/sci/ - Science & Math

>>16361680
I'm unsurprised, the average normal nigger is fucking retarded and will believe almost anything they read off social media. It was always this way, except the unwashed retarded masses didn't have a way to post their retarded opinions for the rest of the world to hear.

>>16361682
Ultimately you're not wrong, it's just really strange to watch in real time.

Personally I blame twitter and Tiktok. Both of them are full of flat earthers because neither platform makes any real attempt to control misinformation at the moment and so flat earthers have large communities in both places. It blew up on Youtube for a while in 2017 until they changed their content recommendation algorithm to deprioritize conspiracy shit and now it's blowing up again on new sites for exactly the same reason.

5% of people in the US and Europe now believe the earth is flat. What happens once they get big enough to become a voting bloc?

>>16361680
just post a proof of curvature and the game is over. oh wait, you can't.

>>16361686
Anon it's not funny anymore. It was funny a few years ago before people started believing it sincerely, but it's not funny anymore.

On the off chance that you are a sincere believer, I can't prove the curve to you. Not because proof doesn't exist or even because it's particularly difficult to find, but because you're not going to believe anything I can tell you. I could post one of today's images from the DSCOVR satellite and you'd say it's fake. I could tell you to pick up an SDR and pick up the transmission yourself as it comes down from L1 and you'd never do it.

I could tell you to watch a flyover of the ISS and you'd say that it's a projection or a weather balloon or otherwise not real. I could show you a video of a sunset or of boats disappearing over the horizon and you'd say it's due to refraction.

Because the truth is that it's not actually about the strength of the evidence. If it was then flat earthers would stop posting stuff like the OP image because it's obviously wrong. There is no real attempt at scientific inquiry, only vague allusions to the trappings of scientific inquiry to the sole extent that enables belief in anything at all. And that's ultimately what it's about, belief. You want to believe the earth is flat because it provides a foundation for an entire worldview, and by clinging to that belief out of spite you are trying to prove that your ideas and your movement is stronger.

>>16361702
>wall of text full of strawmen, accusations and excuses
>no proof
errtime

The internet just has a lot of dumb people nowadays it didn't use to have. Up to ~2010 most internet users (and especially outside the US and a couple of european countries) were highly educated young adults; no elderly almost AT ALL online and no kids at all; the dumb people who never studied anything higher were snobbing the internet as something "for the nerds".

Flat earth was a joke online very clearly; people were using it to mock the conspiracy theories that were more believable up to that point like the neonazis being foolish enough to believe "the jews rule everything I do"; you can see it in 4chan too since the unironic /pol/acks increased.

>>16361707
okay fine we can play the game. Here's an original color photo from the DSCOVR satellite, taken on September 3rd at an altitude of 952,921 miles with an SEV angle of 9.83°.

>>16361686
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.07491 every fucking navigator for the past few thousand years which uses the position og the north star would have to be systematically lying for flat earth to work.

>>16361680
With the assumption that corriolis effect exists, this pic is definetly a sign that something is off. Because with increasing hight, you increase the the distance from the center of rotation hence the tangential velocity is increasing.

But since flat earth is provable wrong and coriolis effect due to earth spin is also provably wrong.
The earth gravitational field must then creat a earth centered coordinate system of motion.
So the earth-centered inertial (ECI) frame as a global reference frame that has its origin at the center of the earth.

>>16361726
No-ones been to space. It not there.

>>16361726
This picture is actually a simulacrum product. It's all programming and NPC tunnelling.

>>16361726
>public cgi imagery plateaued in the early 2000s
>nasa imagery has looked exactly like early 2000s cgi ever since

Things that make you go hmm.

>>16361702
>And that's ultimately what it's about, belief. You want to believe the earth is flat because it provides a foundation for an entire worldview

Pardon? The spherical Earth is integral to the Copernican model, i.e. to Catholicism.

>>16361825

You are retarded

>>16361680
95% of flat earthers are sad, lonely, attention whoring losers hoping for some kind of human interaction, even if it's just people telling them they're morons. About 4% are well poisoners. They're not really trying to convince anyone of anything, they just want to create chaos in whatever discussion they jumped into, usually because they don't want that subject discussed, at least not in a serious manner. The last 1% or so are legitimate retards who are beyond help. It's best to pat them on the head, say "that's nice" and move on to other things.

>>16361840

At least this concession was mercifully brief.

