What it means to believe that “real” trees no longer exist (2016)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I can't help but feel a little bad for anyone who believes that flat-earthers are genuine.
I've pretty much convinced myself that flat-earth groups are more like speculative fanfiction archives than churches. The people who come up with all of these theories and defenses do it because thinking about these things is fun, not because they believe it. And they feed the perceptions of true belief because that's fun too. And they form these little communities for the same reasons that people writing new fan stories about Harry Potter do, because it's more fun to do it with other people.
The author here isn't uncovering some secret truth about the world so much as getting suckered into the drama, feeding it, and providing further joy and incentive to the players.
And here I am possibly getting suckered into the author's drama. Maybe the author is just one of the players and doesn't actually believe that they believe.
I've engaged in open-minded and friendly conversations with flat-earth individuals off and on for quite a few years. It's fascinating stuff; many are pretty chill and willing to chat if you go in with a positive affect.
I think if you graphed the total number of people who truly believe the earth is flat compared to the number of people who profess that just for 'troll' purposes, the latter group would be growing rapidly, and the former growing very slowly.
Why do I do this? Because the older I get, the more I realize that all of us, everyone, make a lot of choices every day that we think are based on logic and reason, but that are actually based on irrational experience and emotions. I think we tend to back-fill with logic and reason as much as we can.
Many people get more things 'right' than others, but what's 'right' is damn hard to know, isn't it?
This might seem like a wallow in all kinds of intellectual relativism, but it's really not. We should all strive for logical and rational thought and decision making, yet at the same time realize that we are all still fundamentally driven by forces that are quite the opposite, and that drive is largely invisible to us.
I've met people who believed they could communicate with aliens by meditating under pyramids made of steal pipes.
I've met people who believed that putting a crystal on a bottle of water will make it stay fresh longer. That they could charge batteries with their mind.
Not sure what kind of proof you might want to be sure these people really believe what they say. And I'm not sure how meaningful that statement is. I never thought they were playing the mind of fan-fic games you suggest though.
My observations lead me to believe people in general believe some pretty weird things.
Most importantly (too me) would it be possible to start one of these on purpose? If you wanted to, what would be a good candidate?
I concluded that the atomic bomb is an excellent choice. I say there never was an atomic bomb. It was propaganda to prevent the US and Soviet Union from engaging in a disastrous WWIII so soon after WWII. And it was very effective but it's time for all the suckers to wake up.
I know you've seen the films. Special effects! Hiroshima/Nagasaki? Regular fire bombing that happened to get out of control because of favorable (or unfavorable) winds! Godzilla? Well that's more difficult to explain but I'm sure if we put our heads together we could come up with something.
Who's with me?!?!?
Godzilla... was just an ordinary human in a rubber suit, in a movie studio sound stage where scale models of cities and landscapes had been built. In later years, as film technology improved, the more detailed films of Godzilla were created with a CGI model, with the virtual skeleton and muscle movements derived from filming a human actor in a mo-cap suit. It only looks real because the animators are so skilled, and the actor is so good at mo-cap acting. It is in no way live footage of a real animal.
That's right. Godzilla doesn't exist. He never existed. He was always a made-up movie character. I bet you could get literally thousands of people to believe that. With enough gaslighting, I bet you could even get someone whose actual home was actually stepped on and burned by Godzilla to believe that it was due to an earthquake or tsunami or tornado or nuclear reactor meltdown or something equally farfetched.
- 9/11 was organized/enabled/allowed to happen by actors within the US Gov.
- Pearl Harbor was organized/enabled/allowed to happen by actors within the US Gov.
- JFK was assassinated by the CIA
- All history from CE 614 to CE 911 was fabricated by the Holy Roman Empire
I'd say 4 is just as easily disprovable as flat-earth-ism: There are other, contemporary societies in contact with Western Europe who were also keeping track of time... unless there was an Eurasia-wide conspiracy (in CE 1000) to fabricate those years, the dates only line up the way we count them now. There are also well-established (and recorded) astronomical events that line up well with the commonly-accepted timeline (but that would take believing that astronomical events are predictable by science).
