Ask questions and don't make it personal. It's annoying and the answers are rubbish, but it's the only way to break these people out of their shell.
> The earth is flat? Why do people in Japan see the moon and a dark sky while I see the sun?
With enough of these types of questions that don't have sensible answers you may be able to get the person into a "maybe this is all bullshit" mindset. It's hard though. Especially with global warming skeptics.
Every sensible line of questions will inevitably hit this wall of incomprehensible undebunkable “understanding” of the world.
It’s better to dig into their understanding of what is a conspiracy and how do they determine where in the conspiracy chain they should stop and why. (Flat Earth conspiracy, flat earth conspiracy conspiracy and so on)
> Is there any research on how to talk to these people?
Treat them like people, not specimens. Part of that means recognizing that each is an individual and there is no universal formula for how to effectively relate and communicate with individuals.
No, but how can we ignore that, like we do in every other facet of life.
I mean un-nuanced thinking has done great for so many of our other problems like: war, homelessness, drug-use, and governance!
Joking aside, we might just need to write certain people off and just let them be. We might not have the resources to tackle climate change, feed and shelter an increasingly populated world, and individually talk people out of these entertaining delusions like believing in flat earth or doubting the efficacy of vaccines.
I don't place Flat-Earthers on the same level as Anti-Vaxxers. First off, I think most flat-earthers aren't sincere, they just love getting attention and a rise out of people. But for those that are sincere, their belief in a flat earth doesn't impact me or society. Someone who believes the earth is flat isn't an ideological threat. So I agree, we just need to calm down and let these loons be.
Talking is easy. Convincing them to rethink their position or even abandon it is much harder and takes a lot of time, patience, persistence and friendliness.
The friendship part is probably the hardest. But what's the success rate of shaming someone into changing their mind? Pretty low to zero. It makes them dig in more.
The best example I know of is Daryl Davis (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis). He's a black man that befriends active Klan members. He invites them to bars and his home and gets to know them.
He intelligently refutes their nonsense but he never asks them to change their mind or leave the Klan. He simply waits until they want to do it on their own accord.
The problem is sometimes people get stuck in a group or culture for various reasons. The key is to give them a safe, friendly alternative rather than a violent disagreement.
Darryl's work is amazing. Today we see people doing the polar opposite, label someone, shum and deplatform, label some more, harass, destroy his/her livelihood, destroy his/her reputation.
It's challenging because the optimal strategy for converting an individual is not necessarily what's best for society as a whole.
Risking Godwin's law, imagine the extreme case of Hitler. The best strategy to convert Hitler may well be Jewish people befriending him, rather than confronting him. But in the meantime, Hitler is radicalizing others and committing genocide. At some point, it makes more sense to just assassinate Hitler (or deplatform him, or depose him, etc.) rather than trying to save him.
No, it doesnt. Responding to mere speech with escalation or violence has not ever worked in the responder's favor. It has instead fueled coups and revolutions (like the American civil rights movement).
Killing someone for their ideas sends the wrong message and grants them more legitimacy than anything. You elevate them to the same status as Jesus Christ, whose popular namesake religion is predicated on sticking to your beliefs in the face of any and all consequence.
> He intelligently refutes their nonsense but he never asks them to change their mind or leave the Klan. He simply waits until they want to do it on their own accord.
This also happens to be the playbook you are encouraged to follow if you are trying to rescue someone from a cult or domestic violence situation.
Arguing gets you nowhere; they will defend their abusers. The best you can do is innocuously show them that the reality they've been brainwashed into internalizing does not work the way they were told. They will either come to their senses--on "their" own terms--or will prove to be a lost cause.
You're on it. you can't change someone's mind, only present information that contradicts their world view, and then it is up to them to process that change, or reject it. Introducing doubt.
An example from a blog on jewelry how to counteract astrological nonsense is to point out supposedly different stones like emerald and beryl, are actually the same mineral, just with impurities like chromium present.
