I lost my dad to this. So far, nothing helps. I have no idea what the solution is. It only works when THEY want out.
But why would they?
We're brutally, brutally mean to people like this.
Every time somebody dunks on a flat earther or their ilk, puts somebody down to defend the superiority of their own worldview, they've added a brick to the wall that keeps these people from feeling like they can rejoin society.
The first time they pop out of the cave, feeble amateurs in the world of normies, they slip up just a tiny bit and get their head bitten off. There is nobody there to to say "if you tried, we'd have you". For most of us, it isn't true.
It seems like few people realize that this is part of the residue we unwittingly leave on the world. That the cost of performative intellectual superiority, even if you're actually right, is the burning of rungs on their ladder back up.
Needlessly dunking on misguided people worsens a world that we ourselves are stuck with.
Vast majority of people are ego invested in themselves, and typically love to criticize other people well hating being criticized themselves. You run into a problem is they're easy to manipulate, as you play to their ego and criticize the people they hate.
+1. I would add that most humans are not stupid. They think the way they do for a reason. That reason could be emotional or cultural but really those are just other forms of information that can be truthful or be made to lie, just like misuse of logic or statistics.
There's guarantee that you will sympathize with someone, or that they will sympathize with you for that matter. But how are you going to find out how they think if you never have a conversation?
(I'm not a flat earther, I'm just tired of reading hot takes on the internet)
It can't always just be about being nice, unfortunately. Parents who choose not to vaccinate their children could get us all killed. It's a serious threat.
If being nice turns out to be the best strategy for curbing this movement, then I am all for it. If screaming in their faces about it turns out to be more effective, then we have to do that.
I would love for everyone to be able to "rejoin society" but at a certain point we also have to defend society against those who reject it in harmful ways. Not every illogical cult-like community is as harmless as flat-Earthers.
It's not merely "lonely being wrong." It's lonely and you face a wall of open hatred and abuse for merely disagreeing or even wondering out loud if maybe the dominant view isn't 100% right and might have some holes in it.
That's completely unnecessary and also often openly breaks a lot of social rules, but people will justify their terrible behavior, the majority will have their back and tell the target of the abuse that they deserve it, it's their fault and the abuse will promptly stop if they will just "stop spouting nonsense."
Only it probably won't. Caving to the demand to pretend to agree will probably be permission to continue to be awful perpetually to someone who once openly disagreed.
The most abusive people typically claim they are being scientific, only they aren't. Because actual science is founded on the idea that we can't really prove anything. We can only disprove things and our current science is all the stuff we have some degree of confidence in because it has yet to be disproven and overturned by something better.
A good example of this is Bigfoot. There are people who believe strongly that Bigfoot absolutely doesn't exist and anyone who allows for the possibility that Bigfoot might be real gets treated like an idiot and a lunatic, never mind that you cannot prove a species absolutely doesn't exist and new species get discovered all the time.
Bigfoot Anti-Believers are typically far more fanatical than Bigfoot Believers, far less rational and far more out of line with scientific principles, yet will justify their terrible treatment of Bigfoot Believers -- or even people who say "I dunno. Could be." -- with claims that anti-belief is scientific.
But anti-belief is scientific if the belief for something requires a complete overturning of scientific principles. It's not just an absence of evidence for something. It isn't "open minded" to say "could be..." to Bigfoot, Nessie, or the like -- it's closed minded because to even consider the idea seriously is to think that ecologists and population geneticists have no idea what the minimum habitat of a large animal is or of the minimum viable population size is.
As an egocentric self-righteous narcissist who spent their 20s making friends by being "right", I'm slowly starting to learn that isn't a fun way to live. I think it's the same thing as when someone you care about is "complaining", you don't always have to help them solve the problem, sometimes they just want to talk.
I read this article about oscar wilde from a recent hacker news post, and some details resonated with me in regard to "the art - and artifice - of conversation."