In all, I'd say it's much more likely that NASA pretended to land on the moon than that the century we think Mohammed lived in didn't happen.
EDIT: Misread my own numbering
A work colleague of mine and otherwise very good friend does indeed believe that the moon landings were fake. It took some time until she started admitting that during our chats, and I have to say that I was at first baffled that she actually believed that they were fake and I've only recently stopped mocking her about that.
I also met a friend of a friend (man, late 30s, otherwise quite a great guy) who told me straight-faced that he believed that the Holocaust was not real, that the numbers were "exaggerated" or somth like that. I couldn't continue the conversation because I felt that there was nothing much that I could say, you cannot really continue that kind of conversation without calling said person an anti-Semite and it all goes downhill from there.
The fact that most of them are only that way about the holocaust argues otherwise.
Still I have to wonder- if you hate Jews why pretend the holocaust didn't happen?
It starts with a nation founded on faith and religion, of a group of people who are willing to kill and enslave based purely on things they believe but can't prove. They'll try like hell to prove it, they'll search up and down for the slightest hint of something they feel to which they can connect other tiny little other unproven dots to. It doesn't matter if YOU don't think it's true, it's MY religion and I believe it and YOU can't fuck with MY faith.
It continues on through a society full of advertisements that scream "the best!" "foolproof!" "most delicious!" night and day, from every corner...first from papers and billboards and then up through radio, tv and the internet. Even when demonstrably untrue and nonsensical, they're allowed to be propagated and repeated.
It reaches a modern day where political classes can literally almost say or do or vote what or however they want without fear of any serious reprisal or of the citizens taking half a minute to remember that they said/did/voted the exact opposite 6 months or two years ago.
This is true in the US specifically but also in varying proportions throughout the world, and moreso as our model is spread everywhere.
So basically I wonder if first we have been misdirected and advertised at and lied to for so long that a sizeable portion of those among us have actually lost sight of what's true reality anymore. Some of my family members I previously thought of as sane and rational have become so unhinged and irrational that if they suddenly came to me and said "the earth is flat and there are no trees" I might flinch for a second but otherwise would not be all that surprised.
We're probably 'enjoying' a new wave of this development with persistent media and I imagine if the promises of AR/VR come to pass that we will see even more severe divisions between individuals/communities/countries understandings of what's "real".
People are able to create mental connections between things. They are able to see patterns and extrapolate. This is one of the things that separates us from most other species and gives us tremendous capabilities, such as the ability to examine the past for mistakes and plan things out for the future. It also leads to storytelling and culture - ways to rapidly adapt at a societal level rather than a genetic or behavioral one.
However, this capability doesn't have to be 100% accurate to work effectively - it only needs to be effective most of the time to provide a significant competitive advantage as far as survival. You can see this in any number of current or past societies, from small tribes to continental civilizations - beliefs and behaviors develop and become standardized/traditional, which are frequently a mix of useful/effective and pointless.
A simple example would be prayer - consistently, human societies invent higher powers that they ascribe control of various aspects of the world to and construct rituals around them, and regardless of the lack of evidence, you can find this is pretty much all human societies. The details, of course, vary widely.
In short, humans have never had a firm grasp on reality - we've already invented things and filled in the blanks with our own imagination, amped up our importance in the universe, because we're limited in scope as far as what we can interact with and control.
Today things are both better and worse than in the past - we have cultural patterns like the scientific method, which ideally gives us more reliable information than most prior constructs; tools that expand our ability to examine the universe around us, giving us a better idea of where we are; consistently better information transfer (spoken word > written word > mass-produced written > analog mass media > digital).
But at the same time, these things can be used to spread incorrect information just as much as correct; things can be cherry-picked, ignored, manipulated; logical fallacies abound; and, as ever, people will see the things they want to see to fit their patterns and beliefs, ignoring or deeming irrelevant the pieces that don't fit for them.