By presenting neutral factual information in that fashion, you can ask how or why the chromium affects the spiritual flow of the thing or whatever. It remains up to the person if they are persuaded or not.
Why would they be persuaded by you pointing out that the only difference between two stones is an element that has shown proven changes when added to other things?
I don't think the intention is to persuade them. But simply by asking questions you start wheels turning that weren't turning before. Then they have to persuade themselves.
The key to understanding these and many other flagrantly irrational "beliefs" is that these things are believed for social or political reasons not simply rational ones.
There is an interview floating around with a flat Earth dude saying exactly this: that even if he were convinced the Earth were round he would stick with it because they have a community.
Humans are not rational robots. We are hyper-social emotional beings. The classical wire monkey experiment shows that primates will prioritize affection over food to the point of near starvation. It's not much of a leap to consider that humans may also prioritize affection over truth to the point of folly.
We see circumstantial evidence of this constantly. Most people would rather be wrong and have friends than right and alone.
If rational ideas look like they are failing, perhaps it's because we have failed to construct positive and lasting communities around them. If anything it's the opposite: the rational worldview is linked culturally to isolating sterile social orders with sterile objectives like GDP maximization or abstract political goals. These may be rational but they are not human.
If the rational can't rationalize community and culture we will continue to see a popular flight from reason.
I think some people believe in irrational things so that they can conform with their in-group, but I there are a number of emotional reasons people believe in irrational conspiracies.
-Desire to be nonconformist
-Desire to feel intellectually superior by 'knowing something others don't'
-Mistrust in authority
-Fear of accepting a truth that will upend their understanding or the world
-Fear (or refusal) of accepting a truth that upends their place in the world
-Outright mental illness
One thing I think the internet and social media does is that it allows people with singular causes of irrational beliefs to find others like them and that in turn reinforces their irrational beliefs. Not to mention that they can easily find misinformation on the internet that reinforces them.
The desire to be noncomformant or know secrets is a desire for a small social in group that is relatable vs belonging to the alienating mass. This is basically why cults exist. The motive is fundamentally social. Search for Dunbar's number, the maximum "social horizon" size for most humans.
>The key to understanding these and many other flagrantly irrational "beliefs" is that these things are believed for social or political reasons not simply rational ones.
Memetic immune disorder, if you aren't already familiar, is in agreement with this explanation.
To reinforce one of the other replies: asking questions is pretty good, as long as one takes it slow and actually listens to the responses.
I've (very lightly and positively) engaged with flat-earth folk for years now, and it's been fairly interesting. Many are 'cranks', many are trolls, but many have something like an honest desire to really know and understand, though with some pretty big blind spots.
Contrarian view warning: neither listening to nor talking to them are important! At least not in the context of helping them come to a more correct belief about the shape of our planet -- talking to them just as people is fine and no worse or better than talking to anyone else. I guess most people presenting themselves as flat Earthers actually know deep down that the Earth is round. Perhaps they enjoy playing the fool. Perhaps they are trolling. Perhaps they just want attention. But they probably know.
Even if they don't, who cares? By virtue of being a flat Earther you basically exclude yourself from any position where such a viewpoint might be relevant. They're not hurting anyone, so just leave them alone. Let people be wrong on the internet.
(Note that like many aspirational exhortations, this one is a little hypocritical. I've been known to have a problem with people being wrong on the internet before. But I'm trying to be better. :))
Don't you think there's a danger that letting incorrect (especially wildly wrong) statements stand unchallenged on the internet encourages those ideas to spread further ?
I have seen studies that suggest engaging with incorrect beliefs does nothing to prevent their spread and might even encourage them. Denying prominent supporters of a belief a platform ("cancelling" them) has plainly been effective in a few cases. However, I think that hammer should be reserved for seriously harmful and dangerous beliefs. I think flat Earth is quite harmless and also sufficiently unpopular that there's not really much that needs to be done.
