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this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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Yeah that really resonates with me, an anarchist. You can't trust authorities, you have to find out things your own way. Especially this part:
These people haven't hurt anyone. Why won't you just let them believe what they want to believe?
Letting people believe what they want to believe gets people killed, unfortunately. You cannot just make up alternatives to chemistry, medicine, and physics.
Mixing brake fluid and bleach isn't magic, but it does produce a lot of magic smoke. It also can permanently blind or kill you. People have turned shit like this into real products, take Radithor for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor
This product led to a revision in medicine after the patient died due to alternative medicine. Another example for flat earthers is flying.
Planes fly routes based off fuel calculations, because fuel is heavy and it takes fuel to fly with fuel. If you are a flat earth pilot, and you fuck up your fuel calculations because you don't account for the curvature of the Earth, you and the 300 other unlucky bastards on the plane might crash into the ocean before reaching your destination. God forbid a flat earth programmer mess with fuel calculations for entire fleets of planes. It might be a one day mistake, but there are tens of thousands of flights all over the world.
I never advocated for people to develop useless or harmful products. I merely suggested that the average person will do exactly 0 (zero) developments in their life which require them to know that the earth is a sphere. So that's what i meant with "let them believe what they want", as long as it doesn't hurt somebody.
The antivax movement is a very good example of how unscientific beliefs and credulity can harm others. Flat earthers, antivax, etc are all symptoms caused by the same reasons.
There are many experiments that can be done by a single person to prove that the Earth is a sphere. Some of these experiments have been known and performed for millenia. If flat-Earthers were truly scientific, they would have changed their minds based on those experiments. Instead, they willingly blind themselves to the obvious and come up with ever more elaborate theories as to why their experiments returned a result they disagree with.
Certainly there are many experiments that can be done by a single person to prove that the Earth is a sphere, but who really has the time (and motivation!) to perform them?
They have their theory. It’s compatible with their experiments. They’re not being “unscientific”. What they believe makes perfect sense given their very strong priors against the possibility that the earth is round.
If you want to criticize them, criticize they way they obtained those extremely strange priors. Do not call people “unscientific” for doing science based upon different prior believes then yours. If everyone have the same believes, there would be no scientific progress.
Science does not HAVE any prior beliefs. It seems like you don't quite understand what the scientific method entails.
Are you denying Bayesian statistics now? I’d argue that is even more “unscientific” than denying the earth is round.
Given its irrelevance to the basic concepts regarding the shape of the Earth, I fail to see the connection
Under the Bayesian way to do science, you start off with some beliefs (”priors”) about what your trying to understand. You then devise experiments that either confirm or deny those believes. You then update your priors based on the data you see from the experiment.
A normal person might start off with, say, 70% belief that the earth is flat. They then look at some data (take an airliner around the world, look at pictures of earth taken by satellites, do some of those curvature measurement experiments, …). Each time they update their priors, and soon enough it becomes a 99.99% belief that the earth is NOT flat.
A flat earther, for some reason, starts off with a 99.99999% belief that the earth is flat, along with a 99.99999% belief that the government is trying to hide the fact from them. You show them some experiments, they might update their priors to a 99.999%. To convince them the earth is not flat, you would need a LOT of data. You might tell them to look at previous experiments done on this, but due to the 99.99999% belief that the government is lying, they would only have a 0.00001% confidence in the data reported by scientists. So it takes a lot more to convince them that the earth is not flat.
Now why did they start off with such strange priors? They’re probably conspiracy nuts. You can criticize them for that. But don’t call them unscientific if they are still doing experiments and updating their priors.