You need to flip the script so HE feels exasperated.
Firstly, you have to disengage from the idea his opinion can shift, it cannot. People who believe such things do so because they WANT TO BELIEVE it! Nothing’s going to touch that, in my opinion.
You need to listen politely, to whatever nonsense he’s spewing, or whatever he’s baiting you with, and respond with a resounding, “Indeed!”, then immediately change the topic.
Never waver from this tactic. Never waver from this singular response.
Now he’s exasperated!
It’s the closest you can get to a win, in my humble opinion.
I tend to think of a “dumbass” as someone who lacks information on a certain subject, or who believes in misinformation for reasons that are understandable, and who can usually be corrected. What we have here is someone so totally disconnected from reality that their core beliefs can only be supported by an entire repertoire of completely baseless conspiracy theories. For my own safety, I’d operate on the assumption that they might be dangerous.
Sure. You can ask them something that’s completely obvious that all sane people agree on, like “Is the world round or flat?”, and conclude that all of the people who say it’s flat are just trolling.
If we assume that there are some people who truly, earnestly believe the earth is flat, and others who just say that to get a rise out of others, that question wouldn’t differentiate between the two – it doesn’t differentiate between people with crazy (but earnest) beliefs, and assholes.
And, it certainly doesn’t help when you’re trying to conduct a survey which is meant to identify how many people actually hold that fringe, crazy belief in the first place.
I think that @robby was more generally asking about polling/survey techniques that would weed out the general trolls; as I noted upthread, there are some ways to at least reduce them, but ultimately, jerks will be jerks.
For heaven’s sake, just because you enjoy writing unformatted walls of text (most of which have nothing to do with your topic), it doesn’t mean people are going to enjoy reading your stream of counciousness. It’s like getting cornered by someone who can’t stop blathering. And that person blaming the listener for just not enjoying conversation anymore after the listener finally extricates themselves.
Figure out if you’re writing for yourself, or for the reader. If it’s yourself, then you might look into getting a blog. If it’s for the reader, then edit your work and break it up into paragraphs.
I don’t think they are all trolling. For one thing, not everyone is sane. Some people are simply delusional.
Others are ignorant, or brainwashed by their parents or others who raised or influenced them. Or by YouTube videos. Or as an article of religious faith.
A belief in a flat Earth is not all that removed from a belief in young-Earth creationism, which is an article of faith for some. Or even the belief that a person can be resurrected after being crucified, which I’m sure a higher percentage of people profess to believe. (The latter belief is impossible, of course, by any rational measure, but the people professing to believe it aren’t all trolling either. Many of them truly believe it.)
And then there are those that are so incurious and caught up in their own worlds that they have literally never given the matter any thought. Or just trying to survive due to personal circumstances.
Both the quoted bit and your response are a bit too close to “attacking the poster” for MPSIMS. This is one of our kinder and gentler forums, where posters often write bloggy things about themselves. And I’d like to suggest that the constructive part of that advice could have been written in a more constructive way.
And XSIV, you are suggesting the posters here are lazy. No one has an obligation to read posts, and long rambling posts are less likely to be fully read than tightly-written posts, because the latter are more interesting.
No warnings, just a reminder to avoid insulting other posters.
Fundamentalist religion, in the form of Biblical inerrancy, appears to be highly correlated with flatearth beliefs. Once on the road to considering every word of the Bible true and real rather than metaphorical, few ever turn back. Attacking their belief is attacking a core part of their being. Worse, that strain of religion feels a necessity to proselytize and make the unbelievers see the truth.
All the more ironic then, that when globes became common in the 16th century they were created in countries that were officially and overwhelmingly Christian. They, and the flat maps that devolved from them, like the Mercator projection, were necessary to plot out routes for ships crossing the Atlantic. Without accounting for the sphericity of the Earth, ships would never reach their intended destinations. Everybody on them would DIE. Even committed Christians were too sensible on that subject to allow a belief in a flat earth to overcome their fear of DEATH and the likelihood of losing money to boot.
Today we use spherical geometry to plot out everything from plane routes to satellite orbits to building bridges and very long buildings. Why? So millions of people don’t DIE. All of science is connected, so all of science is built upon shared assumptions, which is why flatearthers have to deny every single assertion put forth by all the hundreds of sciences. Knock out one prop, knock out them all. Much easier to say goddidit and stand back smugly.
First, since I didn’t notice anyone doing this yet, welcome to the Dope.
I’ve spent way too much time on Flat Earth debunking, since one woman in my critique group turned out to be a Flat Earther, and I was fascinated.
A lot of people say Flat Earthers are just trolls, but while some are, no doubt, many aren’t. Some Flat Earthers make money running YouTube channels, and selling flat earth merch. Some get sucked in by the algorithm.
Almost all Flat Earthers are fundamentalist Christians, but only a minority of fundamentalist Christians are flat earthers. The guy who organized the Final Experiment (more on that later) is a creationist pastor, and before the experiment Answers in Genesis, the creationist organization, had him on and basically laughed at flat earthers.
Google “The Final Experiment.” Since in the flat earth there is no South Pole, and only a ring stretching on the circumference of the pizza, it is impossible for there to be a 24 hour sun in Antarctica - the complement of the 24 hour sun above the Arctic Circle. Will Duffy, who made money in investing, paid for a flat earther and a globe earther to go to Antarctica in December to check to see if the 24 hour sun there was real. Spoiler alert - it was. One of the flat earthers actually renounced it after seeing it with his own eyes. But the ones that didn’t go invented a wide range of absurd explanations, such as it was all done in a VR dome. So sending them to space would be worthless - they’d say the curve came from distorted windows, or it was alll a VR chamber.
As for your brother, the simplest disproof would be to ask him for a map of the Flat Earth with a scale representing mileage. Towards the South things get way farther apart than reality. Ask him to tell you how far it is from Santiago to Sydney, then you can find actual flights that made that trip. I’ve done it - the plane would have to average above the speed of sound to make it. They say it can do it because of tailwinds.
Both ways. If he won’t accept the current flat earth map, which of course doesn’t work, you might ask him why he can’t come up with one.
You get the picture. A lot of the worst of them are now saying “we don’t need no steenkin’ model” since they don’t have one that could possibly work.
Not only that, but they are in it for the argument. There’s a saying: don’t wrestle a pig - you both get covered in shit and the pig enjoys it. Perhaps a little unfair on pigs, but as an idiom, it applies to flerfs. When you argue with flerfs, you are giving them what they want - attention, a sense of validation, etc.
Yeah, or they deny that such flights exist - they claim they are always cancelled, or only appear on departure boards to reinforce the globe earth story; if you present them with someone who has actually been on one of the flights, that person is of course lying, or brainwashed, etc.
You cannot argue them out of it, because the whole thing is about argument.
That’s why if you start offering evidence the world is round, you’ve already lost the argument. The world IS round. This is incontrovertible. By arguing with them, you’ve conceded that the subject is open to debate, which it is not.
We see it too with politics; I won’t mention anything specifically because it will morph into one of the other threads. But there seems to be a thing of: “If enough people believe something, well, it can’t be stupid then. It should be respected”. That’s what flerfers want us to say about FE.