposite side of the world was straight up. This all makes a lot more sense than believing that the world is flat.
I had my share of debates with flatearthers, trying to take them seriously. I am done with that, counting all the online harassments following every attempt of discussion on eyelevel. They become aggressive, act like heavily disturbed psychopaths, troll your accounts, tag you in public posts where they insult you and threaten you, pollute your messenger box with crap article’s and silly photoshop memes, until all you can do is report and block them. These people have serious issues I am afraid basic education does not fix, only therapy and meds.
No, it’s not a lack of understanding – flerfs ignore even very simple to understand things in favor of their cult. Yes, there’s a lack of education and scientific “knowledge”, but to me it looks more like willful ignorance to be part of a group that claims to be special. It is a cult. Oh, and lots of grifters who found that there are gullible people out there they can part from the little money they have. And trolls alot …
I think there is a psychological aspect in the most bizarre pseudoscientifc theories such as Flat Earthers that needs to be addressed in order understand their reasoning (or lack of it). Believing something like that does not just require scientific ignorance and distrust towards society (or at least towards science and who is involved with it), but something deeper, and they have to “gain” something – psychologically – over taking part in that parallel society.
My approach to someone who claims to believe in flat earth is to deny that they really believe it. They can’t actually prove that they are not trolling. And this uses their own most powerful tool (simple denial) against them. Just absolutely refuse to entertain the idea that anyone really believes in a flat earth.
I think there’s a bit of a misjudgement on proper skepticism that we need to clear up. Skepticism is questioning things, *including the things you believe*. You need to be prepared for the answer to contradict your beliefs. A question to which only the answer you like will be accepted is not a question at all. There is, I think, also the secondary problem of most flat earthers having a very dogmatic background, and they reflect that onto us. They think we’re being dogmatic about this because they’re used to being that dogmatic. I don’t know how to solve that, because even if we show willingness to break rank given proper evidence there won’t be proper evidence because we know what the world looks like.
I’m a mathematics professor at a smallish University. The other day I was going down the hall as classes were letting out and what do I see but some fellow wearing a flat Earth Tee shirt. When he saw me he looked sheepish and tried to cover it up. As he should. That’s the kind of cover up I can get behind 😀
It’s a pandemic of anti-intellectualism that has been going on at least since 2000s. I suspect the core of the problem is that mass media, especially the internet, have trained people into processing lots of information in a short time. This encourages assuming the information is correct and believing right away rather than questioning and looking for answers in reliable sources. Also, the access to publishing and broadcasting has become so widespread that anyone can spout nonsense out of their mouth at no cost and no gatekeeping to navigate in order to even get out there, and this is even more pronounced with recommendation algorithms which favor controversy over accuracy and reliability.
I cannot understand flat earthers. I see evidence of a globe earth every time I look out my window. Simulations of a globe that I program on my computer look just like what I see in reality, whereas simulations of a flat earth look quite different. And while the globe earth model has highly accurate maps and calculations to reasonably accurately predict what will happen, flat earthers don’t even have a map that that can acurately tell me how far it is to a nearby city let alone be able to predict anything. I cannot understand how any reasonable person could believe the earth is flat.
I am fed up qualifying my concern about flat Earthism / science denialism. So often I’m told while combatting their idiocy, “Just ignore it, they’re trolls”, “Why does it bother you so much?”. The rise in anti-intellectualism is both worrying and increasing, more than anyone might be willing to admit. It is a creeping malady that will have a lasting effect on the human race if we do not staunch the haemorrhage sooner rather than later.
