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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lee McIntyre
Read between
February 21 - March 9, 2022
truth is under assault. Our fellow citizens don’t seem to listen to facts anymore. Feelings outweigh evidence, and ideology is ascendant.
the worst thing you can do is not fight back, because then misinformation festers.
(1) keep emotions out of the exchange, (2) discuss, don’t attack (no ad hominem or ad Hitlerum), (3) listen carefully and try to articulate the other position accurately, (4) show respect, (5) acknowledge that you understand why someone might hold that opinion, and (6) try to show how changing facts does not necessarily mean changing worldviews.
Respect, trust, warmth, engagement. These are the common threads that run through such first-person accounts.
Here I learned that virtually all Flat Earthers believe that all of the pictures of Earth from space are fake, that we never landed on the Moon, and that all of the employees at NASA—along with millions of others—are “in on the conspiracy” to cover up God’s truth that the Earth is flat.
He said, “The adversary.” I pressed him: “The devil.” He went on to explain that the devil helps those who are in power, and that includes all world leaders: every head of state, astronauts, scientists, teachers, airline pilots, and many others who are rewarded by the devil for keeping the secret of Flat Earth.
insofar as the Flat Earthers had a method, this seemed to be it: if you can’t prove that the Earth is round, then you should believe it is flat.
Flat Earthers have a profound distrust in authority—and great belief in first-person sensory experience. And their standard of belief is proof. In their epistemology, to question a belief is sufficient for concluding that it must be false.
If one asks them for proof that the Earth is flat, they normally turn the burden of proof back on the globalist. The choice is binary. If you can’t prove that Earth is round—subject to their paranoid suspicions of bias or fraud about any evidence you offer—then it must be flat.
if the goal is to get a Flat Earther to admit that they are wrong, it probably cannot be done, at least not in this way.
the primary thing that separates science from nonscience is that scientists embrace an attitude of willingness to change their hypothesis if it does not fit with the evidence.
curvature of the Earth is not visible until one gets above 40,000 feet.
for a Flat Earther there is no such thing as a definitive experiment. For all of their bluster about how much they care about evidence and paint themselves as more scientific than the scientists, the truth is that they don’t really understand the basis of scientific reasoning. Their ignorance is not just about scientific facts, but about how scientists think.
With any empirical hypothesis, it is always possible that some future piece of evidence might come along to refute it. This is why scientific pronouncements customarily come with errors bars; there is always some uncertainty to scientific reasoning. This does not, however, mean that scientific theories are weak—or that until all of the data are in, any alternative hypothesis is just as good as a scientific one.
In science, all of the data are never in! But this does not mean that a well-corroborated scientific theory or hypothesis is unworthy of belief.
One cannot keep modifying what one is willing to accept as evidence just to protect a favored hypothesis.
Flat Earthers routinely employ a double standard of evidence. Virtually anything a Flat Earther wants to believe is allowed to pass muster with hardly any scrutiny, whereas anything they do not want to believe is demanded to be proven?
If you were someone who felt that you were always on the outs in life, never quite fit in or had a chance, maybe never had the career or personal life you wanted, and felt that at least in part this was because other people had been against you and lying to you and undermining you right from the start, might it not seem attractive to explain all this through some giant conspiracy? Instead of being marginalized, suddenly you were part of an elite. You were one of the saviors of humanity, who actually knew a truth that billions of people had missed. And the fact that your cohort was so small
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I concluded that perhaps Flat Earth wasn’t so much a belief that someone would accept or reject on the basis of experimental evidence, but instead an identity.
“What evidence, if it existed, would it take to convince you that you were wrong?”
But what chance did you have if you were raised in a cult? If you grew up in a family where all you heard day after day was conspiracy and not to trust science?
“Kids are the best ones to go after,” he said. Since the teacher was admonishing the child for bringing up Flat Earth in class, he advised her to go out and talk to the kids on the playground, where the teacher wasn’t listening. “Some kids are willing to learn.”
Based on what I’d seen, the Flat Earthers weren’t just wrong, they were dangerous. They were organized and they were committed. And they were adding new members every day.
