Oh yes! And you can get into trouble trying to engage with logic, because that is not the name of the game.
>I've been perversely interested in this
Me too, and with other crankery. I recommend the book Mathematical Cranks for similar entertainment.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Mathematical_Cranks.htm...
Maybe I am interested in it because you begin to see small reflections of similar behavior everywhere once you start looking for it.
It seems rare at first, but now I think similar thinking is to be found everywhere, on lots of topics. It is really mostly a strident, emotional attachment to a point of view that is not founded on a desire to find the truth.
It is founded on a deep personal association. To deny your personal "truth" would be like tearing down your view of yourself. So instead it must be defended at all costs, which is fine because you already are certain it is "true".
I find it amazing that this believing blindly in something so weird so easy for some people and it's definitely not related to their brain power, I know a few instances of very smart software developers, seriously smart people that believe in crazy cult like religions with aliens and stuff.
It's amazing how the brain is spitted, the part that you use to work and live is rational, methodical and precise the part that handles your feelings can be stupid, naive and gullible to the point where is overthrows your rational brain to the oblivion and you become a "Smapid" a Stupid Smart person that is a great coworker but I simply can't start any non work, business related conversation because it drives me insane.
It's really a waste.
> But now suppose that we say to the claimant, "Okay, we'll visit the garage and see if we can hear heavy breathing," and the claimant quickly says no, it's an inaudible dragon. We propose to measure carbon dioxide in the air, and the claimant says the dragon does not breathe. We propose to toss a bag of flour into the air to see if it outlines an invisible dragon, and the claimant immediately says, "The dragon is permeable to flour."
The article points out that "many Americans" hold some kind of wacky belief and strongly resist attempts to challenge it: vaccines cause autism, global warming isn't real, the moon landing was faked, the earth is 6,000 years old, dinosaurs drowned in the Great Flood, ghosts are real, etc...
So rather than the Flat Earthers being anomalies, I actually think they represent the general public quite well; it's just that their crazy belief is different from mine or yours.
What I am really curious about is: what would it take to successfully convince one of these people that they are wrong? Because if you solve this problem, then you solve the problem in its generality, and you can apply the technique to the vast number of people who still believe the earth was literally created in 7 days.
My best guess? Ask them, "What would it take to convince you otherwise?" The problem isn't that most people are incapable of learning the truth — it's that they don't want to learn the truth. Take for instance someone who believes dinosaur bones were planted in the earth by the devil. I have a hard time imagining that if you handheld them and took them step-by-step through the scientific method (e.g., starting with archaeological sites), that by the end of a year's worth of research, they would still disagree with the mainstream scientific view.
And that's the cool thing about science: you don't have to take anyone's word for it! You can check what people are saying all by yourself. Go out there with ice core machines, thermometers, and satellites, and trace through the same steps that the climate experts have taken. After years of following their own work for yourself, there's no way you couldn't believe in global warming.
I think what it really comes down to is that most people would rather live with a comforting or reassuring lie than an uncomfortable truth, and even given the opportunity and resources for discovering the truth themselves, they would prefer not to.
In some cases they would consider themselves a bad person if they didn't defend their ideals to the death. This is especially true if there is a religious aspect to their view. They don't call it a "reasoned position" on religion, it is belief. Belief is strongest when you keep it despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is a core tenet of Christianity and I suspect most other religions as well. Your faith will be tested by "deceivers" constantly and you must keep it.
It's impossible to use logic or science to convince someone of something when they think logic and science are tools of the devil.
It's also the Amiga effect. When a community grows smaller the remaining members are the most ardent. Once you are down to just a handful of remaining members all that is left are the die hard fanboys. All of the reasonable people left a long time ago.
Huh? This isn't true at all.
You can not use logic to dissuade someone of a belief they arrived at emotionally. Instead, if you actually want to do it, you have to use emotion. It's our poor thining that makes us to try reason with the unreasonable.
That being said, there has always been a strong minority pushing for it, and one interpretation of the doctrine "Sola Scriptura" (which is a core tenent of Protestantism) would be that anything contrary to scripture is wrong (hence young-earth creationism).
You are describing a cult not a core tenent of Christianity.
So, it seems like your best option is just to ignore those with decidedly unscientific opinions for the moment and attempt to instill more genuinely curious/less dogmatic thinking into those who have not already made up their minds.
I suspect that the followers of a cargo cult don't spontaneously all decide to believe whatever it is at the same time, someone will lead it and the rest will join in afterwards. I'm also guessing that the leader will be someone who has been a leader in the past and that the nature of the misunderstanding that is at the heart of the cult will reflect how that leader came to prominence previously.
I started wondering about this as I was trying to work out why the main group of climate change denyers in the UK had rented office space in the same street [1] as the Royal Society and other scientific bodies.
