A few year back, there was a Netflix documentary about flat earther. They’ve done a couple of experiment to prove that the earth is flat which (Spoiler alert) demonstrated that the earth is round.
So now that these persons have demonstrated scientifically that the earth is round. How are they doing ? Still flat-earther ? or did they give up with the amount of evidence they collected ?
The movie is called Behind the Curve, and imo is a great move.
It doesn’t try to ridicule the people in it. Instead it tries to make a point that if a group like the flat earth society is being made fun of rather than engaged in discussions, then the gap just gets larger and the problem worse. (If everyone else makes fun of you, you avoid them and stay in the community that supports you.)
As far as I can tell, Mark Sargent is still believing in those theories and continues doing his part in it. This doesn’t surprise me, he’s quite prominent in that community and I guess if he stopped, he’d lose quite a lot of his personal achievements, friends, hobbies, etc.
I don’t know about the others who were in the movie, it would be interesting to know. Especially about those who were directly doing the experiments, yeah.
It tries to show that good faith engagement is better than ridicule, but in the end it shows that flat Earthers are so contrarian that they will actively ignore the results of their own experiments and engaging in good faith is pointless.
Basically, treat all humans with dignity. In psychiatry you’re told to treat all patients with good faith, but don’t let the guy who thinks he is Napoleon run the hospital.
By default all humans should be treated with dignity unless they are causing direct harm to others. Flat Earthers are kind of an edge case because their anti science and evidence approach is tied in with the antivax movement so they are harming others indirectly.
MAGA idiots, racists, and other hate filled people do not deserve dignity. In amedical setting, sure, but not in the real world where they are causing harm.
TIL hospitals aren’t real guys!
Haha!
No, all humans should be treated with dignity always. We should do all in our power to stop and restraint those causing or intending to cause harm to others. But no crime justifies cruelty or indignity ever.
I guess then you start messing with the definition of dignity. I don’t think it’s very dignified to be restrained for one’s fucked up views.
He doesn’t mean literally restrain line with chains or something. He means figuratively restrain
https://lemm.ee/comment/6002206
I was talking about if I think of dignity, being taken in by law enforcement because my beliefs were literally so stupid as to make me dangerous to the general public if I was allowed to spout them any further, that would be very very far away from any dignity.
I know this is radical to you, but even criminals retain rights, even if they’re convicted for their crimes. Even due process and right to legal defense is about preserving human dignity for all.
Wow yes, this is so radical! Thanks for exposing me to this thought, I thought everyone taken in by the police is just thrown into a deep pit, without food, sanitation or anything really, and just forgotten about.
I was talking about if I think of dignity, being taken in by law enforcement because my beliefs were literally so stupid as to make me dangerous to the general public if I was allowed to spout them any further, that would be very very far away from any dignity.
Obviously I was not talking about people not being allowed basic human necesseties or due process or anything like that.
You’re wrong.
Such deep argument, much ethics.
I don’t waste time in futile arguments. I just call them as I see them.
Nah uh
Are you serious? There’s a huge number of humans that deserve no dignity. Terrorists and paedophiles spring to mind but there are many many more.
Yes, I’m 100% serious, even terrorists and pedophiles deserve a minimum of human dignity. It’s not about their morals. It’s about mine and our collective societal moral principles. To deny another human being dignity, no matter how awful their actions might’ve been, says nothing about the other person’s character, but speaks volumes about the person and society advocating indignity towards others. Yours is the logic that enables genocidal and discriminating abusive leaders.
Ok, then I have very different morals and character to you
Think about this. The racist police officers who killed George Floyd had the exact same mindset that you do. They thought that they could treat him as less than human because he was a criminal. Fox news, yes, the MAGA channel, ran with a story that tried to justify his murder because he was a suspected criminal. How do you feel sharing moral values with them?