They were courting celebrities. They were running street clinics to “wake people up.” As such, they were at least a menace to science and education. But they were also contributing to a culture of denial that has gripped this country over the last few years, enabling hundreds of thousands of people to refuse to vaccinate their kids, politicians to refuse to take action on climate change, and gun-toting protestors to parade during a pandemic.
How many years before Flat Earthers are running for a seat on your local school board, with an agenda to “teach the controversy” in the physics classroom?
In order to change someone’s beliefs, you have to change their identity.
Although the content of their belief systems differs, all science denial seems grounded in the same few mistakes in human reasoning.
(1) Cherry-picking evidence (2) Belief in conspiracy theories (3) Reliance on fake experts (and the denigration of real experts) (4) Committing logical errors (5) Setting impossible expectations for what science can achieve
these provide a common blueprint for science deniers to create a counter-narrative on any topic where they wish to challenge the scientific consensus.
The Hoofnagle brothers define science denial as “the employment of rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none.”
denialism is a problem for empirical judgment.
Scientists set out to find the truth, not deny it when it doesn’t conform to their expectations.
the flawed reasoning strategy employed by science deniers is firmly rooted in a misunderstanding of how science actually works.
Scientists care about evidence and are willing to change their minds based on new evidence. This is why science cannot offer proof, but must instead rely on the idea that belief is warranted when a theory has sufficient credible evidence and has survived rigorous testing.
To claim that you believe a fringe hypothesis solely on the basis of faith just doesn’t sound very scientific. To say that you have actual evidence sounds better. For the cherry-picker, though, it matters very much which evidence you choose: you must consider only that evidence that supports your hypothesis and ignore or dispute the rest, else your theory might be refuted.
With confirmation bias, we are motivated to find facts that are consistent with what we prefer to believe, and all too ready to ignore any facts that don’t.
The problem here is one of bad faith. Of not looking for evidence to test your proposal but only to confirm it. But this is quite simply not how science works.
Scientists do not merely look for support for what they hope to be true; they design tests that can show whether their hypothesis might be false.
Belief in conspiracy theories is one of the most toxic forms of human reasoning.
This is not to say that real conspiracies do not exist. Watergate, the tobacco companies’ collusion to obfuscate the link between cigarette smoking and cancer, and the George W. Bush–era NSA program to secretly spy on civilian Internet users are all examples of real-life conspiracies, which were discovered through evidence and exposed after exhaustive investigation.
The distinction, therefore, should be between actual conspiracies (for which there should be some evidence) and conspiracy theories (which customarily have no credible evidence).
We might define a conspiracy theory as an “explanation that makes reference to hidden, malevolent forces seeking to advance some nefarious aim.”
we need to add that these tend to be “highly speculative [and] based on no evidence. They are pure conjecture, without any basis in reality.”
What is wrong with conspiracy theories is not normally that they have already been refuted (though many have), but that thousands of gullible people will continue to believe them even when they have been debunked.
If you scratch a science denier, chances are you’ll find a conspiracy theorist.
they found that 50 percent of Americans believed in at least one conspiracy theory.
In its most basic form, a conspiracy theory is a nonevidentially justified belief that some tremendously unlikely thing is nonetheless true, but we just don’t realize it because there is a coordinated campaign run by powerful people to cover it up.
As far back as the great fire of Rome in 64 AD, we saw conspiracy theories at work, when the citizens of Rome became suspicious over a weeklong blaze that consumed almost the entire city—while the emperor Nero was conveniently out of town. Rumors began to spread that Nero had started it in order to rebuild the city in his own design. While there was no evidence that this was true (nor for the legend that Nero sang while the city burned), Nero was apparently so upset by the accusation that he started his own conspiracy theory that it was in fact the Christians who were responsible, which led to
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lack of evidence in favor of a conspiracy theory is in part explained by the conspiracy itself, which means that its adherents can count both evidence and lack of evidence in their favor.
Conspiracy theorists are famous for their double standard of evidence: they insist on an absurd standard of proof when it concerns something they do not want to believe, while accepting with scant to nonexistent evidence whatever they do want to believe.
