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My Parents Are Flat Earthers

jameshfisher.com

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Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#111

Post by orwin »

mindcrime wrote: post #6
cyberferret wrote: post #3

Increasingly with life these days, I feel like I am an actor in a play where the producer sees less and less of a role for me in the production as the curtain keeps raising on increasingly chaotic scenes - so I end up feeling disconnected and distant from something that I was immersed in and enjoying, and am now just an increasing befuddled and alienated observer. The uptick in flat earth theories among other things…

now get others videos in that channel as 'suggested videos'. FWIW, you can always remove that video from your history, so you won't get those recommendations anymore. Well, assuming you were logged into a Google account when you viewed it. Visit https://www.youtube.com/feed/history and use the smaller search bar to find any "questionable" videos and then you can delete them from your watch history. Another option is…

Thank you so much.

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#112

Post by svat »

scarejunba wrote: post #110
svat wrote: post #87

I love this article: https://deansforimpact.org/why-mythbusting-fails-a-guide-to-... (“Why mythbusting fails: A guide to influencing education with science”) Narrowly, it's about “learning styles”, the idea that certain students are e.g. “visual learners” and would benefit from education geared towards visual learners. But more broadly, it's about science in general, about persuasion. In its second half (starting at…

I thought this “visual learner” vs other kind thing failed to replicate. Example of article listing some sources: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth...

Yes, that's what the article I linked is about. (Specifically, a letter which led to headlines like “Teachers must ditch 'neuromyth' of learning styles, say scientists”.) I see that similar articles (thanks for your link) continue to be published in 2018, which I guess proves that no one took notice or heeded the advice.

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#113

Post by bjoli »

mabbo wrote: post #66
ninguem2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eratosthenes not only showed that the earth is round but computed its circumference around 200BC by measuring shadows at two different latitudes.

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.

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#114

Post by mindcrime »

jobigoud wrote: post #99
mindcrime wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

now get others videos in that channel as 'suggested videos'. FWIW, you can always remove that video from your history, so you won't get those recommendations anymore. Well, assuming you were logged into a Google account when you viewed it. Visit https://www.youtube.com/feed/history and use the smaller search bar to find any "questionable" videos and then you can delete them from your watch history. Another option is…

I have youtube history disabled but still get "recommended" videos. I'm thinking reinstalling greasemonkey to find a script that get rid of them.

Yeah, my guess is that if you're not logged in, or have history disabled, they still generate recommendations by IP or something... or they just give you generic recommendations that go to everybody that doesn't have a history to use.

I don't mind, since I like the recommendations in general. But I think they dramatically overweight recent videos when they generate the recommendations, and sometimes I'll watch a video that's outside my normal habits, and I suddenly start getting all these weird recommendations. That's the only reason I ever bothered learning about the "remove this from my history" feature. :-)

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#115

Post by saiya-jin »

joe_the_user wrote: post #45
perl4ever wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It really has nothing to do with the conditions of the average already living in a money based economy." I'm not sure the median American is representative of the global citizen "living in a money based economy". I have not read Gates' book, but I think it likely you are being overly dismissive. I think the average person in the world has an income of maybe $10K a year, which is not "pennies a day", but it's low by…

Life expectancy has been decreasing in other places besides the US. I was just reading an article that said it's down in the UK. Russia hasn't been doing so well either, I seem to recall. But I figure there is a biological limit and the newest medical tech doesn't have much effect in the aggregate. Or actually quality of life for the working class world-wide could decreasing? Medical research has had an effect for qu…

Life expectancy generally goes down these days either in war-torn places, or other extreme - people overeating on tons of junk food, and generally not compensating their eating habits with adequate physical activity. We are very far from times when medicine and science can properly fix bodies destroyed by such a lifestyle.

Russia & former soviet union countries are a bit special but within same category - their alcoholism contributes heavily to their lower life expectancy.

To me it looks like a perfect storm - people living more stressful lives getting their impulses more from cell phone than real world out there, eating worse and more of it, exercising less. I don't believe most of this is directly related to wealth, although many would like to connect these. More like some mental fortitude and strength to keep up some sane regime of healthy eating & exercising (really, you just need running shoes in most of the world, cheap yearly gym pass can easily cover 100% of your needs).

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#116

Post by spinach »

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 don't think it's about control as it is about conceit. I don't think human conceit can be underestimated. This really became clear to me from reading The Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan. Humans want to believe everything is created for them, the universe was created for them, it's at the basis of a lot of the beliefs people hold. Then they want to cling to this belief of superiority. And because they came there through emotion, it's harder to reason them out of it.

"You can't reason somebody out of a stance they weren't reasoned into in the first place. If you can't address the emotional pains and the emotional tumult and the emotionality that brought people to where they are and some of our worst ugliest moments, rationality isn't going to get them into a different spot than that." - Robert Sapolsky (https://youtu.be/61tChpN3lhY?t=2756)

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#117

Post by paradoxparalax »

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #73
medion wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be fair to say the exact same thing about, say, Christianity, or any large scale religion? That, at it's core, it's a hack on the human mind, for people to feel important, to feel in control, when the world is so large and uncaring? Because to me, this burgeoning conspiracy culture (chemtrails, 5G, flat earth, etc etc) just feels like people utilising the same brain space that was once more used for religion…

He he, had to look up "5G conspiracy", I hadn't gone down that intellectual black hole before. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evmzv7/alt-right-... For anyone interested in a sympathetic approach to debunking fraudulent belief systems I recommend Carl Sagan's excellent book: The Demon Haunted World. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Carl Sagan was a Master at detecting malicious manure. Should be read with maximum attention. Specially the juicy chapter: "the art of detecting baloney" or something like this.

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#118

Post by tntn »

lisper wrote: post #75
sonnyblarney wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Being in a club with secret knowledge' doesn't fit the description of 'religion' very well, though there some aspects of cults for which the description may allude. But that said - this is a hard one, much different than 'aliens' or 'arcane knowledge' because the simple truth is actually evident for everyone to see. It's the craziest of all conspiracy theories because it's so utterly deniable. I mean ... I don't thi…

> 'Being in a club with secret knowledge' doesn't fit the description of 'religion' very well, Why not? (I debated whether or not to include "religion" in my comment because the word is so laden with baggage, but ultimately decided that it was apt, so I am prepared to defend it if you really want to go down that rabbit hole.) > But 'flat earth' has to be the dumbest of all. Not even close. (Go read some Scientology l…

> 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.

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#119

Post by scarejunba »

svat wrote: post #112
scarejunba wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this “visual learner” vs other kind thing failed to replicate. Example of article listing some sources: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth...

Yes, that's what the article I linked is about. (Specifically, a letter which led to headlines like “Teachers must ditch 'neuromyth' of learning styles, say scientists”.) I see that similar articles (thanks for your link) continue to be published in 2018, which I guess proves that no one took notice or heeded the advice.

Oh, I misunderstood what your summary was. I thought you said that the reason myths don’t take hold is that the learning style doesn’t match the myth busting style. Never mind then!
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