From what I can tell from engaging with Flat Earthers, it's actually 50/50 people who reject everything reasonable they've been told, and people who are playing a game.
The game is fun and simple: pretend you believe in the Flat Earth to piss people off. Refute their scientific facts with questioning and amusing statements, like "I never said it wasn't a circle" or "How do you really know Australia exists if you haven't been", etc. You win the game if the other person gets mad and truly believes you believe in the Flat Earth. You lose if either they don't believe that you believe this, i.e. if you've given it away with your facial expressions, or if they manage to actually present convincing evidence (e.g. like Carl Sagan's sundial shadows) that cannot be refuted.
I have conversed with both kinds. The latter can be highly amusing people to talk to, the former are legitimately strange and I can't fathom how they come to exist. The linked post may be correct; I think some people simply have the innate urge to reject everything they've been told and to look for a countercultural answer instead, regardless of the subject matter. At least this is a safe direction to channel their madness into.
Perhaps they seen lots of lying from their governments and the media mouthpieces and so have developed an ingrained disbelief of authority and the establishment and this pervades to all parts of life.
Just like how all the mainstream media attacked MLK and the government treated him like a domestic terrorist. Now we lionize him.
Flat Earthers aren't the only ones who are good at rationalizing things away, it seems to be a skill that is innate to all humans. And, most seem oblivious to it, which makes conversations like this that much more fun.
"...the former are legitimately strange and I can't fathom how they come to exist"
I've come to believe that 10+% of any given population is insane (i.e. the fringe). I find it true almost regardless of what defines the group: professionals, academics, regular folks, ...
I distinctly remember playing this Flat Earth game when I was a young teenager, over 20 years ago now. It was great practice for exercising my burgeoning reasoning skills and annoying my friends to no end.
The charm wore off after a short time when I realised that playing private games is not conducive to productive relationships with people.
I can't fathom how they come to exist. The linked
post may be correct; I think some people simply
have the innate urge to reject everything they've
been told and to look for a countercultural answer
Others take a look at the status quo of our society, and perhaps reasonably, decide that it sucks. Our society has a lot of shortcomings, and has let a lot of people down. So they reject the institutions they view as being responsible for what they consider this poor state of affairs. In other words they are not blindly opposed to the concept of authority; but they have come to the conclusion that the current set of authorities that govern us kind of suck.
I don't think their opinion of society and the institutions that shape it is necessarily wrong, though I most certainly believe that rejecting our accumulated scientific knowledge is most definitely mistake. A true "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" situation.
Also, aside from issues with authority, it's just kind of cool to feel like you have some sort of special and secret knowledge that (most) others lack. A very seductive prospect. Especially if you are lacking in intelligence and/or education and don't get a lot of opportunities to feel that way. After all, we tend to place such people on a pedestal -- folks who figured things out before others and were eventually proven correct. Adopting a fringe theory like Flat Earthism lets people feel they're part of the special/chosen few.
The one thing I don't get about Flat Earthers is who benefits from promoting a globe? I haven't see a conspiracy theory that didn't have someone benefiting from the conspiracy. Who exactly benefits / profits off people believing in a globe instead of a flatland? The motivation escapes me.
That's not fair. You are taking a perfectly innocent -albeit stupid belief and tying it with an entirely unrelated reprehensible one. This is a poor method of shutting down a conversation because a)it's intellectually dishonest and b)is a sweeping generalisation.
I'm seeing a lot of it and i think it's terrible and has disastrous results. Instead of settling a debate, it ends up alienating and dividing people.
Now, i'm sure you didn't mean to do that and it was just a passing remark with no particular intent. But i feel it's a broader issue which ties in with the subject being discussed.
Maybe instead of dismissing it as ridiculous, you should do some research into who exactly many of these folks think are perpetuating the lies about the earth being a globe. Far too often, people who are more ignorant of the actual beliefs these conspiracy theorists spout give them the benefit of the doubt and paint them as harmless.
YouTube started recommending me Flat Earth videos a few years ago, and while it's a broad camp there's certainly plenty of religiously-driven antisemiticism there: references to "JewTube" deleting videos to hide the truth (as opposed to the more likely reason:it was 95% material copyrighted by others)
I am not a flat earther. I think the strongest answer I can give for a directly, logically related possible beneficiary is those who espouse a worldview dominated by impersonal forces. They benefit from the earth being verifiably a globoid because a celestial body being in that particular shape is quite simply explainable by gravity. If the earth were verified as shaped like a flat plane floating in space, or a cube, or some other shape with very large flat surfaces its formation would be far less explainable by impersonal, natural forces.
A creator of the earth would be a foregone conclusion and atheism would be an extremely fringe position. They'd be the ones clinging to theories like "The surface is curved because gravity keeps bending our surface back on itself... But, iron asteroids impact the earth from beneath, attracted to go up and into the inner planar ridge along the lines of the great divided magnetic ring field of our fractured south pole, and the energy from these impacts keep the earth from smoothing out into a sphere! But as asteroid impacts begin to decline, it will close into a sphere shape one day, and when it is you'll all be sorry!".
> The main problem is that most of the facts we are taught in school are all just things that were read in a book or told by an authority figure. We don’t come to them from scientific investigations.
I think it’s also a byproduct of having so much information persisted through generations. We want to “wow” students with the new, exciting information and end up skipping over or glossing over the “trivial” stuff that humans figured out a hundred or more years ago, treating it more like something to be memorized rather than discovered.
And if you don’t memorize it (out of inability, or distrust in authority, etc.) then the conclusions might seem unbelievable.
Imagine just seeing the last 10min of a movie, it would seem pretty confusing and unbelievable in many cases. But if you filmed the movie or edited it, it would probably seem pretty realistic and predictable.
It's tricky. In my school system we ran experiments for the basics. Put balls and blocks down Inclines and dragged things over various surfaces and watched things swing for couple of semesters, then "figured out" and calculated results of experiments, until we got results we already knew we were looking for :-). I'm sure those experiments can be done in a fun and educational manner, I just haven't been privy to that. Maybe they come too late in North American system - they should've been done way way earlier in life. I was a total sucker for science but they fell flat even for me. For those who didn't have inherent interest they were even less engaging.
I do agree that accumulated knowledge through generations is a factor. There's so much of it and we are so far removed from its inception and wonder
I recall one "experiment" I had to do in a science class was literally "do the batteries wear out if you leave a flashlight on in a closet overnight".
Turns out yes, they do. What a surprise.
This was in middle school. What lesson this was supposed to impart was unclear, but the lesson it did impart was "your teacher thinks you're a moron who doesn't know how batteries behave." I think maybe a previous experiment hadn't worked properly and my teacher wanted one that definitely would and came up with this idea from scratch.
It's totally possible to do this stuff well- I remember a pulleys-and-weights module another year that I liked- but when it's bad it's pretty bad.
I think expectations we have of an age are indeed part of it.
I started my education in Eastern Europe, and we got Physics and Biology as dedicated subjects in grade 5, with formulas and proofs etc.
So when we did "inclined slope" in Canada in grade twelve, in what was for many their first true "Physics" class (and this was AP!), it did indeed feel like we were about 6-8 years too late.
---
To reminisce and meander seemingly pointlessly on a personal anecdote - I remember reading "Ender's Game" when I was 18, and initially thinking "what BS, this guy doesn't know how to write kids, they all sound like adults!".
And then realized... wait... that's exactly what I WAS thinking when I was a "kid". Kids don't think they think "like kids". We all think as humans. We have plans and schemes and wants and concerns and ponderings no matter the age. So whatever good bad and ugly there may be in Ender's Game specifically and Orson Scott Card generally, I like to remind myself as I raise my own two kids now, that we need to give children WAY more credit for capability of thinking than we sometimes do, on this continent in particular.
I found it highly amusing how much people care about what other people think, as if the earth is really going to physically change its shape if some people believe it to be another. It's like believing the world is created by a god, or believing the universe isn't expanding, or believing there are finite amount of prime numbers. So what? These beliefs are descriptions, not ideals. They are believing in the earth is flat, not the earth should be flat (oh but I hope so much there's someone believing in the earth is round but we should flatten it). I personally prefer to live in a world where people have absurdly different beliefs on things that won't make a difference in everyday life.
I'm probably wrong about this but I think Flat-Earthers, if they became influential enough, should want to clandestinely (due to concern of dangerous guards patrolling the world border) colonize Antarctica (with resources provided by all sympathetic to their cause) as a staging ground to find and prove the existence of the ice wall. If thwarted in their search for it, they might conclude that the authorities set up some kind of ionic illusion field to make it seem like it simply isn't there and redirect them to wander the same ice plains forever.
If the Antarctican colony were successful, I think the importance of believing in earth's flatness would be the mark of a true citizen, and for people of faith among them, they would be willing to schismate over highly literalist interpretation of parts of scriptures that suggest imagery of a flat earth. The Ice Wall might be colloquially seen as a legendary gate which will one day be revealed, through which the just citizens of Antarctica will be invited to escape to heaven before the end of the world...
On one hand I agree that variety of thoughts and opinions and ideas make things FUN.
But we live in an interconnected society. The person next to me who thinks vaccines are tools of the devil that will install chip, or who believes climate change doesn't exist and God has promised to never again destroy the earth so we are fine, or the guy who believes homosexuality is a sin, or that earth is flat... They Get the same vote I do and their efforts impact me and others, and the only way I can see forward is education. So we can debate things which are value oriented and subjective but dear Gawd let's at least agree on basic facts :->.
Or to put it differently, to what degree is true heart-felt belief in flat earth a predictor or sign of a belief system axiomatically different than mine - which again is super fun in casual philosophical chat with coffee way, and truly terrifying when they are e.g. in position of authority. To use example you've put forward, people who truly fervently believe ib a literal god can be lovely people on individual basis, but on average are likely to act in ways which terrify me.
To put it another another way - a random person from another country being a flat earther is fascinating. My minister of science being a flat earther is not :-P
I agree with everything you said. I'm under the impression that flat earth does not possess an actual threat. If that's true then there's a difference to people believing vaccines are evil, an idea that also advocates action - to not take vaccine, which is capable of causing actual damage. Or believing in homosexuality is a sin - which advocates disrespecting or trying to convert homosexuals which can make people's lives harder. So curious to know how big of a threat flat earth truly is today.
"These people tend to be more suspicious, untrusting, eccentric, needing to feel special, with a tendency to regard the world as an inherently dangerous place," Hart said. "They are also more likely to detect meaningful patterns where they might not exist. People who are reluctant to believe in conspiracy theories tend to have the opposite qualities." - Joshua Hart [1] discussing their research [2] of 1,200 American adults.
I'm trying to understand the author's meaning for this statement: "They are also more likely to detect meaningful patterns where they might not exist."
It sounds like a critique of the persons who detect those patterns. But if/how one could refute that such patterns exist, or are meaningful, seems to hinge on the meaning of that quote.
In a recent season of The Expanse, there was a religious women (sorry, can't remember the character). Someone (perhaps herself) said that "she sees patterns that other's don't". That claim makes sense to me, because it doesn't rely on somehow knowing whether or not the patterns she sees are noteworthy.
I think if you focus on the need to feel special, there is a desire to have 'figured it out' and to be 'smarter than the mainstream'.
From this perspective, these people find 'facts', blow them out of proportion, and construct a wild theory. For example, review all the 'facts' in PizzaGate. [1]
This isn't about people not learning science. The QAnon folks took a lot of really random pieces of data, such as a photo of Obama playing ping pong, and constructed an highly dubious story.