The problem is things like cameras and telescopes don’t work on Flatardia. And things like math, scale, logic, evidence, facts and reality don’t work for flat earthers. In short, trying to teach a flat earther how we determined the shape of the earth is akin to trying to reason with a bag of hammers.:face-orange-raised-eyebrow:
I watched a very interesting discussion about the socio-psychological mechanics of belief. Belief systems based on an individual’s choice are highly resistant to facts which contradict their belief. A person who has reason to believe a wolf may be lurking in their hallway can change that belief by observing the hallway being wolf-free. A person who believes a wolf MUST be in their hallway will double down when observation shows their belief to be contrafactual. For FLERFs, belief is a religion, not a scientific hypothesis. As with all religions, facts are deceptions to the true believer; delusions are truth.
Because of flatearth i left religion, they help me to see how much people can be attracted to an idea even if it is cleaaaaarly wrong !! I put my religion believes into the logic and I realised that I was a “flathearther” somehow… so everyone can be flatearther in a subjetc or another, the existance of flatearthers must be our warning to review our positions in lot of subjects …
Back in the 90’s I use to troll “know-it-alls” on IRC with flat earth theories. All stuff somebody who really knows about science would easily be able to dismiss or disprove. I wasn’t the only one. I just never imagined people would join the ranks not realizing it was what we now would call a meme. Just like troll physics in more recent years.
The camera they use, the internet they use, the compters they use, the equipments for their “experiment”, etc. etc. are all made by science, they clearly like these things science has made. but when it comes to science saying “earth is a ball”, they are like “no. you are correct in every other thing, you’ve made our lives so much better, but you are wrong on this particular subject”. amazing.
My favorite counterargument for the flat earth is that, just before sunrise and shortly after sunset, you can see clouds illuminated from below, by the Sun. On a flat earth, this is impossible and, unlike most of the other proofs that the Earth is not flat, clouds being sunlit from below is something that you can easily verify with direct personal experience.
We appear to be living in a post-truth era where many have lost faith in technology and governments. Religiosity does not require facts and is taken very personally to question beliefs often challenges people emotionally and the defence mechanism kicks in and they want to fight for their world view. I just find conspiracy theories unbelievably ignorant and frustrating.
“One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you’re right, but not enough about the subject to know you’re wrong.” Neil Degrasse Tyson It’s 2024…Why do Flat Earthers still exist? There are so many ways to determine the shape of the Earth, and even after the experiments prove Flat Earthers are wrong, they double down…Ridiculous.
I don’t know everyone blames lack of scientific education but with the internet, and loads of popular science books, magazines, websites, lectures, podcasts, we live in a time when accessing the knowledge and getting education is easiest it’s ever been. And yet we probably have more flat earthers now than we had in the European middle ages, both as % of population and of course in absolute numbers too. Makes you think.
In a flat Earth environment a laser could be shot from Boston to Lisbon without altitude variation. Or from Argentina to the North Pole. Or just from Long Island, New York to Nags Head, North Carolina? In fact, a sailboat could voyage over that last example and never lose the laser point from its sail.
Sabine talks about the intellectual gap but there are also social gaps that cause the flat earther issue. It attracts people who feel excluded from our society. FE is very inclusive, they make isolated people feel welcome and it creates strong social bonds (us against them). And their crazy beliefs actually make them more resilient. Sects with beliefs that are only a little crazy tend to die quickly (or get reincorparated into mainstream), those with more whacky beliefs tend to persist longer (LE, Scientology, Mormon, etc). So unless we can figure out how to make people feel welcome and included in a world they don’t understand them we can expect more FE type societies and they will persist longer than we think possible.