I guess there's a distinction to be made between people who appear firmly committed to ill-supported beliefs and those who plausibly may just be basing their beliefs on inaccurate information.
It's true that I generally don't engage with people who believe in a flat earth or who claim to be absolutely certain that the government is colluding with extraterrestrials, simply because I doubt any good would come of such an interaction.
Yes, of course. But I understood (perhaps incorrectly) your comments as intending to have broader applicability. The case of flat-earthers has always seemed like an extreme outlier to me even compared to other conspiracy theorists.
> I have seen studies that suggest engaging with incorrect beliefs does nothing to prevent their spread and might even encourage them.
If there's anything I learned from my experiences in organized religion, the skeptics' society, various mental institutions and a career in criminal justice, it's that confronting irrational targets (or salesmen!) just teaches them how to better-reinforce their own flawed arguments and behaviors. They learn what rational people will come at them with and learn how to counter or subvert it, which helps them become even more persuasive to their next mark. Now they sound more intelligent and authoritative, which is precisely what makes them so dangerous!
The same advice applies to internet trolls. It's hard because it's instinctual, but never engage-- smile and walk away. Don't give them an opportunity to learn how to exploit or undermine the thought patterns of a rational person. If you don't yourself drown in their sea of circular logic, you're just giving a malicious organic learning algorithm free training data at the expense of your time and sanity.
If you starve them of attention, they can only feed off of each other-- to predictably amusing ends. Without outside input, then like any cult, they eventually become an incestuous feedback loop of lunacy that deviates so far from societal expectations of normality that you no longer have to convince anybody of anything since they do it for you.
> At least not in the context of helping them come to a more correct belief about the shape of our planet
Right, I should have been more clear. I've spoken to these folks not trying to change their minds, but to attempt to understand human psychology better.
Among the various large scale conspiracy theories out there, flat eartherism has, in my opinion, some useful properties.
Did the US Government fly missiles into the world trade centers? No...but proof to the contrary isn't trivial.
How can I prove the world is round? Well, it costs some money, but it's trivial. At the moment, Air New Zealand 30 is flying direct between Auckland, NZ and Buenos Aires, Argentina. The flight time will be just under 12 hours. The aircraft is a Boeing 777-200ER. This is a fast flying aircraft, but it's not supersonic, which it would have to be in order to fly between NZ and AR in 12 hours across a flat earth.
Almost anybody with a few thousand dollars can conduct this experiment.
So, I have studied flat-eartherism as a way to study some fundamental natures of human thought.
I've run into true believer flat-earthers who were intelligent, (mostly) open minded, charismatic and curious.
I think that every human brain is packed with irrational beliefs and thoughtful fallacies. Even the best, most clear thinking of us is, I believe, saddled with (nearly) unbreakable irrational thought processes. For most of us, they're not very obvious.
This isn't an implicit call to give up on the goal of embracing rational thought in all things. Far from it. For me, at least, understanding that I have such weaknesses hidden inside is an even stronger motivation to do everything possible to think and act clearly.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that fringe beliefs like flat-eartherism, young-earth creationism [EDIT: not to be confused with creationism in general], lunar landing denialism, etc. are not subscribed to for logical reasons but emotional ones. It's a club that you can join whose rules are very clear -- all you have to do is to profess to subscribe to the belief. Once you're in you get to feel special, like you are part of a small elite group who knows a Deep Truth that no one else does. As such, no logic is going to convince them. The only thing that will extract a person from such a belief system is emotional support, something to fill to emotional void that giving up the belief and hence the membership in the group will leave.
It always seemed like a mutation of whatever lobe or gland makes us interested in the arcana of computer systems, or makes kids get obsessive about dinosaurs.
They have some kind of construct that generates happiness when they have some secret and/or contrarian knowledge. it's just disconnected from the actual truth value of that "knowledge."
