Flat Earthism
Flat Earthism, what is that all about? Why do people with strange beliefs bother us so much? Do they really mean it or are they joking?
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing Flat Earthism.
Speaker B:Peter, Flat Earthism, what's that all about? So we recently had an interesting celestial event so we had a lunar eclipse with a blood moon which I think Nick went down to Norfolk to see. Yeah I went down to watch it. What I got was a
Speaker C:really impressive lightning storm and no blood moon at all. Well that's impressive nonetheless
Speaker B:but astrological events like this often kick off comment and... Can you just say it again but say it, call it astronomical events. Yes, astronomical events like this often kick off comment and articles and often they mention Flat Earthism and I read one, what got me thinking about this was I read one, an interview with Brian Cox. No matter what you think about Brian Cox he is a decent physicist and something sort of stuck out with me, a particular quote was that Flat Earthism is, and this is a direct quote, idiotic at every conceivable level but indicative of a deeper problem. So what I'm interested in is, you know, I'm not a Flat Earthist and I agree with Brian Cox that it's totally bizarre, it's totally weird. What is this deeper problem and what is it why do some people hold totally ridiculous beliefs that are counter to all sensible evidence and the mainstream and yet they are very persistent and very very strong beliefs that are held by some people. Okay, nice. What's the answer to those questions? Well Flat Earthists are essentially conspiracy theorists so if you look at Flat Earth doctrine it's all about their explanation for a lot of the evidence that why the earth isn't round is about this all some sort of cover-up. It's got to be a cover-up in order for any of their doctrine to make any kind of sense so they will say things like well all the all the images of the earth are photoshopped, you know, all the image of the earth from space is photoshopped, NASA is not a space agency, it's an agency whose job it is to make people believe that the earth is round and there are NASA staff who patrol a 150 meter wall at the edge of this planet. Whose interest is it
Speaker C:alleged to be to make us all think that the earth is round? Is it the military industrial complex sort
Speaker B:of thing? So yeah and this is where it starts to really fragment. This is where it really starts to fragment because there are different core reasons for being a Flat Earthist and some of them have this sort of conspiracy that yes it's the industrial complex blah blah blah it's all in somebody's financial interest but nobody's ever able to posit a coherent explanation as to why that is more likely than the earth is in fact round and actually maybe it is just easier to have a space mission than it is to fake one. Well we're not supposed to be talking
Speaker C:about conspiracy theories but I want to stick up for at least one aspect of conspiracy theorists which is that a lot of conspiracies have turned out to be true. Such as? Well Watergate, classic example. The US president. Well that was a conspiracy not conspiracy theory. Authorizing a raid on the democrat headquarters and to try and steal the US president doing that
Speaker A:bonkers. No but I don't think we're talking about the same thing. But I think there is a
Speaker B:conspiracy and I think there are a lot more conspiracy theories than there are ones that
Speaker C:have been proven to be true. Yeah I know but the thing is that and you know and actually what about the you know let's say the innocence of the Birmingham six. Birmingham four. Oh what
Speaker A:the fuck it was it? Well there were two. Guilford four and Birmingham six I think.
Speaker C:The innocence of the Birmingham six right which again was another example where it just looked it was very implausible all of this nonsense about well they've been touching cards which had on them and blah blah blah and you know police brutality will that you know they were going to an IRA funeral they must have been guilty but they weren't. But I think this is a cul-de-sac Nick because. No but what I'm saying. It's not the same. It's not totally ridiculous to believe in conspiracies. It's not like they never happen. They do happen and sometimes it takes years to get to the bottom of them. So I just wanted to put in a good word for conspiracy theories before we all collectively go around demolishing them. Well yeah I think they have. I mean they're all not
Speaker B:they're there are conspiracy theories and there are conspiracy theories so there are some more extreme than others and yes we welcome as as as as analysts anyone who challenges you know challenges and good analysis and good decision making is all about challenging what you what the sort of current fashionable thing to believe is that's totally vital but some of them are
Speaker C: ounded I think when was it in: Speaker A:mentioned there was that your father said oh but don't worry they don't really believe it so let's get let's talk about that for a moment so good question yeah so do you think I've got I've got
