Monday, March 4, 2019

DUNNING-KRUGER

Thanks to Viv, I watched Behind The Curve on Netflix, it's about people who believe that the Earth is flat and that conventional science and education are all conspiracies. Tim Urban appears on it, along with psychiatrists and CalTech astrophysicists, other science writers. The flat-earthers are divided, most of them can be clearly seen to have some kind of personality disorder, a delusion of sorts, they're paranoid and whatever. They conduct their own experiments to prove there is no curvature to the world, and when the results don't corroborate their theories, they come up with other excuses as to why it doesn't work. They believe the sun and the moon are just hanging from the sky on top of a flat plane and that we are all in a dome like in the set of The Truman Show. I mean??¿¿?¿? It is very weird and my sisters were also saying "how can anyone believe the earth is flat?" And yet, and yet, if I asked my mother and grandmother what they think about evolution, and vaccines, and whether the Earth is flat, they would probably scare me with their answers. It is mentioned in the documentary that sometimes flat-Earthers can seem like ordinary people, living among us. My youngest sister who is fifteen years old doesn't even know if she believes in dinosaurs. It's like, it always seems ridiculous when someone else believes something slightly off-base, but it's so hard to believe something you've always held to be true, to be the thing that's off-base. People just cherry-pick what they want to believe and leave whatever they find undesirable.

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