How YouTube converted people to flat Earth | Hacker News Reader

How YouTube converted people to flat Earth

bbc.co.uk

55 pointsstuartmemo129 comments

Behind the Curve is a great documentary about the strange resurgence of flat earth theory in the last few years. It covers a few of the major YouTube personalities.

I think flat earth’s comeback is actually a good thing and YouTube is making a mistake. It’s true that nobody 30 years ago believed the earth was flat but they probably couldn’t articulate why they believed that. People who are brave enough today to re-examine their beliefs should be admired, not ridiculed.

Of course flat earthers are wrong, but the coolest part of the documentary is when members of the movement start spending thousands of dollars to conduct experiments to prove their theory. At the end one of them gets a contradictory result to what he expected, and you can see the doubt start to form in his eyes as he smiles and just says something like “Oh, that’s interesting, that’s very interesting.”

YouTube has given nonconformists a platform where they can be honest and be themselves, and it’s unfortunate they look to be trying to take that away. Of course some people on there will hold views that are frankly stupid, but I’d say it’s better than having everyone believing the same thing out of a sense of conformity.

HBomberguy's "Flat Earth: A Measured Response" [0] is also an interesting look into the present-day flat earth "community".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gFsOoKAHZg

you can say the same thing about hypothetical people who assert 2 + 2 = 5. there's nothing cool about it, or people experimenting and starting to doubt that 2 + 2 = 5. nothing would be lost if nobody believed the earth was flat. this is not admirable.

But people who believe that earth is flat will always exist, it's just a question of how to deal with them. Letting people doubt and experimentally prove fundamental ideas is healthy (and how many a revolution in physics started). We just have to ensure these people don't get shut in echo chambers.

Letting people doubt and experimentally prove fundamental ideas is healthy

Asking, "How do we know the Earth is round? Can we test it?" is very, very different than asserting, "The Earth is flat and I'll prove it experimentally."

But how much is lost when for-profit enterprises curate and censor the most prominent avenues for speech?

There's a difference between scientific engagement and brain washing.

Science is always cool. Brain washing not so much.

The trick is to distinguish between the two. The only known way is to allow all points of view to compete, unless you have a better idea? (Which, of course, you are allowed to articulate even though I'm sure there isn't one;)

It's reasonable to start from a point of "I think the earth is round, but why is this true?" Flat earthers, much like many conspiracy theorists, are generally not interested in logical reasoning, and prefer to invent elaborate explanations to hold on to their delusions.

It's unreasonable to start from a position of "all scientists are forced by boogeyman governments to say that the earth is flat", which is not a strawman and something you can in fact see them argue.

If you're interested in the effects of conspiracy theories on society, it is a fascinating watch.

You see how people get pulled into the theory, get marginalized by society and how their family ends up becoming the flat earth community (even though they've never met).

You also see how hard it is for scientists with overwhelming evidence to convince them, it's a sobering watch.

On the contrary, having an initial spark of curiousity (or even doubt) about 2 + 2 = 5 is a great way of engaging with critical reasoning, mature mathematical thinking, proofs, etc. Given the number of times human civilisation lurked forward because someone revisited earlier assumptions, training more people to think critically and be courageous about their conclusions would, I believe, be a net benefit to us all.

Yes, 2 + 2 does not equal 5, but we need more people who can explain and think about _why_, and not simply repeat "just because". If someone cannot debunk a misconception as rudimentary as that, how can we expect their arguments against a flat earth theory to be sound and persuasive?

I really don't believe the flat earth phenomenon is about genuine curiosity. An important part of such a conspiracy theory is to generate more and more elaborate reasons why data must be rejected. That's not curiosity.

I don't think these are the same. If you get 15 marbles, arrange them into groups of 1,2,3,4,5 and give them the proper labels, you can trivially prove that the sum of two groups of 2 equals 4 and not 5.

The proofs for round earth are not as trivial. People have varying degrees of skepticism. Some are genuinely curious and are convinced by demonstrations while others are just contrarians. If you've ever heard Eddie Bravo talk, it's clear he doesn't care about understanding what shape the earth is and just likes to spout conspiracies.

Except they are not the same things at all. #1 numbers and math are a very different domain from hard facts, such as the shape of the earth as humans experience it.

In fact, you could probably create a number system, or a mathematics where 2+2=5 (simple example would be a number system the same as we have now, but the symbols for 4 and 5 are swapped). There are interesting ideas to be gained in thinking about what numbers mean, and imply based on questioning that.

However, once you’ve accepted all the definitions, and the number system, and the rules of the system you’ve accepted necessarily imply 2+2=4 then insisting that 2+2=5 is nonsensical. That’s the level at which the flat earth era are operating.

Exactly! I don't understand why they want to censor this, it shows how people can actually accept a scientific method through experimentation...

Alternatively it shows how people can reject well-established scientific fact based on no scientific analysis whatsoever.