- "never tell a story because it is true: tell it because it is a good story."
- Even for the men of science, mere facts were never allowed to dominate diversion.
- "the golden rule of conversation" was "to know nothing accurately."
There is a fine line as most people don't have very good conversation skill's and will use you as a surrogate to a psychologist. You have to pull them in line with eye contact and silence and then giving them the benefit of the doubt, and finally have to say they're in a conversation/discussion. If that all else fails then you leave the conversation.
This article gets close to the heart of flat-earthism, bad sadly doesn't quite take the plunge over the edge. The origin of flat-eartherism is people like this author, and his wife's need to convince others that they are wrong in their beliefs and get them in line with the correct beliefs. It's hard to remember at this point, but think back to about 15 years ago, the idea of a flat-earth was held up as the shining example of how clueless people in the past used to be and how far we've come. That story was fake by the way, people have known the earth was round since ancient Greece, in fact they even had a pretty accurate measure of the earth's circumference. In between there were surely less knowledgeable groups of people, but it's hard to find any concrete cases of large scale belief that the earth was flat, rather than people not really understanding what was meant by "the earth" on a planetary scale, vs. their local perception of the earth around them which did indeed appear to be fairly flat. Except for today of course, where each passing year we hit a new watermark of belief in a flat-earth. How did we get here? Like I said, articles like this give you a good insight into that path, when you're constantly barraged with articles whose entire point is to define a group of people and call them dumb it repels people, and some small number of people get caught up in that repelling force, they start to wonder if maybe this barrage of meanness is actually hiding some deeper truth. Over time these people form into their own group and settle into a symbiotic relationship with the first group. As the group gains steam there's more and more evidence that people are dumb, and need to be called out as such, giving the author of this article and others more ammo, which in turn repels more people into joining the group. And around, and around they go, where it stops I have no idea.
Edit: I should add, this article is among the most civil and charitable articles of its type. I don't mean to pick on this author in particular.
It makes life a lot more pleasant when you realize that most upsetting things you see online are just a meme symbiotic system with a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
This goes way beyond flat earth and the other beliefs he listed. People will laugh at you if you claim that rocks grow out of dead birds, but almost no-one really convinced themselves of where rocks come from or where dead birds go and that it's not the same place. We trust authorities but we don't think it through or investigate it for ourselves. It's much easier to trust authorities because that's what everyone else is trusting too so you get automatic agreement and friends without having to think for yourself. We also have no idea that the Earth isn't flat except from trust in authorities.
What is kind of strange is that even though some wrong beliefs are mocked by people who don't agree (eg flat-earth, Scientology), others are put on a kind of pedestal of respect, such as Islam and native rituals. The justification I can think of is "Let those poor savages have their special beliefs because they're weaker than us and maybe that's all they have to cling onto so we shouldn't hold them to the same high standards that we hold ourselves to." Scientologists and Christians are part of us and have no excuse for being "wrong" so we're more openly critical of them.
I think this article indirectly highlights why mob rule and direct democracies are so potentially dangerous: people need to feel accepted, and will take many ideas on faith, even dangerous ones, than to risk having an opinion that causes them to feel the scorn of their peers.
That may miss the point slightly. These are people who are on the receiving end of scorn, and their decisions to dive deeper into fringe communities only opens them up to further scorn! The very opposite of the issue you are describing, which is a situation in which people conform en masse in order to avoid scorn.
Sadly, being wrong DOES affect others. My fellow citizens vote and I am compelled by the laws they enact. Every friendly attempt to alter their worldview is ignored and every unfriendly attempt drives them further into a rabbit-hole of unreason. I'm left with only one choice- to isolate myself from the consequences of their actions, either forcing them out of my world, or leaving them in theirs.
and that's why I don't speak with my extended family anymore.
How do you know it's not you who's wrong? Do you have access to secret information that they don't? Do you have superior intellect that enables you to understand what they can't? Or did you just happen to be exposed to different influences during your life that led your beliefs in a different arbitrary direction?
