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this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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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.