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this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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An interesting read, thx.
This sums it up perfectly, for me. And not just for those flat-earthers. They don't want to discuss their ideas, they want to be right. There is no way we can have a sincere debate with any 'believer' (of whatever).
And why should we? Why should we do the work to prove them wrong knowing they will blissfully ignore any demonstration that does not end in 'omfg! You were right all the time! The Earth is indeed flat, and hollow, and reptilians are our true overlords, and the only time NASA send anyone to the moon is when they were all high!'
Why not let them do all the work themselves, instead? They seem to be so willing. I would even happily see some public money used to fund their 'space exploration' probes if I did not know for sure that the instant their stupid ideas would be proven wrong by their very own probe, the fact that any public money would have been involved in making it, they would argue it's one more irrefutable proof of the conspiracy against their (unshaken and unshakable) truth.
Imho, the real issues is not those people believing their moronic ideas. There always have been a bunch like them. Flat-earthers, doomsday believers, anti-vax, conspirationists of every single type you can imagine, and so on. We should be fine with them holding to their believes. Why? Because they should not matter, they should remain the statistically insignificant minority they are, no matter how loud. Also, we should not be afraid to call them for who they are.
Have we really become afraid of calling them by their name? Amusing morons at times, but morons nonetheless, and shameless assholes for those among them that take advantage of those people's gullibility for their own personal profit.
Have we become that fragile ourselves that we're afraid to simply ignore them when we're not frankly laughing out loud at their 'theories'? Because if we have, that bunch of eccentrics and their theories, is certainly not the issue I would worry about. We are.
I think the problem is, they have become far more than a 'statistically insignificant minority'. Anti-intellectualism is becoming more rampant at a horrifying speed
I do wonder if we have any data regarding that? I mean isn't it also, next to this quick rise of proud idiocy I'm not denying, a lot more noise made by them, and around them? Say, for example, by our dear media willing to do their worst in order to sell more paper/get more page views?
Not specifically flat Earthers, but there's a ton of data about the increase of anti-vaxxers as compared to in the past. Seems pretty undeniable that their numbers and influence have gone up, the question is what we can do about it.
That's no way to talk about gravity believers.
Show any "gravity believer" any object failing to accelerate to earth at 9.807ms^-2 and they will stop believing in Newtonian gravity.
It's been 337 years and nobody has done it, so at this point it does seem unlikely.
Edit in case of pedantry: within 1% of 9.807 due to gravitational variance on earth's surface
Are you a solipsist?
I thought it'd be pretty clear I'm an empiricist when it comes to epistemology. Solipsism is intensely unuseful. Why do you ask?
Well you said belief is bad, so drag assumed you believed nothing.
Two problems with that comment there. Firstly, solipsism isn't belief in nothing so the outcome of your assumption is ill informed. The second, and pretty glaringly huge problem is that I didn't actually say that, or anything like it. Be honest, now...are you honestly engaging in good faith? Hmmm? Maybe you've just mistaken me for someone else.
Yes, drag mistook you for Lib.
Hehe well that's what I get for jumping in I suppose!
Drag still believes there must be a force of attraction between massive objects, even if Newton and Einstein got the equation wrong.
There is a force of attraction between any two masses. The equation is F=GMm/r^2. That one is good enough for nearly all practical applications, but Einstein's field equations are better if you're doing cosmology.
Do you think there is a better equation than those? You seem to imply that they're wrong.
Drag has decided not to discuss the quantum gravity problem, and just reassert that drag is a gravity believer.
You have a weird way of talking. For example, it's not normal to call Newton and Einstein "wrong" in their equations about gravity just because they did not happen to solve all of physics while writing them down...
at a certain point the question isn't whether a formula is "right or wrong", it's about whether what the formula says is "good enough in this situation" or whether a different formula should be chosen.
This is an important topic in physics: choose the right frame of reference, the right simplifications, the right assumptions, ... for your calculations to be as easy as possible, yet meaningful.
So i guess to "believe" in a formula is just to recognize and accept its usefulness for a purpose.