Except they don't. Belief in flat earth is an ideology, it's not based on science. All of the evidence clearly shows the earth is round. You have to completely ignore the scientific method to believe the earth is flat.

The "main" flat earth research organization if FECORE which kicks out members who ask hard questions and deletes comments from their videos that detail flaws / misstatements of fact in their reports and videos. They don't care about getting the correct answer, to them they already know the correct answer so anything that goes against that answer is ignored.

It's not censoring, just changing the algorithm according to relevance. You could argue that other people were censored first so that youtube would suggest FE theory videos before their own which may have been more relevant. But it seems youtube's current algo is 'this is a conspiracy video, here's another conspiracy video' instead of 'this is a 9/11 video, here's another 9/11 related video'.

The amount of basic science you have to reject to believe in Flat Earth theory is mind boggling. Let’s keep in mind that these are not even non-spherical earth believers, who could probably conjure up a shape, in higher dimensions that may be able to explain basic observations. These are people who believe in a flat earth, which can be disproved by simple science and logic, such as ships appearing from a horizon, looking at a mountain at a distance, seeing the shadow of the earth during a lunar eclipse, or the simple fact that every other planet we see is spherical. There may be an interesting thought experiment to see what sort of shape we could conjure up that would explain the facts as we know them but that’s not what they are doing.

> nobody 30 years ago believed the earth was flat but they probably couldn’t articulate why they believed that

I'm not sure that this needs to be a requirement. Cultural axioms like this have value; there's a lot of knowledge to be had in the world, and not enough time or space in the mind to derive it all. I don't need to prove to myself from first principles every time I have a headache that aspirin will help.

There's danger, sure, if the wrong axioms take root, and we need to keep an open eye for new data that show we might be wrong. But it's unreasonable to expect that every individual person can cogently argue one side or the other of something with such overwhelming evidence that it has been accepted as a fact.

I think this gets at the difference between knowledge and understanding. Simply knowing a fact (like the Earth is round) is different from understanding why we think that. Perhaps what's even more important than understanding is the ability to come up with experiments and arguments questioning our understanding.

Questions of understanding lead to scientific research and analytical thinking, and that's exactly what a large fraction of the human population lacks. I'd say that's the only goal of education: to create people who can think for themselves.

You're right. In fact I think the ideal is even a step further up the abstract ladder: not every person in the street needs to be able to off-the-cuff explain the evidence for the earth being round.

But they should know how to get the resources they would need to make that explanation.

I sympathize with your argument, to a certain degree. The problem, however, is not that fringe or crackpot stuff exists on YouTube, but that it actually gets a disproportionate amount of bandwidth.

There is an inherent bias in the phenomenon. Say I am the only one on earth who thinks that pigs can fly. If I succeed in convincing one other person, I have doubled my peer group. If I do it a few times I have a crowd and may start to host conferences etc. That's a pretty big incentive. If, on the other hand, I do not think pigs can fly, why the hell would I bother convincing people?

> but that it actually gets a disproportionate amount of bandwidth.

I get the impression that people are merely overreacting to this, so I'm curious about this - do you have any source to back this up? We must also consider that perhaps the same set of flat earthers consistently watch such videos so bandwidth isn't a great metric, viewers is what you want really.

True! It would be interesting to contrast the number of flat earth movies vs. round earth movies. There is no easy way to do that. If I type in "flat earth" on YouTube, the first 50 results contain only one defence of flat earth, the rest is debunking.

This might be because 1 in every 50 people believes in flat earth. It might be because for every crackpot clip there are about 50 clips debunking it. It also may be the case that debunking flat earth is popular nowadays. It may even be because YouTube already tweaked their ranking algorithm.

However, when I search for "hollow earth", I get almost no debunking clips in the first 50 results. That makes me think that the first two hypotheses I came up with probably don't hold water.

I feel like it's part of an anti-intellectual trend and not something to laud. Asking genuine questions is a good thing, but I don't believe them to be genuine questions, it's more of a 'if "you" can't answer this question to my satisfaction, then I'm right'.

You are covering these people with a cloak of ideas that they don't have.

FEs do not have ideas. They are not examining anything. They are not courageous.

What they have is a cult of inconsistent, disingenuous rhetoric. They contradict themselves constantly. They are not reasoning, they are jumping from over verbal attack to another. They have decided that the best response to a life empty of "winning internet arguments"... is to just pretend they won.

This is a social cult of people telling eachother that their empty word blocks amount to ideas. Telling eachother that their refusal to think is intellectual integrity. That their refusal to consider is superior knowledge. That their willingness to purport to believe in nonsense, is somehow radical and valuable.

Don't humor them. It won't change anything. They can't magically become smarter, especially if they value the 'feeling of knowing', more than learning.

It’s like the FE who designed an experiment that he said would conclusively prove whether the earth was flat or spherical. It seems he actually designed a legitimate experiment, because its results showed that the earth was spherical.