> I think if you focus on the need to feel special, there is a desire to have 'figured it out' and to be 'smarter than the mainstream'.
IIUC you're saying that those traits explain why many conspiracy theorists fall into that camp.
I don't like leaning on ancedata, but I think I've seen persons like that in every ideological camp I've encountered. So I'm a bit skeptical that it's strongly correlated with being a conspiracy theorist.
I think I've seen persons like that in every ideological
camp I've encountered
I'm not the parent poster but yeah, I think the concept of being "in the know" in relation to others is definitely a concept that appeals to nearly everybody.
I mean, who doesn't enjoy that to an extent? Even if it's something innocuous like being "the person within your friends group who knows where all the cool bars in town are."
The allure of being "in the know is certainly not unique to conspiracy theorists, but I think it clearly is a major part of the appeal.
I think the author of the post is on to something. It isn't that he's saying flat earthers have evidence or are saying something reasonable. He's saying that the Western education system teaches people to memorize facts such as the roundness of the Earth without teaching process methodology to derive the roundness of the Earth.
Anyone who begins to question some of the facts they have been indoctrinated to memorize: (1) will not have a methodology for coming to a conclusion, past "hypothesis" and anecdote (2) will not have peers and close contacts who are able to refute the hypothesis, outside just insisting on the fact themselves, which itself isn't credible or scientific.
One claim that the author makes is that this is a flaw in Western education systems. It would seem to me that Western education varies significantly. And I am not familiar enough with other types of education to know what alternatives are working better in different cultural contexts.
You want to teach the scientific method and skepticism? Fine.
But you have to remember it's extremely laborious for us to do so, especially since these accumulated knowledge exceed anybody's ability to learn it within their lifetime.
I don't think it's a flaw per se to focus on the facts, knowledge, and concept at the expense of scientific thinking, but we all ought to acknowledge that much of our knowledge of the world essentially relied on faith.
No, it isn't laborious when the teacher understands the why and wherefore of the scientific method.
I know the Earth is round, because I have observed that when a ship sails away from me, the top portion of the ship is the last to fade over the horizon. When flying, the shadow of the plane has a surrounding glory.
You confuse your actual collection of knowledge, facts, and conceptual understanding from actual thinking. Actual thinking is hard, confusing, slow, and infinitely more painful.
Your ability to know that the Earth is round is based on facts and knowledge acquired, not thinking from first principle.
The ancient did all the hard work, we just co-opted it.
> Your ability to know that the Earth is round is based on facts and knowledge acquired, not thinking from first principle. The ancient did all the hard work, we just co-opted it.
That's simply made up. There are two examples in my comment. They are not from long dead ancient squabbling scientists of natural philosophy but from my own experience of setting experiments to prove empirically whether the Earth is round or flat.
Teaching a single scientific fact based on supporting evidence is easy, teaching every single fact plus it’s associated evidence simply takes longer. Nobody questions that sugar contains C6H12O6, so it’s simply taught as a fact without showing the evidence used to derive it. This can even run into problems when people get taught a bunch on regurgitated nonsense around stuff like how wings work.
In the end people get skeptical around a tiny number of scientific facts like climate change, evolution, and vaccination but they have no problem accepting everything from the MOS hardness scale, echos, buoyancy, etc etc. Why most people object to just those specific things has absolutely nothing to do with evidence, it’s completely part of a wider social phenomenon.
> In the end people get skeptical around a tiny number of scientific facts like climate change, evolution, and vaccination but they have no problem accepting everything from the MOS hardness scale, echos, buoyancy, etc etc.
The Mohs scale is pretty easy to validate, and the exercises typically done when it is taught tend to serve to do that.
Just imaging if people showed similar levels of skepticism around the Mohs scale as the did global warming etc.
The Mohs hardness scale is actually extremely difficult to demonstrate across a full range of natural materials. It’s intuitive that if A scratches B and B scratches C then A should scratch C, but testing a few samples is nowhere near enough to demonstrate across every natural mineral. It’s even more difficult to show this is a stable property that doesn’t very significantly over time.
So, sure a teacher might hand out a few samples and show what the idea is, but that’s little more than hand waving.
> The Mohs hardness scale is actually extremely difficult to demonstrate across a full range of natural materials
Well, sure combinatorial explosion and the difficulty of gathering every possible natural material makes it impractical to show that:
(1) the scale measures a real trait that exhibits the same consistent transitive behavior across all possible combinations of natural materials, and
(2) every natural material with a rating on the scale is correctly rated.
It's relatively easy to establish that the set of standard examplars for the integer ratings consistently show the relative properties the scale is supposed to measure.
Of course, it trivial to then verify the same is true relative to the examplars for any other material with an established rating, or to establish (within the bounds of the ceiling/floor integers) the rating of any material for which one doesn't have a measure and confirm consistency against examplars and any manageable sample of other rated materials.
But with that thinking society will never progress. If we take everything in the past on faith, then we will stay stuck in those ideas of the past. New ideas often come out of challenging the old ones, especially when that change is revolutionary.
Absolutely some things you may need to take on faith; but you shouldn't base your world view on only taking people in authority's views on faith. The more you use the scientific method, the more you know when you need to use it or not.
But with that thinking society will never progress. If we take everything in the past on faith, then we will stay stuck in those ideas of the past. New ideas often come out of challenging the old ones, especially when that change is revolutionary.
It's not a matter of mindset but the sheer impracticality. As individual, we can only question small parts of humanity's knowledge base.
All the article is suggesting is that we do more than just have people focus on memorizing facts. It isn't asking _everyone_ to understand and prove _everything_. Just that there is more focus on having people understand the why, not just the what.
> we all ought to acknowledge that much of our knowledge of the world essentially relied on faith
Maybe for many people, but this is not a given. I obviously don't have deep knowledge of every discipline, but with an engineering undergraduate degree (20 years ago) I feel like I have strong tools to understand the world around me down to first principles, question what I'm told and situate it within the axioms I firmly believe, and in general apply the scientific method. There is almost nothing they feels like "magic" to me, even if I'm not a specialist. I think it's a question of critical thinking, understanding a bit about the philosophy of science (not the current religious version) and thinking about cause and effect.
I'm prepared to accept we're all living within a simulation, or in some reality constructed by a diety, or some other currently un-testable unknowable thing, but in the world as we perceive it, there is a lot of order that can be understood in general, without having to be a specialist and without requiring faith
You want to teach the scientific method and
skepticism? Fine.
But you have to remember it's extremely laborious
for us to do so, especially since these accumulated
knowledge
I think there's a miscommunication/misunderstanding here; perhaps a language/culture barrier? I'm quite sure that when people refer to "the scientific method" they're talking about this --
It's a method with six steps. It's usually something primary education science teachers spend like, twenty minutes on at the beginning of a school year. It's not laborious.
(For maximum effect, the concept of the scientific method is then of course reinforced throughout the rest of the class, whenever experiments are performed. Assuming classes will be doing these experience anyway, this is not what I would remotely call "laborious")
skepticism
I suppose one could spend a lot of time teaching the history of skepticism, but from a scientific perspective, literally the only relevant bits are the notion that "repeatable, properly-designed experiments" are truly the cornerstone of science. I mean, it's certainly a notion that should suffuse the entire curriculum, but "laborious?"
Deutsch in Beginning of Infinity places the cornerstone at conjecture and criticism leading to Good Explanations: “An explanation that is hard to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for” that are treated as fallible (“Fallibilism The recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying knowledge as true or probable.”). Falliblism to Deutsch is in contrast to:
* Relativism The misconception that statements cannot be objectively true or false, but can be judged only relative to some cultural or other arbitrary standard.
* Instrumentalism The misconception that science cannot describe reality, only predict outcomes of observations.
* Justificationism The misconception that knowledge can be genuine or reliable only if it is justified by some source or criterion.
I generally agree with you, but also recognize that most people would probably be better served accepting consensus - even if I’d rather everyone be capable of critical thinking and reason/rationality.
I'm not convinced. I am pretty sure I got a better education in specifically how we "know" (historically, anyways, eratosthenes and all that) the Earth was round, by 7th grade in the US (public school, albeit a very good one), and having done equivalent coursework in a school run by the Japanese Embassy, you don't get that knowledge in the same way. Japanese education is much, much more like rote knowledge-learning than conceptual frameworks of thinking.
If you made the opposite argument -- that flat earthers exist because in the US we teach conceptual frameworks and not rote memorization, I would be more persuaded.
If we taught the story of Eratosthenes[0] and his method of measuring / calculating the circumference of the earth, I imagine that would go a long way toward making it “real.” I never heard of him in school. I learned of him as an adult who was already interested in learning about history.
He's saying that the Western education system teaches people to memorize facts such as the roundness of the Earth without teaching process methodology to derive the roundness of the Earth.
That's also a claim without much in the way of evidence and plenty of evidence against. The whole rather slight piece is based on this unexamined idea.
Yeah, I certainly remember the Eratosthenes shadow experiment making an appearance. That, and plenty of space footage, because space footage is awesome.
> He's saying that the Western education system teaches people to memorize facts such as the roundness of the Earth without teaching process methodology to derive the roundness of the Earth
I dunno about anyone else, but my Western, public-school education taught specific methods of deriving the roundness of the Earth and it's size (and when they had first been historically recorded as being used, as well), repeatedly, as part of all of the history, math, and science curricula.
It also taught the more general methodology of exploring any issue of material fact.
If anything, the public school education I received (US, '90s-'00s) went out of its way to provide this kind of background. Did it sink in for a lot of kids? Probably not. It's really hard to test for that, and if public schools actually tried to hold kids back who didn't truly absorb the material there would be riots.
Education was in NJ, same time period as you, same experience. Teachers made sure to show us how the things we were learning followed from the other things that we knew. I always loved that because it's much easier to remember things when you know how they derive from other concepts.
Same experience, same timeframe in TX. I remember learning about shadows in Egypt vs Greece during the same day of the year and thinking it was really cool. In elementary school even.
I think Flat Earthers and Pastafarians both provide an excellent service to society: they demonstrate many persons' inability to argue from agreed-upon premises to a widely held belief. I.e., they demonstrate that many of our emperors have no clothes. Unfortunately I'm not seeing this triggering the major educational rethink that I think it warrants.
I could be remembering wrong, but I thought part of their early schtick was to provide evidence for His Great Noodliness using chains of logic similar to what some Christians used in public debates.
Note: I'm not saying that the benefit of Pastafarianism was that it refuted Christianity. Rather, I'm saying that it exposed the weaknesses of some arguments being used to promote Christianity. I think serious Christian apologists would agree that bad arguments for Christianity should be discarded.
Western mass education is, if anything, much more tilted toward "learning skills" versus "memorizing facts" than any other education tradition, contemporary or historical. The piece also implicitly rests on the pretty controversial assumption that conspiracist worldviews like Flat Earth are more common among people educated in Western education systems.
I'm very skeptical of any thesis that this phenomenon is about a failure of people to be able to discern fact from non-fact (or "critical-thinking" as it is often characterized). As it misses that the common thread among all these, formerly esoteric and now increasingly mainstream, subcultures. They're about "belonging" and in-group/out-group signaling. It may be true that they're ill-equiped to discern such things, but it's also the case that there are social incentives for them to not want to adhere to facts, self-derived or otherwise.