When someone is brainwashed or otherwise influenced by propaganda, you cannot argue them out of the position or trap them in a logical contradiction. There is some literature out there on it, but they have to work there way out of it on there own. The best you hope for is to state someone that tricks someone into questioning its validity - creating a seed of doubt.
You'd probably have to state something about flat earth "ideas" that has such an obvious flaw that they can't rationalize it. But not in a confrontational way.
Also, understand that it's not about flat earth. It's filling some other psychological need or some deeper issue.
edit: I had come across https://www.culteducation.com/ a while ago and found it useful. I don't think flat-earthers are a cult, per se, but some of the same techniques could still apply.
I was having a “conversation” with an anti-vaxxer on Facebook once, while simultaneously having a backchannel conversation about it with a friend. He made a point that resonated with me: If someone hasn’t used logic and reason to arrive at a conclusion, you’re not going to use logic and reason to get them to change it. I think that’s the crux of the issue here.
I have another, somewhat related, observation: there are a number of these issues, such as anti-vaxx, flat earth, climate change denialism, and the existence of a “deep state”, where the central premise is that there is some vast conspiracy to mislead the public, with huge numbers of people involved in perpetuating the lie. Once someone believes that these conspiracies are real, any attempt to provide evidence to the contrary is rejected as fake news/lies by big pharma/etc. I honestly don’t know how to reach someone like this.
Beliefs like this used to be a rare thing, something you’d only see in the tin foil hat crowd, but it has spread in recent years to a much wider segment of the population. I’m not sure what is to blame for that.
A lot of things in the world are pretty fucked up lately, and many people want to find an explanation that doesn't boil down to "stop voting in shitty people/ stop being an asshole/ stop being so stupid/ stop being a shitty person"
Unfortunately, this thinking seems to have a long history: human sacrifices, medieval medicine, witch trials, genocide, on and on. People have been using poor logic to make poor decisions for a long time.
It seems like an entirely harmless belief system, so I'm not sure why you'd want to try and talk them out of it, unless it's leading to dangerous behavior on their part.
It reminds me of Sherlock Holmes, on being told that the Earth goes around the sun:
"Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."
[...]
"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
Better a flat-earth obsession than getting into colloidal silver or those shoes with the little toes.
No more so than any casualty of extreme sports like climbing, biking, paragliding etc. It's cliche but I'd like to think the man died doing something he loved: piloting a home-made rocket. The world is a richer place for people like him following their passion.
uhhh.... i'm pretty sure we're going to find several orders of magnitude difference between 'extreme sports' (except maybe base jumping) and 'homemade rocketry'
Looks like we're going to have another thread of people gloating about the death of a man who's done nothing to wrong anybody here; who's only 'crime' is failing to treat science with sufficient reverence.
Comp Sience is loaded with people who need to compensate there insecuritys by making other people look stupid or incompetent.
Why shouldnt somebody refuse a "broadly" accepted theory. If science, then he/she will only proof it in the end. It should be embraced, not discouraged. Attacking science with rigor, is the best you can do for science.
Some may be gloating, but I think the majority are simply pointing out the tragic irony of someone losing their life over a demonstrable, undisputed fact that has been known for several hundred years. Conspiracy theories and the anti-science thinking behind them are dangerous, both to society and to individuals, as this case sadly demonstrates.
He didn't lose his life because of a belief in the flat earth. He lost his life because he was a daredevil. His use of the flat earth meme for promotional purposes is incidental to his death.
Furthermore if a few nutjobs on the fringes of society believing silly shit is genuinely a threat to society, then society must be fragile beyond belief. I reject this.
There have been measles outbreaks and other outbreaks of essentially eradicated diseases because of anti-vaxers. They are no longer simply fringe, and they do pose a real threat to society. A rejection of science, facts, and reason that can be spread instantly over the Internet resulting in something like the possible compromise of herd immunity to solved diseases is a huge problem. How does society continue if it is not based on facts and reason? One person, sure, no big deal. But who would have guessed a hundred years ago people would seriously consider the earth was flat in the numbers that people seem to today?
