Circular Reasoning The Rise of Flat Earth Belief #IEA

oh hello good morning this is the final talk of the what we can learn from ignorant what ignorant scan teachers cycle of seminars that were promoted by the Institute of Advanced Studies of University of Sao Paulo with Institute question of science as you online and hear that the the auditorium can notice I'm speaking English or trying to because our guest today is from England my commercial please join us marsh and marsh is one of the founders of the Merseyside skeptic is a member of the good thinking Society of England in 2013 he recorded an interview with the vice-president of the Flat Earth Society there is a fight exercising in England it's the oldest method of society in the world I guess and he also went to the first Flat Earth convention in England and today he's going to talk to us about these experiences and what photographers think what's their mindset and how did we get to this point when we have to discuss Flat Earth in a university setting we are just a few few messages we are online you can watch us at www.ufxmarkets.com own and please identify yourselves when you ask our questions and please ask our questions don't offer supplementary lectures please put your your cell phones on silent mode and to the public that is watching this online we can you can send your questions to the following email e respond G all in the same would respond G hobo was beep onto there okay I speak I didn't try to say this in English it was a smart of me we'll have a pictures and video of this lecture at the media library or for the Institute of Advanced Studies www pawn to Europe on tools people to be a barn cleaner Media Tech or in the YouTube channel within ten days from from this presentation Marsh Leif Rogers well thank you everyone for coming along and thank you Carlos for that introduction it's a pleasure to be here in in Brazil and to give this lecture the lecture series obviously learning from ignorance so I guess I am the ignorance that you're going to be learning from today but yeah so I I I've been involved in skeptical activism for 10 years I was a co-founder of a community group in the UK as a skeptical activist the Mersey science skeptic Society and then for the last five years I've been the project director of this charity called the good thinking society set up by a science writer called Simon Singh and it means that part of my job is to investigate unusual claims people who are claiming that they can talk to the dead people who are claiming that they can cure cancer with whatever they want to sell you all these manner of different claims that people make where those claims aren't backed by good evidence I turn up to try and understand why people believe in these things understand how they persuade people to follow them and if they're making very dangerous claims I work with the media and I work with regulators and I sometimes work with the police to get information about those dangerous claims out there so the public can understand why these things don't work how we can tell what's true and what isn't true and so that's part of my job and and as that in that job I think I'm the country in the UK I think I'm the only full-time sceptical investigator in the UK and then another part of my job is travelling around the UK and occasionally traveling around the world telling stories about the experiences that I've had and the things that I've learned to try and help people to question these ideas and to explore these ideas and it does mean that part of my job is to going to is to go to rooms full filled er strangers and try and encourage those strangers to doubt things and whenever I tell someone that my job is to encourage strangers to doubt things someone looks at me as if to say that isn't really a job is it and to those people I say that's how good I am at making you doubt things that you even doubt my career doubt whether my job is is even real so as well as between these kind of in-person investigations over the last 10 years I've had another side project where I have a podcast called be reasonable and in that podcast I talk to people that we disagree with and instead of having the kind of conversation that I'm sure you may have had in the past with someone you disagree with maybe online where you tell them they're wrong and they're an idiot and you show how right you are and you have a big argument instead of doing that I try to have a civil discussion and say we disagree but I want to know why I want to try and figure out what we disagree about why we disagree about it how do you support a position that I could agree with let's have a polite discussion and see if we can learn from each other what that gap is so I can try and learn as much as possible when people are persuading people to believe in bad ideas I can learn as much as possible what those people are told and why they're being persuasive and if I know those arguments I'm better at speaking to people about why those arguments aren't real why they don't work and so in 2013 for be reasonable I interviewed remember the Flat Earth Society and ever since then I've given talks all around the country in the UK and I've mentioned it for years now that I spoke to the Flat Earth Society and people would look at me and say I'll come on there isn't really a Flat Earth Society the world people in the world don't really believe the world is flat this is a made-up thing these people are joking having fun they're being silly but they don't believe it and so it's very strange to me then that a few years ago after I've been looking into this for years and years suddenly it's all over the news and there's people in the newspapers and people in documentaries who are saying the world is flat and the movement has exploded and and you may have seen some of these things so you may have seen for example the coverage in several newspapers there's the daily there's the the BBC's coverage in fact there was a conference here in San Paulo near a fortnight ago of flat earthers and there it is covered in The Guardian the UK newspaper and has anyone seen that the Netflix documentary behind the curve which is all about the Flat Earth movement so how do we get to this place where it used to be that the flutter Flat Earth movement was very small and no one had heard of it and now it's it's huge and it seems like there are thousands of people and it's very prominent well because