It's possible, I suppose, that teaching people to discern and derive some domain of facts might coincidentally produce a broader cultural "in-group" of people that value social cohesion with others like them, but underneath it all this is all culture/counter-culture dynamics, not whether or not people have the tools to figure out the curvature of the Earth based on basic science and mathematics.
There still exist religious scientists. Heck, I even know creationists who fully understand how carbon and uranium dating work, and yet they're still creationists. Getting them to abandon their creationism is at a minimum a matter of getting them to be willing to overcome the in-group judgement of their family, their friends, their extended social circles, etc. Unsurprisingly, outside of specific trauma they're not likely to embark on such an upheaval.
People mostly behave like the people they're around. Being shunned or ostracized is (or used to be) an effective mechanism for social cohesion for this category of issue. The trouble at present is that social media makes it much more difficult (for better or worse) for shunning or ostracizing to improve that flavor of cohesion because it allows the universe of the shunned and ostracized to find cohesion amongst themselves, so the local fringe morphs into the global mainstream.
> There still exist religious scientists. Heck, I even know creationists who fully understand how carbon and uranium dating work, and yet they're still creationists.
You can be creationist and believe in carbon dating, fossils, etc. There's no contradiction. There are unanswered questions, such as "Why would a creator create a young planet that looked very, very old?"
But that's not a scientific question, it's philosophical and irrefutable one, and therefore (IMO) it is not a particularly interesting question to get hung up on.
I mostly agree with your point that these kinds of phenomena are not about critical thinking as such.
Though I do think fans of deductive and inductive reasoning tend to entirely overlook other forms of reasoning. For instance, abductive reasoning: what narrative makes the most sense given the options? Also, reputational reasoning: which experts am I going to trust on this?
Abductive reasoning doesn't apply in the case of the shape of the Earth, but reputational reasoning certainly does. At any rate, they help me understand why people make (to me) consterning choices, including in politics, religion, criminal verdicts, investing, and (lately) personal health care.
I don't think they're unaware of the questions. In fact, in the half-dozen or so cases I have any direct interaction with I'm certain they're aware of such questions. My point is exactly that they have other forms of incentives and reasoning that cultivate a willingness, or in the worst cases a zealotry, to entertain what their relative out-groups would consider a contradiction simply as open questions that their in-group permits.
I used the example as a representative for the kind of issue involved, not as an exhaustively defensible one. :-)
Principally I think we're in agreement. There seems to be quite a bit of analysis and consideration about what's going on that's through the lens of a kind of "enlightenment" reasoning wherein it's purportedly obvious that the pursuit of facts is intrinsically valuable, and so people not arriving at that value must be that they just don't know how to get there or are being lead astray.
Alternatively, I would suggest that for almost everything that almost everyone deals with in their day-to-day and/or finds reward & incentives for, there's practically no value to facts. Often it's the inverse. "Bullshit" pays. Sometimes socially, sometimes financially, sometimes both. In the case where such "bullshit" has become a subculture of its own, suddenly facts have negative value.
For whatever it's worth, this relates to one of my annoyances with the general startup ecosystem as it exists (to bring it around to HN-esque territory) I've been told (more than once) that the fact I have integrity is going to make my life harder as a founder. It makes it harder to sell. It makes it harder to fundraise. Etc. Those people are absolutely right. Because both selling and fundraising have a built-in incentive toward BS. "Fake it 'til you make it." became a social and financial good, and so people do it. Because if they don't, they automatically start out at a significant disadvantage. My personal bet is that my biasing toward integrity approach pays off in the long-term when the builders, not the brokers, get their cyclical day in the sun again, and in the meantime I can still be square with myself. That said, I very well could be wrong, and I unnecessarily made both the short term and the long term harder than they needed to be.
"Why would a creator create a young planet that looked very, very old?"
That's not quite the right question. God didn't create a universe in a disguise that looks old. God simply created a universe of a certain age. This is perfectly consistent with the bible's creation story. God created humans of a certain age, in adult form. The bible doesn't say God created embryos that then grew up into Adam and Eve. Likewise the Garden was created with what we presume were fully grown trees, complete with tree rings providing evidence of prior years of existence. Trees with a past, which came into existence just now.
Young-earth creationists like to pick and choose which features of the universe are allowed to have been created in place, and which must have been formed by mysterious interim events. For some reason, a lot of them refuse to allow geological features to have been created in place, which forces them to invent absurd explanations that usually involve Noah's flood and a lot of hand waving.
But it's all unnecessary. There's no reason we can't entertain the notion that the universe was created complete and in motion, exactly as it is, at any point in time. And in fact there would be no way to prove it one way or another, just as there would be no way for Adam to prove that the trees in his garden were a hundred days or a hundred years old.
Not all creationists adamantly believe the earth is literally only 7k years old. That's a very specific subset called "young earth creationists".
I would venture most creationists at the most fundamental level believe the earth, life, evolution, etc. are not accidental occurrences but the calculated result of creative effort. And that basic belief is not incompatible at all with scientific discovery
My response to young earth creationists is, "God worked really hard to make it look like the Earth is billions of years old. Shouldn't we respect His wishes and just go with it?"
Religion teaches you how to rationalize literally anything, for better or worse. I suspect it wouldn't have evolved as part of human culture if there wasn't a need for it.
Indeed! I expect that it's very useful as a function to avoid the deleterious effects of inescapably embracing the pessimistic version of existentialism.
"Religion: An Evolutionary Pressure To Bother With Any Of It At All" :-)
Anything that appears to contradict a belief can instead be seen as a test of faith. Some go so far as attribute that challenge of faith to a bad actor like the Devil.
> Wouldn’t this mean it’s calculated by something that can conveniently ignore both computational complexity and logical completeness
Assuming God has either access to more advanced technology than us or more advanced knowledge, why would that be unreasonable? Something that seems computationally complex now (like factoring primes) might be more manageable with more advanced knowledge/technology. Terraforming, bioengineering, factoring primes, etc. are within the realms of possibility for our civilization, so why not for a more advanced being?
> They're about "belonging" and in-group/out-group signaling. It may be true that they're ill-equiped to discern such things, but it's also the case that there are social incentives for them to not want to adhere to facts, self-derived or otherwise.
I think it’s most evident in cults, but agreed that it’s present in other less intense belief systems as well.
I think this claim of how western education works is rather broad, and really depends where you are.
Where I live (New Zealand), high school questions are graded based in large part on the methodology used and/or how well you demonstrate grasp on the concept. You could get every physics question wrong on an exam, but still get an above average grade if the way you articulated understanding of the topic was very in-depth.
In contrast, I’ve heard that in places in the USA for example (don’t know how regional this is, but even big stuff like the SAT), multiple choice questions are commonplace.
I don’t think I encountered any marked work with more than one or two multiple choice questions, and even then you were still graded on your work not just your mark.
The system I’m used to emphasises clearly understanding of the topic, multiple choice does not. Your marked work was also returned to you, and you could apply to have it re assessed if you felt it wasn’t fair.
My high school physics teacher didn't tell us the kinematics equations. He had us perform experiments to find them ourselves. I learned more about science in one week than I had in all the years up to that point.
(We were also allowed to smoke on campus. Those were the days!)
I think a lot of people that get wrapped up in flat earth stuff aren't the smartest, and so the problem starts in school when they are taught things like trigonometry, they often have a bad/dismissive attitude towards it (thinking "when would I ever use this in real life") or they just can't do it.
As an example, I have a friend that dropped out of high school relatively early to do a trade, and now he is keen about science and watches many videos on space and the like. One time he was theorising to me about how electricity in a wire makes a magnetic field, and that if you put it near a magnet then it would move. I said, that's what an electric motor is, lol. He probably would have learned that if he did better and stayed in school longer, but he wasn't interested back then.
But at the other end of the spectrum, the first person I really heard about flat earth from happened to be someone I went to highschool with. This was at our 10 year reunion (and was nearly 10 years ago now), and he had gone on to become a geologist, but had recently jumped onto flat earth. So, it's quite mind boggling to think about what was going on in his life that lead to that conclusion.
And 1 more thing about learning, I don't recall any schooling regarding 3D space, like how to think about it, approach it, etc. And then when talking about viewing/measuring space from the perspective of earth, you also have to consider your position on the globe, and how that relates to other objects. Even now I struggle with this aspect, and my job for nearly 20 years has involved 3D modelling on computers (although my work is 3D, it is all "planar" though, which is different to bodies in space).
As a European, the idea that there is such a thing as western education sounds completely foreign and absurd. Based on my personal experience I can see that education systems vary quite a lot from region to region within a country, and even more between states and countries themselves. There is no such thing as a unified western education system (not considering universities here), that sounds like an over broad concept without real meaning that can be used a boogey man for criticism.
Generally speaking when I see “western whatever”, it seems to be a lazy way to express something about the United States, without naming the country.
Excerpt from a text book in Hyderabad in 2006: “Why is a computer called a number cruncher?” “A computer is called a number cruncher because it crunches numbers with its teeth.” Students were expected to write down exactly that answer. This is a particularly crazy example, but my favourite and by no means isolated.
Rote learning is certainly taken to an extreme in the Indian system, though it has been improving a bit over the past couple of decades.
No; it’s much simpler than that: the Indian education system is immature, which often leads to the blind leading the blind, and such stunningly bad errors as this because the writers of the textbook were incompetent.
I’m fairly confident in this case that the writer deliberately made something up because he had heard this expression (an English expression, you’ll note—Telugu and Hindi probably don’t have a direct equivalent), figured it was relevant, but didn’t know the answer and didn’t bother to investigate, because who cares what the answer is anyway? It’s just computers, no one needs to know about them anyway. That English was probably his third language will probably have contributed a bit (he would probably recognise a similar phrase in Telugu of an object he was familiar with as a metaphor), but it won’t have been the most important factor.
Simplifying and not getting into the cultural aspects which are also significant:
Most of the people in the country are uneducated or poorly educated. You need teachers to teach, but there are nowhere near enough qualified ones. Unskilled teachers can’t teach understanding since they lack it themselves, and so they favour rote learning, and textbooks do too. This builds up a lot of inertia, so that it takes several generations to break out of it rather than just one or two as you might hope.
As usual, the poor are especially badly affected by it, since they’re much less likely to get a competent teacher.
English-medium teaching also comes into the equation as a double-edged sword, having advantages and disadvantages that I won’t get into.
> figured it was relevant, but didn’t know the answer and didn’t bother to investigate, because who cares what the answer is anyway? It’s just computers, no one needs to know about them anyway. That English was probably his third language will probably have contributed a bit (he would probably recognise a similar phrase in Telugu of an object he was familiar with as a metaphor), but it won’t have been the most important factor.
Why not just get textbooks from the US then? If they are going to teach in English anyways, someone already went through the trouble of writing those.
Importing textbooks or syllabi from another country doesn’t work well, because there’s a lot of culture that goes into such things, far more than you probably realise, and Indian culture is very different from such as British, Australian, Canadian and American. For some subjects it will work better than others, but it’s a total non-starter as a general strategy even from a technical aspect, quite apart from the politics that would render it quite untenable (especially with India’s nationalism and comparatively recent independence from the British).
Even so, there are some places where foreign culture has unduly influenced the textbooks; for example, the Class III and IV Social Studies textbooks go over the seasons, and teach as fact the four season model with snow and all, which is only suitable for temperate or subarctic climates (and doesn’t always have snow); it’s wildly inappropriate in Hyderabad and India at large, which have a radically different, monsoony sequence, reckoned in 3, 4 or 6 seasons. And none of the kids have ever seen snow, Hyderabad’s record low being 6°C.