100 years ago, we believed that people were only ignorant because of their lack of available access to information and knowledge. Now, of course, we know better...
If you need to jump through so many levels of indirection to explain why a silly daredevil is a threat to society, maybe you should ease the fuck up and stop celebrating the man's death. Mike Hughes' share of the blame for measles outbreaks is immeasurable small and indirect compared to people like Oprah.
They're the same stock as anti-vaxxers, young Earth creationists and so forth; there's a lot of cross-pollenation. You're seeing perhaps the silliest blip on the radar, the most reflective peak, and ignoring the huge iceberg of harmful ignorance and reactionary anti-science it represents.
This. These people vote. If the people they want to elect share even a few of their anti-science, essentially anti-reality views, that affects us all negatively. Political party doesn't even come into it, since any politician not operating based on reality is a horrible outcome. Politics has enough theories and things reasonable people can disagree on without having to debate science from hundreds of years ago.
There are no flat earth politicians getting elected. You are grossly exaggerating the harm a flat earther stuntman has caused by lumping him in with other people who believe and did other things. It's disgusting.
What's next, blaming your neighborhood moon landing denialist for global warming? Get a grip.
> Conspiracy theories and the anti-science thinking behind them
I don't think you understand what's behind the mindset of people who theorize conspiracies. There's no sense of being unscientific; in fact, such folks often use the scientific method rigorously. The difference is one of trust - who do you trust unquestioningly to give you good information? The scientific community? Conspiracy theorists question sources of information. That's the 'conspiracy theory' part. When they question sufficiently fundamental or universal sources, they tend to diverge rather greatly from mainstream consensus.
I wish people would stop being so ignorant about so-called conspiracy theorists, and I wish people were less predjudiced against them. Don't forget that Monsanto successfully faked and suppressed scientific evidence for years ('the scientific community never lies', eh?), and the biggest tinfoil hat conspiracy theory of the 2000s was that the US government was spying on its citizens.
"they tend to diverge rather greatly from mainstream consensus."
How is that consensus arrived at? Science. Many may appear to apply the scientific method, but simply reject anything that doesn't confirm their prior beliefs. Science discovered the earth was round and put a man on the moon. Rejecting that, or "questioning the sources", is inherently anti-science. They can use science to work out things, and use it to debunk their own theories. They don't because their beliefs are born out of social and political factors. But the result is a society in which science is trusted less, and that is bad for all of us.
A close relative is incredibly deep into conspiracy theories, so I like to think I understand their thinking quite well. There is a large difference between conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. The NSA spying on us was an actual conspiracy. A fake moon landing is a conspiracy theory. The existence of a certain number of real conspiracies doesn't give any more weight to other conspiracy theories.
tldr: Conspiracy theories are bad and hurt society by weakening science.
"science" is the enactment of the scientific method, which involves hypotheses and Ockham's Razor.
> "questioning the sources", is inherently anti-science
There is no sense in which this is true. Have you ever gone to a doctor for a second opinion? Peer review itself is based on "questioning the sources" of an article. In my example, the questioning is extended to whole fields of study, or groups of scientists. And my real world example, Monsanto, is exactly why such larger categories of sources should be questioned.
> There is a large difference between conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies.
No, there isn't. The only difference is in the amount of information available. Many people found the US surveilance conspiracy compelling, at a level of information it sounds like you would have disparaged. That makes them perceptive, not anti-scientific.
TLDR: mistrust is often well-placed, and those who believe the scientific community is above question are naive.
All these people dunking on the guy out of imagined intellectual superiority. Guy was a marketing genius, decent engineer/fabricator and had giant brass balls.
Show me an engineer that has never made a mistake.
He designed and built two separate steam-powered rockets and at least one mobile launch platform that was able to carry a human hundreds of feet into the air. He obviously fucked something up but on average I'd say he did OK.
73 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22395528
and apparently he wasn't a flat-earther, it was for publicity.
