Dear readers,
If you were a busy astrophysicist at a prestigious institution like New York's Stony Brook University, you'd probably have better things to do than argue with flat-Earthers. Well,
Paul M. Sutter is just such a busy astrophysicist at Stony Brook, and this week he indeed spent time arguing with flat-Earthers, in
a piece in Space.com—or at least offering suggestions for how the rest of us can
avoid arguing with them.
The good news: 84% of Americans accept that the Earth is round. The bad news is the 16% who live in—or at least have a valid visa for—the land of the counterfactual. The world has always been awash in loony-tune ideas, and in many cases the believers are harmless. So you think the moon landings were faked? Go right ahead. You may disqualify yourself from sitting at the grownup table of informed society, but that's on you.
But other conspiratorial ideas are more corrosive. For every person who thinks climate change is a hoax, that's one fewer individual pushing for immediate climate action. Pizzagate was just a crackpot rumor about child trafficking at a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor until an armed gunman showed up and opened fire in an attempt to "rescue" the imaginary children. Anti-vaccine beliefs are nothing but conspiratorial rubbish—except that every parent who subscribes to them endangers their children and the wider community.
Sutter proposes all manner of arguments to respond to flat-Earthers: Note how objects receding over the horizon don't disappear all at once, as they would if they were falling off the edge of the Earth. Note how constellations that are visible in the northern hemisphere are replaced be entirely new ones as you cross the equator. Then there's gravity, which exerts its inward-pulling force equally in all directions, causing an object like a planet or moon that gains enough mass to collapse into a sphere.
But reasoned arguments typically don't move conspiracy believers. In a sort of logical jujitsu, they use the very evidence mustered against them as further proof of just how cunning the plotters are. So what's the solution—and, more to the point, why even bother?
Research shows that belief in conspiracy theories springs not from lack of information and certainly not lack of intelligence—it can take a first-rate mind to weave the exceedingly elaborate webs of deceit that believers sees in the world around them. The belief instead comes from a lack of trust—in institutions, in government, in industry, in politicians.
"Many people don't trust the society around them, most notably the representatives of that society," Sutter writes. "That trust often falls even further when it comes to elite representatives of that society, which includes government officials, members of academia and scientists like me."
But that trust can be restored. It takes honesty on the part of those in power, yes—something that is often in short supply. But it also takes listening and respect from the rest of us. Anti-vax parents may be wrong on the science,
but they're right in their sincere—if misguided—effort to protect their children from what they perceive as harm. Climate change deniers or Apollo conspiracists might be wrong on the facts and the history, but they're right that too often the government and others in power don't give it to us straight. If no less an authority than an astrophysicist can take it easy on the flat-Earthers, maybe everyone can learn a little tolerance. All of us have equal claim to call the Earth our shared home, after all—even if not all of us could properly draw a picture of it.
—Jeffrey Kluger
Originally Posted by Adam Strange
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