>>16361685
>5% of people in the US and Europe now believe the earth is flat. What happens once they get big enough to become a voting bloc?
Flat Earth isn't turning them into retards, they're already retards. They already vote. There are also lots of people who believe the government has a secret car that runs on water. I've been hearing that one since the 1970s. The secret water car people have been voters for half a century.
Conspiracy theories don't create retards, they out retards. If you're worried about retards voting, you should first be against the concept of universal suffrage. Once you get beyond that concept, then work can be done on the issue of retards voting.

>>16361846
The problem is they aren't. 4% or so are definitely well poisoners or nonbelievers jumping into the conversation to cause chaos for personal amusement, but most flat earth communities I've seen and lurked in are busy and full of people who come to know each other well. They're deeply evangelical about their beliefs, but almost all of them are sincere believers. They are absolutely trying to convince people, they're just not particularly good at convincing you or me since the foundation for their beliefs make no sense if you're even basically scientifically literate.

Like there is a real movement here, not just a bunch of disconnected asocial retards. And that's part of what makes the whole thing so strange to me.

>>16361855
I agree that they're dumb. The problem is that dumb people normally believe a bunch of disparate things and so their impact is limited. What we're seeing today is relatively novel in that it's a whole bunch of dumb people forming an organized coalition around a single dumb belief. Like everyone knows that one guy in their town who thinks that magnets can cure cancer or something, what we haven't seen is the magnet guy accruing enough social capital to get multiple medium-to-large conventions going across the country.

>>16361716
(you) tried

>>16361862
>flat earth communities
The 95% who are attention whores aren't going into a hug box where their attention whoring doesn't get them attention. Those communities are highly concentrated sources of the 1% of flat earthers who are believers.
You're still dodging the central issue of retards existing, still trying to push blame for their retardation on them having access to other retards but retards have always been retards. No amount of surrounding retards with non-retards will make the retards non-retarded.
Answer this for us so there's no more weaseling: do you support universal suffrage? If not, where do you put the line? Without making a definitive answer, your whining about retards being voters is just that, whining. Sounds like you might be one of those enlightened leftists who want all retards to have the right to vote as long as their retardation can be confined into leftist spaces to ensure retards always vote for leftist candidates. If so, you know the way back to Hacker News.

>>16361680
It's absolutely retarded that it was brought back in the first place but doesn't surprise me considering how the average Joe is a complete knuckledragger nowadays. However, what it did do very well is permanently ruin the reputation of any real conspiracy theories as normies will forever correlate them to flat earth since they fall under the same umbrella.

>>16361680
How do you think the creator of that image would react to someone smoking on a train?

>>16361820
all digital images are cgi

>>16361685
The misinformation wouldn't be a problem if public schools did their fucking job and taught science correctly.

>>16361702
Based

>>16361680
>What do you guys think about flat earth getting really popular again, /sci/?
I think it's part of a broader problem of stupid ideas getting traction across society.

In the olden days, on most topics there was a consensus truth that almost everyone agreed on. It was the view presented in mass media, in schools, in politics, essentially everywhere. This view wasn't necessarily always correct on everything; but it was the consensus nonetheless. There were people with dissenting opinions, but they couldn't really practically talk to each other on account of not having access to mass media, so they mostly remained lone nutjobs; their ideas could never develop into a coherent-ish body of thought, because the nutjobs weren't really in large scale communication or organization with each other.

In the age of the internet, the nutjobs with stupid ideas get to talk to each other, and they are able to organize and refine their stupidity with the input of many different people, assisted by trolls helpfully adding fuel to the flames. Flat earth is just one casualty of many out of this development, I think.

>>16361702
What is called the sun is a super alien god engine. Go on look at all of the power it produces. Looks like no amount of evidence will ever suffice for the materialist.

>>16361986
>This view wasn't necessarily always correct on everything
it's wrong on literally everything

>>16361680
flat earth is a gatekeeping psyop, people realise that the world isn't what they're told it is so they get swept up into another kabbalistic deception

>>16361680

>The rabbis of the Talmud believed that the world was flat, and that the sun revolved around the Earth every day. There is a debate about the length of the solar year in the Talmud, and its consequences and the rare Jewish ceremony of the Blessing of the Sun (Birkat Hahammah) are discussed. The view of the talmudic rabbis is contrasted with that of the contemporary Greek astronomers. While the rabbis of the Talmud argued about the size of the flat Earth, the Greeks had determined the Earth to be a sphere, had calculated its circumference and had moved on to consider other questions
https://academic.oup.com/book/1751/chapter-abstract/141387578?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Reminder that its very based and redpilled to believe what Talmudic rabbis believe instead of what Aryan Hellenic geniuses experimentally determined

>>16362003
Proof?