Speaker B:a useful possibly useful interjection this point okay this is this is totally my off the back of an envelope in the in the in the last afternoon kind of working out but I've got a taxonomy for the different types of believers ah and I think this can be applied to anything and it depends the the the um the nouns you would choose to describe these different classes of people you might change them depending on how rude you want to be about a particular belief type but so I've got four types of believers and they can I just is it a two by two matrix it does more or less map onto a two by two and so the dimensions are um how much sort of research or introspection somebody has done yeah so lots to none um and um how much they have to gain by believing in that thing from lots to none um so you've got so you've got four classes you've got the nutters or if you're being polite they're the genuine believers so these are people who have done lots of their own research or introspection albeit possibly very biased in terms of what they are reading um you've got the sheep so they're the people who have done virtually no research but are just going along with whatever the prevalent thing is within their social group yeah you've got the jokers these guys who are the guys pretend to believe yeah trolls maybe trolls or trolls or jokers but they've done virtually no research uh and they they they stand to gain very little but they're just doing it for a bit of a joke yeah and then you've got the bastards so they've done a lot of research yeah they may not necessarily actually believe in the thing but they stand to gain those quite a lot or they they they may get lots of social credits for it or lots of money they may be the they the the big business people who uh climate change deniers for example all right okay so you're nutters sheep bastards and jokers that's
Speaker C:sort of divided up humanity there right it's yeah well these this of course that applies to i think the i think that's brilliant it's a great uh two by two matrix and um but i think that only applies to false beliefs right the problem is that there's also a true belief uh side of that where you have you also have sheep who believe true things so a lot of people who um you know believe uh in anthropogenic climate change not because they've studied the evidence but because um you know they think it's just the right thing to believe right and you know they they it's just the nice that's the nice view to have not because they you know not not because they've honestly come to that conclusion but just because that's what all their friends on facebook say you should believe and and um and so i think i the for me the key distinction is probably in this sort of the honesty with which you believe something um you know and and then it feels like there's the sort of depth like how much they actually have bothered to try and make sure their belief is true um i mean you could imagine someone who didn't really know how to research things or how to find out that things would which things were true or false just doing a bad job of doing their research being entirely honest thinking they were being scientific about it and just reading the wrong things and deciding the earth was flat like those people are out there too so i think we need a two by two by two yeah yeah i did i did toy with another dimension but i thought that would be very difficult to get across verbally yes it would be so we're not going to try now but i i think it's a great a great starting point but i think it actually um this question of why it makes us so angry that people believe stupid things even if they're not particularly threatening i mean it is infuriating right yeah when when you i i would on my top tens of things i get
Speaker B:annoyed about this is number one and and i and i think the um weird weird ass things people
Speaker A:believe in but hold on hold on nick but i mean how many flat earthists have you ever met
Speaker B:well i've met i've well i've met one or two flat earthers have you but but the people i hold people are put in the same class are creationists i've met a lot of those yeah and there are a lot of those in london are there yeah a lot of those and they hide they hide amongst the educated sensible appearing normal people you would engage with and this is why we have conventions like you don't talk about religion or politics um because they are hiding there and because they just creep out and i had i've got you know people i've known at university who i've known for years and for some reason the conversation got on to um uh religion and evolution things and it turns out they are massive drum beating creationists whoa and i was totally aghast i didn't know i didn't
Speaker A:know what to say after that i mean i would put creationists above flat earthers in terms of annoying me uh because i've never met a flat earther to my knowledge um but also it's just so bizarre that it's just and also they're not going to do any harm to anyone well yes i mean
Speaker C:absolutely whereas creationists they might that's that's that's probably the key variable to me is do they threaten me whereas you know if you if you take um i don't know sort of um isis or something now i i've got probably as many objections to their beliefs as i do to a flat earthers i mean factual objections i have quite a few factual objections with both camps but i'm not bothered about the flat earthers because at least at the moment they're not they're not trying to trying to kill me right they're not so but the this issue of uh so but but so if we take that away so there are some beliefs which imply a certain kind of action and if that action is something i just don't want to happen you know then that gives me a perfectly good prima facie reason to say i feel unduly angry about this set of beliefs you know you believe that you should um you know kill atheists well they're not directly threatening you well but they they do they would rather i mean they want the isis would basically want me to no isis are but they but oh yeah but
Speaker B:i'm saying that like people that you know the homeopathists the creationists right these people are indirectly threatening because you know you can get you know there's lots of campaigns trying homeopathy on the nhs which is direct taking funding away from treatments that you would more directly
Speaker C:believe lots of things are taking funding away from the nhs let alone yeah yeah i know it's not
Speaker B:a big one no it's not a big one but they're but in the same way that these are people are taking up bandwidth within lobbying and within politics i know but it's it's sort of i what i'm saying
