Tag Archives: flat earth

Science and stupidity

If you haven’t been paying attention to the discoveries of the James Webb telescope, you are missing out on an opportunity to really understand what Science is all about. Scientists start with a hypothesis then they look for reasons for that hypothesis to be wrong. That’s happening right now.

“…results from the James Webb Space Telescope have hinted at galaxies so early and so massive that they are in tension with our understanding of the formation of structure in the universe. Various explanations have been proposed that may alleviate this tension. But now a new study from the Cosmic Dawn Center suggests an effect which has never before been studied at such early epochs, indicating that the galaxies may be even more massive.” (Source)

These ‘too massive’ galaxies do not jive with current hypothesis, and they challenge what scientists think they know about the origins of the universe. These discoveries are forcing our greatest scientific minds to question their own research and beliefs.

Meanwhile, we still have people believing that the world is flat and that for some unknown reason NASA is nothing more than an instrument of the government used to keep us in the dark about our flat world… As if there is some mastermind ploy to keep us ‘in the dark’ because [input ridiculous theory here].

Oh, and as for these ‘look at the horizon, it’s flat just like the earth’ believers? Any time a scientist course corrects and changes their hypothesis, or admits that they have new insights and information, is proof that they don’t know what they are talking about. This process of learning more and changing trajectories isn’t seen as an incredibly brilliant approach to new discoveries. Instead it’s seen as a weakness in thinking. But they don’t see the weaknesses of their own ideas, and the inadequacies that their ‘evidence’.

But this isn’t just about flat-earthers. It’s about unscientific and conspiracy thinking that seems to be growing. Scepticism in science is being confused with scepticism of scientific thinking. Terms like ‘sheeple’ are used to describe people who believe in science, in NASA, and in things like research at CERN. With CERN there is even a conspiracy theory that it is the cause of the Mandela Effect. The basis for this? Nothing.

It’s sad that there is such an anti-intellectual movement happening right now. It seems that people have access to as much misinformation as they do information, and for a small but every growing number of people the misinformation, the un-scientific ‘evidence’ is more compelling than what our best and brightest scientists think… And somehow a guy making videos based on conjecture and stupidity in his basement gets to have equal or more airtime than the brightest minds on our globe, who are making amazing new discoveries about the universe.

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?

In Search of a Flat Earth - QAnon-Part 2

Understanding QAnon

Here is an excellent video that helps us understand the lure and draw of QAnon, and it is better than any other video that I’ve seen. I’ve set the second video below up to play starting at 37:50, or Part 2 of the video.

The video is wrongly titled ‘In Search of a Flat Earth‘. The flat earth conspiracy is really just a metaphor for the bigger point about how bad ideas spread. If you want to see fantastic proof that the earth is round, you just need to go to 5:46 of this video, and watch until 12:48.

The 7 minutes of Part 1 you need to see! 

This 7 minutes is all you need to debunk Flat Earthers, then you can go on to the better part of the video, shared below. From the 37:50 point of the video, the really interesting discussion about QAnon begins:

This 30 Minutes at the end of the video is actually about QAnon

I’ll let the last 1/2 hour of this video speak for itself, other than to say that QAnon is not some little cult of no concern, it is a distributed, disruptive network of people spreading bad and dangerous ideas.