When I was in college 35 years ago, I knew a guy who was in the flat earth Society. That time they were only about 1500 members in the world and if I recall the organization was run out of England somewhere. The guy I knew who was a member, didn’t actually believe that the world was flat, he just somehow got a hold of their newsletter, and thought it was absolutely hilarious. And when he realized they weren’t joking, he signed up so he could get more issues of the newsletter. I am given to understand that a third or perhaps half of their membership in those days were people like the guy I knew, who did it as a lark. The fact that there are millions upon millions of people who legitimately believe the earth is flat now is very disturbing
The Flat Earth theory, while undeniably false from a scientific standpoint, presents an intriguing case study in the realm of belief systems and epistemology. It serves as a stark reminder that unfalsifiable theories aren’t the only ones capable of capturing the imaginations of individuals and even entire communities. In fact, the Flat Earth theory demonstrates that a demonstrably false belief can still garner significant traction, highlighting the importance of rigorous standards of evidence and critical thinking. Firstly, let’s acknowledge the ingenuity of the Flat Earth theory itself. It’s a testament to human creativity and the power of persuasion that such a concept could persist despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. The theory manages to tap into deep-seated cultural, religious, and psychological narratives, offering a seemingly simple explanation for complex phenomena. By invoking skepticism towards established scientific principles and appealing to distrust of authority, it creates a fertile ground for alternative worldviews to take root. Parallel to Last Thursdayism, which posits that the universe was created last Thursday with false memories and evidence of events before that time, the Flat Earth theory challenges our perception of reality. Both concepts stretch the limits of credulity and force us to confront the fragility of our understanding of the world. While Last Thursdayism may seem absurd on the surface, it serves as a thought experiment, prompting us to question the nature of existence and the reliability of our senses.
On the question of why they are doing this you find the answer in psychology: they are overwhelmed and distressed by the science behind it and feel inadequate. So they do what the psyche is doing best and just lie to themselves. They invent a story that they are actually the ones with the superior knowledge and believe in it firmly to suppress the feeling of inadequacy. The cure is to address that feeling of inadequacy appropriately, which is not yelling at them, but gently helping them advance.
At one of the Flat Earth Conferences a person asked how they could get their girlfriend into Flat Earth and the speaker (and others) essentially told the person as long as she was “less educated” he could probably convince her but if she had any “higher education” it was likely impossible. Telling point there.
Some writers have classified religious creationists into three varieties, discussed here in descending order of sanity. The numerically largest group, although deploring evolution and geological deep time, at least are heliocentric in their thinking, accepting that the Sun is the centre of the Solar System, with their supposedly Young Earth and other planets in revolution around it. This position is condemned as unscriptural error by the second group, the geocentrists, who assert that the Earth is the true pivot of the whole material Universe, about which all other celestial bodies revolve. (Galileo was let off pretty lightly then, eh?) However the most off-the-planet view (awful pun, sorry) is that advanced by the Flat Earthers, to whom both the Young Earth heliocentrists and spherical-Earth geocentrists are a lot of heretics. The Flat-Earthers will entertain no notion of our home being roughly spherical in shape, whether stationary in space or fixed in the Sun’s orbit. In pre-internet days I naively assumed, as I think we all did, that the attribution of quaintly silly ideas on this or other subjects to the proverbial “Flat Earth Society” was just a jocular way of dismissing them, a lighthearted rhetorical allusion to a long-extinct belief without any contemporary adherents. However the mainstay of modern-day communication reveals to us that there really are such people out there, with some of them prepared to take the most inordinate pains to propagate their Dark Age nonsense.
That some people could be 1) so stupid as to not even realise they’re being played as clowns to undermine all other conspiracy theories, and 2) Deny BASIC science that can be proved with their very own eyes, scares me too. It’s not even that they believe it, it’s that they don’t WANT to believe otherwise, that’s what’s scary.. the sheer stubbornness in the stupidity. They don’t WANT to learn. They have no end game for the theory. And to know there’s humans so willingly misguided speaks of a much bigger issue, one which makes me question humanity’s intelligence itself, and potential doomed future as a result.
I’m from Brazil. Flat Earthers weren’t really a thing here until 8 years ago or so. They’re growing very fast however. At first I also thought it was just “haha funny crazy guys” but the reality is that flat earth thinking opens up the window for all other conspiracy theories, and they were at the forefront of the antivax movement during the pandemic. Brazil was renowed for it’s high vaccination rates but they took a nosedive in the last few years. A lot of people are dead because of that. We’re also being hit by severe rain floods and they’re denying climate change as well, obviously. They think flattening the amazon to plant crops is their right according to the bible, etc. This has gone past the point of just being funny. It’s become a dangerous cult.
