I don’t really think significant numbers are going to start doubting the Earth’s shape. What worries me is how, in this bewildering internet age, every fact, however apparently undeniable, has the potential to become a subject for debate. The canniest thing Mark Sargent said in his interview was “Don’t take my word for it – I could be a mental patient recently released from an institution.”
Slightly ranty corollary :
One of the really irritating things about communication en masse via social media is that at least one person will, either legitimately or otherwise, misinterpret something fundamental on a far more frequent basis than old-fashioned real life communications [also, you will encounter perfectly sensible people who have got just one or two damn fool ideas firmly stuck in their heads]. I think it's a numerical effect : everyone makes mistakes. So if thousands of people are reading your posts, a small fraction of them are bound to misunderstand.
Of course the benefit of this is that sometimes you get completely new perspectives on issues you thought were obvious. The downside is you also encounter a selection filter where you more often encounter people who are both so convinced of their idea that they have to post it, despite having made a grievous error. It's not that they're stupid* (wouldn't like to even try estimating how many times I've done this), it's just a tail end of the Gaussian effect.
* Or rather, it's in addition to the stupid people, of which there are many.
Anyway, to return to the original article :
How admirably open-minded of him! But what he’s implying is: so could anyone. You can’t take anybody’s word for anything. The discerning thinker disbelieves everything and then makes up his or her own mind on the basis of looking out to sea. It’s a clever line for him to take, because the Earth being round is a classic example of an issue where, unless you’re an astronaut, you sort of do have to take somebody’s word for it.
The recent explosion of weirdly unfocused scepticism is, I suppose, a natural response to this nasty internet-contaminated era. Accusations of fake news abound and are hugely worsened by, for example, Donald Drumpf’s delusional mixture of lying and denial, and his determination to discredit all the most reliable news sources. Recent revelations that thousands of the accounts tweeting enthusiastically about Brexit were probably malign Russian cyborgs further undermines the credibility of anything but the evidence of our own eyes.
Unfortunately, this boundless doubting could take us right back to the stone age – and not in a time machine we’ve invented. The accumulation and advance of human learning, and therefore of civilisation, relies on things being written down and subsequently believed. It’s built on trust.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/19/the-earth-may-not-be-flat-but-it-is-possibly-doomed-fake-news
well as Einstein said:
ReplyDelete"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
The real trouble with an article like this is that it requires a whole symposium of clarifications and qualifications just to land at any shared frame of context so that the discussion can begin.
ReplyDeleteSome people are ignorant or stupid and propagate misinformation, some are malicious and propagate disinformation, and some are complacent and say, just ignore them - they’ll go away. All three are equally dangerous. I oppose the flat earthers and conspiracists because they are a virulent new form of fundamentalism that is perniciously anti-science, and has the potential to replace knowledge based on experience and observation with belief based on fear and loathing.
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