memes

99% of doing science is being wrong and being happy about it

He's getting more views on the "I was wrong" videos so I have doubts about his real motivation. I know, I'm very cynical.

And also add to that that this is more like escaping from a cult than it is merely admitting you were silly and wrong.

Beyond the Curve! Great doc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_the_Curve

Kinda…

It showed them as social outcasts with a drive to have a community but also a drive to have some sort of secret knowledge… the overall message I took away was that if you run into a flat earther, to treat them with some empathy and compassion while not validating their worldview. The dismissal of their ideas and belittling of their arguments further entrenched them in their beliefs.

And for what it’s worth, not everyone in that group is a complete idiot… just vulnerable to wacky ideas. Some of these smart people actually designed legit experiments that would actually prove if the earth was round or flat. At the end of the documentary, one group performed one of them with the film crew… conclusively showing the earth was round. The last word in the documentary was spoken by the guy running the experiment, where he said, “interesting…”. He was one of the ones who seemed to have a little intellectual honesty, and he may have gotten out.

In another part of the documentary, some of the more prominent voices in the movement pooled their money to get a $10k laser gyroscope that had the precision to detect the rotation of the earth…. It detected the rotation of the earth, so they were going out of their way to cover up the findings. It was all caught on film and presented in the documentary… The guy in the post is absolutely correct… these vulnerable are being deceived by con men.

It’s a really good documentary because a lot of them actually want to be scientific about it.

But instead of following the scientific process of test->observe->draw a conclusion, they start with the conclusion and look for a way to prove it. And when the prof isn’t there, they simply say the test was flawed, and move on to the next test that will prove it.

It’s sad in a way. I don’t think, most of them anyway, are con man. They’re just misguided.

Here's two different excitements where they did just that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrGgxAK9Z5A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFqmDazwb6Y

They display the sentiment of "if we fail this test (show earth is round) something clearly went wrong and it doesn't mean anything and we need to try, try again, but if we get a different result just once then that conclusively beyond any doubt proves that earth is flat"

"Current" science is a bit of a stretch, like a couple thousand years of stretching. Eratosthenes showed the earth was round and calculated its circumference to an astonishing precision using research and fairly simple trigonometry. He died 2,219 years ago.

People like RFK confuse skepticism with going against conventional thinking. Flerfers and anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists aren't skeptical, because then they'd be open-minded about evidence. But they think they're being skeptical because they're going against the status quo.

Unfortunately bucking the status quo becomes an identity issue, and not only does evidence not matter anymore, but grifters come out to prey on people who just want to be skeptical.

I think we're pretty fucked on that front... You can just look outside to see the climate changing at this point

And our leaders can't even bother to pretend we're going to try to fix it anymore

In general, we're not taught early enough, if at all, to question both what we 'perceive' and the mental blabbering that makes up stories about it.