Political Memes

Fundamentally, I understand where the flat earthers are coming from.

In our day-to-day experience, the earth seems flat. While there are some things that could show that there's a curve, none of them are easy or obvious. Like, if you live near a big body of water, you can see that as boats get farther away, you can't see as much of them. But, a big body of water also tends to have waves, so it's not obvious that the ships are being hidden by the curve of the earth, rather than by waves. On land, it's even less obvious that the earth is curved because even small hills affect things more than the earth's curvature.

So, for the most part, you have to trust experts who say that the Earth is curved. But, the world has been using so-called experts to lie to people for a long time. Commercials use people in doctor's shirts to hawk medicines. Insurance companies use "experts" that say a treatment isn't needed. Experts testify in front of congress that so-and-so is safe and won't harm people, or won't cost jobs, then it inevitably does. The whole opioid crisis was largely due to trusted "experts" (doctors) over-prescribing opioids and telling patients that they were safe.

"Doing your own research" seems like a smart thing. But, the people doing it don't know how to do research. Ever since "No Child Left Behind", American schools have only gotten worse. They don't know how to read or interpret scientific papers. They don't know how to identify high quality journals, or how to spot conflicts of interest, or how to understand if something is highly cited. So, they go with "Truthiness", and are easily manipulated.