We know more than ever as a species and society; but individually it is completely beyond anyone's grasp to gain a solid understanding of everything we know simply because there is so much. We're relegated to trusting each other - and unfortunately, people don't choose who they trust based on how accurate those people might be, but on things like social relations, world-view match, and so on.
It's the ones that don't understand this who are truly dangerous, not folks who believe weird stuff. You can believe anything you want with a spirit of humility and openness.
Humans are irrational, indeed. That doesn't mean that some of the far-out crazy isn't directly or indirectly harmful.
Not necessarily.
Many are able to compartmentalize irrational beliefs into their everyday lives. You can have folks that appear perfectly rational in almost all things and live full professional lives. Yet when they discuss their tar-baby, "the crazy" comes out. I would lump fundamentalist religious people into this category.
I think if one is able to introspect hard enough, it is possible for _everyone_ to realize that they're holding irrational beliefs at some level. Whether or not this is harmful depends on the norms of the culture, and to what extent one is willing to act on their beliefs or impose them on others.
That is, for writing things that the remainder of myself, and everyone else in the real world around me, can recognize and know to be untrue. Because there is no way that raving lunatic in there could possibly know whether any of the things it shouts out could be true. Could it? It shouldn't really matter that it has such an eye for detail and a knack for explaining things that seem otherwise unexplainable in a rational world.
I heartily encourage you to not make any attempt to pry that box open. Don't touch the lock. Mind the warning signs. The crazy is inside the box. The rational is outside it.
I should probably stop talking to my crazy so much, but it's so much more entertaining than television. It really is an infinite source of amusement. I mean, the story about Devil's Tower being a fossilized tree stump left over from a previous epoch is just amateur stuff in comparison.
They are a clear threat to rational policy making.
Also, their children are often victims of their irrationality, sometimes dying horrible and needless deaths for the sake of their parent's beliefs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHkiZNT3cyE
I started taking notes on everything that was wrong, but literally ran out of ink. I advise watching at 1.5x speed.
At least these people understand their audience's intellectual limitations.
For the record, I circumnavigated the world solo in a 31-foot boat (https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/). From direct empirical evidence, I know the earth is round.
Not if one's satellite navigation system fails and one is then required to reduce sextant sights to get across the ocean safely, as happened to me. I had a laptop on board and wrote a program to reduce my cheap plastic "backup" sextant's sights in a reliable and speedy way. I ended up with almost the same position accuracy from the sextant that I was getting from the failed satellite navigation system (this preceded the GPS era -- GPS is way more accurate).
So from my perspective, being a software person was a distinct advantage, and I assisted a number of other sailors whose non-cybernetic navigation methods would otherwise have gotten them into serious trouble.
Of course, I believe you! I'm not a flat earther. But to someone who has already made the mistakes necessary to convince themselves that the earth is flat, it's easy to deny your proof. You don't have direct empirical evidence, you have the evidence that you went in a loop, plus a bunch of science that these people have crazy reasons for denying, and that science tells you that loop involved going around a sphere.
Antartica is not an island continent, but an ice-wall that extends around the entire flat earth
Nobody has ever got a photograph of the edge because you can't go there, you're not allowed. The governments of the world see to that!
It's all delightfully solipsistic...
Yes, plausible explanation, which partly explains how beliefs like this can persist. Ironically, an increase in mathematical and geometric sophistication can produce more convincing alternative models -- for those who want to defend the alternatives.
Sometimes you don't even have to really work at it.
But is it really just mostly trolls? That's the only explanation that makes sense.
> The particulars differ, but here everyone takes it as a given that a conspiracy reaching from your first schoolteacher to NASA to the metaphysical Beyond has deluded humanity [ed: emphasis mine]
Misusing 'humanity' to mean 'mankind' (or, if you must, 'humankind') is one of my pet peeves: humanity is the quality of being humane. Flat earthers don't believe that a conspiracy is deluding the quality of being humane (that phrase doesn't even make sense); they believe that a conspiracy is deluding mankind (or, again, 'humankind').
edit: add closing paren
It's a very efficient fruitcake detector. It's sort of like a pyramid marketing scheme -- the dumbest people naturally float to the top.