To your point, of course his and his followers’ response has been to try and identify the error in the design of their experiment. I suspect a few months from now we will never hear of this experiment and it will go down their memory holes.

It's already happened, they purchased a 20,000$ laser gyroscope, measured the spin of the earth to be 15 deg / hr. And quietly hit the results. They aren't after truth. They're about furthering the lie, and profiting off merch / etc.

While much of what you say is undoubtedly true, it also clearly applies to a very large number of political bodies, not to mention religious groups, academic societies and businesses.

My read of this comment is both that the ideas and the people who espouse them are not respectable. Half of that is on point, but half of that is not feasible. There are too many people in the world who are wrong about things to start disrespecting people for being wrong. Groups of people command some level of respect, even when they are being actively foolish.

I didn't not get the same take-away from that documentary. My takeaway came from looking at the status-seeking and power games this little artificial pond carved out of the internet with the help of gullible people and people with mental conditions.

That one guy at the end seemed like the only one who legitimately wants to do experiments and improve their knowledge... the vast majority of the people in the film were completely caught up in the glow of attention they get from saying the ridiculous things they say.

I'd be curious to see if the guy at the end has moved on after this experiment, or if their in-group status has convinced them that maybe some mystical force interfered with their experiment, like the other person who was trying to actively keep quiet the false results of their gyroscope experiment.

The during-credits scene shows the "researchers" doing a livestream where they explain away their "anomalous" findings with various hand-waves. They didn't want to find the actual answer, they wanted to reinforce their belief

It's not "nonconformism" it's a mix of stupidity and childish negation

It's one thing to look at the other side of the coin and disagree with it, another to just mindlessly negate something "because I said so".

The world needs more of the former type but it's abounding with the latter type.

The don't actually do experiments. The setup experiments then manipulate them to get the results they need throwing out all the results that don't fit what they think is correct. One can simply check out the FECORE youtube channel and website to see how they do "experiments"

They also enforce group think by removing people who ask them hard questions and who don't just accept what they say. Since FE appears to be about the only community some of them belong to it makes it hard to ask tough questions.

The comment to which you responded mentioned the documentary "Behind the Curve," in which a group actually does experiments. The experiments obviously do not support a flat earth, so they then hide the results, admit quietly that things aren't looking good, and then try to change the experiments to get the results they want.

The experiments in question are actually the second time they tried to do the laser experiment. The videos detailing the experiment on Jeranisms channel got taken down when it was pointed out that they showed the curve of the Earth.

When they make an active effort to hide the result I don't consider it a valid experiment.

>coolest part of the documentary

I'd actually describe that as the worst part, at least insofar the way you contextualized it. That's literally a moment where they are faced with overwhelming evidence against their "theory" and still cannot accept they are wrong.

This isn't something to be admired.

That guy is still a flat earther. He kept trying the experiment again and again until he was able to get the opposite result (by messing around with the set-up enough to make results meaningless).

It even says this after the documentary...

yeah, no. it's way worse than you portray it here.

these people refuse to question their beliefs, exactly the opposite of your claim. they believe that the earth is flat and nothing can get them to change that, no laser gyroscopes, no movies from rockets going to space, nothing. it is a thing of their identity to believe that the earth is flat, they feel special about it and to lose that belief is to be expelled from their social circle.

this is neo-cargo-cult-tribalism at its worst.

But it doesn't just stop with flat earth theory: the conspiracy mindset is contagious and spreads to other aspects of life, such as health, where obviously false information becomes dangerous because suddenly people aren't getting the medication they need.

A few concerns with this story:

1. How big is this 'flat earth movement' really? The video claims it 'caught fire around 2015-16' but gives no specifics. This is unfortunately typical for these sort of 'we need to do something' arguments—no sense of the magnitude of the problem is given.

2. This argument for censorship is often made without a limiting principle, as it is here. "Books are a disturbing platform for conspiracy theories" works just as well.

3. There always have been and will be conspiracy theories, whether 9/11, Moon Landing, JFK, Illuminati or a thousand others. We don't seem to be very concerned with these. Why should we care about flat eartherism, especially as it seems rather benign in comparison?

4. Isn't the obvious response to make a point-by-point refutation to their most convincing claims? The well-argued truth is going to be more convincing than a silly hypothesis.

> The well-argued truth is going to be more convincing than a silly hypothesis.

Flat Earthers are regularly presented with well argued truth and are not convinced, so this point is incorrect.

That's true of anyone who believes something with the utmost conviction - but we're talking about the general population here, not just those already into flat earth.

I LOVE the flat earth theory. Obviously It's wrong, but it's so fun to think about how people convince themselves of it. They claim that it's all about empirical evidence. But spend a few minutes on their site and you'll realize that's bogus. Such as their reasoning for why the sun sets. What they're really saying is "Only trust what you can see, but also you can't trust what you can see"

I suppose when you put it that way, it's basically a conspiracy version of "Reflections on Trusting Trust".

https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p7...