I've been watching it for a while I think I can understand and explain that explosion and see what drove that explosion and to understand it we have to look a little bit into the history and so the real modern Flat Earth movement it actually goes back to about 1838 there's a chap called Samuel Rowbotham who is an evangelical creationist he believed the world was 6,000 years old that Darwin was wrong there's no such thing as evolution and the way that he was proving that the Bible was literally true about the way that the world was created was to say if you look at the world around us I can prove to you that the world is flat and if I can prove the world is flat I can prove to you that the part of the Bible that says the world is flat must be literally true and if those are literally true all the rest of it about it being 6,000 years old and created in seven days all that must be true as well and he did this in 1870 he had an experiment where he had a friend of his in a rowing boat roll along a canal a flat river in Bedford in England and he said if you look at the curvature of the earth as conventional view would have it after five miles of my friend rowing away from me he should disappear over the horizon and the curvature should be between me and my friend and I shouldn't be able to see him and his friend rode for six miles and he could still see his friend after six miles and at this point he said you see the world has to be flat because how can there be a curvature that should have my friend out of sight in five miles if I can still see him six miles away and what he was missing is that his friend was six miles away and there was a curvature but light was bending around that curvature in much the same way as light bends when you look at the curved edge of a glass of water and it distorts an image and you can see an image in a slightly distorted way and that's what was happening his friend was being carried on the bended light over the horizon but they didn't realize this at the time and so this was a roundabouts of the the 19th century and when when Samuel Rowbotham he published all this information in 1881 in a book called zetetic astronomy the earth is not a globe and these were all of his arguments that he said he's demonstrated he's observed evidence that the world is actually flat and when he died one of his followers who was an English aristocrat a very wealthy lady spent a lot of her money to publish this document as far as possible and get thousands and thousands of people to join the Sutekh astronomy club this idea of the world being flat the very first ever Flat Earth Society Flat Earth group was called zetetic astronomy and in the early in the late 19th century there were thousands of members of this group but as we progressed into the 20th century decade by decade the membership started to get smaller and smaller and I think one of the reasons it got smaller is as we started to experiment and invent and develop air travel and people are able to get off the ground the higher up you got the more you could see the curvature and you more you could take photographs from that area and as you're getting into the 40s and 50s and you've started to get people going out into into space and seeing photos of the Earth from space people looked at this and said obviously I was wrong obviously the world can't possibly be flat because I can see it's curved and so zetetic astronomy as a group died it was almost completely gone and then in 1956 this chap here this is Samuel Shenton who was an evangelical creationist again who believed the worlds of 6,000 years old he reform zetetic astronomy as a group called the Flat Earth Society in the UK first thing to be called the Flat Earth Society in 1956 and he died in the 1970s 1971 and this chap here Charles K Johnston an evangelical preacher from America took over the Flat Earth Society brought it to America called it the Flat Earth Research Society of America and used those original argument from 1838 and 1881 to demonstrate again that the Bible was literally true the world is 6,000 years old because I can prove to you that the world is flat and if I can prove that I can disprove all of the rest of science wrong because they're going on this fundamental assumption that I can prove to be false and so in 2004 the Flat Earth Society was reformed after after it sort of gone almost entirely between the 70s and the 90s it was reformed again in the UK as the Flat Earth Society by a guy called Daniel Shenton and this is how I first came across it this website called the Flat Earth Society and it was mostly an online forum where people were sharing their arguments about how we know the world is flat sharing their different proofs and having arguments and debating and try to find more and more sophisticated ways of demonstrating that anybody who thinks the world is round must be wrong because I can prove to you the world is flat and is this kind of forum that I found very fascinating because when I interviewed the vice-president Michael Wilmore in 2013 I learned a couple of things about what the Flat Earth movement was about that I thought it'd be one collective community but actually they were split in lots of different interesting ways partly the community was split between people who genuinely absolutely believed the world was flat and people who knew for a fact it wasn't but just enjoyed arguing a position that they knew was false they enjoyed trying to find inventive and strange and funny ways to demonstrate why everyone else was wrong even though they knew the world was round and these were people who were maybe trained physicists who understood how the world really worked but wanted to have some fun on the Internet to convince some people and to have and to win arguments that they thought were unwinnable by finding unusual proofs but the problem is this set of people who were very well educated trolls were so successful that they really convinced the first set even more and they got more and more people more passionately to believe that the world was actually flat and they grew the number of passionate believers so that was one split in the society the other split in the society that I found fascinating was around what shape the world is because my first came across the idea of the Flat Earth I assumed that everyone had the same idea in mind you know much like this kind of logo where you have the arctic circle in the center