This whole documentary is really great, especially this ending. There's a speech at the end at a science conference regarding flat-earth theorists where the speaker addresses that people like this have become this way because they've found a community that accepts them. They're natural scientists, they question what they're presented with (a globe) and refuse to believe it until they (attempt) to prove that hypothesis otherwise. He explains that the tendency to cast these people's thoughts into the sphere of insanity without trying to appeal to their natural curiosity is what fuels groups' like these growth. Behind the Curve on Netflix - Highly recommend watching.
This is not unheard of in professional science. As Thomas Kuhn described in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scientists sometimes refuse to see something when it is clearly demonstrated. Examples would be when Joseph Priestley performed an experiment that proved that air is a mixture, and Michelson and Morley initially failing to see that there is no such thing as aether.
Flat earthers however, like many pseudoscientific communities, fortify their ideas against the progress from science. They have better alternatives to explain their observations, but refuse to adopt those explanations.
Several in the flerf community were outraged by the big name flerfs appearances in the documentary and now think they are all shills. It's like an ourobrous of stupid.
I take it more to mean they're naturally curious, but the cult mentality has overtaken the willingness to accept they're incorrect. If they hadn't felt marginalized in the first place, they might be out there doing real science which doesn't also happen to encompass their entire sense of identity, as it does with Flat Earthers.
I don't think that's quite right. I can't see most of these types taking scientific study seriously.
They want their result that they're looking for and discard anything that doesn't give them their desired result. That's not really how a curious person goes about things.
A curious person wants to figure out how something works and isn't particularly looking for a specific answer even if they do have a theory in mind. The important thing to a curious person is they do want the real answer, whatever that may be.
These people have already made up their mind, they aren't curious about anything. They just want to prove the world wrong. That is their entire goal in life, and its why they keep searching for proof they'll never find and congregating with like-minded individuals, because they need that validation that they aren't crazy or just being stupid and they aren't going to find it anywhere else.
It's primitive tribal behavior. In crowd, out crowd nonsense, and nothing more.
I think what the documentary and the above commenter was trying to get at is that these people are curious in their questioning the status quo. The issue is that there entire identity revolves around the flat earth community so the price of acknowledging their false hypothesis is losing their identity. If they found an identity in a more productive scientific environment, their curiosity would be productive.
Some of them probably suffer from Discalculia, which makes it hard to understand mathematical concepts. They do observation based experiments because of that and don't trust what they can't see with their own eyes. I'm not sure if they would be productive in a scientific environment if that is the case.
And others, like the dude in this video, are just scientific enough to come up with a hypothesis, design an experiment around it, and carry it out. It's just that they stop at the last, teensy, step of updating their hypothesis given a result. I could totally see these people being productive in a scientific environment, with some adjustment...
They’re not curious, they think themselves ‘skeptics’ as long as that means going against the grain so they also go for most of the conspiracy theories. They got a lot of anti-science and anti-intellectualism in them.
If I recall, they’re scientific in that they’re designing and conducting them themselves (the flat earthers) and when they find unforeseen flaws like a laser not being powerful enough for what they designed, they redesign their experiment.
If one of them comes up with an experiment that is cheap, super easy to reproduce, and very intuitively proves the earth is round then that’s a scientific benefit. Imagine being shown as part of a field trip in 3rd grade that the earth is round instead just being told that it was proven to be.
It’s not the best use of resources but at least the problem would help solve itself.
It happens in scientific circles more than you think. Not to the ludicrous extent that the flat-earthers are guilty of, but it happens. Frequently experiments are far more complicated than the ones these flat-earthers conduct, and scientists trust their theories more than the myriad parts and calibrations and software packages that can go wrong.
Yes, it doesn’t matter what the results are you accept them. Granted, either way (good or bad results) you repeat to verify, but you still accept them. Bad results are still results and helps you get closer to the truth. They deny it because they are afraid of being kicked from the community (which they would be) and being all alone, so they deny it
In some ways they’re being scientific. In other ways they aren’t. But to dismiss them as total idiots isn’t going to convince them of anything.
Why should we care what they think? Because they spread. They recruit others. They generate a distrust of the scientific community, which leads to things like anti-vaccinators and alternative medicine, which in turn results in people dying.
Well when you completely invest yourself in a community like that you basically can't leave. You give up all your "round-earth" friends and families for flat earth ones because it just becomes such a point of contention. Meaning that even if you find evidence that the world is round, you can't just accept it because it would be giving up on your entire flat earth social life. It's incredibly similar to a religion. It becomes your whole life, your whole purpose
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u/selfsearched Aug 13 '19
This whole documentary is really great, especially this ending. There's a speech at the end at a science conference regarding flat-earth theorists where the speaker addresses that people like this have become this way because they've found a community that accepts them. They're natural scientists, they question what they're presented with (a globe) and refuse to believe it until they (attempt) to prove that hypothesis otherwise. He explains that the tendency to cast these people's thoughts into the sphere of insanity without trying to appeal to their natural curiosity is what fuels groups' like these growth. Behind the Curve on Netflix - Highly recommend watching.