Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

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> Trying to understand how an intelligent person could come to an opposite conclusion will improve your thinking ability.

I don't think you can term flat-earthers intelligent. That's a dangerously low bar.

> A good method for this is: pick an idea that you are 100% sure is true. Not "the Earth is round" but "X value is good." Then search for people who disagree.

This is a neat trick (does it have name?), but the true value is in realising their fallacies to hone your own thought process, not why / how they convinced themselves through deliberation, and contemplation, and divine knowledge, and self-enlightenment, and what have you.

> Study philosophy. Study formal logic.

Philosophy ranked as the highest form of knowledge among the polymaths in the Islamic Golden Age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsafa

The encyclopedia of Ikhwan al-Safa and other such massive bodies of work are representative of Philosophy's central role among the scholars at the time: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ikhwan-al-safa/

> I don't think you can term flat-earthers intelligent. That's a dangerously low bar.

Well if they aren't intelligent, wouldn't understanding their reasoning be easier to understand? I at least don't associate simpletons with convoluted logic.

Yeah, dismissing people who believe dumb things as dumb is a horrible thought-terminating cliche. Even the dumbest functioning human is really smart.

We're just much better at creating stories ("convoluted logic") than we are understanding our belief-making process.

> Yeah, dismissing people who believe dumb things as dumb is a horrible thought-terminating cliche.

Dismiss them? The context is: I don't think it is necessary to understand the thought processes of truth deniers [0] to cultivate the "how to think" skill for yourself.

[0] Something that's a 100% true: Square has 4 sides, 0 + 0 = 0, The Hubble Space Telescope is real, etc

This implies you have access to undeniable truth, which is sort of rare. Statements about geometric shapes and numbers can be true by definition, but they are not statements about the entities in the world (numbers and shapes are from a separate ontological category than a telescope; you can't show me where the number 3 is for example -- it doesn't have a location, it isn't an object).

The Hubble telescope may be real. I have more reasons to think it exists than to think it doesn't exist, but I wouldn't call the reasons undeniable. I haven't even seen the thing, nor have I touched it. I've only heard people talk about it, seen text written about it, I haven't been to space, nor have I talked to anyone who was involved in building it. I've also heard people say the earth is flat, and seen that written in text too, so evidently, spoken and written accounts alone is not undeniable evidence.

I get the gist of your stance, but undeniable truth does exist. Just because a few deny it, doesn't make it untrue, if that makes sense. And those few who do deny it... what are we going to learn from their thought processes to aid our thinking? I don't think much that we wouldn't already know. It is an interesting experiment to make one self go through, however. 4chan is one click away.

What do you mean when you say that a proposition is true?

I don't have any numbers on this, but I'm certain lots of "flat-eathers" are just trolls that enjoys annoying people who tries to act smug and smart, but in actuality failed to get the humour behind the flatness of earth. Anyone who is seriously trying to argue with flat-earthers have a very low bar for intelligence. Which is not to say that there aren't actual dumb people who actually believe the earth is flat, but I reckon those people are far below the minority.

> I'm certain lots of "flat-eathers" are just trolls that enjoys annoying people

That was true up to the late 1990s, but it became a real phenomenon, particularly among religious people in the 2000s with the rise of YouTube.

And you can find videos with ex-flat earthers saying "I was wrong, it's round".

Now look for the same kind of videos in other categories. Which I'm not going to name here so as not to offend HN's sensibilities, but yeah, that one.

I can't seem to find such videos, but regardless, how many videos are there? How many of those are actually just fabricated to attract views? I'm really skeptical if there's really a whole community of flat-earthers. There are people profiting from this flat earth drama. See the youtuber "professor dave" for example. He gets an average of <50K views, except his flat earth videos which got 1M to 8M views.

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