Tag Archives: evidence

Mental gymnastics

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I know it’s a very small percentage of people in the world that think the world is flat, but this group fascinates me. You’ve got to be a special kind of stupid to live in 2026 and think that every scientist and millions of others are all conspiring to fool you. The mental gymnastics needed to ignore blatant evidence and then double down on thinly veiled lies and poorly contrived talking points has to far exceed the effort to actually look at the obvious evidence. How much must it hurt to admit you are wrong to continually have to fight logic, facts, and data that contradict your beliefs?

Meanwhile, the rest of the world can marvel at Artemis II, travelling to the moon and back , and sharing incredible photos of this pale blue marble that we all live on. There is so much we still don’t know about the universe we live in, mysteries still to be solved… and here is a group of people who not only fight science with oblivious imagination, they hide from the enjoyment of seeing our globe from angles we have not enjoyed in decades, at resolutions we could not have previously imagined.

Maybe Artemis II will be the thing that has flat eathers ‘come around’ to the global reality… but stupidity defies logic, and I’m afraid the mental gymnastics will continue to work against people dedicated to sharing their ignorance in a loud, proud, uninformed, and uneducated way.


Not even wrong

“Not even wrong” is a phrase often used to describe pseudoscience or bad science. It describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but uses faulty reasoning or speculative premises, which can be neither affirmed nor denied and thus cannot be discussed rigorously and scientifically… The phrase is generally attributed to the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was known for his colorful objections to incorrect or careless thinking. (Wikipedia)

I love this term. A great example of where this applies is to flat earthers.

Another is deniers of the moon landing.

These ‘believers’ have to deny volumes of evidence. They have to believe that so many people are conspiring to lie, across political party lines, and across international borders… with the sole purpose of keeping a massive secret that doesn’t benefit anyone to keep.

What surprises me is the willingness of bright people to engage in debate with these pseudoscientists and crackpots. The reality is that these are such bad ideas that they do not deserve to be put on equal footing with good ideas.

Why argue with someone who is so intellectually dishonest that they aren’t even wrong?

Compliance and conspiracy

The biggest problem with most conspiracy theories is that they require way too much compliance from too many people to be true. Secrets are hard to keep. Big secrets are impossible. The idea that hundreds or thousands of people are somehow in on the conspiracy and yet it still isn’t known to the vast majority of people is unlikely.

Want to keep a secret? Tell no one. Not a single person. Because if you yourself can’t keep that secret, how will others keep it? Why would others keep it? How many spouses, best friends, and drinking buddies would find out?

The world is flat. Really? Every commercial pilot would need to be keeping that secret, and somehow be compliant in hiding impossible travel times in some far-fetched scheme that would also include countless passengers on certain flights.

The vaccine has a microchip in it that tracks your movement or controls your mind. Really? Do you really believe that technology has advanced so far that these things are possible at a microscopic level? How many people would know about this? Who manufactures these devices? How many vaccine production companies faculties, with how many employees wound have to be compliant? Impossible science with impossible amounts of people knowing and keeping it a secret.

The numbers just don’t add up. There is no such thing as a secret that 100 people know and keep. Move into thousands of people knowing and it’s simply impossible to remain a secret. In this day and age, there would be concrete evidence being shared by people. Contracts, videos, photographs, and stories backed by hard evidence.

Imagine if the thousands of people who designed and built the James Webb Space Telescope all knew the earth was flat, why would they build something that looked at round objects all over the galaxy that undermine their understanding of what the world looks like? Would not a single one of them feel like they were hypocrites? Not a single one of them would speak out?

You can’t have so many people involved and keep a secret. Human beings are incapable of this. And yet most conspiracy theories demand this level of compliance for information to stay secret, and for the theory to be more than a theory and actually exist.

Flat earth and flight times

I’ve already shared this clip where you,

“just need to go to 5:46 of this video, and watch until 12:48.

https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44?t=346

This 7 minutes is all you need to debunk Flat Earthers.”

But forget about the science for a moment, forget about the videos from space, and forget about what the shadow of the earth looks like on the moon.

What gets me is how flat earthers think time zones and plane travel work? We have decades of flight traffic data, and every day flights take off and land in predictable times between set locations. If the world were flat there would be some split in between 2 locations that would be impossible. Let’s say the split is somewhere between Hawaii and Japan. Take the globe and flatten it out with Hawaii on the Far West and Japan on the Far East. Then how can the flight between these two places be only 8.5 hours? Meanwhile, going the other way, it takes over 11 hours from Hawaii to Newfoundland… how could a plane go from one side of the flat earth to the other side so quickly?

No matter where you decide to draw the lines for a flat earth, we have flights travelling daily that would have to beat all airspeed records to accomplish landing on time, if they couldn’t go around the earth and instead had to fly the opposite way to avoid the edge. Put a flat earther on one of those flights, and that should defy any proof they think they might have. That should be the only evidence needed. Yet I guess it’s not enough.

That’s the weird thing about conspiracy theories like this… They don’t stand up to any evidence and yet people stick to them. To anyone who seriously and vehemently stands by the idea that the world is flat, do me a favour: draw the lines in the sand. Tell me where the edge is that separates east from west, then tell me how the flights between a city on the east and a city on the west can be achieved so quickly?