and you have all the continents spread around it and then you have Antarctica as a ring of ice around the edge of the disk and that is what some people thought but there was a really passionate counter-argument and these people would argue the whole time and the other side of this argument would be yes the Arctic Circle was in the middle and yes there were countries spread around it and yes there was ice but instead of the ice being a single line around the edge of the disc that kept us all in this other outside the argument thought that ice went on forever in all directions there was no end to the ice they believed that the world was an infinite plane in all directions that bisects reality and I love this idea of it being infinity that bisects reality there is above reality and below reality but you can't get from the ground from below to above because the ice goes on forever and this was a very passionate argument that was happening in the flat earth world in 2013 when I came across it people would have very aggressive arguments about why no it's infinity forever no it's a disc but both these arguments struggle to explain some things about the world and you may if you think about them for a while you might find some of the things that are that are problematic one of the things that's a real problem for both versions of the world is gravity it's very difficult to explain gravity as we observe it if you don't have a spherical earth with a large mass in the center that pulls people towards that central mass you can't explain gravity very easily otherwise but the problem is the the Flat Earth Society had this collection of people who were well-educated knew it was nonsense but enjoy trying to argue it anyway and they said well what is gravity gravity is a force that accelerates downwards you know if you let go of something it will accelerate towards the floor at 9.8 meters per second squared every second it gets faster by 9.8 meters per second until the ground stops its acceleration that they said was identical to a world in which when you let go of something it stays still and the ground comes up to meet it so they said gravity isn't pulling things down but in fact the entire world is traveling upwards and getting faster and faster and faster and that's why things fall they stay still and the ground comes up to meet it they said the earth is an infinite plane in all directions that bisects reality and is accelerating upwards at 9.8 meters per second squared and that's how gravity works according to them but people would look at these arguments and say well if you are accelerating forever there is a problem with that and this physicist in the room I'm sure what's a problem with accelerating forever the speed of light absolutely so people would argue say hi you must be wrong because if you accelerate forever eventually you're gonna overtake the speed of light and you can't do that it's the speed limit of the universe but we have these educated trolls who are having fun and they say well you're right that you can't go faster than the speed of light but if you look at I'm Stein's theory of relativity it says that as you approach light speed time begins to slow down and what's happening is the earth is accelerating more and more but time is slowing down and it all works back out again and so the problem here was the people who would go in and try and argue that the world was actually round they wouldn't think about any of these arguments before they started the argument they would think well I know the world is round I've never thought about it before but I know it must be true and therefore I must be able to tell all these people why they're wrong and they would go in and they would bring up points that would be the first thing you would think of if he were to argue with a flat earther but what they would miss is that the flat earthers would also have thought about that and they are still flat earthers so they must have an answer and so people wouldn't do the research to figure out the answers to their questions they would go in and say ah I know better than you I can tell you you're completely wrong and they'd lose the argument and people would see people who were round earthers coming along and losing the argument it would persuade people that the world was actually flat and so these arguments were actually getting more and more people to believe the world was flat but it didn't go viral there weren't thousands and tens of thousands of people it wasn't all over the media and I think part of the reason for that is that the arguments were quite sophisticated you had to understand basically what Einstein theory of relativity was before you could understand how it explained gravity in a flat earth universe and you can't do that by sticking it on a picture with some text and sticking out and facebooking having 250 thousand people share it so the arguments were sophisticated enough to prevent people being able to prove them wrong but they were so sophisticated that they were stopping spreading even further because you had to really understand them to spread them and this is where the flat earth was when I first encountered it in 2013 so I've got a few versions of what the Flat Earth looked like this on the right there that's the conventional model the AAE model the arid Musil equidistant model that you might think of the Arctic Circle in the middle the second one is what the Vice President had in his mind he said this better explains the way that ships can try to travel around the world and how long they take to travel around so this is his version of the Flat Earth and this one on the far left here this is one version of the infinity of ice model the infinite plane model and the reasoning behind this argument goes if we are beings that I stood on land in the middle of the water in the middle of the ice we're basically in a puddle and if we're in a puddle maybe there's another puddle and if there's another puddle there might be more land and if there's more land there might be more beings and that's where aliens come from so if aliens are visiting us all the time where are they coming from well to the Flat Earth as they're coming from a different puddle so this I think is an example of what happens if you have an existing pseudo-scientific an idea in your mind that we are being visited by aliens all the time and then you come across an idea like Flat Earth that might not