> The earth is flat? Why do people in Japan see the moon and a dark sky while I see the sun?
With enough of these types of questions that don't have sensible answers you may be able to get the person into a "maybe this is all bullshit" mindset. It's hard though. Especially with global warming skeptics.
Every sensible line of questions will inevitably hit this wall of incomprehensible undebunkable “understanding” of the world.
It’s better to dig into their understanding of what is a conspiracy and how do they determine where in the conspiracy chain they should stop and why. (Flat Earth conspiracy, flat earth conspiracy conspiracy and so on)
Treat them like people, not specimens. Part of that means recognizing that each is an individual and there is no universal formula for how to effectively relate and communicate with individuals.
I mean un-nuanced thinking has done great for so many of our other problems like: war, homelessness, drug-use, and governance!
Joking aside, we might just need to write certain people off and just let them be. We might not have the resources to tackle climate change, feed and shelter an increasingly populated world, and individually talk people out of these entertaining delusions like believing in flat earth or doubting the efficacy of vaccines.
The friendship part is probably the hardest. But what's the success rate of shaming someone into changing their mind? Pretty low to zero. It makes them dig in more.
The best example I know of is Daryl Davis (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis). He's a black man that befriends active Klan members. He invites them to bars and his home and gets to know them.
He intelligently refutes their nonsense but he never asks them to change their mind or leave the Klan. He simply waits until they want to do it on their own accord.
The problem is sometimes people get stuck in a group or culture for various reasons. The key is to give them a safe, friendly alternative rather than a violent disagreement.
Risking Godwin's law, imagine the extreme case of Hitler. The best strategy to convert Hitler may well be Jewish people befriending him, rather than confronting him. But in the meantime, Hitler is radicalizing others and committing genocide. At some point, it makes more sense to just assassinate Hitler (or deplatform him, or depose him, etc.) rather than trying to save him.
Killing someone for their ideas sends the wrong message and grants them more legitimacy than anything. You elevate them to the same status as Jesus Christ, whose popular namesake religion is predicated on sticking to your beliefs in the face of any and all consequence.
This also happens to be the playbook you are encouraged to follow if you are trying to rescue someone from a cult or domestic violence situation.
Arguing gets you nowhere; they will defend their abusers. The best you can do is innocuously show them that the reality they've been brainwashed into internalizing does not work the way they were told. They will either come to their senses--on "their" own terms--or will prove to be a lost cause.
An example from a blog on jewelry how to counteract astrological nonsense is to point out supposedly different stones like emerald and beryl, are actually the same mineral, just with impurities like chromium present.
By presenting neutral factual information in that fashion, you can ask how or why the chromium affects the spiritual flow of the thing or whatever. It remains up to the person if they are persuaded or not.
There is an interview floating around with a flat Earth dude saying exactly this: that even if he were convinced the Earth were round he would stick with it because they have a community.
Humans are not rational robots. We are hyper-social emotional beings. The classical wire monkey experiment shows that primates will prioritize affection over food to the point of near starvation. It's not much of a leap to consider that humans may also prioritize affection over truth to the point of folly.
We see circumstantial evidence of this constantly. Most people would rather be wrong and have friends than right and alone.
If rational ideas look like they are failing, perhaps it's because we have failed to construct positive and lasting communities around them. If anything it's the opposite: the rational worldview is linked culturally to isolating sterile social orders with sterile objectives like GDP maximization or abstract political goals. These may be rational but they are not human.
If the rational can't rationalize community and culture we will continue to see a popular flight from reason.
-Desire to be nonconformist -Desire to feel intellectually superior by 'knowing something others don't' -Mistrust in authority -Fear of accepting a truth that will upend their understanding or the world -Fear (or refusal) of accepting a truth that upends their place in the world -Outright mental illness
One thing I think the internet and social media does is that it allows people with singular causes of irrational beliefs to find others like them and that in turn reinforces their irrational beliefs. Not to mention that they can easily find misinformation on the internet that reinforces them.
