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This is one of the funniest/scariest things that I’ve read lately: ‘flat earthers’. It exploded into the news here in the UK recently after that weirdo US rapper started on it. I thought the moon-landing deniers were pathetic enough, but … flat-earthers? What is HAPPENING to humankind?! How are we, as a population, becoming stupider the more science, and the scientific method, are part of our lives? (Flat-earthers and other strange conspiracy theorists are dragging the median down!)
We have become a society of science deniers and worshippers of the ignorant.
But how, and why? I once thought today’s rapid changes caused people’s equilibrium to totter. But the Industrial Revolution introduced far greater changes, and people didn’t get mass hysteria in the same way. … Perhaps the difference is, *our* changes include the internet and the attendant possibilities of GroupThink and reinforcement, in a way the original Luddites couldn’t have imagined.
Honestly, I don’t know. Been trying to figure it out for a while but somewhere along the line it became cool to put opinion ahead of fact. I think here are some linguistic causes for this as well, terms like “Honest days work” refer almost exclusively to manual, unskilled labor which, by implication, means skilled labor, like a doctor or lawyer, is a “dishonest day’s work.”
there’s also the problem with people not wanting to be embarrassed or thought of as uneducated so instead of bettering themselves, they belittle those who know more (Nerds and geeks?)
“Those who know more” – ?? Like, everyone who’s been into space and seen the earth from afar — and, all those pictures? I’m not disagreeing with you, just utterly depressed that if there were a cinematic world’s end and I were one of the survivors, the likelihood of being one of the last humans alive alongside someone who wanted to ‘assure’ me the earth was a disk, or the CIA and Hollywood ‘did’ the moon landings, or umpteen percentages of scientists were just telling us about global warming cuz of some unspecified profit margins … oh, jeez. (Let’s not even start on 9-11, or I’ll absent myself from that putative and cinematic world’s end.)
Exactly… I wish I understood it!