I would also note that getting incompetent teachers only capable of rote-based teaching to use syllabi or textbooks designed for understanding-based teaching will be a disaster.
I was educated in the 1970s. My physics, chemistry and biology classes didn't verify every single thing that's taught but we did do experiments that verified directly quite a bit of it (including ordinary and AP classes). Has this changed? I can google that AP biology still does labs.
Agreed. Most decent teachers in school incorporate some experimentation or explanation of "How do we know that...?" They often discuss who is crediting with a discovery, with an explain how the person made the discovery. But unless you delve deep into a particular field, the amount of facts students need to learn will far outweigh the ability to explain how we came to learn each and every fact.
It jives with my own broader observation that most people who are (forgive generalization) "anti-science" have a different basic definition or perspective - whereas I think of "science, yay!" as a method, a way of thinking, an approach to things ; they think of it as "body of knowledge approved / disseminated by The Man". It can enable a starting from point of agreement - you should be skeptical, you should look for proof or consistency. But just because any given theory or hypothesis may be flawed, I have not personally found a better method to discover things. (I await Poppers and Khuns to attack me with appropriate zeal :-)
> most people who are (forgive generalization) "anti-science" [...] think of it as "body of knowledge approved / disseminated by The Man"
I don't think this is unique to anti-science people, but the majority view. Increasingly, the narrative pushed by pro-science factions (whether media, politicians or even academia), are increasingly eroding and morphing "science as a way of thinking" into "authorities who claim to be scientifically oriented". This can be observed in the premature and vigorous pushes for consensus, and silencing of scientists who disagree with some mainstream narrative, and a lack of openness to debate. So I agree with the post that we do have a crisis. Personally, I'm much more concerned with the quality and integrity of actual science than about those on the fringes who reject it.
I used to be scared by the proliferation of conspiracy theories.
I was scared by the chaos and uncertainty, and the by the potentially grim political consequences.
These days I tend to view all this as a relatively painful transitory state, people are inquiring and making mistakes, but we're collectively learning.
Access to information is power, we've been like a child with powerful new toys, but humanity is growing up, in the grand scheme of things it happens quickly.
Generations before us have been much crazier and gullible than we are.
The only problem I see at the moment is the over-reaction of the so-called elite, they are a bit too scared and they are making mistakes that will undermine their credibility and power in the mid and long term.
The elephant in the room people don't want to talk about is declining trust in powerful institutions, whether official or unofficial.
It's easy and very middle class to just say "oh these dumb people believe dumb things" and much harder and less comfortable to consider there's a growing issue with trust and - ultimately - legitimacy.
I didn't have health insurance for a long time. I had it growing up through my parents, but there's always this weird sense of "fix yourself, don't waste resources". It may have been a holdout from the scarcity of services my parents grew up with in rural Mexico and Central America.
I got hit with a really bad chronic disease that I've been dealing with for over a decade. It manifests in so many weird, seemingly unrelated ways because it's systemic. As I traversed the world of professional medical treatment, I initially felt the rapture of attention. "Oh my God, doctors are like magic. They are literally just focused on making me feel better!"
As I continued, and initial treatments lost efficacy or side effects became intolerable, my hope became overwhelmed with a feeling of resignation. I was thoroughly convinced that doctors can fix things, and that is the signal everything and everyone in society communicates. "But why am I still fucked up? Why am I on treatment #7? Why am I on procedure #3? Why am I out thousands of dollars and seemingly in the same spot I was when I started all of this?"
I gave up. I stopped going to doctors. I stopped looking to them for answers. In the middle of this year's long resignation, I happened to hear an interview on NPR with a doctor. She said, "I think doctors really need to be more open with the fact that there's things we can't fix. There's things we don't know. Trust disintegrates when people approach us expecting miracles, and we fail to temper those expectations. It's hard to tell someone, 'I am an expert at X but I have no idea how to fix X." That was revelatory to me.
I felt anger when doctors would prescribe me Tylenol or antibiotics or off-label depression medicine. "How the fuck are antibiotics going to fix this?!" I realized that those reactions were because I'm the kind of person that needs to know the chain of logic that leads to a conclusion. I would be so much more amenable to unintuitive treatments if the doctors had taken a second to tell me, "JAMA concluded that a combination of acetaminophen and ibuprofen are as effective as tramadol. In addition, I'm going to prescribe you these OTC's because you're young and you have a high risk of opiate abuse." Oh, that is such sound logic that I'm 100% on board with following your orders.
Since I realized that, I now know what to ask and what to research when being treated. I know what my brain needs to be convinced. I know my mind's extreme hesitance to take information on faith. I gained more compassion for conspiracy theorists and radical subjectivists. Yeah, they filled their brain with bullshit from Facebook, but maybe the authority figures they relied on failed to recognize the frames from which they operate.
I don't know if reading about my experience helps anyone. Ultimately, I realized that "be your own advocate" is a tremendously powerful way to operate. For the most part, authority figures and elites aren't trying to bullshit us into complacency. They have to juggle efficiency and effectiveness, and sometimes our individual pecadillos get lost in the mix. The things societies have achieved are because individuals joined in collective efforts, and flat-out ignoring or rejecting that momentum can lead to unnecessary strife and suffering for us individually.
If you're on HN, you're probably super smart. Try to decode what your brain needs. If your conclusions seem to be in contradiction to the world's signals, maybe slow down and entertain ways of convincing yourself of what the signals are telling you. Your mind is powerful, it can hold contradictory facts. Trust in that.
Most doctors don’t know any of that. They’re just gatekeepers between you and the recommended treatments given the symptoms that they feel like writing down for you.
Not sure why "middle class" got slipped in there as a derisive comment, there's nothing wrong with being a member of the middle class, and certainly nothing intellectually deficient.
It may seem pedantic to call out, but I really don't want to live in a world where "middle class" gets thrown around as this synonym for "unexamined" or "incorrect".
The thing that's interesting about "flat earthers" to me is that they largely do not exist. I've never met one or even know anyone who has met one, but the level of discussion about them is insane. It's blown way out or proportion to the actual number of actual flat earthers (you gotta exclude all the ones that are just doing it for debate and to make stupid videos online).
Ultimately, there's really no flat earthers at any meaningful level.
Every time someone has purported to find and interview one, it seems to me their really just trolling everyone. There was a seemingly genuine AMA on reddit of one and he said he really enjoyed arguing with people at parties, but he didn't really believe it.
He was clearly trolling the media. Honestly, some of the sports media are so bad that I don't really blame sports figures from trolling them. It was done in usual Kyrie style, though.
Listened to [1]. Never heard that one, but, to me, that seals the deal that he's trolling. The fact that he wouldn't answer the question "are you trolling?" is the important part, IMO.
I don't see how it seals the deal. If you say something you believe in order to stir up trouble, is that trolling? What about something you half believe, or that you're unsure about, but claim you're sure about?
It seems to me he's unsure whether the earth is round, and unsure about the definition of trolling, and thus doesn't know how to answer. He basically goes along with the interviewer because the interviewer is friendly and charismatic. He sort of wants to answer no, but doesn't want to make his friendly interviewer upset. The interviewer is trying to lead him to say yes, and he navigates it by avoiding the question.
What seals the deal for me is even in his last interview, where he seems genuinely sorry for what he said, he still doesn't say anything along the lines of "it's obviously round, I was just joking", because he doesn't want to say something that goes against his beliefs. Instead he says that if you have those beliefs you shouldn't say them publicly.
I hear you. Look, this is a guessing game. We're trying to figure out what's in the mind of Kyrie.
I will say I think the statement "that goes against his beliefs" is a weird thing to say (not you, him) when we're talking about whether the earth is round. It's not a religion it's science. Science that was settled more than a thousand years ago.
I think Kyrie puts this in terms of "beliefs" so he can push back on people that challenge him. "What, you're attacking my beliefs now??"
We have spent waaaaay too long talk about that fool. Peace.
Did he say it was a joke? He said he said it to get a reaction.[1] People say true things all the time to get a reaction.
Let's look at the timeline[2]:
2017-02-16: He says he believes the Earth is flat.[3]
2017-02-17: He doubles down on it.[3]
2017-09-25: He says he said it to get a reaction. He never uses the word joking. He says he just wants to have an open conversation. "At the end of the day, you're gunna feel and believe what you want to feel, but don't knock my life over it."[1]
2018-06-08: He says he doesn't know whether the earth is round or flat. "I haven’t convinced myself all the way like everything that has been given to us is fake. No. But you also know that a lot of history has been distorted over time."[4]
2018-10-01: He apologizes for saying the earth is flat. He doesn't say he doesn't believe it, just that he's sorry for saying it. He was into conspiracies and went down the rabbit hole and wanted to share it with everyone. But how he thinks "Don't come out and say that stuff, that's for intimate conversations."[5]
He also promoted conspiracies about famous assassinations.[3]
I’ve never met or even known anyone who has met anyone (as far as I know) who has died of COVID or even been hospitalized from it. Would you suggest I should conclude that there have been no COVID deaths or hospitalizations at any meaningful level?
Just out of curiosity, where do you live?
I live in Italy and four friends of my parents died of COVID, and I met all of them. My parents are in their eighties.
Washington state in the US, which is near the bottom of US states in COVID deaths per capita (133.9 per 100k). Here's a graph [1]. In EU terms, we'd be right between the Netherlands (124.1 per 100k) and Germany (139.3 per 100k) on deaths.
Within most states in the US COVID rates (cases, hospitalizations, and deaths) vary quite a bit from county to county. My particular county has had 98.0 deaths per 100k, which would put us between Israel (90.7 per 100k) and Turkey (102.1 per 100k).
I'm old enough to not have older living relatives (my parents were fairly old when I was born) so that greatly cuts down on the number of living older people I've met leaving probably just former older coworkers that I'm not in contact with and whose deaths I'd probably not hear about.
My current company went full work from home a couple of years before COVID, and I think that everyone who works there is the type whose hobbies and other personal interests are mostly things done at home except for one guy, so it was pretty easy for most of us to largely avoid other people during the phase of the pandemic when vaccines were not available. There is one person who is into outdoors activities like hiking and climbing and camping, but I believe when he does those usually the only other people who are around are his family members.
Most ex-coworkers I'm still friends with would have taken good precautions, and they live and work in areas where the region as a whole took good precautions. I do have one ex-coworker friend who lived in a high COVID/minimal precaution state, and then moved to an even higher COVID/minimal precaution state, but he's in a city and county that takes it more seriously, and was eligible for vaccination early, so he's been fine.
My friends who aren't coworkers or ex-coworkers are mostly people I met in college. They almost all have an excellent understanding of science (the college was Caltech) and will have taking appropriate anti-pandemic measures.
Putting it all together, the result is that I don't know of any friends or acquaintances that had COVID, and if any of their friends did it wasn't a serious enough case for them to mention it to me.
I have had a couple people who came to my house to install or repair things who told me that they had had COVID.
I'm related to one. The whole reason he got into it is the YouTube algorithm recommended him some videos on the subject one day.
He's in that group of people who have been fleeing the tradition platforms[1] that you and I probably frequent because flat earth views tend to overlap with other extreme far-right viewpoints. I bet that's probably why we don't see them around as much.
I was part of the Flat Earthers' group in my previous job and used to participate in Flat Earth internet forums.
99.99% of Flat Earthers are internet trolls that succeeded in creating a moral panic similar to Momo or the Blue Whale Challenge. The rest are legitimately insane people that don't normally participate in society.
