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.
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
This just makes me want to rewatch red dwarf
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.
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.
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.
A form of narcissism. The need to feel Superior and Special.
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”
I saw some of them in the zoo last sunday.
… And it’s rather quite… interesting… how long this has been going on…
They fell off the earth.
Bobby got too close to the edge… Damn. Well I guess he’s on the other side now
Apparently their theory fell flat in a round-a-bout way.
I dont know, I think they came around.
They persisted in their flat disagreement with the earth being a sphere