Terry Pratchett had the right of it: flat earthers fail to take into account the flat world sits on 4 elephants which stand on the back of a giant star turtle that swims around the universe. Only then can it be understood how the lost continent was re-discovered and how Vegemite, purely by accident, came into being. 😉
I appreciate that you approach these very strange people with respect. The worst article I ever saw in the 17+ years and tens of thousands of articles I’ve seen on this platform was some young physicist who was talking about “crackpots”, to use her words, that were emailing her with their non-traditional ideas about physics. Instead of trying to help people who were clearly interested in physics understand why their ideas were no good and point them in the right direction, she did a article trying to shame them. What was shameful was her belittling people who asked her for help. Ever since then I’ve been very careful not to antagonize people or make them feel stupid, because you are NEVER going to get through to someone that way.
They also think that the vacuum of space is literally like a vacuum cleaner lol sucking up matter or wtv … a vacuum can also mean, void of anything lol which is what space is … no sound, no air, only perpetual light if you are near a sun . There is no up or down lol and the reason that everything big enough is a sphere is because if you accumulate enough mass at a certain point, gravity becomes a thing … and it attracts everything to a central point from all sides … only shape that can be made is a sphere . Also they don’t seem to understand how big the earth actually is … you can’t see curvature with the naked eye standing on the ground … Pilots must feel so insulted by these loonies ….
They make me sad. We have the scientific knowledge to make observations and calculate where the Milky Way galaxy is headed and when it will collide with other galaxies. We can shoot spacecraft to slingshot around Jupiter and send back data from outside the solar system. And we could do that 50 years ago! There is so much wonder and beauty in science.
I was very fortunate to live in a Bortle 1 dark sky area. When I was younger, I used to gaze at the night sky and study the patterns of the stars. I observed that they all seemed to move from east to west, but not in straight lines. Additionally, depending on whether I was looking north or south in the Northern Hemisphere, the stars appeared to move counterclockwise and clockwise, respectively. Months later, I realized that the arcs they appeared to make, as well as the movement of the Sun and the Moon, matched the rotation of the Earth. This personal discovery helped me understand that the Earth is a globe and not flat, without needing any scientific instruments. Now, I host star parties in Texas, once again enjoying a Bortle 1 dark sky. I’ve had flat-earthers visit these star parties, but they never engage in stargazing through an observatory-grade telescope. Their belief in a flat Earth is often tied to a conspiracy, rooted in political or religious beliefs. After perusal your article about flat-earthers some years ago, I wondered if you had actually spoken to them and discussed their theories. I felt that perhaps you didn’t understand their ignorance of basic physics because they have chosen not to learn. Some people are raised to believe what they are told rather than learning to think critically for themselves. When I talk to flat-earthers, I make it a point not to raise my voice, intimidate, or belittle them. This is because I often remind myself of how little I actually know about the vast expanse of the Universe.
Hi Sabine, the dunning krueger effect is a terrible paper. It says that people that perform bad at tests self assess themselves higher in a ranking compared to people that do well, who rank themselves lower compared to their actual scores. The paper has a flawed statistical test and ignored the fact that if you are the worst participant you can only rank yourself higher and vice versa. The data is public and I had a look at it and all conclusions are basically wrong because it does not correctly model the edge cases.
What disorients me, and sometimes irritates me, are mainly two things (by pragmatic reduction): 1. having at their disposal millions of scientific, experimental and didactic texts, the majority of human beings continue to seek advice in beers with friends on Friday night; 2. after looking at each other, after several beers, they are still incapable of studying human ethology.
Flat earthers actually do their own experiments from time to time. Bob Knodel (RIP) bought a ring laser gyrsoscope, which showed a 15° per hour drift because of the rotation of the earth (thanks Bob), or Jeranism, who repeated the Bedford Level experiment, which showed a curve as well. The movement ignores or explains away both outcomes.
