Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Notes from a Flat Earth Conference

willpatrick.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 169 posts

Re: Notes from a Flat Earth Conference

#141

Post by Rury »

lisper wrote: post #45
kmnc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, they are idiots. If no logic can change their minds then isn’t dismissing them as idiots the best course of action?

You have completely missed the point. Their argument is logical. It just starts from a different foundational assumption.

Everything starts with an assumption. However, in science, if the assumption's conclusion doesn't match the observed evidence, we reject our assumption as true, and we start with a new assumption.

As so, science doesn't have a "foundational" assumption (because it's willing to change its assumptions). Rather, science subjects assumptions to evidence - not the other way around...

Re: Notes from a Flat Earth Conference

#142

Post by esquivalience »

toss1 wrote: post #138
esquivalience wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'd even filter them out for manufacturing or fast food work." What an awful approach to hiring. But, perhaps you see it as a good way to make sure that all of your colleagues are the "right" sort of people and that you never have to work with someone as lowly as a manufacturer or restaurant server.

Considering that I AM a manufacturer, and also enjoy the company of restaurant servers and practice tipping well, that's a quite ignorant accusation. The point is that if I'm hiring for manufacturing, or restaurant, I don't want someone in a shop with many hazards who makes a major practice in their life to 1) ignore actual facts, and 2) actively foment mistrust of any 'authority'.

I'm Sorry. I had completely misunderstood your comment.

Re: Notes from a Flat Earth Conference

#143

Post by trumpersHateMe »

sunopener wrote: post #137
trumpersHateMe wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this reply have any coherence at all or is it just me? It reads very similar to a response I received from the owners of a fishing website that I used to frequent when I questioned them about BLM.

"It has been stated that a text coheres only if the world around is also coherent." Further reading: https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/69.html That you'd ask yourself if this reply is coherent is a function of your own mind seeking meaning from what appears to be unresolved processing of a response you received from the owners of a phishing website. Given you used to frequent said site and received a text you deem…

So, if I understand this right, your love for yourself is so coherent that these ramblings are synonymous with coherence in your mind.

In other words, your understanding of coherence is that it is subjective.

Is that right?

Re: Notes from a Flat Earth Conference

#144

Post by lisper »

Rury wrote: post #141
lisper wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have completely missed the point. Their argument is logical. It just starts from a different foundational assumption.

Everything starts with an assumption. However, in science, if the assumption's conclusion doesn't match the observed evidence, we reject our assumption as true, and we start with a new assumption. As so, science doesn't have a "foundational" assumption (because it's willing to change its assumptions). Rather, science subjects assumptions to evidence - not the other way around...

> science doesn't have a "foundational" assumption

Yes, it does: it assumes that evidence is a reliable guide to truth.

Re: Notes from a Flat Earth Conference

#145

Post by RobRivera »

trumpersHateMe wrote: post #105
sunopener wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You surround yourself with 7.8 billion people who shit nearly every day. To put it bluntly, you are judging yourself when you take yourself to be judging others, you claim an excuse that associating with others leads to your own self-admitted "badness"... You judge yourself, and rather than taking sentence with those aspects within, you externalize it and make assumptions based upon comparisons of your ideal shitty p…

Does this reply have any coherence at all or is it just me? It reads very similar to a response I received from the owners of a fishing website that I used to frequent when I questioned them about BLM.

>Username: trumpersHateMe

Nice, novelty accounts on hn.

That's lovely. I accrue some great insights from this sites river, but I should probably start curating my own river again. The insightful:judgemental signal-noise ratio is trending in a direction I simply fine unstimulating of productive discourse.

Re: Notes from a Flat Earth Conference

#146

Post by mcculley »

Covzire wrote: post #102
mcculley wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I am misunderstanding you. What good is empiricism if you will reject evidence that conflicts with your beliefs?

This isn't my field so forgive me if this is a little confusing, but consider the big bang's origin. We have empirical data that suggests that the universe is expanding. To be clear, the interpretation of the data is that it's expanding, but it's non-controversial since virtually everyone accepts that almost all galaxies are moving away from each other. It's also not controversial to suggest the idea to creationists…

That doesn't help with the direction from my Seventh-day Adventist teachers that I should ignore empirical evidence. They specifically taught that any evidence found which would falsify their calculated age of the Earth should be ignored.

Yes, one can be a creationist and choose to believe that God created the universe with a big bang. But some creationists literally believe that the Earth was created in six days.

Re: Notes from a Flat Earth Conference

#147

Post by giomasce »

llimos wrote: post #132
simplify wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if science leads you to the conclusion that life has no transcendent purpose (and it does) How does it lead to that? I feel like that's a false assumption that many people make, religious or not.

