I've been perversely interested in this Flat Earth movement for a few months. There are a lot of long, stunningly stupid, vehemently argued YouTube videos out there from flat earthers. There are a couple of basic science-minded people who take them on, often with some pretty entertaining results. But one thing is clear is that the flat earthers simply aren't listening. It goes a lot deeper than misunderstandings of facts or what they see when they walk outside. It's really hard to explain such weaponized ignorance. They aren't asking questions, they don't want to know, they just want to tear down the establishment (by exposing secret inside knowledge) in whatever way they can. It's psychological and goes much deeper than beliefs.

I find these people particularly interesting, not because of the absurdity of their belief, but because of the certainty they have in their belief and how difficult it is to convince them otherwise.

The article points out that "many Americans" hold some kind of wacky belief and strongly resist attempts to challenge it: vaccines cause autism, global warming isn't real, the moon landing was faked, the earth is 6,000 years old, dinosaurs drowned in the Great Flood, ghosts are real, etc...

So rather than the Flat Earthers being anomalies, I actually think they represent the general public quite well; it's just that their crazy belief is different from mine or yours.

What I am really curious about is: what would it take to successfully convince one of these people that they are wrong? Because if you solve this problem, then you solve the problem in its generality, and you can apply the technique to the vast number of people who still believe the earth was literally created in 7 days.

My best guess? Ask them, "What would it take to convince you otherwise?" The problem isn't that most people are incapable of learning the truth — it's that they don't want to learn the truth. Take for instance someone who believes dinosaur bones were planted in the earth by the devil. I have a hard time imagining that if you handheld them and took them step-by-step through the scientific method (e.g., starting with archaeological sites), that by the end of a year's worth of research, they would still disagree with the mainstream scientific view.

And that's the cool thing about science: you don't have to take anyone's word for it! You can check what people are saying all by yourself. Go out there with ice core machines, thermometers, and satellites, and trace through the same steps that the climate experts have taken. After years of following their own work for yourself, there's no way you couldn't believe in global warming.

I think what it really comes down to is that most people would rather live with a comforting or reassuring lie than an uncomfortable truth, and even given the opportunity and resources for discovering the truth themselves, they would prefer not to.

The explanation is a lot more simple I think.

Back in the old days, the way you showed you were better than everyone else was owning the nicest car, having air conditioning, or having a powered mower.

Now that more or less everyone has more or less everything, the only ways we can fulfill the basic instinct to be better than our neighbors is engaging in these kind of "all the sheep think this happened, but really..." ideas. Psuedo-intellectualism at it's finest.

You could show these people facts all day, it doesn't matter. Hell if you took one of them up in one of those Space Jets they'd probably swear you were faking it somehow, because the longer you hold onto a belief, the more invested in it you are, the more it's going to wound your ego to admit you're wrong. Most people would rather take a bullet than admit they were wrong (especially Americans and Brits) so that's how we end up with the Flat Earth people.

I have always suspected that the Flat Earth society was a put-on - a joke. There is a certain very British kind of humor where you assume some absurd position and stick to it with a straight face no matter what - you never crack a smile or break character. The pet store owner in the Monty Python parrot routine is a good example.

I recall when I was a kid, a Flat Earth guy was interviewed on TV after John Glenn's orbital flight. The interviewer pointed out that Glenn could see the round earth out his window and he could see he was passing over the entire circumference of the Earth every ninety minutes and ground stations around the world could track him coming over the horizon and passing overhead and ... etc. etc. The flat earth guy earnestly explained that Glenn was just circling around the edge - the perimeter - of the flat Earth, don't you see? - all the while making circular hand motions around the edge of the the flat table top where he was seated. I figured even then that the flat earth guy was just putting on the interviewer, daring him to say what he was no doubt thinking: "Oh for pity's sake, come off it". But both of them played along, neither of them let on that he thought the whole interview was just a joke.

I've been getting a kick out of the flat Earth thing. I've figured it as a "guerrilla ontology" or "alternate reality" prank in the tradition of Robert Anton Wilson, the Church of the Subgenus, the Incunabula Papers, etc. Either that or it's a skeptic troll of the "alt media" community.

Why don't they all just get together and walk over to the edge of the planet and see if there is a cliff or not. Seems like a really easy "theory" to prove. A coupe hundred people walking together while live blogging there attempt to the world should be save from secret NASA police.

I am trying to think of a way to prove without a doubt that the earth is not flat. I thought about sending them into space, and having them look through a window at the round earth suspended in the black. But then I almost know what they would say; the window is somehow distorting the true appearance of the earth. If it doesn't conform to their view, they will create reasons as to why. There are so many similar examples of people rejecting new information/evidence within our world now.

Is this not easy to prove its false? Just take a flight from the southern tip of Chile to South Australia. If the earth is indeed flat, the flight would take 24+ hours. But since they would fly over Antarctica, it only takes ~10.

I suppose one explanation could be that the 747 flight they are in somehow gained the ability to go faster than a F16 at maximum thrust.

If you fancy a trip down this particular rabbit hole:

http://www.atlanteanconspiracy.com/2015/03/flat-earth-societ...

http://www.atlanteanconspiracy.com/search/label/Controlled%2...

https://www.youtube.com/user/ericdubay77/videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5i_iDyUTCg

It's interesting to me that they use language superficially similar to the language of rationality and science to justify their beliefs. The belief is ridiculous, but how many people have opinions that they rationalize as scientific that aren't so ridiculous but still unjustified? It's easier to convince yourself that you're 'rational' than it is to be 'rational'.

