The world is flat

[BrightOranges]

I learnt today that there are 'flat earthers' who seriously believe the conspiracy theories of a flat planet rather than a spherical one.
AIBU to think you can't fix stupid? Or is that too harsh?

AngelaTwerkel I'm intrigued by the idea of a magic bunker that can protect you boss from the end of the world. Like the end of the world happens, but not to the bunker. And that its safe to open the bunker door after the world has ended.

You really have to spend some time reading the debates to understand. Of course you can argue against it but its more fun and more difficult to argue an impossible position. I find I understand things better that way.

My ex is a flat earther. To be fair he's the most intelligent person I've ever met, very much into physics and science and has very good answers for any questions. I almost got sucked in....almost......but then he didn't really care whether I believed it or not. He is convinced the truth will out though but my work colleagues thought he was a nut job haha. As soon as we ended they were like is the earth round again now.

I'm a card carrying member of the Flat Earth Society grin its great for practicing debating skills by defending an impossible position. And actually learnt a lot more about physics from those debates than I did in school (as in school I only learnt about Newtonian gravity which isn't actually how it works and not relativity and gravitation) as people would come along to argue against it but use piss poor arguments so was fun to argue with them. No one (out of the core membership group anyway) actually believes but you didn't hear that from me whistles innocently

I suspect that is a motivation for quite a few people. They don't actually believe the ideas they're supporting, they just enjoy the game. Unfortunately, they are preying on the paranoid, gullible and uneducated. Morally to me it is almost on a par with going to asylums to torment the inmates for entertainment, as was once a popular pastime.

My DP is an avid conspiracy theorist and although he doesn't actually believe the earth is flat he thinks that flat earthers have some very convincing arguments.

Bear in mind that he also believes that planet Niburu is coming towards us as it does every 3500 years causing havoc and destruction and a resulting pole shift as a result of its million mile long charged tail. Apparently all the governments know this but they don't want to tell us because of the resulting chaos. Obama tried to but was thwarted!

Millions will die and this apparently is going to happen within the next few years. He gets most of his information on this from the website of an old American lady called Nancy who is having this information telepathically transferred to her by benign aliens who are part of the Council of the Worlds (think Star Wars!).

They are giving her this information so that she can wake up the world and inform us of the impending event.

Why else do you think there was a huge flood in the time of Noah and what do you think wiped out the dinosaurs?

I'm all for having an open mind and not accepting things without questioning them but having just read back this post I think my DP must have been a Hollywood script writer in a previous existence. (As for Hollywood films secretly giving us messages about what is actually going to happen, don't even begin to go down that road!)

Of course you can argue against it but its more fun and more difficult to argue an impossible position.

I get why you enjoy it, but not why you are effectively supporting such lunacy.

It ends up with Trump, climate change deniers and undermining of science.

I'd only be able to do it in the context of a debate society, not in an actual pro-flat site.

And I still don't get how you can possibly understand actual scientific data and use it in an argument to support actual flat Earth. It seems to me that you can only do it if the "science" is faulty or you don't understand it or your reasoning is faulty.
Either way, how do you do it?

It's a load of rubbish. I don't know how people can have a personal relationship with people who spout nonsense which can easily be disproved by science?

And I still don't get how you can possibly understand actual scientific data and use it in an argument to support actual flat Earth. It seems to me that you can only do it if the "science" is faulty or you don't understand it or your reasoning is faulty.

Maybe they know deep down that they're not as smart as they like to think they are. It's far easier debating nonsense with idiots than attempting something that might meaningfully contribute to science. I'd suggest it's just intellectually immature people inflating their own egos.

As I understand it the Flat Earth Society that Nat is a member of is really a dabating society. It is not there to promot the Flat Earth theorists rife on youtube, it is there to encourage proper debate. So if you turn up at their meeting with floppy arguments, you will get slaughtered. It makes you go and get the correct robust arguments to defend your cause.

It is an exercise frequently used in debating clubs etc. the point is that to find all the points in an opponents arguments is the way to properly understand the issues and get to grips with them. Nothing like a teenager being forced to research and debate a position opposite to their own.

Get a glass from your kitchen.
Half fill the glass with water.
Look at how the surface of the water sits in the glass.....flat.
Then slightly tip the glass to the side so water slips up the side a bit.
Now look at where the water surface level is.
It's still flat.
Water finds its own level in any container (be it a glass, river, lake or ocean) and always has a totally flat surface.
If the Earth was a globe, water surfaces would curve....which they don't.

Rather than laughing at 'Flat Earthers' go and do your own research.
Just do some actual research.
Then google the Solomon Asch Conformity experiments.....and see how easily someone can follow the crowd and be easily conditioned to believe something to be true....even when the person themself assumes the answer to be wrong.

Oh goodness, I've never met a flat earther, or not one that admits to it anyway.

I think because governments have been caught before manipulating certain things, plans for false flags etc. then people do get sucked into craziness.

Asch experiment

Oooh Verbena, do tell me how to Asch conformity experiments back up the flat earth thing, I've not heard that one yet.

Also, your use of the water in the glass idea has a bit of a fatal flaw, it's called a meniscus. Maybe google how that happens?

Verbena A colleague said the same to me! He also has theories around rainbows being artificially created. I wasn't really listening

The Asch Conformity experiments aren't directly related to flat earth.
They illustrate how easily humans can follow the crowd or believe something which is purported to be true, even though it isn't......
Believing everything and anything the government (for example) tells us.
How easy is it for billions of people to have little reason to question something that relatively few people have said, over and over again.

Ahh, so it isn't science, we're just conforming to a world view!

Go take a look at the ocean. See that horizon. It's curved.

I think you've misunderstood the conformity experiments.

The whole point of them is that the truth was completely obvious. Flat Earth and other fringe conspiracy theories are anything but true, or obvious.

Are you a wall of ice theorist, a shadowy guards at the edges of the world theorist or something else?

I'm not anything .
I'm just appreciating that there are many things in the world that appear to be one thing but which could potentially be another.
I'm just not shutting my mind to anything, that's all.

One of the main arguments I remember is people saying but what about gravity? And then explaining how actually the same gravitational effect can be had on a flat earth that is constantly accelerating "up" at a certain rate (I forget the actual rate).

Another one that people loved to come and shout was look at the horizon, its curved! When actually its not possible to see the curvature of the earth unless you are flying very high up with a very clear wide view (so unlikely on a commercial flight)

Even if you ignore gravity, or any kind of science or logic or critical thinking, and you expect bodies of water to curve around a globe, why would a glass of water, which is TINY have a curvature big enough for you to see with the naked eye, unless the world was only about 1 metre in diameter?

If the Earth was a globe, water surfaces would curve....which they don't.

They do if you look on a large enough scale. Locally, all you've got is the tangent to the curve.

You say 'do our own research'... so what experiments (which actually stand up to any sort of scrutiny) have you performed?

steppemum that's exactly what it is. And most people that join to argue against it end up seeing what it really is and switch sides to enjoy the debate too.

Research as in reading, watching videoas, doing experiments.

If the Earth was a globe, water surfaces would curve....which they don't.

See, that is a lie and a misconstruction, which is easy to show otherwise very easily.

The water surface in a glass curves down at the centre. It's not flat. It goes up the sides of the glass, as anyone who's ever prepared a solution in chemistry will testify to.

Then you have the oceans, which are really large surfaces and do follow the Earth's curve.

So, bad science and bad argument.

Do people really use that argument?