I also have a strange enjoyment for learning about the elaborate revisions people try to make to the world of facts. If you haven't tried reading any pyramidology, I recommend checking it out. Christopher Dunn is particularly good; he's a trained mechanical engineer and uses that expertise in his arguments.

This push to censor wrong ideas instead of compete with them is misguided at best. And then there's the nerve to pretend like there isn't some kind of intentional social engineering going on with internet platforms.

If the kinds of policies I see journalists pushing for on YouTube were in place before the Snowden leaks, they would've been suppressing any videos talking about the NSA's spying on American citizens.

But we can't risk letting people try different ideas. They might disagree with us. They're not smart enough to make their own decisions. Better step in.

> This push to censor wrong ideas instead of compete with them is misguided at best

I don't think countering wrong ideas by competing with them works well any more. It used to, but technology changes over the last few decades have given a big advantage to the wrong ideas.

This comment, from a thread a few months ago, goes into more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19772300

The ethical problems of having "truth arbiters" seems pretty simple when it comes to flat earth stuff. Or anti-vaxx stuff. Or maybe even climate change.

But once established - the power to control society we're handing over to a handful of corporations is immense and it will bleed into subjects that are a lot murkier.

It's worth it to compete. B/c centralizing and handing over authority to a handful of tech companies to determine what is and what isn't allowed to be said .. this is something that goes way beyond all the freedom of speech stuff where people are merely offended.

This is dangerous territory. And it's more dangerous than allowing idiots to spin their wheels with their stupid ideas.

No one is handing the power to control society or authority over what is and isn't allowed to be said at that scale to Google or any "handful of corporations." What is said on Youtube or any other large social media platform is not the limitations of what is said in society, nor can Youtube control society beyond its own platform.

It makes no more sense to argue that Youtube trying to enforce some standards, however arbitrary or biased, amounts to "the power to control society" than it would have to argue that having three television stations meant those networks "controlled society," or that the Encyclopedia Britannica controlled the English language.

If you censor conspiracy videos, you're validating them. It looks like you're trying to hide the truth. There is just no way of getting rid of them, unless you want to censor all of the internet.

They will feel validated regardless. That is the nature of conspiracy theorists.

It's still advantageous to discourage the spread of misinformation. Nobody is obligated to host that content, and certainly not make it readily accessible on their platforms.

I think demonetizing them is a better solution. It discourages their production, but creates less attention.

>They will feel validated regardless. That is the nature of conspiracy theorists.

What are you going to define as a conspiracy theory?

Should we not talk about the JFK assassination possibilities?

The Gulf of Tolkien incident? MK Ultra? The Business Plot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot)

Where are you going to draw the line between conspiracy theories that are probably false and ones worth exploring? Who's the arbiter of that?

is the fact that Trump may have raped a 13 year old sex slave a conspiracy theory? Or do we only use that term with Alex Jones rants about false flags?

There is no need for an arbiter. However, statistically, the majority of conspiracy theories are going to be invalid. As they grow in scale the likelihood of being real also goes down.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35411684

If there is strong evidence for such a conspiracy, then it's gone beyond theory (colloquially) at that point. By that definition the term is like "alternative medicine". If it worked, it'd be called medicine.

Additionally, it's worth pointing out that the existence of a previous conspiracy being true is not actually evidence that later conspiracies are also true. MK Ultra and co are the exception rather than the norm.

the problem is once you give platforms the ok to silence dissent, you silence the spread of truth right along with lies and falsehoods.

And i'd rather live with a 1000 lies if that means the truth can still come out.

  Gulf of Tolkien incident?

I think you inadvertently proved a point.

You don't have to get rid of them, just don't feed them into discovery as much.

If you watch the linked video, it seems the guy found them because youtube's algorithm suggested other conspiracy videos instead of more 9/11 videos like he was watching. Other people probably have more relevant 9/11 videos but they were "censored" because they probably weren't dramatic conspiracy videos as youtube's current algorithm "censors", as some see it, rational and less emotional content over clickbait drama.

There are a lot of comments talking about how Youtube should not censor flat Earth but something that people need to keep in mind is how much the Flat Earth youtube community censors. If you point out their errors, their mistakes, or basically anything that goes against what they know to be true they ban you and delete your comments. As a group censorship doesn't appear to bother them just as long as they are the ones in control of the censoring.

How do you explain lunar eclipses (the Earth's shadow is round)?

How do you explain retrograde motions of planets?

These 2 simple observations explain why we live on a round Earth that revolves around the Sun.

(That said, I am against censorship of any kind. People should be free to believe whatever they want.)

Not to mention going outside and LOOKING at man made items like satellites and space stations as they pass overhead.