The absurdity of this intrigued me and I dropped by their site. Read a few threads and it seems like they're not fond of satellite photography and rely on their senses almost exclusively. So here's a little question for them: why does a ship seem to "sink" into the ocean the further it gets?

I love that there's a Flat Earth Society of Australia and I wonder whether they think they're on top or below the disk.

In short, we have a crisis of epistemology in our culture, and facts (empirical, repeatable, independent measurements) don't win arguments any more.

I've always said there are people who are so set in their wrong beliefs about something that if they believed the sun rose in the west you could point them east in the morning and they would still persist in ignoring the reality.

Their model is surprisingly waterproof for tinfoil hatters. Genuinely elegant.

I find Flat-Earthers belief as surprising as an educated person believing in God.

The big thing is you can't convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. They have already made up their mind, dug in their heels, and are willing to fight to the death.

In some cases they would consider themselves a bad person if they didn't defend their ideals to the death. This is especially true if there is a religious aspect to their view. They don't call it a "reasoned position" on religion, it is belief. Belief is strongest when you keep it despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is a core tenet of Christianity and I suspect most other religions as well. Your faith will be tested by "deceivers" constantly and you must keep it.

It's impossible to use logic or science to convince someone of something when they think logic and science are tools of the devil.

It's also the Amiga effect. When a community grows smaller the remaining members are the most ardent. Once you are down to just a handful of remaining members all that is left are the die hard fanboys. All of the reasonable people left a long time ago.

The thing is, I don't think the "What would it take to convince you?" discussion is generally actually fruitful for beliefs like these. For example, Bill Nye posed this exact question to Ken Ham during their Evolution/Creationism debate and essentially his response was "Nothing, this is my belief and I'm sticking to it."

So, it seems like your best option is just to ignore those with decidedly unscientific opinions for the moment and attempt to instill more genuinely curious/less dogmatic thinking into those who have not already made up their minds.

I have a theory that climate change denial is an example of a cargo cult, not thought much about the motivations behind your other examples.

I suspect that the followers of a cargo cult don't spontaneously all decide to believe whatever it is at the same time, someone will lead it and the rest will join in afterwards. I'm also guessing that the leader will be someone who has been a leader in the past and that the nature of the misunderstanding that is at the heart of the cult will reflect how that leader came to prominence previously.

I started wondering about this as I was trying to work out why the main group of climate change denyers in the UK had rented office space in the same street [1] as the Royal Society and other scientific bodies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlton_House_Terrace

>I find these people particularly interesting, not because of the absurdity of their belief, but because of the certainty they have in their belief and how difficult it is to convince them otherwise. The article points out that "many Americans" hold some kind of wacky belief and strongly resist attempts to challenge it: vaccines cause autism, global warming isn't real, the moon landing was faked, the earth is 6,000 years old, dinosaurs drowned in the Great Flood, ghosts are real, etc...

I hate to point this out, but one of these isn't quite like the others: the one about ghosts. The problem with that one is that you can't prove a negative; it's impossible. There might be ghosts; there's simply no way for you to disprove it, no matter how much evidence you amass. You can make the case that it's highly unlikely because you haven't been presented with any sufficiently-compelling evidence yet, just like it's highly unlikely that pink unicorns live on the Moon in underground caves, but you can't disprove it, and with ghosts you can't even amass decent evidence against it (like by going to the Moon, searching for underground caves, and if any exist, looking in them for pink unicorns and coming up empty). Personally, I don't believe they're likely to be real, as I've never seen any good evidence, but lots of other people have claimed to, so while I don't put much stock in it, I think it is a bit different from the others, because the others have strong evidence countering those claims. There's plenty of evidence that vaccines don't cause autism, that climate change is real (the main debate is the source: AGW, but even here there's plenty of evidence that it's man-made), there's literally tons of evidence of the Moon landings, there's enormous evidence that the Earth is much older than 6000 years (and that human civilization predates this too), etc.

>Take for instance someone who believes dinosaur bones were planted in the earth by the devil. I have a hard time imagining that if you handheld them and took them step-by-step through the scientific method (e.g., starting with archaeological sites), that by the end of a year's worth of research, they would still disagree with the mainstream scientific view.

The problem is that religious people like this actively disbelieve in science. You can show them all the evidence you want and educate them about the Scientific Method and it won't help. After all, here again, you cannot disprove their assertion, that "the devil" planted this stuff. After all, science basically assumes that some intelligent force isn't involved in faking the evidence, so that when you carry out experiments they'll come out the same way every time because the laws of the Universe are constant. What if there's some higher force (or "Force"...) that can change the laws of the Universe at will to subvert your scientific experiment?

Of course, here you have to ask, why would someone believe this silliness? It's not that much different from the ghost thing, except that here instead of a relatively benign belief that disembodied souls are wandering around and occasionally doing odd things to give us the willies (like knocking objects over or slamming doors), it's a much more detailed belief that some evil being is screwing with us just so that somehow we won't get into eternal paradise because we don't believe some silly creation tale that has no supporting evidence. Of course this also seems to go hand-in-hand with being a member of some crazy church and needing to give them a significant portion of your income....