I don’t like this false dichotomy. It’s a truism “you can be right or you can be happy”. You can be right and happy. In my experience yes-men are often sad and keep shallow company. If you’re getting a lot of pushback from the group you’re in you might be in the wrong group.
The author appears to lump anyone of opposing views together.
Flat earth - trivial to disprove, ok
Anti-vacation - not trivial, but a huge amount of work has been done to show anyone who isn’t totally shut down the glaring before/after situation of vaccines, so ok
Men’s Rights? Seriously? Is the author saying men have no rights? Some of the things that fall under the men’s rights umbrella are the draft, lack of help for homeless men vs women, biased family court, little recognition when a victim of domestic violence (interestingly the CDC recognizes that), biased prison sentences, vastly higher rates of on the job injuries, etc.
So is the author saying anything that happens to a man his own fault?
Is there a specific men’s rights subgroup the author is referring to that’s very loud and just goes around saying men never do anything bad?
This is like saying “civil rights” people are a bunch of angry people with no reason to be angry.
>Is there a specific men’s rights subgroup the author is referring to that’s very loud
Yes, and, as usual with loud, antagonistic subgroups, they look from the outside like part of the larger group's definition. But that's not an excuse - I wish people like the author would be more generous when talking about the larger groups. Men's rights are particularly affected by this, because it's a topic with both a lot of legitimate grievances and illegitimate hatred among its ranks.
I’ve been thinking of starting a cult. Not a real cult. It would explicitly be a fake cult, and it would have rules to prevent all the evil stuff cults do. But there’s a reason that people join and become very committed to them (or religions). They provide a community, a sense of common purpose, and a support network. Artificially replicating that while cutting out the bad stuff, and scaling that to the level of the Catholic Church or Islam would be the biggest thing one could do to improve human happiness in developed countries in my opinion.
Are we witnessing the birth of a new idea, something like "there is no right or wrong if it hurts people's feelings"? will "non binary truth" emerge as law?
You have the right to say anything that's wrong, and nobody can say it's wrong because that would be discriminatory, but if you say something that's right, nobody should say it's right because it would be binary thinking and discriminating? yet you can say it's wrong, because it's hurting your feelings.
Let's try to abolish logic! It will surely lead to immense happiness.
That's why education is so important. If as kinds those people would analyze the evidences of both - flat and sphere earth they would be immune to flat-earth nonsense.
After kinds lose their natural curiosity and gain political views it's nearly impossible to convince them to something different than they believe.
I don't necessarily mean to agree that the Earth is flat.
But maybe if you think that we don't know all the answers and finding out things we don't know is fun, you could find common ground even with flat-earthers.
Probably 99% of humanity has one element of common ground: we all want to be happy.
So start from there and work outwards. How does believing the Earth is flat make them happier? As you discover the answer to that (one of which is certainly community as the OP points out), maybe there's other shared common ground.
This could apply to almost anything. Even racists want to be happy. They think that they'll be more happy by holding people different from themselves back, but likely part of this is they hold a relative sense of success (are they better off than their neighbors) than an absolute sense (are they better off than they could be). Maybe compare those two pictures of success, and show that even if someone different from them gets successful by getting a good education and curing cancer, they will directly benefit by not needing to worry about cancer.
And connection matters a lot too. Pretty much every instance I've seen of racists dropping their racism was a direct result of direct interactions with people they demonized that they realized they had more in common with than they'd believed (and in some cases more than their racist buddies).
To me the saddest part of the movie was the cross cuts between the science meetup and the flat-earth meetup. Those two groups would actually have got along pretty well, if they focused on shared passion for the unknown and not their differences.
