What @Stranger_On_A_Train said, and what xkcd said about creationists applies to antivaxxers, flat earthers and other conspiracy followers.
It is what John Oliver pointed out about the grossly inexperienced and biased CTs that are getting into government now.
it’s very disheartening and it’s it’s scary. I think that there will be a massive exodus of competence right when you fire everyone who knows what they’re doing and only hire people who will say yes to the rich guy in charge. That’s not a recipe for good government, it’s a recipe for the Titan submersible.
Perhaps related to this, the ‘feeling superior to an idiot’ factor.
The above 2 being a bit like rubbernecking at a car crash.
As mentioned already, FErs tend to be people susceptible to CTs, so you could argue it’s important to understand how they ‘think’, because, unlike FE*, some of the bullshit CTs they believe in could actually be harmful (anti-vax, holocaust denying, illuminati, etc). Understanding their psychology could be a way into changing their minds.
*Even then, FE belief has lead to at least one tragic death, when a well known FEr built his own rocket, got in it, fired it and then died when the parachute failed to open.
Flat Earthers infuriate me because, well, we’re supposed to be better than that. Humanity, that is. We’re supposed to have evolved past rank stupidity like that. And yes, I admit, we’re supposed to be better than we are in a LOT of things, including a great many things far more important than this particular idiocy, but the arguing about actual shape of the Earth is such a quintessential distillation of everything wrong with humanity that I just can’t take it. People can be wrong about things, and you can argue with them, or not, but you can’t argue with Flat Earthers, you just have to punch them in the face until they shut up.
Like the others said, it’s because Flat Earthers are the most obviously-wrong folks there are. The only way they could be more wrong would be Sun-existence-deniers or Moon-existence deniers. So that’s why they gall people.
While almost all flat earthers I’ve heard are inerrant Bible believers, not all Bible believers are flat earthers. The guy who funded the Final Experiment is a creationist, and it was hilarious to hear him and some people from Answers in Genesis (a creationist group) making fun of flat earthers for being unscientific and not looking at the evidence.
Will Duffy’s (the guy who funded the Final Experiment) arguments are straight out of Kent Hovind and Ken Ham. But, unlike them, Duffy is very clear that those positions are non-salvific.
The disappointing thing about the Final Experiment was that the media was not alerted. Very little coverage. But I guess these days silly season is all year long.
There is a small but vocal minority of people working in global climate modeling who are Evangelical Christians (not Young Earth Creationists, I assume, but Biblical ‘literalists’), and I’ve met a surprising number of people working in nuclear fusion research who have pretty staunchly conservative Christian beliefs. I’ve known a lot of engineers and scientists who believe in things like paranormal apparitions (ghosts, angels, elohim, and other supernatural manifestations), extrasensory perception, precognition, reincarnation, et cetera, and even once a medical doctor (admittedly a DO, but still) who expressed that there was “something to homeopathy”.
Never underestimate how an otherwise rational person can hold some very unsubstantiated, physically impossible, and frankly bizarre beliefs.
Maybe he was kidding; he seemed like someone who had picked up a lot of lies about what the Earth being a sphere actually meant, and also had never experimented with a flashlight to see how shadows behave, but who was absurdly sure of himself.
If the conversation is about flat earthers. Then I still think they are either (in one form or another) mentally ill, joking, or making money selling merchandise at conventions off the previous two categories.
When every conspiracy theory, including FE, is lumped together along with world religions then you lose me.
I’m not a religious person and I have strong opinions about people who believe in any kind of “higher power”. But I wouldn’t put the majority of people on earth in the same category as flat earthers. Or any of the wackier CTs that have been mentioned.
Do you engage these people in real life? Attempt to disprove their illogical/irrational beliefs with an intellectual discussion? Or do you roll your eyes and walk away.
Yeah. If it’s mental illness, it seems to have affected a massive percentage of the population and is clearly infectious since that proportion is growing.
I’d sooner reclassify what’s wrong with those people not as “mental illness” but as “addiction”. They are addicted to dangerously ignorant anti-factual patterns of thinking and the addiction is slowly spreading throughout their lives until they become incapacitated by it.
Meanwhile, it’s evidently contagious. Equally evidently, it’s highly profitable to be one of the addiction’s pushers.
The fact that flat earthers exist – and by that I mean genuine believers, as some actually are – and that their numbers are even growing, is an indicator of the sorry state that our world is in, and the threat of disinformation on social media.
They are the canary in the coal mine that we should take seriously. Indeed maybe it’s already too late, as the same conspiratorial thinking and rejection of data and experts has already led to self-harming cultish politics in several countries.
That’s the serious reason. Aside that, I’ll admit there’s an entertainment factor too.
Everybody can play along with “spot the misconception or reasoning error”; like some kind of trivial observation test. And if I want to put on a podcast while doing chores, a flat earth debate is not something that needs concentration, and is occasionally laugh out loud funny.
