When Having Friends Is More Alluring Than Being Right

This article gets close to the heart of flat-earthism, bad sadly doesn't quite take the plunge over the edge. The origin of flat-eartherism is people like this author, and his wife's need to convince others that they are wrong in their beliefs and get them in line with the correct beliefs. It's hard to remember at this point, but think back to about 15 years ago, the idea of a flat-earth was held up as the shining example of how clueless people in the past used to be and how far we've come. That story was fake by the way, people have known the earth was round since ancient Greece, in fact they even had a pretty accurate measure of the earth's circumference. In between there were surely less knowledgeable groups of people, but it's hard to find any concrete cases of large scale belief that the earth was flat, rather than people not really understanding what was meant by "the earth" on a planetary scale, vs. their local perception of the earth around them which did indeed appear to be fairly flat. Except for today of course, where each passing year we hit a new watermark of belief in a flat-earth. How did we get here? Like I said, articles like this give you a good insight into that path, when you're constantly barraged with articles whose entire point is to define a group of people and call them dumb it repels people, and some small number of people get caught up in that repelling force, they start to wonder if maybe this barrage of meanness is actually hiding some deeper truth. Over time these people form into their own group and settle into a symbiotic relationship with the first group. As the group gains steam there's more and more evidence that people are dumb, and need to be called out as such, giving the author of this article and others more ammo, which in turn repels more people into joining the group. And around, and around they go, where it stops I have no idea.

Edit: I should add, this article is among the most civil and charitable articles of its type. I don't mean to pick on this author in particular.

Yeah, I don’t like how the term “men’s rights advocate” is thrown around. Maybe some groups that use that term are crazy or something but men deserve rights and advocates for those rights. Men are often treated as second class citizens. People laughing at that is senseless.

The "Mens rights advocates" reffered to here are a specific subset of activist for "mens rights". These people often focus more on putting down women than trying advance men and women in unison.

That's not to say that a social progressive movement focusing on men and their plights is at odds with the modern feminist movement. Just look at the subreddit /r/menslib for information on that.

How about agree with them? And connect with them?

I don't necessarily mean to agree that the Earth is flat.

But maybe if you think that we don't know all the answers and finding out things we don't know is fun, you could find common ground even with flat-earthers.

Probably 99% of humanity has one element of common ground: we all want to be happy.

So start from there and work outwards. How does believing the Earth is flat make them happier? As you discover the answer to that (one of which is certainly community as the OP points out), maybe there's other shared common ground.

This could apply to almost anything. Even racists want to be happy. They think that they'll be more happy by holding people different from themselves back, but likely part of this is they hold a relative sense of success (are they better off than their neighbors) than an absolute sense (are they better off than they could be). Maybe compare those two pictures of success, and show that even if someone different from them gets successful by getting a good education and curing cancer, they will directly benefit by not needing to worry about cancer.

And connection matters a lot too. Pretty much every instance I've seen of racists dropping their racism was a direct result of direct interactions with people they demonized that they realized they had more in common with than they'd believed (and in some cases more than their racist buddies).

To me the saddest part of the movie was the cross cuts between the science meetup and the flat-earth meetup. Those two groups would actually have got along pretty well, if they focused on shared passion for the unknown and not their differences.

Besides - with everything we are learning about how consensus across entangled observers may be deterministic of the resulting reality (quantum Darwinism, which is supported by recent experiments but not yet proven), perhaps flat-earthers, by abandoning recognition of a shared consensus of the rest of the world, have in fact created a mostly overlapping Venn-diagram sort of pocket reality where the Earth being flat is as real as the notion it is not for the rest of us. And if we adopt that belief we can enter into that reality, and if they adopt the scientific method's application to their premise they'd necessitate returning to ours (perhaps the scientific method is exactly that - a process to evaluate disparate realities and converge to a norm).

In fact, maybe that's what cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias really are -- a desire to stabilize our version of reality by way of consensus. Almost like a psychological gravity both of an equal but unobservable entanglement.

So it stands to reason the only way to get a fringe reality to reconnect with the rest of the herd is to start from consensus and work to re-entangle the detached observations from there.

In some ways it the conflict with feminists is inevitable, for example when feminists demanded that every man accused of rape be punished, ignoring the rights of the accused and the existence of false allegations.

It was MRAs that stood up to that, while menslib seemed to support it.