Sabine Hossenfelder
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2022–2023
15:50 · 2.1M views · Aug 22, 2020
Sabine Hossenfelder explains what flat earthers believe and why, arguing that their reasoning is wrong but not stupid. She suggests scientists should take such believers more seriously.
Pointed to in discussions about engaging with fringe beliefs and distrust of institutions rather than dismissing people.
3 comments from Hacker News
To those who say that flat earthers don’t exist in reality… There’s a guy who drives around town where my parents live in Arizona with his flat earth position writ large on the side of his pickup truck. He will stop to debate with you even if you’re next to him at a traffic light. [1] I think flat earthers do exist but the majority of them may not admit it openly if they’re still sufficiently “there” to fear the social ostracization (word?) that might follow. I agree to some extent with the original article under discussion and I would point interested folks to an interesting video by Sabine Hossenfelder which makes some tangentially similar points. [2] I would also add that the western school system teaches us to fear being wrong and finally letting go of this can be a liberating and empowering experience. After that it seems to become a little easier to believe the next similarly counterfactual thing that comes along. [1] [LINK] [2] this video
Soon every piece of information will have cryptographic claim(s) attached. Everything that can attach it will have cryptographic identity. Everything will likely evolve into some (weighted/probabilistic?) crypto-tree of trust. There won't be absolute truth, only truth scores according to some defined trust sets/trees. Imagine fake news, pictures, videos, voice generated at scale, indistinguishable by humans from real information. It's easy when we talk about monsters on Mars, but not so much if it talked about some spectral analysis of organic compound deposits etc. We're going to be flooded with this stuff very soon and people will have to employ flat-earther's approach to rationality [0] if we don't decorate information with crypto-metadata or find another solution to this problem. Imagine if we're making mistake in 1 fake out of 1mln cases now and what we'll do if we start having 1 true out of 1mln fake pieces of information available. Generating fake information will be very cheap and generation available to anybody. You won't know anymore if this new Gruffalo book was written by authors or generated by AI. You can only guess that this new Beatles song about twitter is probably fake (but looks so real) etc. [0] this video
You may never convince someone to be rational but you may convince the interlocutors. Otherwise you're creating martyrs. Everyone has a valid point, even flat earthers. this video