be able to explain aliens very well instead of throwing out the aliens you put the two together and you form a new theory here's my version of Flat Earth that can also account for aliens and in fact this better explains aliens because now we know where the Raelians are coming from so this the kind of thing that was going on in Flat Earth in 2013 but this wasn't going viral this wasn't shared by thousands and thousands and thousands of people so how do we get to point where it exploded well I think one of those things that that exploded it is the publishing of this book in 2016 this is an e-book and a youtube series by Eric Dubay and of the many Flat Earth is I spoken to I spoken to a few dozen flatters as I think at this point the vast majority cite this this video as one of the reasons they got into the Flat Earth this was persuasive to them so this is three years after those arguments about Einstein's theory of relativity and the infinity of ice and gravity three years you'd imagine of making their arguments more robust more sophisticated better what are the arguments in this book well the first argument is the horizon looks flat show me the horizon I can't see a curve you can't tell me that my eyes are wrong when I look out across the water at the beach and I look across the sea it looks flat how can you tell me that my eyes are wrong basic observation tells me that I'm right they said water always goes flat this the third argument it comes up a lot with flat earthers you can have land and it would be hills and valleys it's be lumpy it'll be up and down but water will always go flat if you fill a bathtub with water eventually it'll be completely still on top and once it's still on top you can measure that surface and they say it'd be completely flat they say that water can't stick to a curved surface if you have a ball which is a curvature in the middle the top of the water will still be flat you can't get water to bend at all according to these arguments they say that rivers always run downhill but if your surface is curved and your river starts here and the sea is there the river has to go uphill to get to the sea and the argument also explained it also says that in the southern hemisphere where we are now obviously if you have a river in the southern hemisphere and has to go to the sea it's going to go all the way up hill and you can't have water run uphill and therefore basic common sense tells you the world has to be flat because water can't run uphill they say what about experts they say if you speak to a pilot about when their plane is traveling at a cruising altitude and they travel in a straight line they say if a traitor if a plane was genuinely travelling in a straight line which is what pilots say is happening if the world was curved in that was happening what you'd see is this so they say the only way for a plane to stay at a consistent altitude above a curved surface is if the pilot continually points the nose down to stop it flying off into space but when you talk to pilots they say there's never a point in the journey where they have to start pointing the nose down towards the ground again and correct their calls downwards and this they say is because the earth isn't curved it's actually flat and when they travel they're traveling the flat line they say what about the movement of things through the air they say if you shot a cannonball from north to south on a world that was spherical and traveling at a thousand miles an hour to the west what would happen if you're stood on that stood next to the cannon ball the cannon rather is the second the cannonball leaves the cannon the cannon would spin away at a thousand miles an hour and the Cannonball would carry on traveling straight and so if you're stood next to the cannon and you're spinning with the cannon you would see the Cannonball leave the cannon and fly 2,000 miles an hour in the opposite direction and they say that isn't what happens and that's because the world isn't spinning and it isn't spinning because it isn't round it's flat they say if a helicopter was genuinely on an earth that was traveling at a thousand miles an hour to the west the second the helicopter lifted off the ground to hover over the same spot the ground would move beneath it at a thousand miles an hour and so to travel in a helicopter all you need to do is lift up and wait for your destination to get to you and then land again but they say that isn't how helicopters work because they say the world isn't spinning it's stationary it's flat as the Bible tells us they say this is genuinely argument hundred and thirteen that if the world is spherical countries in the southern hemisphere like Australia like Brazil they'd be upside down and people would fall off this is the level of sophistication of their arguments 189 is that the Bible says the world is flattened and moving and therefore it must be 191 will Pythagoras Copernicus Galileo Newton Neil Armstrong they were all Freemasons therefore the world is flat this is genuine the level of argument in Eric debate 200 proofs and I think what's interesting about this book is this is a hugely influential book the vast majority of Flat Earth as I've met have said this is what changed their mind this will open up their eyes to the truth and I think the reason this book is so successful in this video series is so successful is because the types of arguments that it makes first of all very easy to understand in a good level they don't go in too deep and complicated formula or equations they speak at a common-sense level incorrectly but they speak at what would be a good level and they cover all manner of different subjects so if you are someone who is interested in basic observations and what you can see there are arguments in there to say what you can see proves the world is flat if you're already interested in conspiracy theory there's arguments in there to say why the flat earth is actually a conspiracy theory if you're somebody who believes the world is you know creationist it was invented 6,000 years ago created by God in seven days there are arguments in there to say well creationism tells us that the world is actually flat and so it covers all these different types of communities who might be persuaded and gives them something that fits with what they believe and I think this is why it's incredibly persuasive and why it's so influential and this has been seen by a thousand