SH wrote:
Quote:
Yeah, but the answers are always a deflection. It's sort of pointless to engage, really. If you watched that Netflix documentary Behind the Curve, there was a guy who used a RLG and got the predicted 15 degree per hour spin, but attributed it to "the heavenly energies."
Conspiracy theories are not based on facts, so facts won't dislodge them.
Hmmm... I disagree with you and iron_mike on this. I don't think the "flats" are so monolithic. Yes, at the top you've got the liars and the hucksters. We're never going to convince them. For them it's just a game and changing your mind isn't part of it. However, you also have the dupes. If these flat assholes are not countered in effective ways we will have a growing number of dupes. I recently watched a video by Michelle Thaller from NASA arguing against a flat earth -- it was terrible. All her examples where from very uncommon observations that required the information to come from mediums that the flats are taught never to trust. Almost worse than nothing.
Proving easily and conclusively that the earth is a sphere is difficult to do in an internet environment where your opponent can just spout bullshit until people give up. IMO, the best way to counter the flats is not to prove the earth is a sphere, but to prove that the flat model is wrong. There are many easy observations to disprove that -- once again IMO.
Yes, I understand that it seems ridiculous to have to learn flat earth theory enough to disprove it. If we continue like we are now we're going to lose a ton of people to the hucksters.
Stepping off the soap box...
I've dealt with conspiracy theorists professionally a lot over the last 20 years or so, and I've found facts will sway a very small percentage of them. And there aren't very many liars and hucksters, and there aren't that many dupes. The majority of people have fairly standard reasoning skills, but they have personalities that make it more important that they feel like they are "in the know" and special than correct and non-special.
It's sort of like political party affiliation. Most people have an almost knee-jerk defense of their political party to the point where they'll see a fact in a totally different light than they would if it were relating to the opposing party. They aren't liars or hucksters or dupes - they just have certain needs that are more important than being objectively correct.
There's a video on Youtube of a bunch of famous flat Earthers present at a simple test where a boat disappears over the horizon. It's done in a number of ways will lasers, etc., right in front of the flat Earthers, and when the tester asks the flatters what they think, they simply respond it wasn't enough to convince them. That's it. Direct evidence you can't refute, and they didn't try to refute it - they just said it didn't convince them.
I once had a months-long conversation with the world's leading proponent of the Expanding Earth Theory. The is the idea that if you rewind continental drift and slowly subtract out the oceanic tectonic plates, the continents fit together on a smaller, oceanless ball. The key point of this belief is that there is no subduction happening between the oceanic and continental plates. As you might guess, for this to be a real thing, all of physics would have to be utterly upended. I mean
all of it, and amazingly, there are vast, elaborate ideas to describe this new physics. But what was just amazing was that if subduction is real, the entire theory falls apart, yet instead of focusing their attention on proving subduction does or doesn't happen, they spend a hundred times more energy creating new physics and new theories to support their position. They aren't interested in the truth; they're interested feeling they know reality better than nearly anyone else.