But what's the emotional advantage of believing in a flat earth? And who is the imagined evil enemy who benefits from making us all think the Earth is a spheroid?
One does have to wonder why, though, despite being one of the largest civilian tragedies ever to happen on our soil, no forensic analysis of the destroyed structure was done. Instead it was all picked up, put in trucks, then shipped overseas to be recycled.
Then, virtually out of nowhere, we get a multi-hundred page document produced laying out new legislation (aka US PATRIOT Act), which was so swiftly voted on and passed that it was absolutely apparent that little to none of it had been read (or if it had, it was read long before it was ever introduced!); we know for a fact that many congresspersons admitted to not reading it before voting on it!
Neither of these things had to happen. Both could have been done differently. Forensic analysis of the structure could have been performed. It would have been expensive, it would have been an engineering nightmare - but it could have been done. We are able to piece together down passenger jets; this would have been an order of magnitude or more greater in difficulty - but had we tried, we could have done it, and our knowledge would be that much better to make decisions with.
But we didn't. And we still don't have an answer for why it wasn't done. I'm not even certain that the question has been raised much.
Instead, we relied upon gut instincts and other emotional factors to pass a piece of legislation that appeared out of nowhere fully written, which couldn't have been developed in the short amount of time it was. It was as if the material presented was already available, waiting for the moment it could be unveiled. Shades of ALEC legislation, in fact. But it wasn't questioned, and those that did question it were called anti-American or worse, for daring to wonder why such wide reaching legislation wasn't honestly reviewed and debated upon by our representatives in government. We are still living with the repercussions of that decision today.
These items are two distinct but intertwined pieces of history which have changed our country and the world. There are many other questions about that day and the days that followed which we the people don't have answers for, or the answers we do have seem vague, even deceptive, when examined closely.
I'm not saying the "government did it", nor am I saying anything that the current understood narrative doesn't say. I'm more interested in what the narrative leaves out, what it doesn't say, what it doesn't explore - and why it isn't being explored, and why we continue to let it be unexplored. Likely, it is already too late to get any answers for these unanswered, and in some cases unasked questions which surround that fateful day in our history.
We probably fear what the answers would reveal, which is why we didn't ask the questions, and why we suppressed those who dared to.
But you can see the curve... Have they never been to the ocean?
EDIT: I just Googled and it sounds like the planet's radius is big enough that, within the range our eyes can see, the curve is extremely subtle.
Or is it claimed that there's "too much debris in the air" to prevent this?
I am willing to confess I have pushed sharks are smooth: https://twitter.com/bransonreese/status/848746940179382272
Also, I can set up at least half a dozen different experiments to let me "experience" that the Earth is round. Is Flat Earth Theory just another set of blinders we get to put on if we want?
See for instance this video I was just watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LNT3CucL6c
It's a video about how NASA supposedly fakes the Mars rover pictures, yet the description starts with "I believe the pope of Rome is Antichrist (Daniel 7:7-27,2Thessalonians 2:1-12,2Peter 2:1-22,1John 2:18-25, Revelation 13:1-9) and Rome 'Mystery Babylon the Great the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth' (Revelation 17:1-18)."
This is one of the first resources on the "flat earth society" website: http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/library/books/Is%20the%20...
I haven't read through it but it features a chapter called "The Bible and science", an other "Moses and geologists" and a third one "science versus christianity".
I'm sure this tale of a primeval forest being destroyed by evil beings resonates with people who believe in flood myths and the like.
In the end all these conspiracy theories are about rejecting science and the "new world order/illuminatis/freemasons/..." who are the work of the devil trying to corrupt us so that we stray away from god's path, or somesuch.