thousand people it was very persuasive to the to the people that I've spoken to one of the other most persuasive arguments our mother one of most important moments in the last five years really a flat earth is the publishing of videos by this champion this is Mark Sargent if you've seen the Netflix documentary behind the curve he's the main person in that documentary really and Mark Sargent it's someone who believed that there was all these conspiracies before he came to Flat Earth who said that JFK John F Kennedy was assassinated by the US government that the moon landing was faked it never really happened that the there was used to be a civilization that lived on Mars and they created they carved a face on a mountain in MA on Mars these are all the things he believed and he said in 2014 he was watching a moon landing video on YouTube and YouTube recommended a Flat Earth video to him and he thought the world can't be flat this is ridiculous I'm gonna watch this and prove how wrong it is he said he watched the video and spent nine months trying to disprove it trying to prove why it can't be true and when he said after nine months he couldn't disprove this video he said I was left with no other choice but to accept it must be true of course in doing that what he's done is he's thrown out the expertise of anybody who's field of expertise involves demonstrating of using arguments or using evidence that the world is actually round all of our expertise all of that scientific knowledge you throw out because you can't personally disprove a video you might not have access to that knowledge but if it's not yours if you don't already have those observations you throw it away because you can't personally disprove these things and this is how he came to be a flat earther and I interviewed him in 2017 after he he'd produced this series of videos called Flat Earth Clues in 2015 hugely influential I think the second or joint first most influential series of videos on YouTube on YouTube so because I'd already spoken to flat earthers at this point I thought well when I wanna interview mark Sargent the first thing I'll ask is what version of Flat Earth do you believe in because I think it's important to understand what's in the other person's head and that we have a shared understanding of the topic which talking about before we start to investigate it more and he said well he does believe that the world is actually a disc shape without the arctic circle in the middle but not only is it a disc shape but it's underneath the dome and he said it's very much based on their film The Truman Show with Jim Carrey where he lives in a giant dorm as part of a reality TV experiment he doesn't realize he's in the dorm but marks Arjun says it's no coincidence that it's like the film The Truman Show because the people in charge of Hollywood know that we live in a giant dome and they put the film out The Truman Show to confuse people so people start to say I think we live in a giant dome they could be dismissed all you've seen this film The Truman Show and you took it too seriously you're thinking of fiction there so he thinks the people who know that the world is under a dome are actually the same people as who controls Hollywood and if you can imagine what that means we'll get to there shortly so how do we know that it's just true well he says there's a few different clues and one of the clues he says in the 1960s the USA Soviet Russia they were engaged in the Cold War they were intimidating each other from across the world and one of the ways that they would intimidate each of those to try and find a base a military base that they could use of strategic importance to show how important and to intimidate from and obviously Russia tried to get a base in Cuba as part of this kind of expansionist program this expansionist strategy and part of that expansion was both the USA and Soviet Russia looked one tark teeka try and have a military base in Antarctica - Antarctica's exploit the mineral wealth and to be able to intimidate from there but according to mark Sargent when the USA and Soviet Russia got to Antarctica they found the edge that's when they hit the wall that is a Antarctica that keeps us in the dawn and at this point according to Mark Sargent the Cold War was over USA and Russia agreed to hide the truth of the dome from the rest of the world and pretend to still be at war and everything in the next 30 years nearly of Cold War was a lie that they were perpetrating to keep everybody believing that they were still at war to hide the truth of the dome from the world and around them and they say if you look at those evidence marks Hodgins says of this being true if you look at the long-range missile capability testing of the USA in the 60s and 70s and onwards they would fire those range missiles straight up in the air why says mark sergeant would you fire a long-range missile straight up in the air to see how far you can shoot it if you want to see how far you can shoot it mark sergeant says you shoot it as far as you can but why shoot it straight up in the air well mark sergeant said it's because they were trying to figure out how high up the dome was they were using their missiles to bomb the ceiling on top of the world to see what it was made of and to see where the dorm ended see whether the parameters of our world are now I would argue if you're trying you 'only have an opponent who is in this kind of phony war there's Cold War this is this intimidatory war you don't want them to know what your capabilities are while you're testing it so you shoot it straight up in the air and work out from the thrust how far it could go and that way it's much harder for your enemy to track these long-range missiles and understand what your capabilities are and also you don't accidentally bomb somewhere because you're shooting a missile but no mark Sartain says they were trying to bomb the ceiling on top of the world but he says this isn't all supposition there is evidence of this what are the points of evidence that he brought up was the gravestone of Verna von Braun so Verna von Braun is the rocket scientist who was smuggled out of Nazi Germany after the Second World War it was his technology that led to the v2 rockets that were responsible for the Blitz of London and various other kind of blitzes from from the Nazi expansion and he was smuggled out of America Germany into America under Operation Paperclip