The thing that worries me about society is the amount of people that believe Flat Earthers are real.
"What does it mean to be indoctrinated in “science” class? Let’s think back to an example that most of us learned growing up. If I asked you, “What is the mitochondria,” you, like me, would probably say “it’s the powerhouse of the cell,” or some similar concept."
"Lies to children". Sir Terry Pratchett's words. That's how education works. You start off with lies and you compound them and compound them until no one even knows what on earth is going on but there is a narrative from A to B. Lucy Worsley calls them "fibs" and I agree.
That's good enough for most people. It's slightly better than Just So stories and ideally avoids people doing something terminal. Sometimes, someone brought up on this nonsense looks really deeply into something and writes a paper on it. You never know, it might fly.
Flat earth? What a complete pile of bollocks. Imagine how gravity would work on a disc. If you have snags with gravity as a concept then I'm mad.
Question: Does anybody actually have a good quality reference point of "This is how I know the earth really is a sphere"? Like, something more direct than indirect (I know you'd need a fairly massive conspiracy, but that's indirect). Previous googling and so forth didn't really yield particularly good results for me.
Foucault's Pendulum is a practical proof to show directly the earth is rotating and spherical. There are thousands of these around the world in museums or universities. Or you could create one with some relatively inexpensive materials.
The Earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse. It's always round -- no matter the time of day, etc. -- which is only possible if the earth is a sphere.
Have you lived in different latitudes? Not only the stars change (what is not very noticeable nowadays), but the Sun goes through entirely different paths on the sky.
If you care to observe the stars, moving only a couple hundred km on the north-south direction is enough to see the change with bare eyes.
Since my school days I always thought Theory of Knowledge was the most important and underrated class. That's where you talk about the scientific method and how we discover facts. Somehow it was only worth a tiny portion of the international baccalaureate.
Basically this essay is correct. Science is taught the wrong way. It should all be a mix of history (of thought) and experiments that guided that thinking. Something like that Bill Bryson book, a brief history of everything. Instead of telling kids the end result, tell them how we got there. Basically, follow the method that you say you use. If you understand science, you know the end result is tentative anyway.
Speaking of everything, there's probably too much content as well. Too many insignificant details that people have to cram, and that they'll never need to know, and if they do, it won't take them long to find. People need to know the large movements, not lots of specific reactions and equations.
The content is also missing a rather important ingredient: what are the open questions in each field? Why turbulence? Teaching kids that we don't know everything is an antidote to science denial, however strange that may sound. The objection people have to science is often that it's arrogant.
I don't disagree with the authors point, yet I would contend that it's practically impossible for education to happen without indoctrination. Philosophy itself has a heck of a time proving anything is true in the face of radical doubt besides maybe some elementary notions such as that thought exists. Never mind proving anything as complex as the shape of the earth.
Trying to prove to a radically sceptical flat earther that the earth is a specific shape is folly, you will never successfully demonstrate such proof against a sufficiently prepared opponent. You CAN demonstrate that it cannot be proven that the earth is flat, but that's about it. One of the most absurd thing about flat eartherdom is how "round earthers" don't seem to truly understand the limits of their own knowledge but are eager to get into arguments with other people, whereas flat earthers range from those who are equally inept to savvy people playing a prank on those who wrongly consider themselves knowledgeable.
I see the entire phenomena to be a great public lesson on philosophy and science, as well as the futility of imposing your views on other people.
What were really talking about is epistemology – how do we know what we know.
What the author is saying is that much of what we call science are actually facts that we take on faith.
Middle school science are experiments we can all confirm, like observing protazoa under a microscope, or basic chemistry experiments.
College (and beyond) science delves into things that we have to trust others to perform on our behalf.
90% of western understanding of cosmology, anthropology, physics, molecular biology, etc all rely on us taking others’ observations on faith alone. And many are merely models or theories with no modern observation.
Moreover, the researchers who are making observations, are themselves using complicated apparatus designed by another person, like an electron microscope. The researchers are putting faith that the apparatus is producing an accurate & informative signal.
Your ability to observe and understand the world requires a lot of faith in that system.
Just remember that the entire system is built upon people, who have biases and are vulnerable to groupthink. There have been misunderstandings in the past, which are glamorously called “scientific revolutions”. Even small-scale misunderstandings should remind people to remain intellectually vigilant.
I was listening to a podcast that made a really good point about the varying reliability of different sciences.
In psychology, for example, a theory might have been validated in only a small experiment and fails when replicated.
Meanwhile, something like Maxwell's Laws of electromagnetism are replicated trillions of times a day. Every time your cell phone or wifi works correctly, that is another replication indicating that Maxwell's equations were correct.
When the science becomes engineering and we can build functioning things based on the theories, that is a good indication that they are correct.
Maybe you didn't personally verify that the Earth is round, but the people who built the GPS system used that fact. If the Earth were flat, the GPS wouldn't work. So far, no flat-earthers have built a functioning GPS based on the Earth being flat.
> What the author is saying is that much of what we call science are actually facts that we take on faith
This is true from a practical sense in that most people don't validate scientific assumptions that are widely accepted for themselves. But the reason why we are able to reliably take them on faith is the interesting part to me.
Peer review and the scientific method allow for incentive to "prove each other wrong" as well as to have the ability to replicate (or try to) the results for yourself. When I ask my Catholic friend why he believes the Christian God is real, and he says his evidence is that he feels the holy spirit. I have no way to disprove that and no way to replicate or prove that evidence. Therefore it's not really a reliable way to have faith in that fact.
The technology we have works. It's developed from R&D that's based on main-stream science. How do I know? The companies that are making it recruit from colleges that teach such science. It's round-about, but that's evidence for me.
It's not faith, it's trust, the difference being that trust can be broken and must be earned, faith relies on absolute adherence.
You require zero faith to trust in the scientific community, because you can "spot check" what you learn at any point, if you decide you want to. It takes a lot less effort than you may initially think, to independently verify certain aspects of even complex scientific advancement.
Consider even something as simple as ibuprofen; you're "spot checking" modern medicine when you take it and verify it reduces your fever or lowers your pain.
Or when you make a phone call with your cell phone. You're "spot checking" a whole host of physics just be reliably receiving and sending signals from your cell phone; if any of the theory were wrong, your phone would not work. That's not faith, that's trust, because you have direct evidence of accuracy in what you've been told. It's probably not even worth getting into how much you're "spot checking" science by simply opening up Google Maps and seeing how accurately it determines where you are!
I must repeat; zero percent of western understanding of hard or soft sciences require faith of any kind to be useful.
Naturally we're overindexing on telecom, given the HN audience – where we have practical applications of advanced physics.
But it's less concrete with other "sciences" like evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics. Even cosmology & theoretical physics is taken more on faith than trust. What observations of the multiverse or string theory can we build our trust on?
And medicine , molecular biology have also had mixed results, to the point that many beliefs were taken on faith (e.g. dietary vs blood cholesterol)
My point is don't lump all the "sciences" together in one lot of "the science"– there's a spectrum of observability and corroboration depending on the field.
No beliefs in science must be taken on faith. Some people do out of convenience perhaps, but they don't need to do, and if they decide not to, the path to corroboration is open to them.
I think I'm effectively a flat earther because I wasn't able to generalize Bostock's "Command Line Cartography" [0]--totally got stuck trying to work out projections for different shapes. I notice that no other comment has brought up the challenges of calculating different projections, does it just come naturally to other people?
It's too bad _Mathematics for the Millions_ [1] isn't used as a text book. It covers the evolution of math throughout history, basically showing how mathematics was derived by the problems being solved.
I haven't met anyone who believes in a flat Earth. I'm also wondering if anyone here has. Or if anyone anywhere has. I wonder if they really exist. My current theory is that the belief is a wildly successful joke which has created a community in which they can all share in. Maybe the flat Earth people are the good ones.
ETA: Which also means I screwed up a great opportunity to continue the joke by posting information on why the world really is flat.
I have met people who work in Silicon Valley who believe in a flat earth. After pressing the issue a bit, no matter what logical argument you throw at them, they can excuse it as "the earth might be curved a little bit, but it's not a sphere" (so no mathematical argument backed by facts they can see is going to persuade them) or "there's a conspiracy so no astronaut/satellite can see/show the true shape of the earth". It's not worth the time to engage someone who holds such a belief in conspiracy nonsense.
To those who say that flat earthers don’t exist in reality…
There’s a guy who drives around town where my parents live in Arizona with his flat earth position writ large on the side of his pickup truck. He will stop to debate with you even if you’re next to him at a traffic light. [1]
I think flat earthers do exist but the majority of them may not admit it openly if they’re still sufficiently “there” to fear the social ostracization (word?) that might follow.
I agree to some extent with the original article under discussion and I would point interested folks to an interesting video by Sabine Hossenfelder which makes some tangentially similar points. [2]
I would also add that the western school system teaches us to fear being wrong and finally letting go of this can be a liberating and empowering experience. After that it seems to become a little easier to believe the next similarly counterfactual thing that comes along.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadThe game is fun and simple: pretend you believe in the Flat Earth to piss people off. Refute their scientific facts with questioning and amusing statements, like "I never said it wasn't a circle" or "How do you really know Australia exists if you haven't been", etc. You win the game if the other person gets mad and truly believes you believe in the Flat Earth. You lose if either they don't believe that you believe this, i.e. if you've given it away with your facial expressions, or if they manage to actually present convincing evidence (e.g. like Carl Sagan's sundial shadows) that cannot be refuted.
I have conversed with both kinds. The latter can be highly amusing people to talk to, the former are legitimately strange and I can't fathom how they come to exist. The linked post may be correct; I think some people simply have the innate urge to reject everything they've been told and to look for a countercultural answer instead, regardless of the subject matter. At least this is a safe direction to channel their madness into.
Just like how all the mainstream media attacked MLK and the government treated him like a domestic terrorist. Now we lionize him.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29973075
I've come to believe that 10+% of any given population is insane (i.e. the fringe). I find it true almost regardless of what defines the group: professionals, academics, regular folks, ...
The charm wore off after a short time when I realised that playing private games is not conducive to productive relationships with people.
Others take a look at the status quo of our society, and perhaps reasonably, decide that it sucks. Our society has a lot of shortcomings, and has let a lot of people down. So they reject the institutions they view as being responsible for what they consider this poor state of affairs. In other words they are not blindly opposed to the concept of authority; but they have come to the conclusion that the current set of authorities that govern us kind of suck.
I don't think their opinion of society and the institutions that shape it is necessarily wrong, though I most certainly believe that rejecting our accumulated scientific knowledge is most definitely mistake. A true "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" situation.
Also, aside from issues with authority, it's just kind of cool to feel like you have some sort of special and secret knowledge that (most) others lack. A very seductive prospect. Especially if you are lacking in intelligence and/or education and don't get a lot of opportunities to feel that way. After all, we tend to place such people on a pedestal -- folks who figured things out before others and were eventually proven correct. Adopting a fringe theory like Flat Earthism lets people feel they're part of the special/chosen few.
1. Flat Earth Conference, All Gas No Breaks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H110vCGvTmM
I'm seeing a lot of it and i think it's terrible and has disastrous results. Instead of settling a debate, it ends up alienating and dividing people.
Now, i'm sure you didn't mean to do that and it was just a passing remark with no particular intent. But i feel it's a broader issue which ties in with the subject being discussed.
There are obviously significant differences in magnitude, but explicitly rejecting reason is never what I would call “perfectly innocent.”
