Comment on Flat Earthers BTFO since the 3rd century BCE
PugJesus@piefed.social 10 hours ago
Explanation: Eratosthenes was a Greek polymath who lived in North Africa in the 3rd century BCE. An immensely accomplished and intelligent man, one of his most resounding achievements was to measure the size of the earth. While Greek philosophy already considered the world to be spherical, Eratosthenes managed to use extremely simple tools, with an understanding of mathematical principles, light, shadow, and geometry, to calculate the size of the earth to within ~10% of its actual value, as measured by modern tools!
Flat Earther lunatics in the modern day have attempted to re-perform his experiment, expecting a different result from the OBVIOUS flatness of the earth. It never works out for them. Curiously, it rarely changes their minds, either.
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I think a lot of the flerfer influencers know and simply keep the charade because it’s profitable.
I think a lot of the antiscience influencers are like that, actually.
AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@piefed.social 9 hours ago
Oh absolutely. Most influencers are in just for the grift. There’s probably some dumb enough to believe it, but I’m sure most of them are just grifting fools.
FatVegan@leminal.space 10 minutes ago
I remember watching “beyond thr curve” or whatever that netflix documentary was called. Me and my gorlfriend played a game where we tried to spot the idiot or the grifter. It’s pretty funny, like: that guy just wants to build cool stuff and sell it to tgese people… Suddenly that guy pops up on that conference and said something like: hi, these are my kids, they are third generation flat earthers.
There was something about that sentence that was truly sad, and you could see some people probably thought tye same thing.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
The secret is to know your bullshit is bullshit and fervently believing it at the same time. Doublethink is not something Orwell invented, he just described it.