[Xcelerate]

I find these people particularly interesting, not because of the absurdity of their belief, but because of the certainty they have in their belief and how difficult it is to convince them otherwise.

The article points out that "many Americans" hold some kind of wacky belief and strongly resist attempts to challenge it: vaccines cause autism, global warming isn't real, the moon landing was faked, the earth is 6,000 years old, dinosaurs drowned in the Great Flood, ghosts are real, etc...

So rather than the Flat Earthers being anomalies, I actually think they represent the general public quite well; it's just that their crazy belief is different from mine or yours.

What I am really curious about is: what would it take to successfully convince one of these people that they are wrong? Because if you solve this problem, then you solve the problem in its generality, and you can apply the technique to the vast number of people who still believe the earth was literally created in 7 days.

My best guess? Ask them, "What would it take to convince you otherwise?" The problem isn't that most people are incapable of learning the truth — it's that they don't want to learn the truth. Take for instance someone who believes dinosaur bones were planted in the earth by the devil. I have a hard time imagining that if you handheld them and took them step-by-step through the scientific method (e.g., starting with archaeological sites), that by the end of a year's worth of research, they would still disagree with the mainstream scientific view.

And that's the cool thing about science: you don't have to take anyone's word for it! You can check what people are saying all by yourself. Go out there with ice core machines, thermometers, and satellites, and trace through the same steps that the climate experts have taken. After years of following their own work for yourself, there's no way you couldn't believe in global warming.

I think what it really comes down to is that most people would rather live with a comforting or reassuring lie than an uncomfortable truth, and even given the opportunity and resources for discovering the truth themselves, they would prefer not to.

[jandrese]

The big thing is you can't convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. They have already made up their mind, dug in their heels, and are willing to fight to the death.

In some cases they would consider themselves a bad person if they didn't defend their ideals to the death. This is especially true if there is a religious aspect to their view. They don't call it a "reasoned position" on religion, it is belief. Belief is strongest when you keep it despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is a core tenet of Christianity and I suspect most other religions as well. Your faith will be tested by "deceivers" constantly and you must keep it.

It's impossible to use logic or science to convince someone of something when they think logic and science are tools of the devil.

It's also the Amiga effect. When a community grows smaller the remaining members are the most ardent. Once you are down to just a handful of remaining members all that is left are the die hard fanboys. All of the reasonable people left a long time ago.

[socalnate1]

"Belief is strongest when you keep it despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is a core tenet of Christianity and I suspect most other religions as well."

Huh? This isn't true at all.

[sevensor]

"Core tenet" overstates the case a bit, but credo quia absurdum has a long history in Christian apologetics.

[sopooneo]

To your point, the first step is to make them want to be convinced. For the irrational, changing beliefs is about many of the things we might consider heresy: appeals to authority, ad homonym attacks, etc. But much more often, I have found the key is if the person feels connected to you or the people making the counter argument.

You can not use logic to dissuade someone of a belief they arrived at emotionally. Instead, if you actually want to do it, you have to use emotion. It's our poor thining that makes us to try reason with the unreasonable.

[aidenn0]

Fideism plays an important role in some sects of Christianity, but is considered heresy in others. It is not mentioned in any of the eccumenical creeds.

That being said, there has always been a strong minority pushing for it, and one interpretation of the doctrine "Sola Scriptura" (which is a core tenent of Protestantism) would be that anything contrary to scripture is wrong (hence young-earth creationism).

[jhawk28]

1 Cor 15:14-19 is very clear that if Jesus did not raise from the dead, then Christian beliefs are in vain.

You are describing a cult not a core tenent of Christianity.

[soylentcola]

Luke 16:22 - Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake

Peter 4:14 - If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you.

Matthew 10:22 - and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

Not all the exact same thing but the concept is fairly common in Christian scripture and teaching. Basically people will denounce you, hate you, oppose you, and ostracize you for your beliefs, but if you stick to it, you're blessed or favored by God.

