As with many things, the underlying problem creating conspiracy theorists is the mediocre high school dropouts need to feel superior to others in a world that values you for your skills and education. American Psychological Association: "The researchers found that overall, people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment and a need to feel like the community they identify with is superior to others."

If you can't develop a sense of pride by working hard to create actual merit, why not just fake it by grouping together with a bunch of other flunkies to be like "actually, we're all better than you, because you're all just sheep who believe what the government tells you!"

Bonus points if you combine this line of thinking with some other forms of discrimination, but even traditionally marginalized groups can fall prey to this trap. I'm not sure how to solve it, perhaps a stronger social safety net would prevent people from losing their grip on reality just to feel safe from perceived threats. Then again to quite a few people "black people" and "women" and "people from other countries" and "trans people" are threats so perhaps nothing we do can make them feel safe enough to stop being annoying online

I love how UFOs are more grounded in reality than flat Earth. Lol

Spheroids are definitively spherical, otherwise they wouldn't call them that.

Close enough

My favorite type of sphere.

Technically it's a shape defined by the EGM96 coefficients.

I remember reading this article on how this group of flat earthers had pooled together to buy this incredibly expensive device, that had been laser calibrated. I think I recall being some sort of gyroscope that, if the planet was truly a sphere, would record on its inclination the degrees it would shift in order to maintain perfectly balance . The group had also did the math and they had reached a value that would be expected to be measured if the Earth was truly a sphere but it was immediatly rendered impossible because the device would never record such deviation as the Earth was flat.

Can you guess where this is going?

The device measured the exact figure the group had calculated. With no margin of error. And repeating the experiment only returned the exact same result. They had, by their own standard, reached proof the Earth was not flat.

Their conclusion?

The device had been sabotaged.

Sometimes I wonder why this flat earth stuff refuses to go away

Because for these people it is more about inflating their own ego. They know what they believe is wrong, but they like to think they are better by going against the grain. It is about having the notion of "I know something that you don't" which they imply to others by pushing the flat earth nonsense.

I think it's genuinely just people trying to make money at the top. They don't believe a word they say, but they keep making money from idiots so they keep doing it.

Interestingly, most of people just believe in spherical Earth without ever checking anything, because society says so.

This is not an argument in favor of flat earth, but an argument that people around you can make you firmly believe absolutely anything without you ever bothering to check it by yourself.

The whole thing about flat earthers is that they come up with more and more elaborate explanations to fit each individual observation, when Occam's razor says that the theory that explains them all should probably be the correct one.

Like, they'll argue about refraction of light due to hot air being the cause for the disappearance of ships past the horizon, and then their explanation for how time zones work is something else entirely, and why we have seasons, and why planes take the routes they do, and all this other nonsense. They all need separate, complicated explanations, and they willingly accept them and vehemently deny the simplest theory that ties everything together.

The actual explanation for this behaviour is flat earthers are a friend group, doubly so for the people who pushed "globeheads" out of their life. So to change their view is to socially isolate themselves