A creator of the earth would be a foregone conclusion and atheism would be an extremely fringe position. They'd be the ones clinging to theories like "The surface is curved because gravity keeps bending our surface back on itself... But, iron asteroids impact the earth from beneath, attracted to go up and into the inner planar ridge along the lines of the great divided magnetic ring field of our fractured south pole, and the energy from these impacts keep the earth from smoothing out into a sphere! But as asteroid impacts begin to decline, it will close into a sphere shape one day, and when it is you'll all be sorry!".
I think it’s also a byproduct of having so much information persisted through generations. We want to “wow” students with the new, exciting information and end up skipping over or glossing over the “trivial” stuff that humans figured out a hundred or more years ago, treating it more like something to be memorized rather than discovered.
And if you don’t memorize it (out of inability, or distrust in authority, etc.) then the conclusions might seem unbelievable.
Imagine just seeing the last 10min of a movie, it would seem pretty confusing and unbelievable in many cases. But if you filmed the movie or edited it, it would probably seem pretty realistic and predictable.
I do agree that accumulated knowledge through generations is a factor. There's so much of it and we are so far removed from its inception and wonder
Turns out yes, they do. What a surprise.
This was in middle school. What lesson this was supposed to impart was unclear, but the lesson it did impart was "your teacher thinks you're a moron who doesn't know how batteries behave." I think maybe a previous experiment hadn't worked properly and my teacher wanted one that definitely would and came up with this idea from scratch.
It's totally possible to do this stuff well- I remember a pulleys-and-weights module another year that I liked- but when it's bad it's pretty bad.
I started my education in Eastern Europe, and we got Physics and Biology as dedicated subjects in grade 5, with formulas and proofs etc.
So when we did "inclined slope" in Canada in grade twelve, in what was for many their first true "Physics" class (and this was AP!), it did indeed feel like we were about 6-8 years too late.
---
To reminisce and meander seemingly pointlessly on a personal anecdote - I remember reading "Ender's Game" when I was 18, and initially thinking "what BS, this guy doesn't know how to write kids, they all sound like adults!".
And then realized... wait... that's exactly what I WAS thinking when I was a "kid". Kids don't think they think "like kids". We all think as humans. We have plans and schemes and wants and concerns and ponderings no matter the age. So whatever good bad and ugly there may be in Ender's Game specifically and Orson Scott Card generally, I like to remind myself as I raise my own two kids now, that we need to give children WAY more credit for capability of thinking than we sometimes do, on this continent in particular.
If the Antarctican colony were successful, I think the importance of believing in earth's flatness would be the mark of a true citizen, and for people of faith among them, they would be willing to schismate over highly literalist interpretation of parts of scriptures that suggest imagery of a flat earth. The Ice Wall might be colloquially seen as a legendary gate which will one day be revealed, through which the just citizens of Antarctica will be invited to escape to heaven before the end of the world...
On one hand I agree that variety of thoughts and opinions and ideas make things FUN.
But we live in an interconnected society. The person next to me who thinks vaccines are tools of the devil that will install chip, or who believes climate change doesn't exist and God has promised to never again destroy the earth so we are fine, or the guy who believes homosexuality is a sin, or that earth is flat... They Get the same vote I do and their efforts impact me and others, and the only way I can see forward is education. So we can debate things which are value oriented and subjective but dear Gawd let's at least agree on basic facts :->.
Or to put it differently, to what degree is true heart-felt belief in flat earth a predictor or sign of a belief system axiomatically different than mine - which again is super fun in casual philosophical chat with coffee way, and truly terrifying when they are e.g. in position of authority. To use example you've put forward, people who truly fervently believe ib a literal god can be lovely people on individual basis, but on average are likely to act in ways which terrify me.
To put it another another way - a random person from another country being a flat earther is fascinating. My minister of science being a flat earther is not :-P
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180925075108.h...
[2] Joshua Hart, Molly Graether. Something’s Going on Here: Psychological Predictors of Belief in Conspiracy Theories. Journal of Individual Differences, 2018; DOI: 10.1027/1614-0001/a000268
It sounds like a critique of the persons who detect those patterns. But if/how one could refute that such patterns exist, or are meaningful, seems to hinge on the meaning of that quote.
In a recent season of The Expanse, there was a religious women (sorry, can't remember the character). Someone (perhaps herself) said that "she sees patterns that other's don't". That claim makes sense to me, because it doesn't rely on somehow knowing whether or not the patterns she sees are noteworthy.
From this perspective, these people find 'facts', blow them out of proportion, and construct a wild theory. For example, review all the 'facts' in PizzaGate. [1]
This isn't about people not learning science. The QAnon folks took a lot of really random pieces of data, such as a photo of Obama playing ping pong, and constructed an highly dubious story.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/10/business/medi...
IIUC you're saying that those traits explain why many conspiracy theorists fall into that camp.
I don't like leaning on ancedata, but I think I've seen persons like that in every ideological camp I've encountered. So I'm a bit skeptical that it's strongly correlated with being a conspiracy theorist.
I mean, who doesn't enjoy that to an extent? Even if it's something innocuous like being "the person within your friends group who knows where all the cool bars in town are."
The allure of being "in the know is certainly not unique to conspiracy theorists, but I think it clearly is a major part of the appeal.
Anyone who begins to question some of the facts they have been indoctrinated to memorize: (1) will not have a methodology for coming to a conclusion, past "hypothesis" and anecdote (2) will not have peers and close contacts who are able to refute the hypothesis, outside just insisting on the fact themselves, which itself isn't credible or scientific.
One claim that the author makes is that this is a flaw in Western education systems. It would seem to me that Western education varies significantly. And I am not familiar enough with other types of education to know what alternatives are working better in different cultural contexts.
But you have to remember it's extremely laborious for us to do so, especially since these accumulated knowledge exceed anybody's ability to learn it within their lifetime.
I don't think it's a flaw per se to focus on the facts, knowledge, and concept at the expense of scientific thinking, but we all ought to acknowledge that much of our knowledge of the world essentially relied on faith.
I know the Earth is round, because I have observed that when a ship sails away from me, the top portion of the ship is the last to fade over the horizon. When flying, the shadow of the plane has a surrounding glory.
Your ability to know that the Earth is round is based on facts and knowledge acquired, not thinking from first principle.
The ancient did all the hard work, we just co-opted it.
That's simply made up. There are two examples in my comment. They are not from long dead ancient squabbling scientists of natural philosophy but from my own experience of setting experiments to prove empirically whether the Earth is round or flat.
In the end people get skeptical around a tiny number of scientific facts like climate change, evolution, and vaccination but they have no problem accepting everything from the MOS hardness scale, echos, buoyancy, etc etc. Why most people object to just those specific things has absolutely nothing to do with evidence, it’s completely part of a wider social phenomenon.
The Mohs scale is pretty easy to validate, and the exercises typically done when it is taught tend to serve to do that.
The Mohs hardness scale is actually extremely difficult to demonstrate across a full range of natural materials. It’s intuitive that if A scratches B and B scratches C then A should scratch C, but testing a few samples is nowhere near enough to demonstrate across every natural mineral. It’s even more difficult to show this is a stable property that doesn’t very significantly over time.
So, sure a teacher might hand out a few samples and show what the idea is, but that’s little more than hand waving.
Well, sure combinatorial explosion and the difficulty of gathering every possible natural material makes it impractical to show that:
(1) the scale measures a real trait that exhibits the same consistent transitive behavior across all possible combinations of natural materials, and
(2) every natural material with a rating on the scale is correctly rated.
It's relatively easy to establish that the set of standard examplars for the integer ratings consistently show the relative properties the scale is supposed to measure.
Of course, it trivial to then verify the same is true relative to the examplars for any other material with an established rating, or to establish (within the bounds of the ceiling/floor integers) the rating of any material for which one doesn't have a measure and confirm consistency against examplars and any manageable sample of other rated materials.
Absolutely some things you may need to take on faith; but you shouldn't base your world view on only taking people in authority's views on faith. The more you use the scientific method, the more you know when you need to use it or not.
It's not a matter of mindset but the sheer impracticality. As individual, we can only question small parts of humanity's knowledge base.
Maybe for many people, but this is not a given. I obviously don't have deep knowledge of every discipline, but with an engineering undergraduate degree (20 years ago) I feel like I have strong tools to understand the world around me down to first principles, question what I'm told and situate it within the axioms I firmly believe, and in general apply the scientific method. There is almost nothing they feels like "magic" to me, even if I'm not a specialist. I think it's a question of critical thinking, understanding a bit about the philosophy of science (not the current religious version) and thinking about cause and effect.
I'm prepared to accept we're all living within a simulation, or in some reality constructed by a diety, or some other currently un-testable unknowable thing, but in the world as we perceive it, there is a lot of order that can be understood in general, without having to be a specialist and without requiring faith
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
It's a method with six steps. It's usually something primary education science teachers spend like, twenty minutes on at the beginning of a school year. It's not laborious.
(For maximum effect, the concept of the scientific method is then of course reinforced throughout the rest of the class, whenever experiments are performed. Assuming classes will be doing these experience anyway, this is not what I would remotely call "laborious")
I suppose one could spend a lot of time teaching the history of skepticism, but from a scientific perspective, literally the only relevant bits are the notion that "repeatable, properly-designed experiments" are truly the cornerstone of science. I mean, it's certainly a notion that should suffuse the entire curriculum, but "laborious?"https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
I generally agree with you, but also recognize that most people would probably be better served accepting consensus - even if I’d rather everyone be capable of critical thinking and reason/rationality.
If you made the opposite argument -- that flat earthers exist because in the US we teach conceptual frameworks and not rote memorization, I would be more persuaded.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
That's also a claim without much in the way of evidence and plenty of evidence against. The whole rather slight piece is based on this unexamined idea.
I dunno about anyone else, but my Western, public-school education taught specific methods of deriving the roundness of the Earth and it's size (and when they had first been historically recorded as being used, as well), repeatedly, as part of all of the history, math, and science curricula.
It also taught the more general methodology of exploring any issue of material fact.
I think Flat Earthers and Pastafarians both provide an excellent service to society: they demonstrate many persons' inability to argue from agreed-upon premises to a widely held belief. I.e., they demonstrate that many of our emperors have no clothes. Unfortunately I'm not seeing this triggering the major educational rethink that I think it warrants.
Note: I'm not saying that the benefit of Pastafarianism was that it refuted Christianity. Rather, I'm saying that it exposed the weaknesses of some arguments being used to promote Christianity. I think serious Christian apologists would agree that bad arguments for Christianity should be discarded.
It's possible, I suppose, that teaching people to discern and derive some domain of facts might coincidentally produce a broader cultural "in-group" of people that value social cohesion with others like them, but underneath it all this is all culture/counter-culture dynamics, not whether or not people have the tools to figure out the curvature of the Earth based on basic science and mathematics.
There still exist religious scientists. Heck, I even know creationists who fully understand how carbon and uranium dating work, and yet they're still creationists. Getting them to abandon their creationism is at a minimum a matter of getting them to be willing to overcome the in-group judgement of their family, their friends, their extended social circles, etc. Unsurprisingly, outside of specific trauma they're not likely to embark on such an upheaval.
People mostly behave like the people they're around. Being shunned or ostracized is (or used to be) an effective mechanism for social cohesion for this category of issue. The trouble at present is that social media makes it much more difficult (for better or worse) for shunning or ostracizing to improve that flavor of cohesion because it allows the universe of the shunned and ostracized to find cohesion amongst themselves, so the local fringe morphs into the global mainstream.
