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My Parents Are Flat Earthers

jameshfisher.com

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Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#131

Post by csa »

javajosh wrote: post #81
jamesfisher wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a symmetry between conspiracy theorists and conspiracies. It's a kind of jealousy. They want to feel like they're in on a secret club. You can go one better than joining the Illuminati by instead joining the secret club that exposes them.

Haha I hadn't heard that one before, I like it! Interestingly this kind of one-upsmanship quite easily makes conspiracy theories self-fulfilling. Consider the secret club that defends against the Illuminati. Then, another secret club arises to defend against the excesses of the first club. Since they define themselves in opposition to the other, the second group may as well be the Illuminati, which justified the cons…

Both groups are the Illuminati — that’s how we planned it (obviously).

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#133

Post by tntn »

lisper wrote: post #124
tntn wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not even close. (Go read some Scientology literature, or the Book of Mormon.) Color me intrigued. Which statements in the book of Mormon do you believe are significantly more readily deniable than "the earth is flat" in some sense different that doesn't also apply to the statements in, say, the bible. Same question for Scientology.

Well, I could also point to the Bible, but I feel like I'm already pushing the boundaries of what is appropriate on HN. In the case of the BoM it's not so much what's in the Book as the process by which it came to be written. Joseph Smith literally pulled it out of his hat! Also the ancillary beliefs that have grown up around it: Kolob, sacred underwear, institutionalized racism, polygamy... In the case of Scientolog…

Sounds like you are just talking about things you find really weird rather than things that are easily falsifiable.

I'm not convinced that any of the things you are discussing can be disproved more easily than flat earth.

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#136

Post by james_s_tayler »

everdev wrote: post #48
mabbo wrote: post #33

I feel like the Flat Earth movement is, at it's core, a hack on the human mind. People want to feel important, and they want to feel in control. When the world is so large and uncaring, so horrible and meaningless, and people are so small and unimportant, a good conspiracy theory lets me be someone important . There are evil people out there who did this all to us, and now I get to know the truth . I get to be in bet…

I remember a teacher in the 80s asking the class when humans proved the Earth was round. The correct answer for her was when an astronaut took a picture from outer space. While I'm sure your theory fits for some, there's also some misunderstanding of science that can be at play too. For me, there's little difference between a flat earther and believing we didn't know there Earth was round until we took a picture. Sur…

You're susceptible to misinformation to the extent that you can't verify a truth claim. And you can't verify most truth claims.

You can gaslight basically anyone about basically anything by playing epistemological games with them. Unless they have direct experience with the thing in question and they have personally observed the phenomena in question you can always get people to realize that they take everything they know on faith. It's a hell of a thing to realize.

I did this to my nephew recently with regards to Flat Earth when she said "but we have satellites up in space, so we know its round!" and I asked her "did you see the satellites go up into space?" and the penny dropped for her that she realized she took it on faith that the satellites were really up there and that if she wanted to find out if they really were or not that it would be one hell of a task.

Now, that's a pretty reasonable thing to take on faith and aside from a few conspiracy theorists there is broad consensus about that and it doesn't seem to be particularly contraversial. But our epistemology about most things boils down to that. We don't actually know anything. We are told things, we don't verify them for ourselves because it's way too expensive or not even possible for us to do so and we build our whole model of the world on that + things we personally observe.

You also can't explain basically how anything works in great detail. Look around any given room in your house and start going through items and explaining them in as deep detail as you can.

So with that as a reference point any time anyone has an explanation for something that provides more detail than your model has and they seem believable, it's actually not easy for you at all to tell when someone is bullshitting you either on purpose or because they are just as clueless as you. This is why we believe all manner of crazy, implausible things.

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#137

Post by lisper »

tntn wrote: post #133
lisper wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I could also point to the Bible, but I feel like I'm already pushing the boundaries of what is appropriate on HN. In the case of the BoM it's not so much what's in the Book as the process by which it came to be written. Joseph Smith literally pulled it out of his hat! Also the ancillary beliefs that have grown up around it: Kolob, sacred underwear, institutionalized racism, polygamy... In the case of Scientolog…

Sounds like you are just talking about things you find really weird rather than things that are easily falsifiable. I'm not convinced that any of the things you are discussing can be disproved more easily than flat earth.

I think you're underestimating how hard it is to disprove a flat earth (to a flat-earher).

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#138

Post by tntn »

scarejunba wrote: post #108
sonnyblarney wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+ ~90% of the world's population are religious (depending on how you look at it) and they mostly grow up in communities wherein everyone is basically the same religion, ergo, they are not generally 'missionary' , 'proselytizing', nor do they feel they have access to 'special information'. In fact, it's the total opposite: for most of the world's religious, 'religion' is just part of every day, normative culture in mo…

It’s all just layers of shit for people who are incapable of knowledge acquisition. Maybe one thing is piles of chicken shit mixed with pig shit and the other thing is one pile of horse shit but it’s all just shit. Flat Earth crap, anti-vaxxers, chemtrails, Scientology, Mormonism. They like to draw distinctions between them but it’s all just a matter of the kind of shit. Waste of time trying to say which one is stupi…

There are distinctions between them. Some of the things you mention make claims that fall into the domain of science (I.e. are falsifiable) and some do not (those regarding spirituality, miracles, etc). That is an important and worthwhile distinction.

Incidentally, a lot of the problem of the anti-vaccine movement is not the facts (though there is a lot of that, too) but rather risk analysis. It is extremely probable (pretty much certain) that some vaccines have been associated with harm to some people in the past (and some maybe still do today) but the risk of that is so much ridiculously lower than the risk of not getting the vaccine that it is irrelevant.

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#139

Post by tntn »

lisper wrote: post #137
tntn wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you are just talking about things you find really weird rather than things that are easily falsifiable. I'm not convinced that any of the things you are discussing can be disproved more easily than flat earth.

I think you're underestimating how hard it is to disprove a flat earth (to a flat-earher).

I think you are confusing how hard it is to convince flat-earthers that the earth is not flat with how ridiculously easy it is to prove the the earth is not flat.

I (and the original comment you responded to) are discussing the second of these two.

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#140

Post by paradoxparalax »

bjoli wrote: post #113
mabbo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've read it, he got a very close estimate, but only because he made two errors that happened to cancel each other out. As well, he didn't actually measure the shadows himself, but heard stories about there being no shadow at a specific city.

What he did was simple geometry, and in a way he was the right man in the right place. He heard that the sun was in zenith during the summer solstice ina certain town. He had a good runner measure the distance between Alexandria and that town and then measured the angle of the sun during the solistice in Alexandria (for simplicity, say it was 6 degrees). To get the full circle, just multiple by 60. 6th graders maths.

Is a pity that we have lost "his" library by human stupidity. There could have been a lot more to know about the state-of-art of astrography at his time.
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