There's a new documentary on Netflix called Behind the Curve that talks about the growing phenomenon of flat earth conspiricists. At times it's really hard to watch the asinine mental gymnastics, but I'm going to recommend it for the following reasons:
1) It sheds light on the kind of black-and-white thinking and behavior that you often see in believers and former believers of fundamentalist ideas.
2) There are interviews (but not nearly enough) with psychologists talking about the motivations behind this kind of thinking.
3) They follow a couple of experiments that the flat-earthers insist will prove the claims once and for all. We get to see those experiments fail and then hear the backpedalling and special-casing that results (make sure you watch the end credits).
4) Another reminder that genuinely intelligent people can believe ridiculous and unsupportable things, and less intelligent people will line up to follow them.
Here's one little example. The main character they follow claimed he was a solid skeptic until the evidence became insurmountable. He now believes the North Pole is the center of the disk, which means the southern continents are divided by immense gulfs of ocean. His turning point was when he realized it would be impossible for airliners to travel between continents below the equator because of the vast distances, so he found a realtime map of all of the airliners that are currently in the air. He saw no planes in the southern oceans. So he watched and watched and watched, but after three days there were still no planes crossing oceans in the southern hemisphere. Case closed.
Just to see what he was talking about I looked for myself. I have continued to check every day since and this is consistently what I see:
- Flights_2_24_19B.JPG (142.61 KiB) Viewed 13060 times
Anybody else watch this?