Memetic immune disorder, if you aren't already familiar, is in agreement with this explanation.
listening is far more important than talking to.
To reinforce one of the other replies: asking questions is pretty good, as long as one takes it slow and actually listens to the responses.
I've (very lightly and positively) engaged with flat-earth folk for years now, and it's been fairly interesting. Many are 'cranks', many are trolls, but many have something like an honest desire to really know and understand, though with some pretty big blind spots.
Even if they don't, who cares? By virtue of being a flat Earther you basically exclude yourself from any position where such a viewpoint might be relevant. They're not hurting anyone, so just leave them alone. Let people be wrong on the internet.
(Note that like many aspirational exhortations, this one is a little hypocritical. I've been known to have a problem with people being wrong on the internet before. But I'm trying to be better. :))
It's true that I generally don't engage with people who believe in a flat earth or who claim to be absolutely certain that the government is colluding with extraterrestrials, simply because I doubt any good would come of such an interaction.
IMO that excludes all flat Earthers, at least those who have received a primary school education.
If there's anything I learned from my experiences in organized religion, the skeptics' society, various mental institutions and a career in criminal justice, it's that confronting irrational targets (or salesmen!) just teaches them how to better-reinforce their own flawed arguments and behaviors. They learn what rational people will come at them with and learn how to counter or subvert it, which helps them become even more persuasive to their next mark. Now they sound more intelligent and authoritative, which is precisely what makes them so dangerous!
The same advice applies to internet trolls. It's hard because it's instinctual, but never engage-- smile and walk away. Don't give them an opportunity to learn how to exploit or undermine the thought patterns of a rational person. If you don't yourself drown in their sea of circular logic, you're just giving a malicious organic learning algorithm free training data at the expense of your time and sanity.
If you starve them of attention, they can only feed off of each other-- to predictably amusing ends. Without outside input, then like any cult, they eventually become an incestuous feedback loop of lunacy that deviates so far from societal expectations of normality that you no longer have to convince anybody of anything since they do it for you.
She's not spouting this because it's rational.
Dehumanizing or disrespecting others is one of the easiest dangers, as is challenging with a incomplete or fallacious counter.
These only add fuel to the fire.
Right, I should have been more clear. I've spoken to these folks not trying to change their minds, but to attempt to understand human psychology better.
Among the various large scale conspiracy theories out there, flat eartherism has, in my opinion, some useful properties.
Did the US Government fly missiles into the world trade centers? No...but proof to the contrary isn't trivial.
How can I prove the world is round? Well, it costs some money, but it's trivial. At the moment, Air New Zealand 30 is flying direct between Auckland, NZ and Buenos Aires, Argentina. The flight time will be just under 12 hours. The aircraft is a Boeing 777-200ER. This is a fast flying aircraft, but it's not supersonic, which it would have to be in order to fly between NZ and AR in 12 hours across a flat earth.
Almost anybody with a few thousand dollars can conduct this experiment.
So, I have studied flat-eartherism as a way to study some fundamental natures of human thought.
I've run into true believer flat-earthers who were intelligent, (mostly) open minded, charismatic and curious.
I think that every human brain is packed with irrational beliefs and thoughtful fallacies. Even the best, most clear thinking of us is, I believe, saddled with (nearly) unbreakable irrational thought processes. For most of us, they're not very obvious.
This isn't an implicit call to give up on the goal of embracing rational thought in all things. Far from it. For me, at least, understanding that I have such weaknesses hidden inside is an even stronger motivation to do everything possible to think and act clearly.
Good luck.
They have some kind of construct that generates happiness when they have some secret and/or contrarian knowledge. it's just disconnected from the actual truth value of that "knowledge."
You'd probably have to state something about flat earth "ideas" that has such an obvious flaw that they can't rationalize it. But not in a confrontational way.