I hate to point this out, but one of these isn't quite like the others: the one about ghosts. The problem with that one is that you can't prove a negative; it's impossible. There might be ghosts; there's simply no way for you to disprove it, no matter how much evidence you amass. You can make the case that it's highly unlikely because you haven't been presented with any sufficiently-compelling evidence yet, just like it's highly unlikely that pink unicorns live on the Moon in underground caves, but you can't disprove it, and with ghosts you can't even amass decent evidence against it (like by going to the Moon, searching for underground caves, and if any exist, looking in them for pink unicorns and coming up empty). Personally, I don't believe they're likely to be real, as I've never seen any good evidence, but lots of other people have claimed to, so while I don't put much stock in it, I think it is a bit different from the others, because the others have strong evidence countering those claims. There's plenty of evidence that vaccines don't cause autism, that climate change is real (the main debate is the source: AGW, but even here there's plenty of evidence that it's man-made), there's literally tons of evidence of the Moon landings, there's enormous evidence that the Earth is much older than 6000 years (and that human civilization predates this too), etc.
>Take for instance someone who believes dinosaur bones were planted in the earth by the devil. I have a hard time imagining that if you handheld them and took them step-by-step through the scientific method (e.g., starting with archaeological sites), that by the end of a year's worth of research, they would still disagree with the mainstream scientific view.
The problem is that religious people like this actively disbelieve in science. You can show them all the evidence you want and educate them about the Scientific Method and it won't help. After all, here again, you cannot disprove their assertion, that "the devil" planted this stuff. After all, science basically assumes that some intelligent force isn't involved in faking the evidence, so that when you carry out experiments they'll come out the same way every time because the laws of the Universe are constant. What if there's some higher force (or "Force"...) that can change the laws of the Universe at will to subvert your scientific experiment?
Of course, here you have to ask, why would someone believe this silliness? It's not that much different from the ghost thing, except that here instead of a relatively benign belief that disembodied souls are wandering around and occasionally doing odd things to give us the willies (like knocking objects over or slamming doors), it's a much more detailed belief that some evil being is screwing with us just so that somehow we won't get into eternal paradise because we don't believe some silly creation tale that has no supporting evidence. Of course this also seems to go hand-in-hand with being a member of some crazy church and needing to give them a significant portion of your income....
Back in the old days, the way you showed you were better than everyone else was owning the nicest car, having air conditioning, or having a powered mower.
Now that more or less everyone has more or less everything, the only ways we can fulfill the basic instinct to be better than our neighbors is engaging in these kind of "all the sheep think this happened, but really..." ideas. Psuedo-intellectualism at it's finest.
You could show these people facts all day, it doesn't matter. Hell if you took one of them up in one of those Space Jets they'd probably swear you were faking it somehow, because the longer you hold onto a belief, the more invested in it you are, the more it's going to wound your ego to admit you're wrong. Most people would rather take a bullet than admit they were wrong (especially Americans and Brits) so that's how we end up with the Flat Earth people.
I recall when I was a kid, a Flat Earth guy was interviewed on TV after John Glenn's orbital flight. The interviewer pointed out that Glenn could see the round earth out his window and he could see he was passing over the entire circumference of the Earth every ninety minutes and ground stations around the world could track him coming over the horizon and passing overhead and ... etc. etc. The flat earth guy earnestly explained that Glenn was just circling around the edge - the perimeter - of the flat Earth, don't you see? - all the while making circular hand motions around the edge of the the flat table top where he was seated. I figured even then that the flat earth guy was just putting on the interviewer, daring him to say what he was no doubt thinking: "Oh for pity's sake, come off it". But both of them played along, neither of them let on that he thought the whole interview was just a joke.
Why don't you keep walking in one direction then tap them on the back when you've gone the whole way to prove tou're right?
When you argue against people who have no interest in evidence, it's really very tricky
Essentially, just repeat this ancient experiment: http://www.juliantrubin.com/bigten/eratosthenes.html
Do flat Earth believers believe in a sufficiently large solar system for that to be true?
I suppose one explanation could be that the 747 flight they are in somehow gained the ability to go faster than a F16 at maximum thrust.
> [The theory is that] "GPS devices are rigged to make airplane pilots think they are flying in straight lines around a sphere when they are actually flying in circles above a disc."
In short, we have a crisis of epistemology in our culture, and facts (empirical, repeatable, independent measurements) don't win arguments any more.
I'm still not convinced they are serious.
I'm not religious and don't believe in a god, but who's to say there isn't a god? We still don't have an explanation for how we're here. Until then, I'd say it's as fair a theory as any. Folks who believe in a god simply have a reason to believe, and that works for them.
The main difference is that the Flat-Earthers are a very small group, whereas those who believe in God is extremely large. The small group is seen as ridiculous, but since the larger group is popular belief, is not seen as absurd.
It is actually more absurd to me that a huge number of people still follow religions, than the fact that a super subset of people believe the Earth is flat.
