My Father Firmly Believes the Earth Is Flat, How to Help

My Father Firmly Believes the Earth Is Flat, How to Help
quora.com

I suggest you go out of your way to be nice to your mother, he will be so appreciative he will cave in and agree with you.

However, that approach is unlikely to work with Global Warming.

I mean think about it - if you don't have a satisfactory social group, what better way to fill that void than by joining a group of hundreds or thousands that all think and feel the same way as you, and will gladly welcome you with open arms.

It's not about logic, it never was. It's about belonging. A strong enough emotion trumps rationality, just as people refuse to evacuate before a natural disaster because "it's their home".

I would add some of those 1001 other issues include things Well educated and common sense folk “know” to be sound, backed by evidence and scientific research. I would cite the reproducibility crisis which is not limited to just social science but endemic in academia and corporate driven research. Further I would hi-light the “fake news” situation is not ideologically limited nor is propaganda or any individuals personal biases leading to a kind of myopia to counter examples and challenging ideas. Suffice to say it’s easy to throw stones at flat earth and trump but if you think somehow your primate brain is not as broken or fallible as the next person then you’ve surely been had.

Now, Shaw is exaggerating, but there is something in what he says, and the question is worth following up, for the sake of the light it throws on modern knowledge. Just why do we believe that the earth is round? I am not speaking of the few thousand astronomers, geographers and so forth who could give ocular proof, or have a theoretical knowledge of the proof, but of the ordinary newspaper-reading citizen, such as you or me."

This is by George Orwell, who goes on to explain his reasons for thinking the earth is round.

"It will be seen that my reasons for thinking that the earth is round are rather precarious ones. Yet this is an exceptionally elementary piece of information. On most other questions I should have to fall back on the expert much earlier, and would be less able to test his pronouncements. And much the greater part of our knowledge is at this level. It does not rest on reasoning or on experiment, but on authority. And how can it be otherwise, when the range of knowledge is so vast that the expert himself is an ignoramous as soon as he strays away from his own speciality? Most people, if asked to prove that the earth is round, would not even bother to produce the rather weak arguments I have outlined above. They would start off by saying that ‘everyone knows’ the earth to be round, and if pressed further, would become angry. In a way Shaw is right. This is a credulous age, and the burden of knowledge which we now have to carry is partly responsible."

Of course, this was before pictures of the earth from space...