and they used that v2 rocket technology at natty rocket technology to power the u.s. space race and to get the u.s. to the moon it was his rockets that led to or that inspire and drove that that technology for the USA which is true but mark Sartain says be if he was the father of space race the father of rocket science why does his gravestone quote Psalms 19:1 this is a dead giveaway this is a clue as to what was really going on because Psalms 19:1 reads the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork well the firmament is the biblical name for the lid on top of the world the roof of the world so why would the father of rocket technology on his on his gravestone have a reference to there being a dome there being a roof on top of the world this says mark Sargent is proof that he's confessing from beyond the grave that all of that work after that after the war was a lie and everything he did was actually part of this giant Hawks and there's a lid on top of the world now I would argue actually the court is much more about the heavens declaring the glory of God for a man who saw his technology as the key to the heavens it was his rockets that got us into space and so he's saying oh I allowed us to witness the glory of God from space but no mark sergeant says this is a confession actually there was a roof on top of the world and he had to go along with it in order to get out of Nazi Germany so once we accept that there's a dome on top of the world what else does the universe look like well according to Mark Sargeant there are no stars and planets out there in the solar system or out there in the universe those are projections on the dome or paintings on the dome like in a planetarium I gave this talk in Rio planetarium last week and I said the mark Sargent things were just in a really really big planetarium and the stars look like they're very far away but they're just painted or projected onto the curved dome of the world he says the Sun and Moon do exist but they're just outside of the dome and they have their own separate light and they move around independently and I said well how do they move around and he said well this isn't the important thing at the moment we can't even accept the truth that were in a dome they're hiding that truth from us but if we accept that truth we can start asking the big questions like who put the Sun and Moon there and why did they do it but we're not even allowed to accept the truth of the dome so we don't get to the important questions like what's beyond the dome and who's in charge of the Sun um so at this point the interview with mark I thought I'm gonna try and understand how do you sense check how do you understand what how do you question whether you're right or wrong and what was Mark's standard of evidence and could mark change his mind on Iran on one of these ideas and so I said to mark you used to believe in all these different conspiracy theories is there a conspiracy theory that you used to believe in but you no longer believe to be true but maybe that will help you understand can mark change his mind and we could start in an avenue he said yes and I'm glad you asked me that because I used to wonder why were all these different conspiracy theories all true and then I realized it all made sense that the US government killed JFK because they knew we could never get to the moon we'd have to halt the moon landing because we can't get to the moon because there's a dome there because the earth is flat so once he said once you understand that the world is flat all of the other concerns see theories make sense it's like that it's the key to all the other conspiracies but he said except one there's one I no longer believe in and I believe it's so false and I need to meet the person who invented it to see why he came up with it he said I no longer believe that there was ever a civilization on Mars and I said yes but that's because you no longer believe in Mars you not only believe that Mars exists there can't be a civilization on something if it's not actually there that's not quite the question that was asking is that you aren't dismissing that the civilization on Mars you're dismissing the existence of Mars which is getting further from reality according to me rather than getting closer to it but Mark sergeants work has been hugely influential in the flat-earthers that I meet he's the the the the father really of the modern the most modern Flat Earth movement and this is one version of what the Flat Earth might look like according to mark Sargent under the dome this is taken from his website I don't think he thinks this is literally true but this is a drawing of the kind of thing that might be true or under a dorm version of the of the world and so this was becoming huge on YouTube and what was happening is that people who would view moon landing stuff on YouTube would be recommended this video of these videos about Flat Earth and he viewed one of these videos about Flat Earth they'd be recommended another one and the more they watched the more they were shown by YouTube because YouTube just wanted them to keep watching YouTube didn't care what they were showing them so long as you're putting the hours in sat in front of YouTube and so when one video goes up well Flat Earth and people put up a response video about how they believe it and how passionate now they are about Flat Earth all these different videos end up being recommended to one another and becomes this kind of network that the more you're watching the more you're given to watch and the more you're sent down this rabbit hole the more you're radicalized into being a flat earther and this was starting to impact a lot of people and start to convert a lot of people and in fact the last meet in the America of the American Academy of Sciences there was a paper presented where they went to the American flat earth convention and asked people what persuaded you that the world was flat and of the 40 people they spoke to 39 of them said I saw it on YouTube that's what converted me I saw YouTube videos and the 40th person said my son told me about it he saw it on YouTube so YouTube's been a huge driver of this of this movement and I can explain why if people want to know a little bit later about the technology technological reasons why I think youtubers sponsible and why this works but it goes beyond youtube in fact this was actually in in Chester a city near where I