Speaker C:that the outrage is uh not proportional i i my hypothesis is not proportional to the harm that i see that belief doing right okay so so now the question is whether or not uh okay so do we there's i think there's there's there's sort of two ways to think about our reaction to people with false beliefs one is a sort of it's pure tribalism you know that actually someone who has a false belief um if we get angry about it if that belief is a marker of of an opposing tribe so now so things i would throw into this camp as a kind of as a sort of to suggest that tribalism is uh you know a driver behind the reaction we have to people's professed beliefs is that some beliefs have switched sides and um i would i would proffer two examples one would be heavy industry support for heavy heavy industry 30 years ago generally left-wingers supported the existence of heavy heavy industry they supported the coal mines and workers who worked in heavy industry and that came first um today left-wingers generally are more concerned about the environment and will be opposed to heavy industry now that so they 30 years ago a left-winger would have got angry about someone who said they wanted to shut down heavy industry and close the coal mines now they get angry about people who think we should reopen the coal mines for example um the bit support for the eu uh 30 years ago that was a tory thing um in general uh you know the labour party objected to the eu because they saw it as potentially contain it you know in the service of international trade curtailing the rights of workers well that's sort of switched sides now the the anti-eu people so what's your point well my point is that it is not the content of the this is in support of the idea that our reactions to beliefs is tribalism is the fact that these beliefs seem to be able to switch sides and elicit the same sorts of reactions but from the other side right yeah
Speaker B:we do cover this in a previous podcast i think well that that may be true but what i'm saying
Speaker C:is that the the question as to why these beliefs make us angry could just be tribalism okay it could just be i see you know not to do with their content or their falsehood but to do with the it is a marker that that person is not in our gang are you sure though i mean something like
Speaker A:creationism i mean is that the kind of thing that i mean you mentioned you took you talked about it from a political uh point of view but talking about albeit political stuff where a group has sort of gone in one direction rather than another uh can you think can you give me an example of how that might happen with something like creationism or flat earthism i mean yes creationism
Speaker C:doesn't bother me it's creationism is is is not uh well i don't particularly have much of an out group there isn't like someone i really really a group of people who i really hate but you know if i was a people who step off the tube uh too early right exactly now if there was a group of people who thought that you should get on before people got off different story um uh no that's my only point really i mean only all i'm saying is that you know part of our reaction might be conditioned by tribalism okay in that um you know if you concoct a false belief you know if i said something like um uh you know the internet doesn't exist to peter i doubt he'd find it as annoying as flat earthism or you know there were there probably not millions of false beliefs that wouldn't bother you but there's something about it which which suggests that yeah there's something about their whole attitude and their whole and their whole sort of approach to how they gather information and how they analyze it that that drives you maybe but i i have i i yeah maybe maybe
Speaker B:but i i've got this drive in me i feel it's like it's a pity i feel pity for these people who have these weird beliefs because i want to help them i want to help them i want to i want to help them realize that they're wrong right um but you know i've often been accused of being dogmatic i am yes i hold my hand up yeah i am i like but i but it's out it's out of it's out of a sort of humanist kind of desire to help people open their eyes and realize that something that what there's some sort of assumption somewhere along their logic they've made a mistake or they've not found a piece of information that they really need to read um to help them out so you're coming from a good place it's almost like forgive them lord for they do not know what they
Speaker C:they're doing yes but this only works on the people who are um you know in there because they've got mistaken beliefs and not people who are in there because they and my anger my anger
Speaker B:comes my sort of frustration comes from when they are unable or unwilling to accept that
Speaker A:there's some sort of change yeah i mean i remember at university when i studied theology um i'd never really met any nutcase evangelicals until i went to university and they were not studying theology they were studying other subjects um and you know for the first six months or so that i was there i quite enjoyed having these engaging debates and so on until i realized there's no bloody point because it came to that point which you've just said which is that it's just the
Speaker B:somehow the shutters uh come down and you are yeah yeah and there's lots of nice little studies that suggest that um that you're you by our by sort of trying to put a different point of view to somebody who's got a very well entrenched belief you're actually you actually just further entrench them right you with some there's a sort of some sort of threshold somewhere um of like depth of belief that by challenging it you only make it stronger yeah i mean i think this is
Speaker A:where well sorry just with evangelical christians in particular might be the same with flat earthers
