> But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion
This applies to flat earth theory believers as well. If they are unable to refute the reasons for the sphere theory, they have no ground for preferring either theory.
There's also the part "where he must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest" and I have a hard time imagining that most conspiracy theorists actually believe their theories -- in my experience, most people cling to conspiracy theories because they're more convenient to them; the need to believe is stronger than the actual belief. But that viewpoint is exactly what Socrates was denouncing ;)
> Conspiracy theories, religious fanatism, extreme nationalism, flat earth societies, sanitary anticompliance (anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers), climate change denial... they all have a thing in common: they are not rational and the people behind them are afraid of rationality and science.
Actually, I'd disagree. If you dig in to a lot of these theories, there is a kernel of rationality behind them. Many adherents can actually rebut arguments with evidence that makes a surprising amount of sense: there are usually multiple possible explanations for individual phenomena, and if you look at them in isolation, it can be very hard to conclusively demonstrate that the "scientific" answer is actually the best possible explanation. This to me explains why even intellectuals can fall prey to these theories: if you already have a nonconformist streak, the alternative explanations can be interesting to dig into.
Where they fall flat is in overall coherence; these theories often end up with massive gaping seams if you try to expand them from explaining one phenomena. And these seams are so obvious, and yet adherents have no coherent explanation for these seams, that it overshadows whatever kernel of rationality the theory originally had.
Maybe to people who don’t know any better. To anyone with basic knowledge of the subject and crib notes on common logical fallacies, not so much.
I mean, the ancient Greeks figured out the Earth was spherical over 2000 years ago. Good grief; Eratosthenes even worked out its approximate circumference with nothing but a road atlas and a twig! So if flat Earthers can’t even bring themselves to reproduce that ancient experiment themselves, it’s only because they don’t want to see the answer.
Frankly, it’s more useful to dissect the reasons why such people retain and defend such beliefs in the face of openly available evidence. And dollars to donuts you’ll find a manipulatively dishonest, self-serving paranoid narcisissm at heart: that consuming need to believe themselves powerful and clever, and in Control.
As Francis Bacon once observed: Knowledge itself is Power. He did not specify that it had to be right. And that’s ultimately all it’s about. Just one more Means to Power.
As thinking creatures go, they are all so very flat and squalid.
(See also Moon Hoaxers, 911 Truthers, Qanoners, and every other ego-masturbating skinsack of Fail that wastes their all-too-brief potential to be anything greater than just a future worm’s dinner.)
>I'm off the belief that (honest) flat earthers aren't of that belief due to lack of evidence, but rather due to lack of the trust framework necessary to have faith that those interpreting the evidence are interpreting it correctly.
...and yet the same people place absolute faith in arguments supporting the flat earth merely because it defies orthodoxy, and also believe the pseudo-scientific rationales behind them.
I think treating flat earth theory as a rational argument to debunk is appealing, but ultimately unproductive.
There was an interesting article some time ago: https://jameshfisher.com/2019/01/20/my-parents-are-flat-eart..., which casted the human perspective on the problem: at the root, believing a conspiracy theory gives self-importance to the believer, and it's, in a way, "fun".
Considering this perspective, this phenomenon belongs to the class of problems whose easy angle of attack is the technical (rational, in this case), and the difficult one is the human.
I'd argue that if one thinks that a flat earther is metaphorically a brick wall, and consequently a fool, opposing technical arguments against it is equally as foolish. It's actually the other side of the coin: yelling arguments to a wall is the mirrored human problem, in my opinion.
In conclusion, I think it would be more productive to think more about why this belief is appealing to people (and why it's spreading), rather than proving it's false.
You need to listen to them in order to be able to refute them. So if you want to change their minds you need to listen to understand what their belief is founded on so you know what you need to convince them of.
But in a more open way of seeing it:
It's important to understand where their beliefs are coming from to understand why they believe what they do. Maybe their belief is based on a fear of government and government influence on their lives. So maybe there is merit in talking about where that fear comes from.
The flat Earth portion of their beliefs is not valid. But their reasoning for it might include some interesting points to discuss that can help everyone be able to work together better.
> You know it was once a conspiracy theory to say the Earth wasn't flat.
In the 3rd century BCE, it is documented that the Egyptians calculated the circumference of the Earth to a relatively high degree of accuracy [1].
The Earth not being flat wasn't so much a "conspiracy theory" but a challenge to medieval Christian doctrine. It just doesn't fit the modern definition of a "conspiracy theory". The essential part of a conspiracy theory is that a powerful and covert group is responsible for something not appearing as it seems.