live where people have gone on the street to preach the truth about the Flat Earth and you can see that Flat Earth 200 proofs is on his his poster so it's the Eric Dubay arguments and this is a chap from a Flat Earth group in Chester and if you're anything like me and you're interested these kind of things when you find out there's a flat earth group that meets 20 miles away from where you live you go along and you meet these people and you gon sit in the pub and you have drinks with them and you try and understand what they're about I didn't go to tell them why they were wrong I didn't go to tell them why I was better than them or superior to them I went to understand what brings people together around this idea how do people justify this idea to themselves what do they talk about and I found some fascinating things out I was told first of all you can never trust any experiment you haven't personally done information someone else has come up with could be compromised you can't check it you can't be sure it's true so only check only trust the experiments you can personally do which is very handy if it means that you can dismiss anything done in space and anything done at the Large Hadron Collider anything done with any technology you haven't got in your kitchen you can dismiss but it's this an idea of elevating your own personal observations your own personal logic above anything anyone else can do anyone elses expertise means nothing compared to what you can figure out for yourself I was also told you can never trust photographs show me a photo of the world from space they would tell me and I'll show you a composite image I'll show you a Photoshop job I'll show you a con I'll show you a hoax because you can't trust where those photos came from digital media is too easily manipulated you don't know who put it together what their agenda was what work they've done to it you can never ever ever trust photographs whereas YouTube videos you can trust in fact here's this YouTube video that proves the world is flat in fact they would say to me here's a YouTube video of an experiment someone's done that proves the world is flat I said well have you done this experiment No so what happened to not trusting experiments you haven't personally done what happened to not trusting digital media because it can be manipulated when it comes to being something that supports your own argument the standard of evidence was much lower and I think this is something that we're probably all guilty of in some way you know when we're having arguments the thing we find that agrees with what we think we don't question it as much as the thing we find that disagrees you know and if you're having an argument someone on line how many times have you gone to find the first link that proves you right whether you fully read it whether it's reflective of the best available evidence no it agrees with me have that I'm right you're wrong I don't I don't need to investigate this it fits with my own personal beliefs and I think we see this in Flat Earth in a much much bigger way um I was told gravity doesn't exist there is only density the reason you stick to the grounded because you aren't denser than the air very similar weight if you had a very light liquid and you poured a heavy liquid into it the heavy liquid would sink to the bottom it's happening because of density which is true but the reason density works that way is because of gravity gravity is the reason that heavy things fall whether they're liquids and density or not so they're not interrogating their ideas fully they're finding something to dismiss what everyone else thinks as easy as possible and I think we see there's an awful lot we were told again water always finds its level water always falls flat it never ever curves it never bends you can never get water to bend this was happening in a pub and I did at this point in their in the conversation when they said water never ever bend you can never show me waterbending as a result of gravity or anything like that I did say to them if you want to see water bending as a result of a force is exerted on it and bending as a result of pressure follow me to the bathroom and I will demonstrate it very visibly they didn't take me up on that particular air at that particular argument so this is the Flat Earth meeting in a local pub but it actually got as you guys probably already know it gets much bigger than local pub events and in fact just just last week there was flat con Brazil here in some Powell or 400 people attended I unfortunately I wasn't here for that I arrived a week too late which is a shame because I would have loved to have gone my wife wouldn't have enjoyed going but I would love to have attended this convention but you can see from their own report on Facebook the kind of arguments that were being made they said shouldn't we feel the earth moving if it's moving we should feel it this is straight out of Eric Dubay is 200 proofs there saying how the creationists who still believe in asparagus farakhan earth explain the flood the ball can't be filled with water there's no way so very clearly making it clear that the Flat Earth movement is still at its heart a creationist argument that the world is 6,000 years old invented as as described in the book of Genesis and here we have Jota Martin saying there is no global warming because there is no globe bringing another conspiracy theory in and this is something we see all the time it's not just one conspiracy that the world is flat as we'll see in a moment it's all these are the conspiracy theories are part of it too but I didn't go to black on Brazil I did go to the UK version of it in April 2018 there's a hundred and sixty people in the room when I found out about it of course the first thing I did was buy a ticket and go along to spend three full days in a hotel in Birmingham hear about hearing about why the world was flat and in the most fun weekends I've ever spent in my life it was genuinely fascinating it was Jenny my wife is taken issue with that we've had lots of fun weekends but this is one of the most fun weekend's I've ever spent and I went there again not to tell people how wrong they were not to tell people how much better than them I was I won't to try and understand what do people talk about how do people justify this how do people explain this to each other what what brings people to that to that world and I want to tell you