That’s completely misrepresenting what I said. Don’t put words in my mouth. Suspected of a crime, then it should be proven beyond doubt and then punished. Guilty of bombing people, abusing kids? Don’t deserve any dignity in my opinion
I agree there are people undeserving, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are inalienable rights inherent to all people. If the state is going to legitimately enforce the law it must respect those rights while doing so.
“Don’t let the horse run the hospital”
-John Mulaney
I didn’t even know a horse could do that!
Why not, they are great at running.
Generally in most cases schizophrenia isn’t catching whereas poisonous stupidity spreads. It’s important to keep the disease from infecting too many new adherents. Think of humor as containment.
Unfortunately, the guy who thinks he’s Napoleon usually does run the hospital and most other organizations.
My takeaway is there is something driving that contrarian attitude. We need to figure out how to address those underlying causes rather than exacerbating them through ostracization.
Really good documentary. I watched it while trying to engage over at reddit’s AskTrumSupporters. It was interesting to see that community become more and more radicalized as the years went on, as the insane bullshit piled up. Helped me come to terms with the fact that engaging on that level is counter productive if anything.
The problem with flat earthers is that they don’t listen to reason.
You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
The takeaway I got from the movie is it’s not really about the theory, it could be literally anything that brings people together. It’s just about being part of a community and being respected somewhere. Of course you can’t logic someone out of that.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
-Upton Sinclair
…But also his friendships, and entire sense of worth.
I don’t remember if it was said in the doc itself or it was a video discussing the doc (I think Hbomberguy), that said “they (flat earthers) are attempting a form of science”.
To me, what that says is, if they were intellectually honest with genuine curiosity, then they would’ve changed their views in the face of contradictory evidence. Time and time again, they showed that they weren’t willing to do that even after seeing the results of their own experiments.
As you said, they’ve staked too much on this notion that the Earth is flat and can’t afford to give up the grift now.
You’re right. It isn’t about proving something with science. It’s about the community. In this community you always hear the same things over and over again, so if you start questioning your beliefs you also have to question all this “evidence” you saw. You have to question all your beliefs. The beliefs that you defended in the Internet and real life against other people. Doing so can cause an “existential crisis”. It isn’t comfortable to question yourself. Humans don’t like change, so they won’t question anything and hold onto their beliefs, since it’s easy. Also all the people always positively engage with each other so breaking with your beliefs also means breaking with your social circle.
Yeah. It’s totally the sunken cost fallacy. They mistakenly think that there is too much to lose to change their minds and cut their losses.
Have you considered that there is actually more virtue in containing stupid than trying to rescue it. The audience for such communication is rarely the person afflicted because its almost impossible to convince such folks its the folks at the margins who might be convinced either way.
Consider an imaginary belief say 0.5% of the population believes that flu can be treated by shoving pancakes up your ass. If ridicule keeps the percentage at 0.5% instead of growing to 1% its incredibly virtuous whereas more respectful treatment of the belief might help you convince 0.01% to stop shoving starch in their rectum while allowing the mental virus to spread to far more people.
This theory is applicable everywhere. Every time you engage with a crazy person or a nazi imagine your audience is the other folks reading the discussion not the person you are engaging.
If ridicule keeps the percentage at 0.5% instead of growing to 1% its incredibly virtuous
That if is doing a lot of lifting. One of the points of the movie is that people and media was laughing off the flat earthers and they grew in strength to have a national movement.
One of the indications the signals we perceive automatically regarding whether an idea is “truthy” is that something is either prevalent, common, worthy of considerations (2 sides), laughable, stupid, immoral.
Balkanized feed driven experience can help expose people to erroneous signals eg seeing pro flat earth things constantly because it was selected to be like previously engaging content and confusing that with it being commonly believed.
Treating an idea seriously in other venues only makes this signal problem worse not better. If they were capable of reasoned argument they wouldn’t be flat earthers to start with the only thing between them metaphorically or perhaps literally shoving pancakes up their ass is the type of social signals they are getting. I believe that ridicule is a net positive in deterring stupid beliefs because it deters SOME folks from believing whereas respectful argument is virtually worthless again when dealing with such folks.
