crackpotscience:

deepsea-dive:

If you think flat earthers are batshit, but you’re content to just let them have their weird geology in peace, you’re probably a middle of the road, life in the received wisdom lane type of person. That’s cool. Situation normal.

If you think flat earthers are wrong but you’ve done at least some research into it, you’re probably fairly intelligent and naturally curious, if not quite skeptical enough about conventional wisdom. Not bad, but you have a tendency to be over-trusting of rationalisations and excuses as a way of dodging cognitive dissonance.

If you are a flat earther, you’ve come to trust your own judgement and reasoning over the enormous pressure society heaps on you. Well done. Let’s not get cocky though, that’s how we ended up being duped in the first place.

If you decide to make snarky comments about flat earthers on tumblr, it goes to show you are the type to tread on and insult others to score a few social points from other narcissists. Making fun of marginalised, powerless groups takes no bravery whatsoever.

There’s a fine line between skepticism and arrogance, in my opinion. Skepticism and critical thinking are things I consider to be virtues, I will be the first one to tell you not to trust those in a position of power. But once you start rejecting the voice of bona fide experts before fully understanding what they have to say, then you have a problem.

Once you start rejecting data by claiming it’s a part of some grand conspiracy, you can maintain any paradox you want. You can claim the Earth is flat, a cube, a Klein bottle or whatever, and your views won’t change in the face of any new data. You’ll reject all data that disagrees with you by claiming it’s fake, but accept all data that even somewhat confirms your worldview despite the source. You’ll start thinking you’re the only smart person in a world full of morons, and that you personally have cracked the facade that fooled all the other sheeple in the world. And once you start thinking this, you’ve stopped learning.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t question the results of science, far from it. Great science is built on people putting each other’s work up to scrutiny. But if you feel like you need to get to the bottom of everything because you can trust no one, you’ve lost. No one can get to the bottom of everything, that’s why we have experts! It turns out, reality is very complicated and no one can take it all on alone. If you actually listen to what an expert has to say for more than two seconds before discounting them, you’ll find that most experts are experts for a reason.

Not every scientist is a part of some grand conspiracy, most of us are curious, driven people who will do anything to get to the bottom of how the world really works. We’ll test old theories to see if they hold up, and explore new theories to see what we can find. But we can’t move forward as a culture if people begin to deny basic scientific principles just for the sake of just being rebels. Point is, you’re holding us back, and I’m getting sick of it.