>>16361680
I think its fine. Just part of divergent evolution where superior people who are intelligent will form a separate species called "Homo Chadus". Meanwhile the stupids, who despite all the modern education, despite over 2000 years of the human acquisition of knowledge, despite fundamental everyday phenomena as simple as seeing shadows rise on a tall tree at sunset, these poor dumb sacks of shit will form a species called "Homo Retardus".
Inevitably Homo Chadus will herd these dumb animals into deep salt mines and seal them up permanently, leaving them to gibber blandly about flat earth as much as they like until they eventually die out. As a result the quality of conversation and technological progress above ground will improve by immeasurable orders of magnitude. Perhaps many millions of years into the far future archeologists will dig up the fossilized remains of Homo Retardus and wonder how such a stupid creature could have managed to remember to breathe.

>>16361862
Flat earthers are homosexual pedophiles.
Things like established flat earth communities and flat earth conventions gives them opportunities to prey upon gullible, poorly educated and low IQ young boys.
In facts its a great filter for them to carry out their perversions. If a kid is smart and knowledgeable they are far less likely to be manipulated and to go to the law. Dumb kids on the other hand can be easily controlled, fail to see the lies, and less likely to call the cops. The dumb kids make perfect victims for sexual abuse by flat earthers.

>>16362100
The best theory I heard was that phoenicians spread the flat earth theory to maintain their trade monopoly

>>16362154
Plausible. Sailing peoples will note the tops of mountains they're approaching appear first and wonder why that is

>>16361685
>any real attempt to control misinformation at the moment
any attempt to """control misinformation,""" even for something as banal as flat earther stuff, will absolutely be used as a foot in the door for controlling other speech deemed to be misinformation (aka questioning the government). i'd rather there be a handful of flat earthers or moon landing deniers having dumb opinions online than normalize the idea that it's okay to ban people from social media for daring to criticize the harris regime

>>16361680
Flat earthers are mostly brown people

>>16361682
>the average normal nigger is fucking retarded
This but unironically

https://www.unz.com/anepigone/flatism-is-racist/

>>16361680
Its not all retardation. It is denial. Once they are emotionally invested into flat earth or whatever retard thing there is, they need an emotional bridge to bring them out of denial. Denial is an incredibly powerfull defense mechanism and someone trying to reason out of it will just end up avoidant. I see my mom in denial. She needs us to be the great family that she imagined. She cannot know my sister is a child sex offender and that I am fucked up. She cannot acknoweledge it even though she is not retarded. These people are stuck and it will cause them suffering to enter into reality. Unfortunately, therapists are all retarded and in denial themselves and don't have a robust way to bring people out of it. It is a dangerous process.

>>16362116
>take any statement from mass media, schools, politics or science
>look at reality
>observe the literal opposite is true

>>16362216
its part of that for sure. these flat earth swine are also some of the most arrogant and prideful people i've ever interacted with, every ready to believe that everyone else is a fool while they, after only a brief surface reading of any subject, have seen through to the deceptions that all others have missed. They believe themselves to be the most daring and incisive of all freethinkers, able to shrug off the brainwashing and indoctrination that holds all around them in thrall. THEY are the great detectives spotting clues which no one else has the insight or courage to see.

And so on.

It's this conceit which holds them in the flat earth cult. They dare not admit they are wrong about anything because for them flat earth is the last and greatest truth. To admit a mistake about it would destroy them and their lofty self image with it

Half the flat earthers are GPTs. Some are trolls who are poes lawing and throwing out garbage data to confuse and distract people. The goal of psychological operations is to confuse, distract, and increase noise.

>>16362438
Half of them are literally lying to you to troll you. Filter and block.

>>16362466
certainly all of them are lying in one way or another

Also.

Any population group that believes flat earth literally could not calibrate artillery properly. Flat earthers lose every war bc they cant even aim a gun accurately long range.

>>16361685
Note that all conspiracies that are *not* heavily algo censored are literally allowed because they make you less dangerous to rich cowards.

Anything that is censored and suppressed heavily = dangerous to status quo. That makes it a reliable truth indicator. You can use censorship to determine which conspiracies are more accurate.

>>16362478
Basically, rich cowards believe they can control you by allowing massive amounts of garbage data in public view, while harshly suppressing data that is dangerous to them. This is a useful heuristic.

Surely euthanasia is the merciful choice for flat-earthers.

>>16362497
only for the most acute and terminal cases.

>>16362497
i have to assume they have an answer to that. i low key admire the way they have superficially plausible explanations for every conceivable objection

>>16361680
>I think it's even more worrying that the people sharing stuff like this have accumulated massive followings of sincere believers
agreed