You can be creationist and believe in carbon dating, fossils, etc. There's no contradiction. There are unanswered questions, such as "Why would a creator create a young planet that looked very, very old?"
But that's not a scientific question, it's philosophical and irrefutable one, and therefore (IMO) it is not a particularly interesting question to get hung up on.
I mostly agree with your point that these kinds of phenomena are not about critical thinking as such.
Though I do think fans of deductive and inductive reasoning tend to entirely overlook other forms of reasoning. For instance, abductive reasoning: what narrative makes the most sense given the options? Also, reputational reasoning: which experts am I going to trust on this?
Abductive reasoning doesn't apply in the case of the shape of the Earth, but reputational reasoning certainly does. At any rate, they help me understand why people make (to me) consterning choices, including in politics, religion, criminal verdicts, investing, and (lately) personal health care.
I used the example as a representative for the kind of issue involved, not as an exhaustively defensible one. :-)
Principally I think we're in agreement. There seems to be quite a bit of analysis and consideration about what's going on that's through the lens of a kind of "enlightenment" reasoning wherein it's purportedly obvious that the pursuit of facts is intrinsically valuable, and so people not arriving at that value must be that they just don't know how to get there or are being lead astray.
Alternatively, I would suggest that for almost everything that almost everyone deals with in their day-to-day and/or finds reward & incentives for, there's practically no value to facts. Often it's the inverse. "Bullshit" pays. Sometimes socially, sometimes financially, sometimes both. In the case where such "bullshit" has become a subculture of its own, suddenly facts have negative value.
For whatever it's worth, this relates to one of my annoyances with the general startup ecosystem as it exists (to bring it around to HN-esque territory) I've been told (more than once) that the fact I have integrity is going to make my life harder as a founder. It makes it harder to sell. It makes it harder to fundraise. Etc. Those people are absolutely right. Because both selling and fundraising have a built-in incentive toward BS. "Fake it 'til you make it." became a social and financial good, and so people do it. Because if they don't, they automatically start out at a significant disadvantage. My personal bet is that my biasing toward integrity approach pays off in the long-term when the builders, not the brokers, get their cyclical day in the sun again, and in the meantime I can still be square with myself. That said, I very well could be wrong, and I unnecessarily made both the short term and the long term harder than they needed to be.
That's not quite the right question. God didn't create a universe in a disguise that looks old. God simply created a universe of a certain age. This is perfectly consistent with the bible's creation story. God created humans of a certain age, in adult form. The bible doesn't say God created embryos that then grew up into Adam and Eve. Likewise the Garden was created with what we presume were fully grown trees, complete with tree rings providing evidence of prior years of existence. Trees with a past, which came into existence just now.
Young-earth creationists like to pick and choose which features of the universe are allowed to have been created in place, and which must have been formed by mysterious interim events. For some reason, a lot of them refuse to allow geological features to have been created in place, which forces them to invent absurd explanations that usually involve Noah's flood and a lot of hand waving.
But it's all unnecessary. There's no reason we can't entertain the notion that the universe was created complete and in motion, exactly as it is, at any point in time. And in fact there would be no way to prove it one way or another, just as there would be no way for Adam to prove that the trees in his garden were a hundred days or a hundred years old.
I would venture most creationists at the most fundamental level believe the earth, life, evolution, etc. are not accidental occurrences but the calculated result of creative effort. And that basic belief is not incompatible at all with scientific discovery
Religion teaches you how to rationalize literally anything, for better or worse. I suspect it wouldn't have evolved as part of human culture if there wasn't a need for it.
"Religion: An Evolutionary Pressure To Bother With Any Of It At All" :-)
Anything that appears to contradict a belief can instead be seen as a test of faith. Some go so far as attribute that challenge of faith to a bad actor like the Devil.
Wouldn’t this mean it’s calculated by something that can conveniently ignore both computational complexity and logical completeness?
To me this seems as unreasonable as young earth creationism..
Or are you thinking of something else..?
Assuming God has either access to more advanced technology than us or more advanced knowledge, why would that be unreasonable? Something that seems computationally complex now (like factoring primes) might be more manageable with more advanced knowledge/technology. Terraforming, bioengineering, factoring primes, etc. are within the realms of possibility for our civilization, so why not for a more advanced being?
I think it’s most evident in cults, but agreed that it’s present in other less intense belief systems as well.
Where I live (New Zealand), high school questions are graded based in large part on the methodology used and/or how well you demonstrate grasp on the concept. You could get every physics question wrong on an exam, but still get an above average grade if the way you articulated understanding of the topic was very in-depth.
In contrast, I’ve heard that in places in the USA for example (don’t know how regional this is, but even big stuff like the SAT), multiple choice questions are commonplace.
I don’t think I encountered any marked work with more than one or two multiple choice questions, and even then you were still graded on your work not just your mark.
The system I’m used to emphasises clearly understanding of the topic, multiple choice does not. Your marked work was also returned to you, and you could apply to have it re assessed if you felt it wasn’t fair.
(We were also allowed to smoke on campus. Those were the days!)
As an example, I have a friend that dropped out of high school relatively early to do a trade, and now he is keen about science and watches many videos on space and the like. One time he was theorising to me about how electricity in a wire makes a magnetic field, and that if you put it near a magnet then it would move. I said, that's what an electric motor is, lol. He probably would have learned that if he did better and stayed in school longer, but he wasn't interested back then.
But at the other end of the spectrum, the first person I really heard about flat earth from happened to be someone I went to highschool with. This was at our 10 year reunion (and was nearly 10 years ago now), and he had gone on to become a geologist, but had recently jumped onto flat earth. So, it's quite mind boggling to think about what was going on in his life that lead to that conclusion.
And 1 more thing about learning, I don't recall any schooling regarding 3D space, like how to think about it, approach it, etc. And then when talking about viewing/measuring space from the perspective of earth, you also have to consider your position on the globe, and how that relates to other objects. Even now I struggle with this aspect, and my job for nearly 20 years has involved 3D modelling on computers (although my work is 3D, it is all "planar" though, which is different to bodies in space).
https://medium.com/mind-cafe/the-5-basic-laws-of-human-stupi...
Generally speaking when I see “western whatever”, it seems to be a lazy way to express something about the United States, without naming the country.
Isn't Flat Earthism an American phenomenon? If so, the school system wouldn't explain why Europe doesn't have it.
Rote learning is certainly taken to an extreme in the Indian system, though it has been improving a bit over the past couple of decades.
Number cruncher is probably a 1990s affectation. The teeth thing is a bit worrying.
I’m fairly confident in this case that the writer deliberately made something up because he had heard this expression (an English expression, you’ll note—Telugu and Hindi probably don’t have a direct equivalent), figured it was relevant, but didn’t know the answer and didn’t bother to investigate, because who cares what the answer is anyway? It’s just computers, no one needs to know about them anyway. That English was probably his third language will probably have contributed a bit (he would probably recognise a similar phrase in Telugu of an object he was familiar with as a metaphor), but it won’t have been the most important factor.
Simplifying and not getting into the cultural aspects which are also significant:
Most of the people in the country are uneducated or poorly educated. You need teachers to teach, but there are nowhere near enough qualified ones. Unskilled teachers can’t teach understanding since they lack it themselves, and so they favour rote learning, and textbooks do too. This builds up a lot of inertia, so that it takes several generations to break out of it rather than just one or two as you might hope.
As usual, the poor are especially badly affected by it, since they’re much less likely to get a competent teacher.
English-medium teaching also comes into the equation as a double-edged sword, having advantages and disadvantages that I won’t get into.
Why not just get textbooks from the US then? If they are going to teach in English anyways, someone already went through the trouble of writing those.
Even so, there are some places where foreign culture has unduly influenced the textbooks; for example, the Class III and IV Social Studies textbooks go over the seasons, and teach as fact the four season model with snow and all, which is only suitable for temperate or subarctic climates (and doesn’t always have snow); it’s wildly inappropriate in Hyderabad and India at large, which have a radically different, monsoony sequence, reckoned in 3, 4 or 6 seasons. And none of the kids have ever seen snow, Hyderabad’s record low being 6°C.
I would also note that getting incompetent teachers only capable of rote-based teaching to use syllabi or textbooks designed for understanding-based teaching will be a disaster.
I still think it’s a form of trolling to make people mad. And it works. A form of “fuck you” to the ellite.
I don't think this is unique to anti-science people, but the majority view. Increasingly, the narrative pushed by pro-science factions (whether media, politicians or even academia), are increasingly eroding and morphing "science as a way of thinking" into "authorities who claim to be scientifically oriented". This can be observed in the premature and vigorous pushes for consensus, and silencing of scientists who disagree with some mainstream narrative, and a lack of openness to debate. So I agree with the post that we do have a crisis. Personally, I'm much more concerned with the quality and integrity of actual science than about those on the fringes who reject it.
I was scared by the chaos and uncertainty, and the by the potentially grim political consequences.
These days I tend to view all this as a relatively painful transitory state, people are inquiring and making mistakes, but we're collectively learning.
Access to information is power, we've been like a child with powerful new toys, but humanity is growing up, in the grand scheme of things it happens quickly.
Generations before us have been much crazier and gullible than we are.
The only problem I see at the moment is the over-reaction of the so-called elite, they are a bit too scared and they are making mistakes that will undermine their credibility and power in the mid and long term.
It's easy and very middle class to just say "oh these dumb people believe dumb things" and much harder and less comfortable to consider there's a growing issue with trust and - ultimately - legitimacy.
They need feedback.
I got hit with a really bad chronic disease that I've been dealing with for over a decade. It manifests in so many weird, seemingly unrelated ways because it's systemic. As I traversed the world of professional medical treatment, I initially felt the rapture of attention. "Oh my God, doctors are like magic. They are literally just focused on making me feel better!"
As I continued, and initial treatments lost efficacy or side effects became intolerable, my hope became overwhelmed with a feeling of resignation. I was thoroughly convinced that doctors can fix things, and that is the signal everything and everyone in society communicates. "But why am I still fucked up? Why am I on treatment #7? Why am I on procedure #3? Why am I out thousands of dollars and seemingly in the same spot I was when I started all of this?"
I gave up. I stopped going to doctors. I stopped looking to them for answers. In the middle of this year's long resignation, I happened to hear an interview on NPR with a doctor. She said, "I think doctors really need to be more open with the fact that there's things we can't fix. There's things we don't know. Trust disintegrates when people approach us expecting miracles, and we fail to temper those expectations. It's hard to tell someone, 'I am an expert at X but I have no idea how to fix X." That was revelatory to me.
I felt anger when doctors would prescribe me Tylenol or antibiotics or off-label depression medicine. "How the fuck are antibiotics going to fix this?!" I realized that those reactions were because I'm the kind of person that needs to know the chain of logic that leads to a conclusion. I would be so much more amenable to unintuitive treatments if the doctors had taken a second to tell me, "JAMA concluded that a combination of acetaminophen and ibuprofen are as effective as tramadol. In addition, I'm going to prescribe you these OTC's because you're young and you have a high risk of opiate abuse." Oh, that is such sound logic that I'm 100% on board with following your orders.
Since I realized that, I now know what to ask and what to research when being treated. I know what my brain needs to be convinced. I know my mind's extreme hesitance to take information on faith. I gained more compassion for conspiracy theorists and radical subjectivists. Yeah, they filled their brain with bullshit from Facebook, but maybe the authority figures they relied on failed to recognize the frames from which they operate.