Consider the same flat earther is all over the net speaking the same nonsense hundreds of times per year. Nonsense and ridicule is seen by hundred or thousands of folks whereas everyone is still talking to the one asshole. It’s pretty easy to see why it ought to be a net positive.
Hey now, don’t kink shame. I’d be fine with people shoving pancakes up their ass. It’s better than the bleach some of them drank to try and kill coronavirus.
These people deserve to be ridiculed. It’s time we stop catering to these Idiots and allow them to face the consequences of their ignorance. Same with the MAGA minions.
What consequences are there for being a flat earth idiot?
I don’t understand how you can see a comment that says “being mean is unproductive” and conclude “we should be mean anyways”
Do you carry the same principle for fat shaming?
Fat shaming is such a bad analogy, I wouldn’t dream to mock someone for their body.
Mocking someone for the factually wrong “theory” they scientifically disproved themselves… That’s fair game.
What if an individual believes in flat earth theories because of a mental disregulation they suffer from?
You don’t have a choice over whether or not you’re fat. If you ask a fat person if they want to be fat, I can guarantee that the vast majority of them will say no.
Believing in flat earth, on the other hand, is a choice. The people in the Flat Earth movement don’t want to leave; in fact, when faced with contradictory evidence, they just dig their heels in.
The village should not change for the village idiot.
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I agree, except WTF is catering to flat earth?
Didn’t they also establish that Sargent is a hyper-religious Christian and that the majority of American flat-earthers are? If this is a religious belief for them then there’s absolutely no hope that they’ll change their views.
It’s mostly a religious belief. There are a couple of Bible verses that say things like “the earth will be rolled up like a scroll” and “spread to the four corners of the earth”.
Biblical literalists cannot handle the Bible being incorrect about anything, so it’s everyone else that’s wrong.
Much easier to rearrange reality to fit your perception rather than alter your perception and admit that you’re possibly wrong.
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I know a guy who was involved in some of those “experiments” and spent a considerable amount of time and money on them. He still is very adamant that it just proves that there is some other unknown confounding variable that just proves that the experiment was valid and that the designers of the flat earth already expected the experiments. It’s really depressing. I used to really respect him when I was younger.
Hold the fuck up. Now theres DESIGNERS of the flat earth? Jesus Christ
Actually, it’s his father
Its his father, him
The Time Traveling adventures of Yahweh and his selfson, Jesus.
Hi Dad. It’s me, you.
Luke, I am… my own father
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God
I think they’re voting for Trump.
They illuminati killed them for their insolence
Most probbably just doubled down and made excuses. The main takeaway of the documentary was a lot of those people are just lost/lonely and being part of that club gave them a sense of belonging to a group of similar people.
Yea I’m glad the documentary uncovered that. It really shows why someone would get into this despite it being pretty easy to prove otherwise (even inadvertently proving themselves wrong) they have this little community of friends.
People like to feel like they’re in on some truth that most people aren’t aware of.
The sad part is that the less intelligent someone is, then the stronger is the need for that hidden truth. Highly educated and intelligent people are more comfortable with ignorance and need less that validation of having secret knowledge.
On the other side of that coin, it is much easier for someone with a high degree of intelligence and self awareness, to perform the necessary mental gymnastics to justify bullshit beliefs…
It seems that a lot of the ‘hidden truths’ that the lower intelligence people seem to gravitate to were manufactured by this kind of intelligent bullshit artist. Sociopaths that realize they can control and manipulate gullible people and use them to their own benefit, like cult leaders and such.
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There was a short segment on 60 Minutes (maybe?) back in 2020 before the elections where they interviewed someone who had deprogrammed himself from Qanon.
It was the same story. He had no friends IRL, no social support, he had turned his mom onto Qanon and she was still down the rabbit hole.
