Also very good points, assuming “the person is at all reasonable”. The reason threads like this can go on until the horizon, is that it is not a science versus science debate.
I’m no psychologist but here is what I see:
- flat earthers are a collective of people who generally misunderstand the role of science. True scientists know that many things we consider “scientifically proven” today, will be disproved later by more sophisticated observations. Recall everyone used Newtonian physics for centuries before Einstein proved it wrong. True scientists don’t try to prove things “right”, but try to prove things “wrong”, as that is where real progress is made.
- you can see this in their terminology. Science is not a way of approaching observations and attempting to model and explain them, and using these models to design more sophisticated observations, but something that you can choose to “believe”, and something you can change, like you would change clothes. Science is only learned by indoctrination and brainwashing and enforced by authoritarian conspiracy.
- the mindset that this is how science works is also a mindset that is easily exploitable and malleable, as you replace models with other models, without a true understanding of all the implications, and pretend that simplified models are absolute truths.
- science can make people uncomfortable, when they don’t understand the increased complexity needed to model the real world.
- I see a group of people who want to remove that discomfort, by replacing what they don’t understand with something they do understand, and supported by things they want to believe.
- I see a group of people who want to believe in conspiracies, so they can blame others for causing their discomfort.
Recently I watch the “Behind the Curve” documentary, and I could see a group of people really excited that they found a place, and a group of people, where they really felt like they belonged. With the internet, people can find each other, and have conventions where they can feed off each other and build their ideas and confidence.
What is interesting in that documentary is that over the course of 90 minutes, several flat-earthers performed experiments actually “proving” rotation and earth curvature, but remained in denial. “Bob” spent more than $20,000 on a gyroscopic experiment that showed a 15 deg per hour rotation of the earth, and wanted to continue improving the experiment, as he wasn’t comfortable with the answer. The documentary ends with an experiment that shines a light through holes in a panel, only to find they have to lift the light way above their head, much higher than predicted, but still refused to accept that this was necessary to compensate for curvature. I don’t recall if this was in the documentary, but I seem to recall (memory is sketchy), the infamous Mark Sargent witnessed a helicopter experiment (?) but still refused to accept the outcome was as predicted by a globe earth.
They remain in denial, because accepting these complicated realities would bring back the discomfort they were avoiding, and they could no longer blame the authorities for fooling them.
But I could be completely off base here, as I am no psychologist. As a true scientist, I’m willing to listen to competing theories, and have this one proven wrong.