
The Earth is Flat - ibobev
https://bartoszmilewski.com/2018/01/11/the-earth-is-flat/
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machiaweliczny
Under the article you can read most ironical comment I've ever read.

> This article is not only an uneducated embarrassment to modern scientific
> progress, but also a dangerous attempt to spread misinformation by somebody
> who is simply too lazy and/or incapable to understand and accept the
> scientific and mathematical facts of the matter. The only real achievement
> here is that you managed to write so much content without really saying
> anything of value.

> To summarize: You, sir, are an idiot, as is any person who unironically
> believes in any flat earth theory. Educate yourself, and stop spreading lies
> in an attempt to feel important. You’re not.

> Feel free to reply to this comment and try to deflect or argue, or maybe
> even take the “Thanks so much for your feedback!” approach so that you can
> feel like the good guy in the situation. In the end, though, the simple fact
> is that you are wrong, and that’s all there is to it.

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paulddraper
> What I’m arguing is that science is not a property of the Universe, but
> rather a construct of our limited brains.

By _definition,_ it is a human construct: "the intellectual and practical
activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of
the physical and natural world through observation and experiment"

Was this ever up for debate?

The real point being made is that the Universe might not be governed by
finite, universal, consistent, "knowable" laws.

This is a point that has been advanced by several physicists. (My first memory
was a book by Hawking.)

If it's not, science won't be able to know everything. But let's try anyway,
because it's the best we can do.

~~~
n4r9
This idea of model-dependent realism [0] strikes me as a very mature approach
to epistemology, which I was very glad to discover a few years ago.

As to what extent science is a human construct: personally I'm with you but I
think many would disagree. I feel like Tegmark's ideas about the universe
stand in contrast to the idea that science and maths is inherently
anthropocentric.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-
dependent_realism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism)

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klez
Here's a translation of the Saggiatore at the beginning, for those who are
curious and don't trust machine translation.

> Philosophy is written in this huge book that is always opened in front of us
> (which I call the Universe), but you can't understand it if first you don't
> learn the language and characters in which it is written. It is written in
> the language of mathematics, its characters are triangles, circles and other
> geometric figures, without which it's impossible to understand a single
> word; without them all you can do is wander around an obscure labyrinth.

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nyrulez
I'm confused by this article. I agree with the author that the flat earth
coordinate model as advocated by him can converge with the spherical model if
we allow it to account for changes as we move away from the poles.

But I think he misses the point why people hate or discount the flat earthers.
I don't think they are advocating for a practical model that works in
approximation. Their illustrations literally seem to portray the earth as a
flat pan. For our 3D perception that is not true. It's nothing to do with how
we measure distances on the ground. That's the image or belief everyone is
fighting against, not against a particular coordinate system.

The phrase flat earth is misrepresented in his article when compared to
popular parlance ([https://video-
images.vice.com/articles/596717d19d542017b4db7...](https://video-
images.vice.com/articles/596717d19d542017b4db7c15/lede/1499928541955-flatearth-1.jpeg)).
So we aren't even talking about the same thing.

~~~
snowwrestler
Pretty sure he is just using flat Earth as a convenient example for his main
point about scientific theories, not actually trying to explore what today's
flat Earthers think. Here's a hint, from the article:

> Unlike present-day flat-earthers, who are not scientifically sophisticated,
> they would actually put some effort to refine their calculations to account
> for the “anomalies.”

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AElsinore77
A great read! A sharp commentary on conflating our models of reality with
reality itself. So many of our current debates are simply dialogues over which
model of the world is most accurate, but we have a tendency to identify our
ego with our pet models, which can lead to righteous certainty that we are
right and our model is in fact reality itself -- which brings all
conversations to an impasse. Reminds me of this quote I read in another HN
post recently: "Stanford business school’s motto is “change lives, change
organizations, change the world” — though they rarely seem to know what or
how. Or what the role of chance and circumstance is. But if the goal is to
change something, they must have the ability to determine the future, mustn’t
they?" (source: [https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/western-elite-
chi...](https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/western-elite-chinese-
perspective/))

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mesozoic
His point is that earth is flat if your perception is in a spherical
coordinate system ... ok. The crazy youtube conspiracy theorists though
certainly aren't claiming that or even have a sophisticated enough
understanding of 3 dimensional geometry to begin to grok it.

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woodandsteel
The author is assuming a radical mind-body dualism in which human minds
construct an idea of reality, but never actually contact it.

This is an idea from Western philosophy whose most famous advocate was
Descartes. However, it has some deep philosophical contradictions, as anyone
who has taken intro philosophy can tell you.

In the last century and a half, a long line of leading Western philosophers,
including Wittgenstein, Strawson, the pragmatists James, Dewey, and Pierce,
Whitehead, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida, have rejected
radical mind-body dualism.

And let me add that modern scientists generally assume something like
pragmatism, which not a surprise given that two of the founders of pragmatism,
namely James and Pierce, were professional scientists, and Dewey took modern
sciences as one of his models for knowledge.

~~~
woodandsteel
Speaking of the problems with Cartesian dualism, here's a marvelous article by
Anthony Gottleib about a Bohemian princess whose critique was so persuasive
that Descartes himself admitted the theory is wrong.

[https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/states-mind/ghost-and-
princ...](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/states-mind/ghost-and-princess)

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n4r9
Isaacs Asimov touches on similar themes in his essay The Relativity of Wrong:
[http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm](http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm)

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bornonline1
Public education at its best.

