
Why Bad Ideas Refuse to Die - pcrh
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/28/why-bad-ideas-refuse-die
======
11thEarlOfMar
On the one hand, no matter how obscure one's beliefs are, the Internet enables
us to find others who believe the same thing.

On the other hand, no matter how obscure an illness may be, the Internet
enables us to find others who have the illness and may be able to provide
help.

Among the billions of us connected and searching and sharing, the I surmise
that the chances that there will be others who are also searching for the same
thing are pretty close to 100%.

------
rdtsc
> Earth is really flat.

In a perverse way I like the flat earth thing. It is nice quick proxy for what
a particular person believes and a testament to their background and
intelligence level. In other words it quickly tells something about them.

Sometimes I wonder if flat earth is a ploy by a group of con men to spread the
idea and see who believes them which, then quickly identifies those as good
potential "marks" for scamming.

One can extend this to other beliefs -- Earth is only 4000 years old. There
are lot of those in this country. And with Mitt Romney we almost had a
President with power to launch nuclear weapons who belies some pretty wacky
stuff.

It doesn't have to be religious -- anti-vax people in the same category.

~~~
3princip
I am not a "flat earther", just setting context to avoid confusion.

There are everyday observations which will reinforce the fact that the Earth
is not flat. Tides? Movement of Sun/Moon/Planets/Stars across the sky?
Satellites? Pictures from space? That's just off the top of my head, probably
hundreds more.

But, and just to play devils advocate, let's say the pictures may be fake and
there is an elaborate conspiracy. Have I done any experiment myself to prove
the Earth is round? There are some very simple intuitive ones mentioned
here[1]. The answer is no. So while it is clear from the overwhelming body
evidence that it is not flat, I have accepted almost all of that evidence
without verifying it myself in any experimental way. And this is one of the
simplest topics one can examine.

I haven't tracked the movement of stars across the sky, I have not been to
space, I have not measured shadows or the curvature of the earth. I've been in
a plane, and it does appear to be curved, so there is that.

Obviously, I cannot possibly question everything, it would be futile and
exhaustive and get me nowhere. But I do believe we do not question enough the
truths we take for granted because they have been presented to as truth.

And while some topics are barmy, flat-earth being one, there may be others
with much shakier body of evidence to back it up, which are today presented
and taught as truth. Also, I find myself more and more intrigued by a good
conspiracy, and enjoy the company of conspiracy theorists, because it makes me
think and re-examine why I take the presented truth for granted.

[1] [http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26427/what-is-
the...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26427/what-is-the-simplest-
way-to-prove-the-earth-is-round)

~~~
Artlav
Hm, aren't there 2 directly visible pieces of evidence (at least for anyone
who travels)?

One is talking to someone on the other side of the planet, where the time
would be different (and so day or night instead of night or day).

The other - that the stars look quite different when you go to another
latitude.

It may not be possible to question and personally re-check everything, but if
you make that a habit, you'll notice a pattern of which experts are usually
right and in which field (besides getting a good idea of how the world runs).

From there, you can bridge the gaps in your experience with carefully placed
bits of trust.

~~~
titanomachy
The sun setting at different times depending on longitude seems to be a pretty
obvious hole in the theory. I'm curious how the flat earthers justify that,
although not curious enough to actually research it.

You don't even need to go around the world... just call an East-coast friend
from the West coast a couple of hours before sunset... "hey is it night
there?" "yep" "OK, the world must be round then!"

~~~
3princip
Sure. I'm not arguing for flat-earth, but I've never called someone to check
if the sun has set for the purpose of satisfying my curiosity about the shape
of the Earth. It is, however, implied in the conversations we have every day
(coworkers finishing work at different times because of timezones) so there is
no need to ask some things I guess.

My point was more that we take a lot for granted, some things obvious, some
maybe less so, and it is not always silly to question even the simplest of
assumptions.

~~~
ommunist
Why not? The Earth is flat for a four-dimensional being.