Besides - with everything we are learning about how consensus across entangled observers may be deterministic of the resulting reality (quantum Darwinism, which is supported by recent experiments but not yet proven), perhaps flat-earthers, by abandoning recognition of a shared consensus of the rest of the world, have in fact created a mostly overlapping Venn-diagram sort of pocket reality where the Earth being flat is as real as the notion it is not for the rest of us. And if we adopt that belief we can enter into that reality, and if they adopt the scientific method's application to their premise they'd necessitate returning to ours (perhaps the scientific method is exactly that - a process to evaluate disparate realities and converge to a norm).
In fact, maybe that's what cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias really are -- a desire to stabilize our version of reality by way of consensus. Almost like a psychological gravity both of an equal but unobservable entanglement.
So it stands to reason the only way to get a fringe reality to reconnect with the rest of the herd is to start from consensus and work to re-entangle the detached observations from there.
"Observation" in quantum mechanics is not "people looking at stuff" though.
Here is a good video on quantum misconceptions [1]. Just ignore the part about the boxes. "Nobody understands the Alice and Bob analogy" (Richard Feynman)
all of this said can also be true for any kind of community, even extrapolated to religion, leftist ideas, fascism, fad diets.
There is nothing inherent in flat earthers, most communities outside of academia (and sometimes inside it) that is not about the feeling of belonging somewhere. It is stronger than truth and facts. Always.
It's not a wicked problem. It takes very little effort to research and conclude that the empirically established standard of medical care for transgender people is to allow them to transition and allow them to integrate into society as the gender they tell you they are. It takes very little effort to discover that gender has not been and is not a binary in every single human culture, either.
They are different. For a different reason. Flat earthers don't hurt people by having a very wrong belief. TERFs want to deny transgender people their basic human rights and largely succeeded for a great long time. That's injustice.
I think oftentimes in human interaction you can either be right or be liked. It might seem like a great injustice but oftentimes, being right comes at the expense of another being wrong. The problem is that there is nothing wrong with being wrong and yet a lot of us still take this very personally. Everyone is wrong until someone tells them what is right.
>[...]being right comes at the expense of another being wrong. The problem is that there is nothing wrong with being wrong[...]
I think this hits the nail on the head, completely.
I think a large part of it, for me at least, was that school taught me that wrong is bad. Not knowing an answer is bad. Failure. It took many years after school to correct that belief - and I'm much happier for it.
Being wrong is great, in a way. Of course I'd like to be right about everything all the time but I know that's not possible. Being wrong lets me know that I have an opportunity to learn what is right.
>The problem is that there is nothing wrong with being wrong
This says more about you though (in a good way). To many people who lack that kind of intellectual maturity, there is something wrong with being wrong. It's the saw someone can use to cut the rungs off of your ladder as you climb the social hierarchy. Someone can always rub your mistakes in your face, and groups of people will view you as less capable because of it. Look at politics...it's a big reason why politicians are so vague; being wrong is a nail in your coffin. Many politicians are not unintelligent people, but they know how being wrong impacts the public's perception of your competency.
the point is that being wrong once or twice isn't bad, but being wrong all the time leads to hurt and backlash. to compensate, we have elaborate cultural rituals and coded language to avoid such situations (e.g., "giving face").
It wouldn't be such a big deal if these "wrong" communities didn't seem to be so outrage driven, but they tend to be more about the anger than pursuing their "truth".
Acts of "proving" oneself to the community gain a person favor, which ends up being the stuff that effects us "normies", rather than their mere existence.
> "And if it was just flat-earthers, I’d say fine, it’s harmless. But you’ve got anti-vaxxers and Men’s Rights Advocates and anti-global warming folks and TERFs and incels out there, all fueled by one central pivot point of humanity – namely, that it’s lonely being wrong."
It seems quite odd that he lumps "Mens rights advocates" in there. Are they crazy?
The Red Pill documentary by (feminist!) Cassie Jaye opened my eyes to what MRAs are all about. It's a fascinating watch, and I'd honestly be astonished at anyone who comes away from watching it thinking that they have no legitimacy.