How does your GPS work? Get yourself an RTL-SDR and watch the traffic yourself, read the ephemeris, and correlate with your observations.

Build your own Focault pendulum, and explain the observations. And hundreds of other phenomena you can observe and measure yourself.

There are 18 spacefaring nations.

There are hundreds of spacecraft companies with about 3,000 satellites and thousands more launches, spending hundreds of billions $$.

If ANY of this was made up, it would involve about a half million people keeping a secret in the conspiracy. (edit - that's just space industry. astronomers, cosmologists, LIGO, EHT, etc, geologists, including the oil companies.. add another million maybe?) So we're either talking about willfull trolling, ignorance, and illness, or malice.

I would be more inclined to believe malice, in the form of that family spending millions [1] to spread antivax propaganda. Perhaps it's a more general anti-science thrust to control the populace. There, it's a conspiracy in the opposite direction.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/meet-...

The FE community basically refuses to do any radio based research. If you ask them why the radio emissions of the Sun go away after it sets they get upset and delete your comments because it goes against their idea that the Sun is just moving away from us and not setting.

I don't need to, people before Galileo already did :^) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle

Just goes to show that with enough variables, you can fit any data you have into any shape you want

  lunar eclipses (the Earth's shadow is round)?

Pizzas are both flat and create round shadows.

  retrograde motions of planets?

That proves heliocentricity but is unrelated to FE.

Perhaps 60+ years of artificial satellites are a better tack.

> "One researcher found that of attendees at a flat Earth conference, nearly all said they first came to the idea through the video-sharing platform."

Aside from shilling time shares, MLM schemes and recruiting for a cult of some sort, I can't think of anything that would necessitate a "Flat Earth conference".

I'm convinced the the only reason these hoaxes exist is to identify high quality leads for obvious snake-oil products. It's similar to how the ye olde Nigerian prince scams are made to sound as absurd as possible, so you know that people who respond to them have a high likelihood of converting.

Does it really matter if someone believes the earth is flat? What practical effect does that actually have on society?

I can't help but think most flat-earthers are just after attention and the desire to correct them is a feedback loop.

This is the non-political version. There are lots of far more political videos that cause real problems, such as the Alex Jones ones, pizzagate, QAnon etc.

The underlying point is that Youtube's reccomendation algorithm has a significant effect on society as a whole, and this effect can be very negative.

It seems to me, that most flat earthers already believed in some conspiracy theories so, they just add another one. What puzzles me the most about flat earther is, how much the shape of the earth is part of their identity. I mean for my daily life the shape of the earth doesn't matter. So for me personally it doesn't matter if the earth is round, flat, or shaped like a banana. it just happened that the earth is round.

If you go looking far enough to validate an opinion that you have you will find "evidence". Awful clickbait title BBC for shame!

Really this should be "how the proliferation of disinformation enabled by the internet converted people to flat Earth." Also not helped by the (warranted) declining trust in legacy media sources.

It's more than just flat earth too. There's many strains of conspiracy holes on youtube - you can spend all day watching people predict the rapture is coming (this year for real this time!), of course there's the standard political extremism strains of youtube if you're into that, and so on.

The problem is that people learn to trust personalities, and then those personalities can spread ideas regardless of their merit. If you start by denouncing the brainwashing of the mainstream consensus, just about any idea can be rationalized with enough effort. And to top it all off, Youtube and other online platforms offer a profit model for personalities who can garner attention (not to mention the softer connections to money and fame that come with being an "influencer")

Do so many of these personalities actually believe in a flat earth? Personally, I've had my doubts from the beginning. I follow a few communities on Twitch, for example, and you see personalities pop up all the time, often by being controversial. I've seen people pop up, often leveraging flat earth or anti-vax as a tool to make themselves more edgy. Sometimes they make it too obvious that they're just trying to be controversial and it gives away the act - one personality on twitch trying to make his debut, for example, claimed that his childhood best friend grew gills and swam away in the river after a vaccine. To his credit, it worked in the short term and the show brought him back for a few more segments.

Frankly, I hope we as a society will come to learn sooner rather than later that public personalities on the internet can't be trusted. For some reason, people have learned this lesson for public personalities on TV, on the radio, and so on - who really trusts the mainstream news these days? - and yet these same folks turn into their favorite strain of youtube conspiracy to learn on the daily what the world has been hiding from them and what truth the mainstream has buried like a treasure, only to be found on youtube.

This totally can't be applied to ironic fascism.

People like PewDiePie are totally not playing into that.

People converted themselves to flat Earth. YouTube videos don't represent anything special except that some of them occupied the side of the spectrum corresponding to what people already wanted to hear. Ditto fascism. It is not anybody's job to curate content to prevent weak minded people from believing the "wrong" things - that is called censorship and censorship is worse than some weak minded people becoming couch-potato fascists.

> This totally can't be applied to ironic fascism. People like PewDiePie are totally not playing into that.