0:43 Bingo. What’s most annoying to me about flat Earthers is that when they argue with you, their arguments never actually contain proof of their claims. Their entire arguments are always just “debunks” of the globe, but based on completely incorrect science or just plain misunderstanding of the globe model. For example, they’ll claim that water should just fly off the Earth on a globe, therefore we can’t live on a globe… but there’s no reason that should happen on a globe, either. Or they might claim that if we were on a spinning ball, we should be able to jump up and land somewhere else… but that’s just a complete misunderstanding of our atmosphere and conservation of momentum.
I’m 42 years old now, and some of this might be partly my fault.. maybe but probably not. One of my favorite things to do about 15 years ago was to participate in the flat earth society forums. It was very fun to see how good of an argument you could make for something that was clearly silly. You actually can learn things through requiring people to properly detail why they believe something and the flat earth forums was the perfect place for it. Most of the top pro flat earth posters did not believe it, but enjoyed the exercise of engaging in an argument where people need to put forward what proof they have and respond to criticism and issues with their arguments. It would get pretty detailed, “flat earthers” would win most of the exchanges. I feel like someone should make a documentary about this or something.. I still see lots of posts on social media about what “flat earthers believe” and nearly all of them are either strawman or low hanging fruit arguments that the flat earth society addressed already. Now of course there are plenty of arguments you can use that prove flat earth wrong – yet almost every time those arguments are not used in the clickbait that is needed to get people to bother looking at it.
In the USA, conservative political strategy for the last couple of decades has been to undermine science and academia. Climate change denial and Covid controversy are two symptoms of this. The rise of conspiracy theories as well as Q-Anon are also a function of the willingness to ignore science for political and social issues.
Flat earthers don’t scare me. What is scary is the level of cost of attending a university, especially in the US, and the continuous downgrade in quality. Also, what scares me is the grip of the corporate multinationals on the scientific community, and the ways it tends to justify inhumane treatment of people and animals down to the DNA of every living being. I don’t think a future where life forms are patented is a good future, but that sure beats the heck out of flat earthers. There is no anti-intellectualism, there is reduction of knowledge to suit the interests of a minute number of people in power.
As someone who works in GIS, having nearly become a land surveyor, and taken graduate level geodesy courses in University, I find flat earthers intolerable. They fly on planes, they use GPS, they use satellite communication networks, they get their land surveyed, use maps, all the while completely and willfully oblivious to the amazing science that is behind it all. It boggles the mind. People of a certain mental makeup just seem to be more predisposed to falling for these conspiracies, and there isn’t a bigger or more juicy conspiracy than thinking that centuries of scientists have made up globe Earth physics and somehow kept it under wraps the whole time. They get to tell themselves that they’re in on a gigantic secret that everyone else is oblivious to. They’re really just trying to find a way to tell themselves they’re better than everyone else. I really think that’s what it boils down to.
In September 2011, I had a strange experience in Washington DC. I took a taxi from the Smithsonian to the University of Washington. The taxi driver was a flat-earther and told me that the earth was actually a disc inside an egg. I arrived at my destination a little disturbed, and a young man gave me a pamphlet written by a creationist biochemistry professor. I still keep it as a curiosity. For me, the issue is simple: if the system collapses, these strangely varied (and mistaken) people could forcibly impose themselves, destroy everything, and take us back to a pre-technological era. Of course, it’s frightening.
Here’s an old quote from mathematician and sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov that speaks to this: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Ya know, I always been on the nutty side… But even I know that the earth is round… 😛 I feel sorry for those people, really… Like, what went wrong in your life for you to just up and decide one day that everything you’ve been taught is a lie? Cuz those are some next-level jumps in your worldview in a VERY short time… 😖
I wouldn’t worry too much, Sabine. For the past ten years or so I’ve been checking in on these oxygen thieves from time to time, but their clown car’s either always breaking down or vanishing in a puff of logic. They can’t debate without heckling, nor can they follow a Socratic path through a question-and-answer chain of reasoning without crashing with the BSOD.