~~~
mikhailfranco
We have flatness and straightness. The 4D beings would have 3-flatness,
2-flatness and straightness.

------
andres_kytt
Dawkins and his memes should have been worthy of mention as well as Hawking
with his model-based realism. The flat-earth folks just have a different model
of how the universe works. It has sufficient predictive power for their
purposes and, as a meme, apparently performs a function or it would have been
eradicated long time ago by evolutionary pressure. That's probably true for
many of the zombies. They have managed to carve out an evolutionary niche that
allows them to survive for centuries. Which is rather impressive.

------
ommunist
The short answer - because they are memes, and memes inhabit brains. Only when
physical brain running the specific idea is dead, only then spreading of the
idea is stopped. The bad thing, meme can be reimprinted into brain by reading
a book. Think of books as cyst containers for memes. So you have to eradicate
wrong books too if you want to stop bad ideas spreading. The question stays -
is it worth it? Ah, yes, 21st century... You have to kill all webpages with
bad ideas, including search engine caches.

------
Turing_Machine
Given that the _Guardian_ still pushes Marxism: Mote. Beam.

~~~
ommunist
Marxism is a good meme, useful for survival of the society. Just have a brief
look at China.

~~~
Turing_Machine
China hasn't been Marxist in decades. Authoritarian, yes, but not Marxist.
Note that they didn't become a significant international player until _after_
they scrapped the Maoist stuff. Before that they were having famines. Just as
Venezuela is now having a famine.

And yes, I'm aware that on some level China still describes itself as Marxist,
just as the United States still describes itself as a democratic federal
republic.

------
jerf
This seems to draw a few too many conclusions from what is probably a movement
primarily populated or at least driven by people who are mentally ill,
probably mostly paranoid schizophrenia. There's several major such memesets,
including the "hollow Earth" set, the "aliens are in control of the
government" sets (plural, there are multiple massively contradictory such
sets), and any number of sets that have attracted no other adherents but are
equally epistemologically closed, such as the Time Cube.

We often celebrate Occam's Razor, and it is certainly a valuable heuristic,
but one of the appealing things about science is how _deep_ it goes and how
complicated it can be while still producing correct predictions. For instance,
it is difficult to imagine how the science of genetics could possibly be
completely false _and yet_ for it to continue producing the results it does. I
think a lot of this stems from a mindset that simply can not engage with
complexity and sees the world fundamentally from a simplistic perspective, and
from that point of view, anything goes. I think a lot of people here will know
what I mean by the idea that you can explain anything with "God did it" or
"God wills it". But that's not really a "religion problem", it's actually a
cognitive problem that when combined with religion produces that. It can
easily be combined with other things as well to produce an epistemologically
closed system in which ultimately everything boils down to "That is true
because I momentarily rationalized it to be that way as a simple answer to
maintain my pre-existing belief."

You can't disprove that the Earth is flat to somebody by taking them up in a
spaceship if they truly believe they are "really" on the ground and everything
outside is just a Hollywood movie beamed on to the windws, and they simply
don't know, understand, or even _care_ what the acceleration meant. You can't
even prove anything by contradiction if somebody refuses to hold more than one
thing in their head at a time. There's "cognitive dissonance" and then there's
not even being able to hold multiple ideas in their head at once in the first
place.

This isn't new, it isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and if there's an
interesting story here I don't even think it's about how it's becoming more
popular (at the very least I'd need to see some stats), but about how the
Internet allows such people to find each other.

But to the article's credit, it at least avoids the usual trap most articles
of this ilk fall into and doesn't contain a "bad idea that deserves to die" in
its list that is probably true. I could quibble with "the efficient market
hypothesis caused the market crash"; I'd say it's a lot more along the lines
of "A economic modeling paradigm that happens to contain the idea of the
efficient market hypothesis caused the economic crash (and for that matter the
utterly failed subsequent recovery)", where the primary problems with the
model profoundly probably lie elsewhere, but it's at least still in the
neighborhood of "a bad idea that deserves to die".