And him playing "Papers, please" while wearing a hat with hammer and sickle[1] is a secret plot to convert the youth of America into commies, right?

I'm baffled to see such McCarthyism.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsWQfZl-Xtc

It’s almost like there’s a conspiracy theory to censor information and manipulate public discourse. Hmmm...

The current centralized structure of the web is broken. Any person who believes in classical liberalism should find this disgusting.

company says it's taking action to prevent conspiracy videos from reaching large numbers of people

I'm not afraid of conspiracies. Are you?

Yes. People are remarkably dumb and gullible.

It's mostly a fault of the education system, countries with better education such as Japan do not have it this many gullible people (per capita), USA and other countries do not teach even the most basic skepticism going as far as teaching completely ridiculous things such as creationism inside the schools themselves under the guise of "tolerance" and "teach both sides".

Back up, before you crap all over American schools, public schools don't teach creationism, and the attempt to do so resulted in court case ruling it unconstitutional.

Also, do you have any direct evidence in your claim that Japanese are more skeptical? The Aum Shinrikyo death cult got almost 10% of the vote in the mid-90's.

The amount of studies about skeptisim and gullibility around the world are near none, but there is some data about US highschoolers consider true and it shows dangerous trends such as 1 every 4 students believing astrology is real: https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-148278044/skepticism-in...

I would need to see comparisons with the rest of the world before that has any relevance to my point. Kids will believe lots of stupid things.

According to todayifoundout, US schools aren't nearly as bad as the meme likes to portray them [1].

[1] https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/01/kids-get-su...

The thing is that we don't know how related the other areas of education are with skepticism; if I would have to guess I would say reading and science are the most related but that's just a guess, the best path forward would be to actually measure skepticism, stuff like how good are people at spotting fake news from the real ones and such.

I live in Japan and I'm shocked at how many people here believe in patently absurd nonsense. I wouldn't be surprised if someone mentions to me, for example, that they saw a ghost recently, or went to a fortune teller.

At least for the ghosts thing, belief in ghosts, demons and spirits has been deep-rooted in Japanese folklore throughout history[0]. Also there is different kinds of "believe", for example if some Japanese lady said a ghost got her pregnant I think nobody would believe her, my guess is that they believe to a point but not to the point to spark risky behavior from it (e.g. antivaxxers)

[0] http://www.asianart.com/articles/rubin/

You don't believe modern Japanese believe in absurdities from the past because it's part of folklore but it's not okay for Americans to believe in absurdities from the past because… the Japanese have a better education system? (Which I'd also count as an absurd belief because I only hear complaints about it.)

And are you really going to give lessons on the mythology of Japan to people who live in Japan? That's perhaps a tad presumptuous, especially considering it's like telling people living in Britain that witches are part of British folklore.

I mean, please.

You miss-represented all the points, AND skipped the one where I said they don't take such superstitions as seriously as their American counterparts.

An anecdote: A friend of a friend's son was very sick in the stomach. She went to see a fortune teller to ask what was wrong. The fortune teller took her money, did a reading, and told her she needed to take her son to a doctor.

I found that amusing. I have tons of these, most of them amuse me. Try living here and (among the many other notions you have of the place that are no doubt wrong) you'll see there's a huge amount of superstition, regardless of education level.

If you can't afford to come, https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/ is a good resource. It's amazing how much that sounds absurd is true.

I think flat eartherism is stupid but I really don’t want YouTube start censoring stuff. That’s a dangerous path.

They already effectively censor via algorithm. They are a monopoly that should be broken up.

How, exactly, would you ‘break up’ YouTube? How do you divide the whole into reasonable parts?

You start by separating it from Google, so that it needs to compete with other video-sharing sites on a more-level playing field.

YouTube is the 900lb gorilla. How would breaking apart from Google (which is not what was suggested) help other video sites?

YouRube is FAR past critical mass. It IS online video. And I can’t think of anything you could do short of shutting the site down that would fix that and give competitors a level playing field.

A big chunk of YouTube's dominance comes from Google's other lines of business including online search and online ads. See the other post today from a former competitor[0] for an example.

The reasoning is that stripping YouTube of Alphabet's deep pockets from advertising would give competitors a chance to monetize as well as YouTube, without fearing that Google will choke off their air supply to preserve YouTube's dominance.

It might not be enough, but it would be a start.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20472351

Has Youtube actually started censoring anything but the most extreme voices? They still allow race-baiting idiots like Stefan Molyneux on their platform, so I doubt they have some "evil liberal agenda".

They took off Alex Jones, not for ideological reasons, but because he was blatantly lying about people being pedophiles; this was after years of accusing school shooting victims of being liars . If you can't see how that's a violation of a terms of service, I really don't know what it would take to convince you.