Like anything regarding scripture and religion you can interpret this in plenty of ways. Maybe they don't specify what aspects of the faith you must always hold in spite of all else, but the way it's often taught (and as it was presented to me growing up in a Christian community), you must hold to your beliefs in the existence of a God, whose son was Christ, who rose from the dead, and all of the related supernatural implications laid out in the core beliefs of Christianity. People will argue against your beliefs and even persecute you for holding them, but if you want to really prove the strength of your faith and your worthiness as a Christian, you need to stick to your guns.

Either way, it's a matter of debate whether this is a core tenet or not so I'll agree with you there. Still, it's definitely a strong "principle" of many Christian teachings for as far back as the religion has resembled its modern form.

[Roodgorf]

The thing is, I don't think the "What would it take to convince you?" discussion is generally actually fruitful for beliefs like these. For example, Bill Nye posed this exact question to Ken Ham during their Evolution/Creationism debate and essentially his response was "Nothing, this is my belief and I'm sticking to it."

So, it seems like your best option is just to ignore those with decidedly unscientific opinions for the moment and attempt to instill more genuinely curious/less dogmatic thinking into those who have not already made up their minds.

[rjsw]

I have a theory that climate change denial is an example of a cargo cult, not thought much about the motivations behind your other examples.

I suspect that the followers of a cargo cult don't spontaneously all decide to believe whatever it is at the same time, someone will lead it and the rest will join in afterwards. I'm also guessing that the leader will be someone who has been a leader in the past and that the nature of the misunderstanding that is at the heart of the cult will reflect how that leader came to prominence previously.

I started wondering about this as I was trying to work out why the main group of climate change denyers in the UK had rented office space in the same street [1] as the Royal Society and other scientific bodies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlton_House_Terrace

[Grishnakh]

>I find these people particularly interesting, not because of the absurdity of their belief, but because of the certainty they have in their belief and how difficult it is to convince them otherwise. The article points out that "many Americans" hold some kind of wacky belief and strongly resist attempts to challenge it: vaccines cause autism, global warming isn't real, the moon landing was faked, the earth is 6,000 years old, dinosaurs drowned in the Great Flood, ghosts are real, etc...

I hate to point this out, but one of these isn't quite like the others: the one about ghosts. The problem with that one is that you can't prove a negative; it's impossible. There might be ghosts; there's simply no way for you to disprove it, no matter how much evidence you amass. You can make the case that it's highly unlikely because you haven't been presented with any sufficiently-compelling evidence yet, just like it's highly unlikely that pink unicorns live on the Moon in underground caves, but you can't disprove it, and with ghosts you can't even amass decent evidence against it (like by going to the Moon, searching for underground caves, and if any exist, looking in them for pink unicorns and coming up empty). Personally, I don't believe they're likely to be real, as I've never seen any good evidence, but lots of other people have claimed to, so while I don't put much stock in it, I think it is a bit different from the others, because the others have strong evidence countering those claims. There's plenty of evidence that vaccines don't cause autism, that climate change is real (the main debate is the source: AGW, but even here there's plenty of evidence that it's man-made), there's literally tons of evidence of the Moon landings, there's enormous evidence that the Earth is much older than 6000 years (and that human civilization predates this too), etc.

>Take for instance someone who believes dinosaur bones were planted in the earth by the devil. I have a hard time imagining that if you handheld them and took them step-by-step through the scientific method (e.g., starting with archaeological sites), that by the end of a year's worth of research, they would still disagree with the mainstream scientific view.

The problem is that religious people like this actively disbelieve in science. You can show them all the evidence you want and educate them about the Scientific Method and it won't help. After all, here again, you cannot disprove their assertion, that "the devil" planted this stuff. After all, science basically assumes that some intelligent force isn't involved in faking the evidence, so that when you carry out experiments they'll come out the same way every time because the laws of the Universe are constant. What if there's some higher force (or "Force"...) that can change the laws of the Universe at will to subvert your scientific experiment?

Of course, here you have to ask, why would someone believe this silliness? It's not that much different from the ghost thing, except that here instead of a relatively benign belief that disembodied souls are wandering around and occasionally doing odd things to give us the willies (like knocking objects over or slamming doors), it's a much more detailed belief that some evil being is screwing with us just so that somehow we won't get into eternal paradise because we don't believe some silly creation tale that has no supporting evidence. Of course this also seems to go hand-in-hand with being a member of some crazy church and needing to give them a significant portion of your income....