Are you familiar with the men's rights movement? The term or concept of "men's rights" could certainly be discussed in a neutral, non-crazy way. But the actual movement as it exists today and the logic that commonly defines it is absolutely as detached from reality as any of those other cult-like ideologies.
Yeah, I don’t like how the term “men’s rights advocate” is thrown around. Maybe some groups that use that term are crazy or something but men deserve rights and advocates for those rights. Men are often treated as second class citizens. People laughing at that is senseless.
The "Mens rights advocates" reffered to here are a specific subset of activist for "mens rights". These people often focus more on putting down women than trying advance men and women in unison.
That's not to say that a social progressive movement focusing on men and their plights is at odds with the modern feminist movement. Just look at the subreddit /r/menslib for information on that.
None of MRAs, TERFs, or Incels should be listed there. They don't hold beliefs about nature that can be judged as wrong. They just want things. But the author is apparently too entrenched in his political camp to see the difference between "enemy" and "wrong".
It probably comes from the fact that “Men’s rights activists” are somewhat extreme considering men have dominated every aspect of society (e.g. politics, religion, sports, etc.).
The idea of “Men’s rights” seems redundant to most people in my estimation.
[+] [-] RickS|6 years ago|reply
But why would they?
We're brutally, brutally mean to people like this.
Every time somebody dunks on a flat earther or their ilk, puts somebody down to defend the superiority of their own worldview, they've added a brick to the wall that keeps these people from feeling like they can rejoin society.
The first time they pop out of the cave, feeble amateurs in the world of normies, they slip up just a tiny bit and get their head bitten off. There is nobody there to to say "if you tried, we'd have you". For most of us, it isn't true.
It seems like few people realize that this is part of the residue we unwittingly leave on the world. That the cost of performative intellectual superiority, even if you're actually right, is the burning of rungs on their ladder back up.
Needlessly dunking on misguided people worsens a world that we ourselves are stuck with.
Be nice.
[+] [-] hackits|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epiphanitus|6 years ago|reply
There's guarantee that you will sympathize with someone, or that they will sympathize with you for that matter. But how are you going to find out how they think if you never have a conversation?
(I'm not a flat earther, I'm just tired of reading hot takes on the internet)
Edit: clarity
[+] [-] s09dfhks|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phil248|6 years ago|reply
If being nice turns out to be the best strategy for curbing this movement, then I am all for it. If screaming in their faces about it turns out to be more effective, then we have to do that.
I would love for everyone to be able to "rejoin society" but at a certain point we also have to defend society against those who reject it in harmful ways. Not every illogical cult-like community is as harmless as flat-Earthers.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
That's completely unnecessary and also often openly breaks a lot of social rules, but people will justify their terrible behavior, the majority will have their back and tell the target of the abuse that they deserve it, it's their fault and the abuse will promptly stop if they will just "stop spouting nonsense."
Only it probably won't. Caving to the demand to pretend to agree will probably be permission to continue to be awful perpetually to someone who once openly disagreed.
The most abusive people typically claim they are being scientific, only they aren't. Because actual science is founded on the idea that we can't really prove anything. We can only disprove things and our current science is all the stuff we have some degree of confidence in because it has yet to be disproven and overturned by something better.
A good example of this is Bigfoot. There are people who believe strongly that Bigfoot absolutely doesn't exist and anyone who allows for the possibility that Bigfoot might be real gets treated like an idiot and a lunatic, never mind that you cannot prove a species absolutely doesn't exist and new species get discovered all the time.
Bigfoot Anti-Believers are typically far more fanatical than Bigfoot Believers, far less rational and far more out of line with scientific principles, yet will justify their terrible treatment of Bigfoot Believers -- or even people who say "I dunno. Could be." -- with claims that anti-belief is scientific.
[+] [-] jhbadger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neom|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
- "never tell a story because it is true: tell it because it is a good story."
- Even for the men of science, mere facts were never allowed to dominate diversion.
