I like it when something weird teaches important lessons about how to think.
This week, 15 people visited Antarctica to test if the Earth is flat. Three participants were ‘flat earthers’, while 12 were convinced the Earth was not flat. The experiment was simple: if there was a 24-hour sun, then the current flat-earth model is false. It’s unclear why they couldn’t just go to Sweden or Alaska to see a 24-hour sun, but I’ll let that slide.
The strangest thing is that the experiment was unnecessary because flat earthers are right. The Earth is flat, but so is the entire universe. Every particle exists on a flat plane. The trick is that the physical forces acting on those particles create observable effects.
Although we don’t know if gravity is a ‘thing’, we can describe gravity’s effect on particles. When particles are near each other, they tend to increase in mass. This mass bends space/time, attracting more particles and increasing the mass. We can observe the effect of gravity as each particle ‘falls’ towards a centre mass from all directions since there is no ‘up’ or ‘down’ in space. But, at all times, each particle exists on a flat plane in reference to each other.
The counterintuitive result of gravity is that the Earth is always flat; it just has so much mass that gravity has bent it into a sphere. Said differently: a sphere is actually the flattest object in the universe.
It turns out the flat earthers are right, but for the wrong reasons.
Well, that’s not quite true. The Earth’s particles aren’t evenly distributed across a centre mass, because 99 per cent of them are ‘solids’ rather than ‘gases’. As you know, solids are harder to spread out once they get stuck together. Jupiter, for example, is a gas giant, so that planet appears as a perfect sphere because gases dissipate. Earth is an uncoordinated clump of solids known as an oblate spheroid, which appears as a lumpy sphere.
Fairly basic maths will show this. However, poor calculus isn’t the main problem here.
The first issue is that most flat earthers, I’m sorry to say, are Christians. To be more specific, they are almost always protestants who believe in sola scriptura, in which the Bible is accepted at its word, with no human interpretation whatsoever. The Bible intimates that the Earth is flat; therefore, that’s the starting point for most flat earthers. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t start with the Bible as your reference point, but you can’t also say you’re doing science.
Of course, it doesn’t help that the scientific community never tells the full truth about the earth’s shape, either. The maths says the Earth is ‘lumpy’ and not perfectly spherical at all. Yet, every image of the Earth you’ve seen from NASA or in textbooks depicts a perfect ‘globe Earth’. The Mercator map also folds into a perfect sphere. They don’t see the contradiction in this at all. But flat earthers do see this contradiction and it makes them suspicious that someone is lying.
This brings me to my main point about thinking.
The flat earthers should be sceptical of the claims made by the scientific community. While the scientific process depends on saying ‘I don’t know’, scientists hate saying those three words. They pretend to enjoy being wrong, but being wrong feels like pain and most (normal) people will do anything to avoid pain. The strange thing about being wrong is that it feels the same as being right, right up until someone shows that you are wrong. Then it feels like pain.
Where this gets difficult is that while the experiment in Antarctica this week showed that the current flat-earth model fails to describe the shape of this planet, but that does not mean that we know its shape. The experiment only proved that the Earth is not flat. The movement of a light in the sky can supply no positive information about what you’re standing on.
This is why the flat-earth conversation is important. The burden of proof lies with the claimant. If sufficient doubt can be created about the veracity of a model, it is not the sceptic’s job to then supply a working model. If neither the flat- nor globe- earth models fit the data, then it’s time to go back to square one and anybody who is honest would understand that.
It is not honest for people to fall back on a false model because it’s ‘the best we have’. If something is wrong, then it’s wrong. We saw this kind of dishonesty all the time during Covid.
For example, when I pointed out that before the ‘pandemic’ hospitals never physically counted the annual ’flu deaths but instead ran an algorithm that hypothesised how many people would die each year from the ’flu and that they were doing the same thing with Covid, people reacted like I said the Earth was flat. If no one knew how many people died from Covid (as opposed to with Covid), then the numbers that supported the emergency response were wrong.
The response was always the same: they wanted me to offer a replacement theory for what was going on. When I said that the burden of proof was on them since they were making the claims, they inevitably reverted to their original theory about how the Covid spreads even though I had just told them the numbers were invented by an algorithm. The sceptic does not need to have all the answers, but you can’t also go back to a flawed model once it’s been disproven.
Similarly, it is not fair to require a sceptic of the globe Earth also to show the true shape of the Earth. They don’t need to know that. The burden of proof is on the person who makes the claim. Maybe no one knows the shape of the Earth. Maybe we need better metrics to figure it out. But you won’t get anywhere near the truth if you can’t understand the burden of proof.
People’s inability to grasp the burden of proof leads to an even worse outcome: false binaries. It’s all in the way you frame the question. There’s a big difference between asking a person what shape the Earth is and asking if it is flat or a globe. One encourages the person to look at the available evidence and describe what their eyes see. The other forces them to fit what their eyes see into predetermined boxes. It’s a form of mind control.
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus had the idea of differential ontology, which showed that the only way to define a thing is to describe what it is not. I am a human because I am not a dog. I am a European because I am not a Polynesian. Differential ontology shows that what is ‘good’ is that way only because it is not ‘bad’, and vice versa. But Heraclitus said we couldn’t know the thing in itself (an idea echoed by Immanuel Kant as the ‘noumenon’).
It is devilishly easy to misread how differential ontology works and turn millions of things into a binary by saying they are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Children do this all the time with their pretend games. Binaries are a simplistic form of thinking meant to fill a gap where a narrative should be. Children lack experience with the world, so they invent a narrative.
Do you know else what loves binaries? Power.
The key to controlling what people think is controlling what they think about. The best control method is not to refute a claim but rather to get people to argue about a ridiculous false binary. Don’t make a person rethink their position; make them take it sideways a little at a time: not self-rule, National or Labour; not armed citizens, gun control or school shootings; not sexual morality, abortion or pregnant 10-year-olds. People will say with a straight face that having one choice for a leader is tyranny, but having two choices is freedom.
By introducing a false binary, you can easily steer people to the next logical conclusion, like redirecting a river. You can’t make a river run uphill, but you can redirect it to irrigate your crops. For example: when a nation has one story, the citizens ask if it is true. When a nation has two stories, citizens ask which one is true. Isn’t that a neat magic trick?
What shape is this thing you’re standing on? Is it a globe or flat? Does anyone know for sure? Is it possible to know for sure? You’ll be surprised how often the correct answer to these questions is, ‘I don’t know, let’s find out together.’
It’s also the safest way to think about power.