He said that was the part that kept him in it for so long, even once he started questioning things. All his “friends” and close relations were part of the cult and he would have to cut ties with everyone or worse, they would turn on him and attack him as a traitor.
It would be sad if these online-cults weren’t so damaging to society.
Yup. Eerily similar with what people getting out of MLMs experience.
Did you watch the movie? Because the experiments showed that the earth was round, they decided that there must have been something wrong with the experiments.
Flat Earth Follower: “So what was the result of that laser gyroscope experiment we all gave you money for?”
Flat Earth Leader: “Well it showed a 15 degree an hour rotation… So we think ‘heaven energies’ are affecting it.”
Flat Earth Follower: Nods happily, knowing he doesn’t have to change his beliefs.
Very important question! Did they do the mind acrobat tango and still believe it’s flat or did they just go to the next conspiracy theory?
No idea, but the greatest predictor of whether someone will believe a conspiracy theory is if they already believe another conspiracy theory.
The documentary was called “Behind the Curve” and featured Bob Knodel. Unfortunately he passed away this year. https://www.robertsfhsc.com/obituary/RobertBob-Knodel
It looks like you still believed in the theory though. He had a YouTube channel that was devoted to flat Earth conspiracy.
The experiment he was involved in was the gyroscope one. The documentary showed what happened after his experiment “failed”: he decided the experiment was flawed and needed to be refined.
The aftermath of the wood slats with holes experiment at the end wasn’t shown, but based on the rest of the documentary (and the history of people with conspiratorial beliefs) it’s almost certain they did the same.
RIP to Bob, though. I hope his friends & family are coping well.
he decided the experiment was flawed and needed to be refined.
Ah yes, the scientific method:
- Make an observation or ask a question
- Gather background information
- Create a hypothesis
- Create a prediction and perform a test
- Analyze the results and draw a conclusion
Share the conclusion or decide what question to ask nextDiscard the experiment if it doesn’t support your preconceptions
You are correct, I had forgotten about the last experiment with the light shining across a distance. For some reason I thought that the gyroscope was the one that they ended on.
Bob may have been confused about the shape of the Earth, but he was still a person with family and friends. A good thing to remember about all of these people.
Going to suggest the folding ideas YouTube channel on the same topic.
https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44?si=m2b1gAkCOlDOnCle
Spoiler: his hypothesis, well supported in my opinion, is that a large proportion of those formerly in flat earth are now neck deep in qanon, and since the film was made many are now into other conspiracy stuff. The election was fake etc.
Also, his video of minnewanka lake is just perfect flat earth debunking.
I’m sure they changed their minds… /s
There is not a lot to laugh about with flat earthers. The theory stems from Christian fundamentalism, and it is tightly connected to the christofascist movements trying to coup the USA at the moment.
And no, they are not going to give up their beliefs, because they didn’t come by them through rational thought, so rational thought isn’t going to disprove it for them.
Just to piggyback off this for the uninitiated:
If the Earth is round, then that means Earth is just like any other planet; one in a trillion.
Flat Earthers are convinced “space” is an illusion, all the celestial bodies are there to trick us into feeling insignificant.
If the Earth is flat, then we are special.
Truth is: we aren’t, not in any cosmic sense.
It’s not specifically about those same individuals, but I want to mention Dan Olsen’s documentary In Search of a Flat Earth, which touches more on the ideology of the flat earth movement, and how it’s developed in recent years. No spoilers, peeps!
It might asbwell be: when his experiment failed, he got told to “pray about it and try again”
They fell off the earth.
Bobby got too close to the edge… Damn. Well I guess he’s on the other side now
I saw some of them in the zoo last sunday.
Apparently their theory fell flat in a round-a-bout way.
I dont know, I think they came around.
They did not.
Well, the only thing they have to fear is sphere itself.
They persisted in their flat disagreement with the earth being a sphere
… And it’s rather quite… interesting… how long this has been going on…