Common examples: faked Moon landings, UFOs (as aliens, including Roswell and other such incidents), the JFK assassination (done by the CIA or whoever) or the Holocaust didn't happen.
They all tend to revolve around some Big Lie (a fact exploited by Goebbels and others) and it tends to play into human psychology that there's some grand plan or there's something you, as a believer, know that other people don't. We now live in a time that has validated people raising how they feel to having the same weight as science, demonstrable evidence and reason. So now we have people believing in stolen elections, QAnon, Covid-19 being fake and the like.
So what you're doing is attempting to conflate the term conspiracy theory by applying it to a situation any reasonable person knows as being obvious ("the Earth isn't flat") and I have to wonder why. What other belief are you trying to validate?
> Sure, they could all be faking it, but at that point you have to question how much evidence it takes to believe in anything at all.
This is worth questioning (and hopefully coming back around to believing in)! Most of the reason I reject the idea of young earth theory is that the incentive to fake the earth's evident age is so vanishingly low my understanding of the rest of society would also have to be rejected. And that's a deeply stressful act to engage in without my own incentive to. But it's worth knowing about yourself that your view of the world is inherently based in your place and comfort within it, even the stuff that people broadly agree about, not some sense of discovering absolute truth. The latter aspect is just a symptom of having a coherent worldview, which people manage with very heterodox beliefs all the time.
It's worth looking into examination of flat-earthers and why they turn to it—it's often linked to myriad other conspiracy theories, each of which support each other.
> Science, as we do it, ie based on trust and without personal verification, is absolutely equivalent to religion.
We call it Social Constructionism. It's the basis of all knowledge in society. Whether a concept exists or whether it's believed to be true does not necessarily have anything connected to an objective reality, all you need is making it believable (different groups of people and different societies have different standards on what qualifies as believable). Demonstrating it by direct observation using the scientific method can achieve this goal, creating a mythology or writing a textbook can do it as well. At the end of the day, you must start from an existing concept and assume it is true. Theoretically, You can start from simple and self-evident concepts and derive everything from first principles. However, in a modern society, the existing body of knowledge is too large for any individual to independently verify and too useful to refuse. Even the verification of the simplest fact can be non-obvious and expensive. Thus, we assume they're true without verification. And often, what we have accepted are not even technically accurate.
Now, I'm not interested in discussing any particular issues in the thread, but I'd like to use this chance to talk about my pet theory on the psychology of conspiracy theories... An interesting thought exercise: Consider the shape of the Earth. Now, design a physics experiment to provide empirical evidence for a spherical Earth, preferably also it's rotation. Requirements: This should be practical within the ability of a single individual, and should be as easy as possible. Only minimum pre-existing concepts should be used. The result should be as obvious and unambiguous as possible without too much interpretation. It should be able to defend itself from any challenge on its technical inaccuracy or alternative models... I think it's actually a non-obvious problem. It's amazing how much domain-specific knowledge it requires. Flat Earth conspiracy theorists have cherry-picked numerous arguments to support their positions, just to name a few...
* Bedford Level Experiment. A number of sticks were placed in an 6-mile uninterrupted straight line. Optical observations were made. Experiment failed to detect any curvature, or that the data showed the curvature was not outward, but inward. Many modern versions by Flat Earthers can be found in YouTube videos, often on lakes or sea - objects and buildings well beyond the horizon can be seen by telescopic lens. Laser beams have been detected 15 kilometers apart, etc. Why? Atmospheric refraction. After atmospheric effects have been corrected, the data will definitely show that the Earth is indeed a sphere. But from now, to interpret the data, you suddenly need a model of atmospheric optics, which is far from obvious and requires many additional concepts. Then, consider the cost and difficulty of this naive experiment - For an individual, it's already high enough and unpractical for a city dweller. Thus, all optical experiments are doomed? Radio based observations are even trickier than optical observations.
* Foucault Pendulum. It's the most famous physics experiment to show the Earth's rotation, but the instability of the original, unpowered pendulum is notorious, even minor imperfection in mechanical construction or startup can create unwanted mode of oscillation, such as an elliptic oscillation which can totally mask the Earth's rotation. For powered pendulum, a careful and complicated mechanical analysis is needed to show that the pendulum has no preferred direction of swing,. Thus, Flat Earth advocates reject Foucault Pendulum as a valid experiment - any expected result is refuted as a coincidence or the result of the experimenter's biases.
* Gyroscope. An accurate and sensitive gyroscope, such as a Laser Ring Gyroscope, can sense the Earth's rotation. But gyroscope observations are rejected by Flat Earthers in general - the raw data output is noisy with random drifts and noise, aquisation of useful data heavily relies on algorithms and data processing. They argue that the algorithms can be biased to show a rotational Earth. Of course, it's not the case, but then you need to justify the entire subject of statistics and digital signal processing, good luck with that.
