• Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    1 day ago

    If only he’d gone the next step and actually looked up how electrolytes work.

    This is how conspiracy theorists actually think, they do a single Google search, fail to understand the answer because typically they have the intelligence of a lump of cheese, and form a totally incoherent theory as a result. Once the theory is formed, any evidence to the contrary is disregarded.

    Flat earthers primary reason for believing the earth is flat is that otherwise water wouldn’t form puddles and lakes it would always be flowing downhill. This makes perfect sense provided you’ve failed to achieve a 12-year-old’s understanding of gravity. Which of course they have failed to achieve because of the aforementioned intellectual deficiency.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      they do a single Google search, fail to understand the answer because typically they have the intelligence of a lump of cheese, and form a totally incoherent theory as a result

      I mean, it’s more complicated than that on two levels.

      Firstly, sports drinks like Gatorade were formulated for a very specific kind of short term high intensity activity (specifically, playing football in Florida during the summer). But for lower intensity and longer term exercising (anything over two hours - long distance running / biking / swimming, most notably) its generally worse for you than water. So expressing a degree of skepticism is warranted. That’s doubly so in the face of endless marketing and native advertisement in sports media.

      Secondly, when you get into the dietary sciences and start running into contradictions between the more well-established benefits of drinking water relative to the dubious claims of marketing agencies, it can easily become difficult to determine what is and is not bullshit. Because Google itself has been marketed as a valuable tool for research and analysis, and because so much of our academic infrastructure has been privatized (Google being a prime example), even the most intellectually curious and level headed can become overwhelmed with the task of “Doing Your Own Research”.

      Flat earthers primary reason for believing the earth is flat is that otherwise water wouldn’t form puddles and lakes it would always be flowing downhill.

      The primary reason for believing the Earth is flat is that the ground is flat in much of the country. People don’t natively intuit that the earth is round, they have to be told or to engage in some fairly non-intuitive experimentation. To grapple with the idea of a round earth, you have to start taking second and third hand accounts at face value or get reasonably good at geometry and have a certain bedrock faith in the accuracy of your calculations.

      I’d argue that flat earthers are more curious and often more intelligent than their “I believe the earth is round cause that’s what they told me” set. And its often this curiosity - combined with some error in logic or bad initial data - that leads them to try and prove the unproveable so doggedly.

      But so many people fall into the trap of believing intelligence leads to correctness. You can be very smart and still end up with a very wrong answer. What’s more, if you’re surrounded by people you don’t trust (because you believe you are smarter than them), it can be difficult to convince you of your own failings precisely because you don’t have enough of an intellectual peer base to understand your reasoning, spot the mistake, and demonstrate a counter-example.

      • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        its often this curiosity - combined with some error in logic or bad initial data - that leads them to try and prove the unproveable so doggedly.

        You know what we call people who perform experimental tests on a given hypothesis?

        Scientists

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          Scientists regularly get things wrong, which is why we have peer review.

          The Flat Earther phenomenon is far more about a lack of trustworthy and accessible peer review than a critical mass of dumb people.

    • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
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      18 hours ago

      Whoa now, lets not give flat earthers so much credit. That doesnt even make sense within their own theories. Logic is not the point

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        18 hours ago

        Well it does. Here’s the logic, with proof by negation:

        1. Earth is round (assertion to disprove)
        2. Water flows around round objects
        3. Water doesn’t flow on the earth, it stays put, therefore the earth is not round

        That’s as far as it goes.

        • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
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          17 hours ago

          Step 2 seems like a big leap. Either with or without gravity, im not sure anyone had made the case that water flows around round objects. Unless youre talking about the cowanda effect, which i doubt flat earthers are aware of.

          I want to be clear, im not ridiculing you or in any way attenpting to be disrespectful, i just dont think a group that prides themselves on not having logical consistency should be considered seriously because by engaging in intellectualism with flat earthers or seriously attempting to debunk them, you are adding to their legitmacy.

          Youre effectively saying “this needs to be disproved” when instead the onus should be on them to prove it, and until they are serious with their arguments they shouldnt be taken as anything more than a meme.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            17 hours ago

            I’m just saying that’s the general level of proof they have. They ignore important effects and focus purely on observations. Basically, the only way to really disprove them is to take them to space, and that’s obviously not happening.

            • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
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              13 hours ago

              I dont think taking them to space would prove anything. For the vast majority of them theyre willfully ignorant. Its not about whether what theyre saying is true or not, the just enjoy the story.

    • canofcam@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      “This is how conspiracy theorists actually think”

      I’m not sure why this generalisation was required? Many ‘conspiracy theories’ have been proven to be true, and not ALL theorists believe ALL of the theories. It’s easy to discredit somebody when you label them something and then say that those that are labelled are idiots.

      edit- downvoting something without replying to it is how you get an echo chamber

      • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        I also thought it was a bit of a weird tangent, but it makes sense. Maybe they have something fresh in mind that connected those dots for them.

        I’d only make the distinction between what kind of conspiracy theories people believe in because some people fly straight into fantasy. If it’s about aliens and Flat Earth, there’s no reason to give the benefit of the doubt. These people have left reality and are in it for themselves for whatever personal reason, actively ignoring and denying contrary evidence. It wouldn’t surprise me if they knew they were being idiots.

        That said, I’m only partial to some conspiracy theories that seem plausible, like COVID conspiracies that stem from ignorance of science and fear of technology. In that case, I will give the benefit of the doubt.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          17 hours ago

          aliens

          Eh, I think the alien ones are interesting. We know the government is hiding something, we just don’t know what, and if it was aliens, this is how I’d expect them to act. But it could also be a number of other things, and the evidence is usually quickly discredited by experts.

          A better example would be something like Sasquatch.