Yeah your article from a few years ago stunned me. You really gave them too much credit. It was a cringe article, tbh. I’ve watched a lot less of your content since bc you seemed to be jockeying for a seat at the Joe Rogan Experience and I didn’t need any of that in my life. 6:31 you got it wrong AGAIN. They are NOT trying to figure out how science works! They can be shown how they are wrong again and again and instead of learning – they double down. That’s not someone who’s ‘trying to learn” these are contrarians who don’t believe in vaccines, the majority of them are in North America and have ties to the extreme far Christian right. I can tell you as an American, I’ve never met a flat earther who is also a Biden supporter. They are all Trump or Kennedy supporters. This is a life style for them. STOP thinking these people are at all sincere.
Wow, this is one rare instances were I don’t agree with Sabine AT ALL. The phenomenon Flat Earthers isn’t explained by a lack of science education which very much available, both in school and online. Flat earth belief is ALL about attention seeking. They are to science what extreme Black Metal metal bands who wants to burn down churches and bite off heads of a bat are to rock music. They won’t stop because you play them a bit of Bon Jovi. But they also reject science because of narcissism, as they believe only their own thoughts and reasoning hold value and are worth more than others. This lack of humility can not be cured with more science. But basically the main purpose of flat earthers is to gain attention which means that flat earth belief actually will grow if you make debunk articles such as this, and discuss it as a subject that is worthy of discussion. THIS is giving flat earthers the attention they want, a sort of recognition even, weirdly enough. This ideology has completely grown by the cruel Internet algoritm which rewards both a cause and also the opposite of it. Anything that is polarizing enough will grow by the algorithm. So if you want the silliness to stop the only way is to silence it. Stop making these articles! It’s important.
What we shouldn’t ignore is fact that in social media crazy theories are being pushed like crazy for the sake of outrage. Yes most people will only hate click on this stuff but if this ideas will be constantly pushed by alghoritm then some people will eventually believe them. It’s like this – first we are giving flat earthers 100 milion impression on social media, then we laugh at them, later we give them another 100 milion impression. And afterwards we are making pikachu face and say “Some people actually believe this? How did this happen?”
A large issue is, tons of scientists and people in power who love to tout the phrase “trust the science” have given a large amount of people tons of reasons NOT to trust them. Flat earth takes it to a silly degree, but trust in academics and research is at all time lows between how much of it gets bought out or politically influenced. If you want to reduce distrust in science, it needs to be made less distrustful.
All the mathematical calculations on the sunrise, sunset, tides, lunar eclipse, solar eclipse, planetary positions etc etc are all based on an almost spherical Earth and all these calculations are 100 percent correct.. So what is the problem? As far as I am concerned these flat Earth theorist have mental issues in my humble opinion.
You went for the scientific approach, describing why you don’t understand flatearthers. The answer is a lot more social. One of humans greatest fears is to be preceived as stupid. A human would rather double down on any stupid idea, instead of admiting that his world view up until now, was stupid. And no, there is 0 sympathy to be had here. They are NOT trying to figure stuff out. They’re simply trying to keep the topic going.
4:49 It’s a protien that has a special shape which lets it attach to specific genomes, and when it does, there’s a hook on the other end which cuts on both sides and stitches a replacement in between. 4:51 Something to do with topology. /shrug 4:53 Silicone 4:56 Spread evenly once a year before spring
Actually this started as a joke. I don’t understand, how people started to take it serious. In no time in history (No, not even in the Middle Ages.) scientists believed that the Earth was flat. One you have seen the ocean, you an see with your own eyes that it is round. So only primitive cultures in landlocked territories could come up with this theory.