And frankly, I'm not convinced it's gaining any kind of new followers at all. 20 years ago it was virtually unheard of to encounter a flat earth believer, but thanks to Youtube and the Internet at large all kinds of fringe beliefs are brought to the masses' consciousness. That doesn't mean that those beliefs are finding new adherents. It doesn't give fascists license to crack down on anyone's beliefs either. Google/Youtube censoring anyone over this is literally doing more harm than good in every conceivable way.

But it is. No matter how stupid you think a belief is, giving it an audience does give it new followers. The more stupid it is, the more of an audience it needs to gain significant amounts of new followers… but thanks to youtube, you can have hundreds of thousands of people watching a video and that's a drop in the ocean. And it's not flat-earth BS that's actually harmful, it's the spread of other kinds of political propaganda which radicalizes people.

For some reason, it's not controversial to say "we're banning ISIS propaganda videos which radicalize young muslims", but it is controversial to say "we're banning political propaganda videos which radicalize young americans".

Young or old, actually.

I spoke to a flat earther once. Trying to convince her via science - explaining how GPS works, showing her images from space, etc, was not convincing her.

So I tried to understand her mindset, and just talked about her life. Turned out she was abused by a parent who was "doing it for her own good" - it was a horrible story. Her whole childhood was a lie, she was trained by the parent not to trust her instincts, and to believe something false so the parent could benefit.

My takeaway was that her childhood experience taught her that you can't trust people and that "big lies" are possible, and so she latched onto the flat earth thing due to that.

This reminds me of something I read of Thich Nhat Hanh's - don't answer the question, answer the questioner. The belief they're espousing is really secondary to the attitude that leads them to buy into it. I find your approach as not only more likely to effect positive change with that, it's just more compassionate and respectful.

There's an almost palpable element of dehumanisation among those ridiculing them and wanting to silence them, as if holding on to untruths makes them unworthy to exist in our society.

The way to truth is never censorship. SV/Google employees have become the book burning church of the 60's and 70's, complete with shoving their morality down everyone's throats by any means necessary.

So you're going to try to silence, or censor, a company into not choosing a more relevant algorithm? Their original algo changed and it "censored" more relevant content. I had a few videos on youtube giving my own personal experience of 9/11 but they quickly got overshadowed once the algo changed to prefer dramatic conspiracy content over regular content, even if it is more relevant. I don't like being "censored" either and I'd rather youtube change the algo.

Doesn't have to be political propaganda, the anti-vax movement wouldn't be as big without the publicity it gets on social media.

I don't want to get too political here, but the propagation of Alex-Jones-esque conspiracy can be very influential to a larger-than-it-should-be percentage of the population, who will vote in demagogues who perpetuate these narratives.

If you have such little faith in your fellow citizens' decision making capabilities, isn't your argument really just a criticism of democracy?

You only trust them to vote, if they're going to vote according to a narrow band of acceptable thought. At that point, you're really just tyrannical, the democracy is an illusion.

Democracy requires a functional education system. It's not about "a narrow band of acceptable thought". The truth matters.

I didn't realize the truth was so simple, and a matter of education.

Is an unborn fetus a person or a cluster of cells?

Is a transgender woman a woman or a man approximating phenotypical gender characteristics of a woman?

Is sex under 18 capable of consent? Under 16? Under 14? In Spain it was 13 until only a few years ago, where is "the truth?"

Prostitution, gambling, drugs? Truth?

Almost all of the most contentious issues are not unresolved because of a lack of education, they're unresolved because of inherent moral conflicts worthy of negotiation. (Age of consent isn't really contentious, I just wanted to show something that most people consider to be obvious or a given not being necessarily resolvable). If we were to simply convince more people that a woman's right to bodily autonomy supercedes the unborn's right to live, or vice versa, we would have only really succeeded in indoctrination. Neither position is "truthful," it's always just an arbitrary moral elevation of one violation of consent over another.

I think the only issue even close to approximating the simplicity you've described would be climate change, but even then there is a wide chasm between the role people believe that the state should play.

That's their choice then. We have to have believe that a majority of our fellow citizens are by and large capable of overcoming such views otherwise democracy itself is a failed concept.

Censoring their content to bias their political views in a way you like is... extremist at best.

Ok, I'm a little tired of this constantly coming up; it's not a political position to rebut something that is objectively incorrect. If Party A bases its platform on the idea that "All Circles Are Secretly Squares", this is objectively false, and me saying so isn't me "biasing their political views in a way I like", it's a simple matter of fact.

The earth is not flat. This is relatively easy to prove, but people can be influenced by the right rhetoric, and they vote.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be allowed to believe in dumb things from a legal perspective, I just don't think they're entitled to a platform.

Would you apply this logic to ISIS recruitment videos? "It's their choice! YouTube shouldn't pull their videos because if they do democracy has failed as a concept!"

> I'm a little tired of this constantly coming up

Perhaps then you shouldn't have made it into a political position by suggesting that they'd all vote for a specific candidate.