- "the golden rule of conversation" was "to know nothing accurately."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20219628
[+] [-] hackits|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdoliner|6 years ago|reply
Edit: I should add, this article is among the most civil and charitable articles of its type. I don't mean to pick on this author in particular.
[+] [-] xvfz|6 years ago|reply
It makes life a lot more pleasant when you realize that most upsetting things you see online are just a meme symbiotic system with a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
[+] [-] brighter2morrow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lopmotr|6 years ago|reply
What is kind of strange is that even though some wrong beliefs are mocked by people who don't agree (eg flat-earth, Scientology), others are put on a kind of pedestal of respect, such as Islam and native rituals. The justification I can think of is "Let those poor savages have their special beliefs because they're weaker than us and maybe that's all they have to cling onto so we shouldn't hold them to the same high standards that we hold ourselves to." Scientologists and Christians are part of us and have no excuse for being "wrong" so we're more openly critical of them.
[+] [-] daenz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phil248|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamwong246|6 years ago|reply
and that's why I don't speak with my extended family anymore.
[+] [-] lopmotr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slowhadoken|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomkat0789|6 years ago|reply
Be sure to stop and consider: would YOU give up all your friends in search of the truth?
[+] [-] chantelles|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] david38|6 years ago|reply
Flat earth - trivial to disprove, ok Anti-vacation - not trivial, but a huge amount of work has been done to show anyone who isn’t totally shut down the glaring before/after situation of vaccines, so ok
Men’s Rights? Seriously? Is the author saying men have no rights? Some of the things that fall under the men’s rights umbrella are the draft, lack of help for homeless men vs women, biased family court, little recognition when a victim of domestic violence (interestingly the CDC recognizes that), biased prison sentences, vastly higher rates of on the job injuries, etc.
So is the author saying anything that happens to a man his own fault?
Is there a specific men’s rights subgroup the author is referring to that’s very loud and just goes around saying men never do anything bad?
This is like saying “civil rights” people are a bunch of angry people with no reason to be angry.
[+] [-] happytoexplain|6 years ago|reply
Yes, and, as usual with loud, antagonistic subgroups, they look from the outside like part of the larger group's definition. But that's not an excuse - I wish people like the author would be more generous when talking about the larger groups. Men's rights are particularly affected by this, because it's a topic with both a lot of legitimate grievances and illegitimate hatred among its ranks.
[+] [-] baron816|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdietrich|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lopmotr|6 years ago|reply
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/weddings/75107725/
[+] [-] whenchamenia|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weddpros|6 years ago|reply
You have the right to say anything that's wrong, and nobody can say it's wrong because that would be discriminatory, but if you say something that's right, nobody should say it's right because it would be binary thinking and discriminating? yet you can say it's wrong, because it's hurting your feelings.
Let's try to abolish logic! It will surely lead to immense happiness.
We're at the tipping point where Idiocracy becomes real (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/)
[+] [-] bobharris|6 years ago|reply
Things get culty. But what community doesn’t look inclusive and strange to an outsider? Sports? Reps/Dems? Any system not your own?
I think its a lovely article. Spurs up alot of thoughts. Especially when being wrong is considered so bad in the US.
[+] [-] gorzynsk|6 years ago|reply
After kinds lose their natural curiosity and gain political views it's nearly impossible to convince them to something different than they believe.
[+] [-] kromem|6 years ago|reply
I don't necessarily mean to agree that the Earth is flat.
But maybe if you think that we don't know all the answers and finding out things we don't know is fun, you could find common ground even with flat-earthers.
Probably 99% of humanity has one element of common ground: we all want to be happy.
So start from there and work outwards. How does believing the Earth is flat make them happier? As you discover the answer to that (one of which is certainly community as the OP points out), maybe there's other shared common ground.
