[mlyle]

> And things move down.

It's not a bad way to look at it for a start. Things move down because it is their nature to move downwards. And this kind of empirical law is what we rely upon for most thought.

It takes a lot of work to get to a theory that makes more general predictions.

And even after having that, 98% of the time my thought is effectively just "things move down." Another 1.5% it's "things move down at 9.8 m/s/s". It's an extreme edge/special case when I'm thinking "massive things are attracted to each other, with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distances".

And even with "massive things are attracted to each other, with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distances" ... if you ask me why, it's because "uh, they just do that?"

[lukan]

"with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distances" ... if you ask me why, it's because "uh, they just do that?""

To be fair, that is somewhat the current scientific consensus on gravity. It just is. We can meassure it and determine a general constant and calculate with it (and even though some people claim to have understood way more, it is highly debated terrain as far as I know)

And in general, I was actually arguing with flat earthers recently a lot, I even met a flat earther in real life. It is an interesting intellectual challenge debating them. Basically rebasing all the physical theory I have. (Main summary is, they have a high ego, but lack understanding of everything and make up for it with make believe.)

If I found a school one day, one of the lessons will be the teacher telling the students: "The earth is flat! Proof me otherwise." Or more advanced, model a flat earth on a computer. Flat earthers try that for real - it gets weird very quickly, so much that I could not believe anyone taking it serious and it all is just satire. But they are for real (but with a very different concept of reality).

[mlyle]

> To be fair, that is somewhat the current scientific consensus on gravity. It just is. We can meassure it and determine a general constant and calculate with it (and even though some people claim to have understood way more, it is highly debated terrain as far as I know)

Sure, and if we come up with some fancy unified theory, and ask "why" once more, the answer will still be "uh, because they do?."

> But they are for real (but with a very different concept of reality).

We think ourselves so advanced. I wonder what big counterfactual scientists believed in the 1900s and 2000s will be laughed at a few hundred years from now.

And, of course, some of that will be libel; e.g. that we thought the world was flat "just like Christopher Columbus's compatriots" [who didn't].

[UltraSane]

A huge thing about flat earthers is that they don't care if their explanations are self-consistent. They happily accept explanations for one thing that directly contradict their explanations for another thing.