* Astronomic and Geodesic Measurements. Examples include observing the fixed stars and showing their variation in altitudes, or showing the sum of a triangle on Earth is greater than 180-degree, etc. Many of these experiments require an individual to travel great distances, many geodesic measurements also require accurate navigation, which can be disputed.
Of course, obvious experiments that produces strong evidences do exist, good candidates can be lunar ellipses, sun rise and sun set, timezones. But it's just a rhetorical question, I used the absurd example of Flat Earth to illustrate the point of non-obviousness of personal verification - indeed, many people who believe the Earth is a sphere have proposed these experiments to Flat Earthers, while making the mistake of not realizing their limitations, which in turns strengthens the beliefs of many Flat Earthers that "people are too brainwashed to see the truth". If we move away from Flat Earth and step into more advanced subjects, obviousness completely disappears, and only domain-specific knowledge remains, which are heavily dependent upon preexisting results.
In my opinion, it's how numerous conspiracy theories are created. The conspiracy theorists will simply tell you: why do you assume they're true? It's entirely possible that everything you know is false. And all the gaps in your accepted knowledge can be exploited by them to make this point. And ultimately, you may come to the conclusion that the entire body scientific knowledge is a hoax. Then, one may ask, how can people build anything in engineering? The conspiracy theorist will tell you, the truths are carefully and systematic distorted in a way that appears to be self-consistent, enough for some applications, but it's distorted enough to kill truth. And since any pre-existing results couldn't be trusted and one is unable to derive or verify anything from first principles due to limited time and resources, science is hence rejected.
Conclusion: The theoretical and epistemological foundation of many conspiracy theories are the equivalent of Reflection on Trusting Trust - they claim the vast majority of knowledge is manipulated for malicious purposes, in the same way that the hypothetical attack by Ken Thompson claims one's compiler could be backdoored and no program in one's computer can be trusted.
> These people do not listen to reason; they didn't reason themselves into the position and you cannot reason them out of it. The flat earthers doing the "experiments" keep coming up with reasons to keep on believing, even when their experiments are so blinkered and janky they show either nothing at all or that they are, in fact, wrong.
I’m late to the party here, but I recall reading (or watching) about one flat earther devising a somewhat novel, and actually very solid experiment for determining the roundness of the earth. Unfortunately, they thought their methods or testing apparatuses were flawed when the results indicated that the earth was in fact pretty roundish. They’ll be back with a fresh experiment, no doubt, to confirm their pre-existing notions.
> If it's a crank conspiracy theory it should be easy to disprove.
Have you never spoken to conspiracy theorists? Go and watch one of the Flat Earth documentaries. If Flat Earth is a crank conspiracy theory then it should be easy to disprove and the conspiracy would die out, right?
This. The idea of actual flat-earth believers should be met with at least the same degree of scepticism as they supposedly demand of round-earth believers. Mind that merely having someone claim to be a flat-earther or arguing in favor of flat earth does not distinguish between them actually believing it and engaging in some sort of Socratic rhetoric (so as not to say trolling)
People respond differently to "the world is flat and I know it because you can't trust any experts and they all say the world is round" vs "the world is flat and here are my satellite observations supporting the claim."
Lots of conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Even more turn out to be false. The derision comes from absolute conviction in the absence of evidence. If evidence appears, people can change their opinions and still deride you for unquestioning beliefs before there was evidence.
> nobody 30 years ago believed the earth was flat but they probably couldn’t articulate why they believed that
I'm not sure that this needs to be a requirement. Cultural axioms like this have value; there's a lot of knowledge to be had in the world, and not enough time or space in the mind to derive it all. I don't need to prove to myself from first principles every time I have a headache that aspirin will help.
There's danger, sure, if the wrong axioms take root, and we need to keep an open eye for new data that show we might be wrong. But it's unreasonable to expect that every individual person can cogently argue one side or the other of something with such overwhelming evidence that it has been accepted as a fact.
I've been told by multiple people I respect variations of "If you cannot argue the other side's argument in good faith and well, then you really don't know what you believe yourself".
I do fail in this with some of the extremes. I just cannot figure out the why of the "flat earth" thing since I don't understand who "profits" in some way from a cover-up.
