Flat Earth: A Measured Response
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it as an entertaining and thoughtful look at flat earthers that frames the belief as a distrust of failing institutions.
What it is
hbomberguy investigates the modern flat earth movement and why people come to believe it. The video treats the community with a measured, humorous tone and looks at the social causes behind the belief.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2019 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec pdkl95 · 2020-02 · on “If your cipher were secure, this image wouldn't have repeating patterns (2015)”
I strongly recommend watching hbomberguy's video about flat earthers, "Flat Earth: A Measured Response" [this video] The short summary is that flat earthers are probably seen as a rejection of established institutions (like capitalism/neoliberalism) that the (correctly) see as a major source of the problems in their life. Unfortunately, lacking the social/political background required to actually understand these problem, they work with what they can understand. "The government/etc has been consistently lying to us for decades while our jobs were shipped overseas and our quality of life keeps sliding lower and lower. If they are consistent liars, why should I believe anything they've said?"
Recommends pdkl95 · 2019-02 · on “Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway”
> A flat earth makes sense if you only spent 5 minutes thinking about it and have no background in or exposure to basic science. Not that I particularly want to jump to the defense of people that believe in a flat earth, but they are not people that "only spent 5 minutes thinking about it". A lot of time has been spent trying to back up their beliefs and to form a coherent theory. They're wrong , of course, for many reasons, but it's incorrect and dismissive to call them intellectually lazy. The core of flat earth and similar beliefs is often a legitimate reaction against the large established systems in society that, from their perspective, appear to be failing in obvious ways while lying t
Recommends dejawu · 2019-07 · on “How YouTube converted people to flat Earth”
HBomberguy's "Flat Earth: A Measured Response" [0] is also an interesting look into the present-day flat earth "community". [0] [this video]
Recommends smcl · 2024-03 · on “Latam Airlines SYD to AKL flight: 50 people treated after mid-air incident”
Yeah I've known someone (a family, actually) who did the same. In case you want a bit of light entertainment, the video where I learned about this is here - don't worry it's debunking flat earth, not in favour it: [this video]
Cites dijksterhuis · 2024-11 · on “Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science”
Scientist 1: If we put a sugar cube into water whose temperature is exactly 74.7373 degrees centigrade, the water will likely turn pink. here is our evidence for this. Scientist 2: we tried this and found that if the water is cooling that it doesn’t work, it has to remain at a constant temperature. Scientist 3: we tried it with refined and unrefined sugar. unrefined sugar did not work. scientist 1: we took another look - it seems there was some weird additive in the refined sugar, when this additive added to water at 74.7373 degrees centigrade the water turns pink. that’s a very silly and stupid example of “challenging” other scientist’s work. you precisely explain what you tried and how it