Speaker C:i'm worried about that our evangelical christian listeners will be put off by your they might well
Speaker A:and so be it you know but no but they actually quite enjoyed having their faith being challenged and you know being able to sort of feel quite virtuous about that that is something i definitely
Speaker B:admire the people who have faith they have gone on a a sort of um a tempered journey epistical journey no it's some sort of journey they've gone on a journey where they've they've explored their faith and they are willing to open open challenge because they see that as an opportunity for them to further strengthen their faith nick i know you're about to come
Speaker A:into something there but just before you do um in fact no instead of you doing that um i just wonder i mean given your matrix that you discussed i wonder if you speak to a flat earther and then you start talking about you know jfk or the royal family we all being lizards or something and they look at you like you're bonkers go what what are you talking about no of course they're not or
Speaker B:they go yeah of course you know yeah i mean yeah the the limited amount of research i could do suggests that the flat earthers are no different to any other conspiracy theorists and they are more likely than people who don't have a conspiracy who don't prescribe to a conspiracy theory are more likely to believe in other okay inverted commas weird things like esp and aliens and being an inside job an average person they are they are more they are just they're just in the same way that somebody says that jfk was killed by the cia are going to
Speaker C:believe in aliens and then they go that's that's perfectly rational i mean it makes sense i mean if you think that the government is capable of organizing massive conspiracies then there's
Speaker B:then actually you know you would but it's not it's not a lot it's not logical it's not thematically logical like that they also might believe in esp and uh you know others and most unorthodox
Speaker C:belief beliefs have a conspiracy component because there's almost always a claim that someone somewhere with an interest in doing so is covering up the evidence for that thing
Speaker B:yes but there's the there's the research that i was looking at was not because there's some thematic link between particular conspiracy theories there's if you believe if you're a conspiracy theorist who believes in one thing you are much more likely to believe in other
Speaker C:completely disconnected conspiracy i'm saying that there's there's a completely rational interpretation of that which is that you you know if if you were already convinced that the government or various other powerful people with an interest in subverting evidence are capable and willing willing to do it then you're less likely to dismiss you know but yeah yeah
Speaker B:what i'm saying if you believe in a weird thing like flat earthism you're you're you're also believe you're also more likely to believe in esp you're trying to claim and mind you're trying to
Speaker C:claim that these are independent astrology there's just me that i'm more i aren't me as kind of i believe one conspiracy completely independently i don't think that's not what
Speaker B:i'm saying at all i'm saying i'm saying that if you believe if you're if you're willing to believe in one weird thing you're more likely to believe and i'm giving you a i think you both agree with
Speaker C:each other as to why that might be which is that if yeah but you're saying that you're saying that
Speaker B:they're connected because there's some there's some power i'm saying that you can say i'm saying
Speaker C:that it's independent of that thematic thing but you i don't see how you can how you can know what is driving those people to believe these multiple things by merely observing that they correlated because those belief in all of those things has always has a component which is that someone is covering up evidence now if you think if you're prior esp doesn't have anything to do
Speaker B:with people covering up evidence just being able to read people's minds yes i know but the fact
Speaker C:that it that for example the medical establishment doesn't um you know fund esp research and the fact that you know it is considered to be no the beliefs that i've seen cited are not the fact
Speaker B:that there's anything being covered up it's just the fact that as a thing you don't know why that
Speaker A:person believes in esp i wish i hadn't asked that question anyway um look we need to a minute ago
Speaker C:you're gonna come to me about the thing that i was gonna say no which is okay i was i was gonna
Speaker A:i was gonna not actually but um but is there something you want to say yeah go on it's just
Speaker C:that if you turn this uh discussion around yeah and imagine a flat earth podcast talking about why all these deluded right wankers are going around thinking that the earth is round and then i think you can understand why it's counterproductive to try and sort of analyze them in terms of um i mean essentially peter's taxonomy if you're in any of those uh boxes you're either basically either stupid or evil right and that is i think now i'm not saying there's anything wrong with the taxonomy it's a great taxonomy but but the thing is that that is what people feel when uh when they're told that um you know what they believe is wrong they're often you know that that you're either saying i believe this thing uh honestly but i'm mistaken which is more or less saying i'm stupid or or that i believe this thing dishonestly um in which case i'm kind of evil i'm doing it for selfish reasons and i'm denying evidence yeah and and and so it does make sense that people see um cling contradictory beliefs as a threat yeah in a sense or at least a slight um and and uh yeah that's all i wanted to say is that you know that that it doesn't it's not implication free i mean you can't even though i love the idea of a completely dispassionate debate where two people uh you know have completely different evidence bases they come together they share the information they go away with compatible beliefs that has never ever happened in the history of humanity people there is always people always take an argument personally even though they shouldn't and we do our best to try and stop that happening but there's it's it actually isn't and peter's uh taxonomy does a great job of explaining why um you know if if you think somebody if you if somebody thinks that you're wrong they're imputing a bad thing on you stupid