> “Likewise, fringe movements in the sciences have long been a part of American society, although, to be sure, there has been a decided uptick over the past few decades. Consider the Flat Earth theory. Despite what you may have heard, Christopher Columbus did not discover that Earth was round; this fact was known since antiquity. (Plato wrote about it.) The notion that Columbus, one of the few knowledgeable mariners who did not quite believe it was a sphere (he thought it was egg-shaped), “discovered” its shape was a creation of the writer Washington Irving, who sought to assign some scientific legitimacy to what was otherwise a colonialist land grab. [5] Yet in the past decade, Flat Earth theory has achieved a certain currency, fueled by YouTube videos and an appetite for contrarian thinking, hyperskepticism, and a yearning for community. [6]”
That last sentence suggests intrinsic motivation. Sometimes there may also be a business motivation (e.g., economics of the infotainment industry).
> You know it was once a conspiracy theory to say the Earth wasn't flat.
Archimedes knew the Earth was a sphere. You can tell the surface of the Earth is curved by the fact that the body of a ship disappears from view before its mast.
> I can tell you that I can identify an ideology for every conspiracy that I am familiar with.
Are you familiar with UFO conspiracy theories such as Area 51/Roswell/etc? What is their ideology? How about JFK assassination conspiracy theories, what ideology are they? What is the ideology of the moon landing hoax theory? Or the conspiracy theory (which a taxi driver once tried to convince me of) that the passengers on MH370 were abducted by the CIA? [0]
> - Flat Earth conspiracism is about an anti-intellectual pan-Christian traditionalist ideology
Wikipedia [1] says:
> Research on the arguments that flat Earthers wield shows three distinct factions, each one subscribing to its own set of beliefs. The first faction subscribes to a faith-based conflict in which atheists use science to suppress the Christian faith... The second faction believes in an overarching conspiracy for knowledge suppression... The third faction believes that knowledge is personal and experiential. They are dismissive of knowledge that comes from authoritative sources, especially book knowledge
So, contrary to what you say, it says only one branch of Flat Earthers have a Christian ideology. Also, it isn’t “pan-Christian”: almost all Christian Flat Earthers are non-traditional Protestants (such as “independent Fundamentalists”); very few Christian Flat Earthers are Catholics or Orthodox or traditional Protestants (Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists, etc). At the time of Christianity’s founding, most educated people believed the Earth was round, and the vast majority of Christian leaders accepted that societal consensus; it is only in modern times that a tiny fringe has emerged to question it. The idea that belief in a Flat Earth was ever widespread in the history of Christianity is actually a myth that was invented by polemicists in order to defame Christians (especially Catholics) [2]
> - Antisemitic conspiracy theories are about an ideology of white supremacy, and of mythic struggle among "races".
Antisemitic conspiracy theories are extremely popular in the Arab and Muslim worlds, but in that context have nothing to do with white supremacy. To quote Wikipedia’s article on the infamous antisemitic hoax “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” [3]
> Neither governments nor political leaders in most parts of the world have referred to the Protocols since World War II. The exception to this is the Middle East, where a large number of Arab and Muslim regimes and leaders have endorsed them as authentic, including endorsements from Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, President Abdul Salam Arif of Iraq, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya. A translation made by an Arab Christian appeared in Cairo in 1927 or 1928, this time as a book. The first translation by an Arab Muslim was also published in Cairo, but only in 1951.
The 1988 charter of Hamas, a Palestinian Islamist group, stated that the Protocols embodies the plan of the Zionists. The reference was removed in the new covenant issued in 2017. Recent endorsements in the 21st century have been made by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ekrima Sa'id Sabri, the education ministry of Saudi Arabia…
The Nation of Islam has been a major promoter of the antisemitic conspiracy theory of Jewish responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade. [4] Their ideology is definitely not white supremacy. Antisemitism is found all over the ideological spectrum, even among secular progressives [5]; it is a disease which transcends the boundaries of ideology - and antisemites of any and all ideologies are susceptible to accepting antisemitic conspiracy theories
> May I ask if you've ever had an extended conversation with a conspiracy theorist?
Yes, a good friend of mine was quite taken in by PizzaGate, and tried hard to convince me of it, although in the end we agreed to disagree. Also, whatever is the ideology of PizzaGate as a whole, I know my friend didn’t share it. I’m convinced his credulity on that topic was more about his personal dislike of Hilary Clinton than disagreement with her actual policies (e.g. he was and is the kind of guy who says things like “abortion is a women’s issue, men should stay out of it”)
> But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion
This applies to flat earth theory believers as well. If they are unable to refute the reasons for the sphere theory, they have no ground for preferring either theory.
There's also the part "where he must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest" and I have a hard time imagining that most conspiracy theorists actually believe their theories -- in my experience, most people cling to conspiracy theories because they're more convenient to them; the need to believe is stronger than the actual belief. But that viewpoint is exactly what Socrates was denouncing ;)
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