[freitzkriesler]

At first I enjoyed flat earth as a mental exercise in going through "settled" science and creating experiments to prove or disprove them.

However, flat earthers have a flawed understanding of several concepts. Differences in lense focal point and mirages in particular are the biggest misunderstandings they carry which they will berate you until you give up.

Here's an even simpler experiment. There's a flight from Perth Australia to Santiago Chile. On a round earth the flight time works, it doesn't on a flat earth.

The old adage goes: when you wrestle with a pig, you get muddy.

[neilk]

Some of the original flat earth theorists seem to just be playing around, having fun with the idea of scientific authority. One of them explained gravity by positing the earth was a flat disk accelerating upwards at 9.8m/s^2, forever.

Where is the energy coming from? Why isn’t the atmosphere stripped away? Why isn’t earth white hot or achieving relativistic speeds? These problems can be dealt with enough special pleading and creative physics. They can stay one step ahead of their critics, forever.

I got very into studying flat earthers for a while. The fundamental contradiction is that they claim to be resisting authority but for their claims to work you have to take more and more on faith and accept that there are unresolvable mysteries.

Which is actually what they’re more comfortable with! They are usually in some sort of cult, or an authoritarian version of a mainstream religion.

[chungy]

I've never been sufficiently convinced that most "flat earthers" are actually serious about it. The movement seems to consist of a large ratio of people claiming such just to troll.

[mbfg]

And certainly now there is youtube monetization to keep you going promoting flat earths.

[mistermann]

That's my intuition too, I think it's hilarious how worked up people get.

[pixl97]

There is another group that uses the same tactics....

>“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

The issue with a group that plays idiot, is they attract a lot of idiots.

[chungy]

Flat-earthers aren't by their nature demonizing and dehumanizing groups of people. If done in sincerity, they merely disagree with consensus about the nature of the planet we're on.

It's quite a drastic change from that to anti-semitism.

[soco]

But are the flatearthers spreading just this one fringe theory? Because once riding the conspiracy train there's usually lots of extra luggage...

[sebzim4500]

Yeah but basically every flat earther is also at minimum anti-vax.

[mistermann]

This itself is a rather clever "tactic" (comparing something to anti-semitism, arguably the most powerful psychological phenomenon on planet Earth, and then allowing readers to form their own conclusions about the initial proposition...and, human minds have been thoroughly trained on how to "correctly" respond to "anti-semitism"), though I do not necessarily think you are doing it with conscious intent.

> The issue with a group that plays idiot, is they attract a lot of idiots.

Well, that depends on whether one is "measuring" on a relative or absolute scale, and a subjective or objective one....and also: whether one is able to think in these higher dimensions, that are all around us (and inside us) all the time.

Take HN for example: on a relative scale, this is a highly intellectual forum. But on an absolute scale, I wonder how impressive it is.

[cuteboy19]

Maybe Einstein can help? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle

It's not clear why gravity needs to be "explained" in such a manner though. Nothing about our current theories of gravity requires the gravitational body to not be flat

[raattgift]

> Nothing about our current theories of gravity requires the gravitational body to not be flat

On the contrary the bulk behaviour of the source matter demands an ellipsoidal Earth: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrostatic_equilibrium#Deriva...>.

One might attempt to banish magma, lava, and other indicators of fluid flow (the oceans, the atmosphere, planetary differentiation generally) and imagine an infinitely rigid lipped/walled plate underneath. However, then:

An eternally-accelerating flat plate does not generate the Weyl curvature tensor which a set of plumb bobs or zero-length springs can measure.

Even before General Relativity, such measurements were undertaken and characterized as smooth functions of distance from the Equator less than sixty years after Newton e.g. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clairaut%27s_theorem_(gravity)>.

[freitzkriesler]

Keep it simpler, these are people who don't understand mirages.

[got2surf]

>The old adage goes: when you wrestle with a pig, you get muddy.

Not only do you both get muddy, but the pig wins with the benefit of experience

[bsuvc]

Don't wrestle with a pig. You get muddy and the pig likes it.

Mark Twain

[tzs]

> At first I enjoyed flat earth as a mental exercise in going through "settled" science and creating experiments to prove or disprove them.

I did a similar thing but with legal crackpots instead of science crackpots, as a source of material to practice legal research on in law school.

Namely the Sovereign Citizen [1] and Tax Protest [2] movements.

(Note that tax protestors are different from tax resistors. The latter refuse to pay tax as a protest against government policies. The former refuse to pay because they believe that it is not legal for the government to tax them. It is only the tax protestors who are crackpots).

None of their material stands up long to scrutiny. When you go look up the cases or statutes they cite, they often don't even exist. If they do exist what they quote from them often isn't there. And if it is there, it isn't there for what they say it is. An example of that I've seen one quoting the Supreme Court as unanimously saying that income tax is unconstitutional, but the quote wasn't actually by the Court. It was from a brief from the side that lost, so it was actually something the Court unanimously rejected.

At least with these things I can kind of understand. If you claim that people don't have to pay taxes, or register their cars, or have a driver's license to drive on public streets, people will pay for your book or to attend your seminars.

That's something a con man can work with. You can even point out that you've been selling your books and running your seminars for years and have never gotten into trouble for tax evasion or driving without a license and let the rubes infer that this proves your methods work. No need to tell the rubes that the reason you don't get in trouble is that you quietly actually do pay your taxes and do carry a driver's license when you drive.

Flat earth is a bit more puzzling. I would have expected that to be harder to make money on.

Telling someone you are going to show them how to stop paying taxes is promising something that will make a major difference in their life.

Telling them the Earth is flat doesn't seem like something that would make much difference--offhand I can't think of anything I would actually do different if I believed the Earth was flat--so I'd expect there to not be much money in it.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_protester

[berkeleyjunk]

> Telling them the Earth is flat doesn't seem like something that would make much difference--offhand I can't think of anything I would actually do different if I believed the Earth was flat--so I'd expect there to not be much money in it.

I would think that buying into the Flat earth theories could be a way to identify marks for the other profitable theories.