> This is relatively easy to prove, but people can be influenced by the right rhetoric, and they vote.

It's a bit of a trusting trust exercise - you can prove it in a way that satisfies you, but that doesn't necessarily satisfy everyone.

> Would you apply this logic to ISIS recruitment videos?

Much more debatable because ISIS videos encourage outright violence.

I didn't say they'd all vote for a specific candidate, but based on what you're telling me, this is the logical conclusion:

1) People don't vote based on their beliefs, 2) Beliefs can't be wrong, 3) A vote based on a wrong belief can't lead to an undesirable candidate.

That's a complete and utter misrepresentation of what I said and I have no interest in engaging it.

I didn't say that's what you said, I said that's the logical conclusion.

If we expose people to the most sophisticated system of disinformation ever created in the history of mankind, with no restrictions or supervision of any kind, and then watch democracy collapse, it's not enough to to say "Welp! Democracy is a failed concept".

This is not about censorship. This is about each of use trying to help educate, uplift and enlighten those around us. In other words, it's up to us to help our fellow citizens. If you want to punt on that project, then so be it. But not all of us have given up.

> the most sophisticated system of disinformation ever created in the history of mankind

The exact same system is used for spreading that information too. Adding your personal bias into the system is not a "fix" for disinformation.

No, it is absolutely necessary to control the spread of racial slander and similar forms of hate, because those have got people killed. From the Holocaust to Rwanda to Myanmar, once the lies about the evil of X racial group reach a critical level the violence starts and can be inflamed into a self-sustaining cycle of violence.

This is off topic as we're talking about flat earth here, but I'll engage it anyways: Are you suggesting that a lack of access to such information is the only thing stopping such genocides from occurring? You think this is a realistic level of faith in humanity to hold?

Why is it unreasonable to think that people act on the information they receive? That is after all how normal politics works. If people talk about how bad the potholes are in the roads, someone will demand that something is done about the potholes. If people talk about how Jews eat the blood of children, someone will demand that something is done about the Jews.

It's not sensible to say "lack of information about X is the only thing stopping Y from happening" because that can be true of an infinite number of falsehoods. Lack of information about the riches of Atlantis is a major factor in people not setting off into the sea. And so on.

Isn't it also reasonable to think that people consider the information they take in? Testability is key to most strong beliefs and I like to think that the majority of the population is not so firmly rooted that they refuse to update their views based on evidence to the contrary.

Sure, a few crazy people may choose to believe that Jews eat the blood of children, but I hope that in a free society where information to the contrary is readily available it will not impact a significant enough portion of the population to cause the sorts of genocides you're suggesting.

This is measurably false. Climate change denial is a pretty obvious example that hurts everyone. The facts are available, relatively easy to find, but people still tow their party lines about it being a "hoax from China", or some such nonsense.

Is it measurably false? I seem to remember seeing statistics that showed those convinced it very much is happening were over 50% and rising of even the US population while those who were convinced it was NOT were under 7% and dropping. I would suggest that this is in fact an example to the contrary.

Do you have any evidence to suggest that these beliefs are so widespread as to influence a majority of the population and require intervention for a properly functioning democracy as the parent was suggesting?

Well, first off, you don't need a "majority" for it to cause damage. The Nazis didn't have more than 30% of the vote, but they caused damage. Currently in the US, we have a president who has said, multiple times, that climate change was a hoax made up by China to make us weaker in manufacturing [1], and has dismantled the EPA to make sure they explicitly don't do anything about climate change [2].

Second, I'm going to need some sources for your stats. It looks like in the Gallup polls, we still have roughly 69% of Republicans who claim that climate change is greatly exaggerated [3], with only 35% of Republicans who think humans are the cause of it, and only 18% or Republicans that think it will cause any problems in their lifetime.

[1] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun...

[2] https://mashable.com/2017/02/03/trump-epa-climate-website-ch...

[3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/231530/global-warming-concern-s...

While there may be truth there, those numbers don't take into account the strength of those beliefs, also note that if I'm not mistaken, it's not counting independents who may vote republican, so the pool is actually much smaller in terms of overall Americans. I think this was the study I'd seen if you're interested:

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/americans-who-accept-climate-ch...

> Isn't it also reasonable to think that people consider the information they take in?

We started this conversation talking about people who believe the earth is flat.

Yes and the number of people who believe in something like that is actually rather small. That's kind of my point. These things get treated as way more serious than they are given actual belief rates.

It's not censoring as much as school is not censoring. Some things are just factually, objectively wrong and unsupported by evidence.

It's easy for scientifically-minded people who inhabit communities of similar thinkers to underestimate the power of propaganda.

Human psychology hasn't changed, though, and propaganda is still powerful.

I'm afraid of real conspiracies, but the main stream media seems far less interested in them than this nonsense that I've yet to be convinced is any more harmful than any other weird hobby.

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