Speaker A:or evil quite i think that's a really nice point i'd almost like to finish on that but i want to finish on something else um can you tell me any deeply committed belief or view of the world that you have personally held that you have then gone on to see is incorrect or you renounce or you change your mind so i can think of one for me which i've i for a long long time i believed in justice um and i believe myself to have quite a strong sense of of injustice or justice um and in a sense that in the end um let's just say people like this the good guy wins let's say or the you know um things along the lines of crime never pays or you know someone gets their just desserts i actually no longer believe that to be true um and although i try and behave in what i think is a good way i i think the world i know what i'm trying to say i used to think the world
Speaker B:is fair but i no longer do you realize now that it's a big chaotic mess of people trying to get
Speaker A:one over on each other yeah and there's no there's no reasoning under everything there's no
Speaker C:rationale i think you phrasers taking the black pill yeah
Speaker B:i yeah no i i i'm there it's not a nice place to be but i want to get that same reversal i had a very yeah yes i sort of i think that's kind of like the definition of growing up really isn't it and uh yeah no it'd be nice to live in a childlike world where there is some sort of higher order to things and everything will be okay eventually and right it's it's all for
Speaker C:the best it's all for the best and they're calm down you guys everything's gonna be okay
Speaker B:yeah so i think my mind is a mind is on sort of meta level to the whole conversation here that i used to think that you could win people over and you could you could convince them to do the right thing or to do to do the sort of rational thing um through exposing and describing and explaining and demonstrating evidence to them that um that would change their mind but now you know mid-20s i realized that there are some people you can't do in your mid-20s no i said when i was in my mid-20s i realized this is not possible and actually you're just arguing a brick
Speaker C:wall at some point there are none so blind but that doesn't sound to me peter's belief that you can reason people uh into a different position it doesn't sound like a fundamental deeply held belief i think that is yeah no i know that answers my question i was i mean i was brought
Speaker B:up my my my parents are both doctors and uh we're all kind of educated and very communicative family we talk you know we always grew up talking and exploring the world together right and so i was brought up to you know with an expectation that yeah that's the context yeah through sort of conversation you could describe and you could educate people and you could bring them around to sort of finding the truth but then but then you met nick then i grew up and i met loads of other adults who believed in flat eartherism and creationism right and then i thought there's nothing i could
Speaker C:do for these people yeah yeah yeah nick well when i was um i guess about 11 or 12 i believed in uh astrology because my mum was really into astrology and um some of her friends were into astrology and uh and you know i didn't in any way question whether astrology was true and in fact my mum told me about various french uh a french guy who'd done some studies and discovered that it was broadly borne out by uh frequency studies into birth time of year you know your birthday and what kind of profession you went into and so on and i didn't um question any of that at all and then uh when i was about um 12 or 13 uh a program called james i think it was james randy's world of the unexplained or something came on tv and it was um but james randy is a famous american skeptic and took all of these pseudo-scientific beliefs and subjected them to various kinds of uh well a combination of scientific testing and and uh justified ridicule so i had a there was a short term effect which was that i uh stopped believing in astrology uh but the longer term effect was that i realized it was actually really nice to make your beliefs coherent with the real world you know there was a joy in making sure that you weren't going around believing things that were wrong and and it was quite nice to uh be iconoclastic about your beliefs and say well you know these ones that i've clung to and got rid of i'm happier doing that it's like getting rid of an old girlfriend who you're not getting on with or a pair of scabby old trousers that you
Speaker A:never wear well this sounds like a seed of to mix metaphors a seed of a path that led to um starting uh aleph insights which is all about um exactly that we're built aleph insights is building a
Speaker B:tower towards this shining bright light called the truth we'll never get there but we're working
Speaker A:on it and on that note uh we're going to conclude this podcast and uh thank you as always for listening to the cognitive engineering podcast i'm fraser mcgrew we've been here with peter coghill and nick hare of aleph insights thanks and until next time bye bye and you can all take your tinfoil
Speaker B:hats off now