Science leads you to the conclusion that we are here as the result of a series of chance events. Not because of any "decision" to put us here. If we're all just here by fluke, and when we're gone we're gone entirely and completely , what transcendence could there be?

How does science exclude the possibility of a decision to put us here? It seems to me that science (paired with a good bunch of epistemological assumptions) gives us the laws our universe follows. But as for why such laws are like that, or who possibly decided them and with which purpose, I'd say such questions do not even make sense for science.

Re: Notes from a Flat Earth Conference

#148

Post by giomasce »

Humdeee wrote: post #95
manfredo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the moon were a disk, the angle it makes relative to a normal vector coming out from ground demonstrates a spherical earth. You don't even need to factor in the moon, this can be done with the stars. In a flat earth, the same stars would be visible when you're in the southern too of south America as in the northernmost top of north America. This isn't the case since the earth is spherical. Heck, even just the…

I have no clue about any arguments flat earthers make, but I am curious how they would object to some of the fundamental concepts like you provided. I suppose it doesn't make much sense that they would use science to refute your points...

They invent new scientific rules. With two caveats: first, the new rules are not independently tested by experiment (maybe they are vaguely justified by thought experiment; thought by them); second, their rules are just qualitative, nearly never quantitative, so that they basically everything can be true.

So, measuring angles is off limits. Then they admit you cannot see things that are far away and close to the horizon, but not by curvature. By perspective: perspective laws, they say, mandate that far away objects become very small, too small to be seen. Do you basically can see only a limited part of the sky, at a sufficiently high angle from the horizon on the flat earth. That is why you can't see the whole sky.

Re: Notes from a Flat Earth Conference

#149

Post by brightball »

lisper wrote: post #108
brightball wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inerrancy is a whole other bag of chips. I teach a Sunday School class and one of my big topics is man made rules that aren’t Biblically supported. Inerrancy falls in that camp from my reading. There’s a single verse that the basis for the entire doctrine. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be…

The problem seems to me more fundamental than that: if the Bible potentially contains errors then you need some process or mechanism to figure out what those errors are if you're going to use the Bible as a guide to action. What could that process or mechanism possibly be? It obviously can't be the Bible.

The Bible is a collection of books though. Taken one verse at a time, out of context, errors with interpretation are easy. Context is huge.

That’s really the root of it. If you read the entire Bible, you’ll see common themes that are reiterated over and over. You’ll see patterns of human behavior that haven’t changed in thousands of years.

Reading the entire Bible provides so much more context. There’s not nearly as much left up to discussion after that because you’ll have a much better understanding of e everything.

I mean, nobody talks about it but one of the biggest themes of the entire Old Testament is idolatry. We think about that today as worshiping gold statues but it’s just as easy to frame in terms of political parties, our own anger and biases, etc.

Another is the dangers of pride.

Re: Notes from a Flat Earth Conference

#150

Post by mattmanser »

BrianOnHN wrote: post #73
rgoulter wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I'm starting to think this inability to control their emotional response when hearing anything that conflicts with their "belief system" is the hack that various organizations leverage to build a cult-like following. Jonathan Haidt describes this as "morality binds and blinds". The full quote being: "Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the wo…

> each team is composed of good people who have something important to say This is what makes this "abuse of the amygdala" a hack . The flat-earthers/trump-supporters don't have anything "important" to say unless you want to give credit to their conspiracies. That said, they are indeed screaming loud and clear that there is a significantly large segment of people with certain mental dispositions that are being abused…

Well, they actually do, and that's the problem. And I say that as someone who thinks Trump is an utter arse.

For example, they're not keen on a huge influx of foreigners from a different culture. Maybe you're dismissive of that, but it's because you're not listening.

Or, for example, they want to keep their jobs, e.g. coal miners. Maybe you're dismissive of that, but it's because you're not listening.

Or, for example, they're tired of politicians saying they'll do something but then nothing actually happening. Mainly because there are downsides to that action, e.g. because mass immigration now drives growth due to falling birth rates, there are no real attempts to stop it. Maybe you're dismissive of that, but it's because you're not listening.

Look at what happened recently in most western countries and it comes across as rigged. Mass immigration even though the population opposes it, no consequences for bankers in the 2008 crash, widening wealth inequality, falling wages when you take account of inflation. And America has really weird political dynasties, Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons. It's supposed to be a democracy and yet somehow you almost have feudal-esque ruler inheritance.

You can see why Trump's anti-establishment message worked.

Post reply on HN