I don't know if reading about my experience helps anyone. Ultimately, I realized that "be your own advocate" is a tremendously powerful way to operate. For the most part, authority figures and elites aren't trying to bullshit us into complacency. They have to juggle efficiency and effectiveness, and sometimes our individual pecadillos get lost in the mix. The things societies have achieved are because individuals joined in collective efforts, and flat-out ignoring or rejecting that momentum can lead to unnecessary strife and suffering for us individually.
If you're on HN, you're probably super smart. Try to decode what your brain needs. If your conclusions seem to be in contradiction to the world's signals, maybe slow down and entertain ways of convincing yourself of what the signals are telling you. Your mind is powerful, it can hold contradictory facts. Trust in that.
It may seem pedantic to call out, but I really don't want to live in a world where "middle class" gets thrown around as this synonym for "unexamined" or "incorrect".
Which if I think about it, is probably still not a great thing to be derisive about.
Ultimately, there's really no flat earthers at any meaningful level.
https://www.nbcsports.com/boston/boston-celtics/kyrie-irving...
It seems to me he's unsure whether the earth is round, and unsure about the definition of trolling, and thus doesn't know how to answer. He basically goes along with the interviewer because the interviewer is friendly and charismatic. He sort of wants to answer no, but doesn't want to make his friendly interviewer upset. The interviewer is trying to lead him to say yes, and he navigates it by avoiding the question.
What seals the deal for me is even in his last interview, where he seems genuinely sorry for what he said, he still doesn't say anything along the lines of "it's obviously round, I was just joking", because he doesn't want to say something that goes against his beliefs. Instead he says that if you have those beliefs you shouldn't say them publicly.
I will say I think the statement "that goes against his beliefs" is a weird thing to say (not you, him) when we're talking about whether the earth is round. It's not a religion it's science. Science that was settled more than a thousand years ago.
I think Kyrie puts this in terms of "beliefs" so he can push back on people that challenge him. "What, you're attacking my beliefs now??"
We have spent waaaaay too long talk about that fool. Peace.
Let's look at the timeline[2]:
2017-02-16: He says he believes the Earth is flat.[3]
2017-02-17: He doubles down on it.[3]
2017-09-25: He says he said it to get a reaction. He never uses the word joking. He says he just wants to have an open conversation. "At the end of the day, you're gunna feel and believe what you want to feel, but don't knock my life over it."[1]
2018-06-08: He says he doesn't know whether the earth is round or flat. "I haven’t convinced myself all the way like everything that has been given to us is fake. No. But you also know that a lot of history has been distorted over time."[4]
2018-10-01: He apologizes for saying the earth is flat. He doesn't say he doesn't believe it, just that he's sorry for saying it. He was into conspiracies and went down the rabbit hole and wanted to share it with everyone. But how he thinks "Don't come out and say that stuff, that's for intimate conversations."[5]
He also promoted conspiracies about famous assassinations.[3]
[1] https://streamable.com/d9nx2
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrie_Irving#Conspiracy_theori...
[3] https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2693635-kyrie-irving-act...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/movies/kyrie-irving-nba-c...
[5] https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/24863899/kyrie-irving-bo...
It's a great way to arrive at discriminatory conclusions, and it's a great way to cause harm to people who aren't like you.
Within most states in the US COVID rates (cases, hospitalizations, and deaths) vary quite a bit from county to county. My particular county has had 98.0 deaths per 100k, which would put us between Israel (90.7 per 100k) and Turkey (102.1 per 100k).
I'm old enough to not have older living relatives (my parents were fairly old when I was born) so that greatly cuts down on the number of living older people I've met leaving probably just former older coworkers that I'm not in contact with and whose deaths I'd probably not hear about.
My current company went full work from home a couple of years before COVID, and I think that everyone who works there is the type whose hobbies and other personal interests are mostly things done at home except for one guy, so it was pretty easy for most of us to largely avoid other people during the phase of the pandemic when vaccines were not available. There is one person who is into outdoors activities like hiking and climbing and camping, but I believe when he does those usually the only other people who are around are his family members.
Most ex-coworkers I'm still friends with would have taken good precautions, and they live and work in areas where the region as a whole took good precautions. I do have one ex-coworker friend who lived in a high COVID/minimal precaution state, and then moved to an even higher COVID/minimal precaution state, but he's in a city and county that takes it more seriously, and was eligible for vaccination early, so he's been fine.
My friends who aren't coworkers or ex-coworkers are mostly people I met in college. They almost all have an excellent understanding of science (the college was Caltech) and will have taking appropriate anti-pandemic measures.
Putting it all together, the result is that I don't know of any friends or acquaintances that had COVID, and if any of their friends did it wasn't a serious enough case for them to mention it to me.
I have had a couple people who came to my house to install or repair things who told me that they had had COVID.
[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
He's in that group of people who have been fleeing the tradition platforms[1] that you and I probably frequent because flat earth views tend to overlap with other extreme far-right viewpoints. I bet that's probably why we don't see them around as much.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/01/06/1070924133/how-dan-bongino-is...
99.99% of Flat Earthers are internet trolls that succeeded in creating a moral panic similar to Momo or the Blue Whale Challenge. The rest are legitimately insane people that don't normally participate in society.
The thing that worries me about society is the amount of people that believe Flat Earthers are real.
"Lies to children". Sir Terry Pratchett's words. That's how education works. You start off with lies and you compound them and compound them until no one even knows what on earth is going on but there is a narrative from A to B. Lucy Worsley calls them "fibs" and I agree.
That's good enough for most people. It's slightly better than Just So stories and ideally avoids people doing something terminal. Sometimes, someone brought up on this nonsense looks really deeply into something and writes a paper on it. You never know, it might fly.
Flat earth? What a complete pile of bollocks. Imagine how gravity would work on a disc. If you have snags with gravity as a concept then I'm mad.
But yeah, of course that has real consequences!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_circumference#Histor...
They used some pretty low-tech means to do so, which you could probably reproduce if you were so inclined.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bHqBy92iGM
If you care to observe the stars, moving only a couple hundred km on the north-south direction is enough to see the change with bare eyes.
Basically this essay is correct. Science is taught the wrong way. It should all be a mix of history (of thought) and experiments that guided that thinking. Something like that Bill Bryson book, a brief history of everything. Instead of telling kids the end result, tell them how we got there. Basically, follow the method that you say you use. If you understand science, you know the end result is tentative anyway.
Speaking of everything, there's probably too much content as well. Too many insignificant details that people have to cram, and that they'll never need to know, and if they do, it won't take them long to find. People need to know the large movements, not lots of specific reactions and equations.
The content is also missing a rather important ingredient: what are the open questions in each field? Why turbulence? Teaching kids that we don't know everything is an antidote to science denial, however strange that may sound. The objection people have to science is often that it's arrogant.
Trying to prove to a radically sceptical flat earther that the earth is a specific shape is folly, you will never successfully demonstrate such proof against a sufficiently prepared opponent. You CAN demonstrate that it cannot be proven that the earth is flat, but that's about it. One of the most absurd thing about flat eartherdom is how "round earthers" don't seem to truly understand the limits of their own knowledge but are eager to get into arguments with other people, whereas flat earthers range from those who are equally inept to savvy people playing a prank on those who wrongly consider themselves knowledgeable.
I see the entire phenomena to be a great public lesson on philosophy and science, as well as the futility of imposing your views on other people.
What the author is saying is that much of what we call science are actually facts that we take on faith.
Middle school science are experiments we can all confirm, like observing protazoa under a microscope, or basic chemistry experiments.
College (and beyond) science delves into things that we have to trust others to perform on our behalf.
90% of western understanding of cosmology, anthropology, physics, molecular biology, etc all rely on us taking others’ observations on faith alone. And many are merely models or theories with no modern observation.
Moreover, the researchers who are making observations, are themselves using complicated apparatus designed by another person, like an electron microscope. The researchers are putting faith that the apparatus is producing an accurate & informative signal.
Your ability to observe and understand the world requires a lot of faith in that system.
Just remember that the entire system is built upon people, who have biases and are vulnerable to groupthink. There have been misunderstandings in the past, which are glamorously called “scientific revolutions”. Even small-scale misunderstandings should remind people to remain intellectually vigilant.
In psychology, for example, a theory might have been validated in only a small experiment and fails when replicated.
Meanwhile, something like Maxwell's Laws of electromagnetism are replicated trillions of times a day. Every time your cell phone or wifi works correctly, that is another replication indicating that Maxwell's equations were correct.
When the science becomes engineering and we can build functioning things based on the theories, that is a good indication that they are correct.
Maybe you didn't personally verify that the Earth is round, but the people who built the GPS system used that fact. If the Earth were flat, the GPS wouldn't work. So far, no flat-earthers have built a functioning GPS based on the Earth being flat.
This is true from a practical sense in that most people don't validate scientific assumptions that are widely accepted for themselves. But the reason why we are able to reliably take them on faith is the interesting part to me.
Peer review and the scientific method allow for incentive to "prove each other wrong" as well as to have the ability to replicate (or try to) the results for yourself. When I ask my Catholic friend why he believes the Christian God is real, and he says his evidence is that he feels the holy spirit. I have no way to disprove that and no way to replicate or prove that evidence. Therefore it's not really a reliable way to have faith in that fact.
You require zero faith to trust in the scientific community, because you can "spot check" what you learn at any point, if you decide you want to. It takes a lot less effort than you may initially think, to independently verify certain aspects of even complex scientific advancement.
Consider even something as simple as ibuprofen; you're "spot checking" modern medicine when you take it and verify it reduces your fever or lowers your pain.
Or when you make a phone call with your cell phone. You're "spot checking" a whole host of physics just be reliably receiving and sending signals from your cell phone; if any of the theory were wrong, your phone would not work. That's not faith, that's trust, because you have direct evidence of accuracy in what you've been told. It's probably not even worth getting into how much you're "spot checking" science by simply opening up Google Maps and seeing how accurately it determines where you are!
I must repeat; zero percent of western understanding of hard or soft sciences require faith of any kind to be useful.
But it's less concrete with other "sciences" like evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics. Even cosmology & theoretical physics is taken more on faith than trust. What observations of the multiverse or string theory can we build our trust on?
And medicine , molecular biology have also had mixed results, to the point that many beliefs were taken on faith (e.g. dietary vs blood cholesterol)
My point is don't lump all the "sciences" together in one lot of "the science"– there's a spectrum of observability and corroboration depending on the field.
0. https://medium.com/@mbostock/command-line-cartography-part-1...
1. https://spatialreference.org/ref/epsg/nad83-california-alber...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/039331071X/
ETA: Which also means I screwed up a great opportunity to continue the joke by posting information on why the world really is flat.
There’s a guy who drives around town where my parents live in Arizona with his flat earth position writ large on the side of his pickup truck. He will stop to debate with you even if you’re next to him at a traffic light. [1]
I think flat earthers do exist but the majority of them may not admit it openly if they’re still sufficiently “there” to fear the social ostracization (word?) that might follow.
I agree to some extent with the original article under discussion and I would point interested folks to an interesting video by Sabine Hossenfelder which makes some tangentially similar points. [2]
I would also add that the western school system teaches us to fear being wrong and finally letting go of this can be a liberating and empowering experience. After that it seems to become a little easier to believe the next similarly counterfactual thing that comes along.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/InfowarriorRides/comments/gow054/mo...
[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f8DQSM-b2cc