This could apply to almost anything. Even racists want to be happy. They think that they'll be more happy by holding people different from themselves back, but likely part of this is they hold a relative sense of success (are they better off than their neighbors) than an absolute sense (are they better off than they could be). Maybe compare those two pictures of success, and show that even if someone different from them gets successful by getting a good education and curing cancer, they will directly benefit by not needing to worry about cancer.
And connection matters a lot too. Pretty much every instance I've seen of racists dropping their racism was a direct result of direct interactions with people they demonized that they realized they had more in common with than they'd believed (and in some cases more than their racist buddies).
To me the saddest part of the movie was the cross cuts between the science meetup and the flat-earth meetup. Those two groups would actually have got along pretty well, if they focused on shared passion for the unknown and not their differences.
Besides - with everything we are learning about how consensus across entangled observers may be deterministic of the resulting reality (quantum Darwinism, which is supported by recent experiments but not yet proven), perhaps flat-earthers, by abandoning recognition of a shared consensus of the rest of the world, have in fact created a mostly overlapping Venn-diagram sort of pocket reality where the Earth being flat is as real as the notion it is not for the rest of us. And if we adopt that belief we can enter into that reality, and if they adopt the scientific method's application to their premise they'd necessitate returning to ours (perhaps the scientific method is exactly that - a process to evaluate disparate realities and converge to a norm).
In fact, maybe that's what cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias really are -- a desire to stabilize our version of reality by way of consensus. Almost like a psychological gravity both of an equal but unobservable entanglement.
So it stands to reason the only way to get a fringe reality to reconnect with the rest of the herd is to start from consensus and work to re-entangle the detached observations from there.
[+] [-] UnFleshedOne|6 years ago|reply
Here is a good video on quantum misconceptions [1]. Just ignore the part about the boxes. "Nobody understands the Alice and Bob analogy" (Richard Feynman)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7v5NtV8v6I
[+] [-] arisAlexis|6 years ago|reply
There is nothing inherent in flat earthers, most communities outside of academia (and sometimes inside it) that is not about the feeling of belonging somewhere. It is stronger than truth and facts. Always.
[+] [-] haberman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] draw_down|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] danharaj|6 years ago|reply
They are different. For a different reason. Flat earthers don't hurt people by having a very wrong belief. TERFs want to deny transgender people their basic human rights and largely succeeded for a great long time. That's injustice.
[+] [-] blackflame7000|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziddoap|6 years ago|reply
I think this hits the nail on the head, completely.
I think a large part of it, for me at least, was that school taught me that wrong is bad. Not knowing an answer is bad. Failure. It took many years after school to correct that belief - and I'm much happier for it.
Being wrong is great, in a way. Of course I'd like to be right about everything all the time but I know that's not possible. Being wrong lets me know that I have an opportunity to learn what is right.
[+] [-] daenz|6 years ago|reply
This says more about you though (in a good way). To many people who lack that kind of intellectual maturity, there is something wrong with being wrong. It's the saw someone can use to cut the rungs off of your ladder as you climb the social hierarchy. Someone can always rub your mistakes in your face, and groups of people will view you as less capable because of it. Look at politics...it's a big reason why politicians are so vague; being wrong is a nail in your coffin. Many politicians are not unintelligent people, but they know how being wrong impacts the public's perception of your competency.
[+] [-] clairity|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diminoten|6 years ago|reply
Acts of "proving" oneself to the community gain a person favor, which ends up being the stuff that effects us "normies", rather than their mere existence.
[+] [-] Maximus9000|6 years ago|reply
It seems quite odd that he lumps "Mens rights advocates" in there. Are they crazy?
[+] [-] daenz|6 years ago|reply
Her TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WMuzhQXJoY
[+] [-] phil248|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slowhadoken|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herbstein|6 years ago|reply
That's not to say that a social progressive movement focusing on men and their plights is at odds with the modern feminist movement. Just look at the subreddit /r/menslib for information on that.
[+] [-] lopmotr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandonfro|6 years ago|reply
The idea of “Men’s rights” seems redundant to most people in my estimation.