Also, understand that it's not about flat earth. It's filling some other psychological need or some deeper issue.
edit: I had come across https://www.culteducation.com/ a while ago and found it useful. I don't think flat-earthers are a cult, per se, but some of the same techniques could still apply.
I have another, somewhat related, observation: there are a number of these issues, such as anti-vaxx, flat earth, climate change denialism, and the existence of a “deep state”, where the central premise is that there is some vast conspiracy to mislead the public, with huge numbers of people involved in perpetuating the lie. Once someone believes that these conspiracies are real, any attempt to provide evidence to the contrary is rejected as fake news/lies by big pharma/etc. I honestly don’t know how to reach someone like this.
Beliefs like this used to be a rare thing, something you’d only see in the tin foil hat crowd, but it has spread in recent years to a much wider segment of the population. I’m not sure what is to blame for that.
It reminds me of Sherlock Holmes, on being told that the Earth goes around the sun:
"Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." [...] "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
Better a flat-earth obsession than getting into colloidal silver or those shoes with the little toes.
this infographic isn't exactly authoritative... but it's sort of fun to look at: https://www.tetongravity.com/story/news/your-chances-of-dyin...
Really disgusting behavior.
Why shouldnt somebody refuse a "broadly" accepted theory. If science, then he/she will only proof it in the end. It should be embraced, not discouraged. Attacking science with rigor, is the best you can do for science.
Furthermore if a few nutjobs on the fringes of society believing silly shit is genuinely a threat to society, then society must be fragile beyond belief. I reject this.
What's next, blaming your neighborhood moon landing denialist for global warming? Get a grip.
I don't think you understand what's behind the mindset of people who theorize conspiracies. There's no sense of being unscientific; in fact, such folks often use the scientific method rigorously. The difference is one of trust - who do you trust unquestioningly to give you good information? The scientific community? Conspiracy theorists question sources of information. That's the 'conspiracy theory' part. When they question sufficiently fundamental or universal sources, they tend to diverge rather greatly from mainstream consensus.
I wish people would stop being so ignorant about so-called conspiracy theorists, and I wish people were less predjudiced against them. Don't forget that Monsanto successfully faked and suppressed scientific evidence for years ('the scientific community never lies', eh?), and the biggest tinfoil hat conspiracy theory of the 2000s was that the US government was spying on its citizens.
BTW, I'm not a flat earther.
How is that consensus arrived at? Science. Many may appear to apply the scientific method, but simply reject anything that doesn't confirm their prior beliefs. Science discovered the earth was round and put a man on the moon. Rejecting that, or "questioning the sources", is inherently anti-science. They can use science to work out things, and use it to debunk their own theories. They don't because their beliefs are born out of social and political factors. But the result is a society in which science is trusted less, and that is bad for all of us.
A close relative is incredibly deep into conspiracy theories, so I like to think I understand their thinking quite well. There is a large difference between conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. The NSA spying on us was an actual conspiracy. A fake moon landing is a conspiracy theory. The existence of a certain number of real conspiracies doesn't give any more weight to other conspiracy theories.
tldr: Conspiracy theories are bad and hurt society by weakening science.
> "questioning the sources", is inherently anti-science
There is no sense in which this is true. Have you ever gone to a doctor for a second opinion? Peer review itself is based on "questioning the sources" of an article. In my example, the questioning is extended to whole fields of study, or groups of scientists. And my real world example, Monsanto, is exactly why such larger categories of sources should be questioned.
> There is a large difference between conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies.
No, there isn't. The only difference is in the amount of information available. Many people found the US surveilance conspiracy compelling, at a level of information it sounds like you would have disparaged. That makes them perceptive, not anti-scientific.
TLDR: mistrust is often well-placed, and those who believe the scientific community is above question are naive.
He designed and built two separate steam-powered rockets and at least one mobile launch platform that was able to carry a human hundreds of feet into the air. He obviously fucked something up but on average I'd say he did OK.