a little bit about what I experienced there because I think it helps illustrate what the front earth movement is about I think um so one of the speaker's was Irulan du chí he also spoke in flack on Brazil last week he's an Argentinian conspiracy theorist and youtuber he's put videos up all about the New World Order 9/11 truth anti GMO anti vaccines he's have been a flat earth believer since 2014 which curiously is after I first found out about Flat Earth world I haven't met I think any flat-earthers who've been looking into Flat Earth movement as long as I have it's quite irrelevant quite a recent phenomenon even amongst the biggest speakers so and his earu talking on argentinian television about tierra planner the Flat Earth so earu was was fascinating for a couple of different reasons um first of all there was a mixup with aru's timing he thought he had two hours to give a presentation when he only had an hour and the the organizer in introduced him by saying oh we had this confusion but we've sorted it out he's going to give his talk in two halves and so Iria give his first the first half of his talk on Saturday morning and it took about an hour and a half and he gave the second half of his talk on Saturday afternoon and they took an hour and they give the third half his talk on Sunday morning and it took another two hours so there's a huge amount of material here what was interesting was of all the Mateen that was being presented a huge amount of it had nothing to do with the Flat Earth it had to do with all these other ideas so for example he said that the UN United Nations is a front for the one world order the one world global government and we know that this is definitely true because if you look at the Spanish name for the UN it is the ole n u and the O and new backwards is UN or which is Spanish for one so this is proof that the UN is a front for the one world order because the reverse name of Reverse acronym of it in Spanish is the same as the Spanish word for one and this is a dead giveaway this is a clear clue now I was at this convention with a friend of mine at this point she did leaned over and says does it will realize that UN is already French for one because you could have cut a lot of that logic out if you switch language and start looking at UN in French because una is French for one so he could have shocked at all of that logic by picking a different language he said if you look at dinosaurs the reason dinosaurs you see pictures of them they don't look real the reason they look like a mix of alligators and rhino rhinos and giraffes is that the artist that was paid by the one world government to invent dinosaurs drew from those or animals as inspiration so it's not because there is a familial relationship through evolution over millions of years that main that mean these these animals are related to dinosaurs no it's nothing to do that it's because the dinosaurs were invented and they were invented because the world is 6,000 years old and the Bible is literally true and therefore we can't have ever had dinosaurs there hasn't been enough time so going straight back to creationist arguments here he said that the protocols of the Elders of Zion prove that the Jesuits are in control and they intend all these malicious things about the world if you want to know why the One World Order is being run all these wars are happening in all these disasters and tragedies and evil things are happening it's because it's all in the book the protocols of the Elders of Zion now this made my blood run cold because the protocols of the Elders design it's a very famous document it's a hoax book written in the nineteenth century which claims actually that the Jews are in control of the world and they have all these evil plans and it's been completely debunked it's a the work was actually ripped off from a work of fiction about Machiavelli the Italian politician in hell work is tacit Oracle fiction about him in Hell and it was ripped off from that and labeled as being script of a meeting of the elders of zion the elderly Jews who run the world so we had this up this anti-semitic conspiracy theory being brought up at the Flat Earth convention and what shocked me is nobody seemed to be concerned about that at all when we're now hearing about how there's this anti-semitic conspiracy ruling the world making all the evil things happen nobody seems to be concerned I thought I'd be there to hear about how the world is what I'm hearing all this other stuff he also said that there's any a theists there I'm an atheist myself he said I might think you know he thinks that atheists might think they don't worship a God but actually a theists come from the word ethos which is a Greek Mountain God so that a theists are actually secretly worshiping a Greek Mountain God called athos and that worship might be so secretive they don't even realize it might be secret from themselves that they're doing it now the word atheist doesn't come from a thoughts they come from a theist but we saw this kind of manipulation of language all the time and this was the this was endemic of a certain type of Flat Earth argument which was just throwing all sorts of things out there all sorts of ideas all sorts of conspiracy theories not backing things up by evidence not doing rigorous research rigorous study just throwing ideas out and proclaiming them as facts so that was a rule on duty or my favorite things about arrow actually was when he was introduced the organizer said you actually arrived in Birmingham 24 hours early than was expected so we expect him to arrive on Friday and he arrived on Thursday I was Thursday Wednesday something like that and they said was his hilarious kind of mix-up that I had to run to the airport to rescue him because they didn't expect him to arrive for another day and there's a mix-up but I heard that story and I thought yeah I bet that happens all the time when your world you can't account for the International Dateline when you can't explain why it's a different day in different parts of the world does this kind of thing happen all the time I'm not sure so that was one type of the lecturers that we saw was evil at you will undo gee a good example of the other type of lecture that I saw is a chap called Dave Murphy so Dave's a really interesting character he was a former software engineer on Wall Street a computer programmer he used to work in the financial district of New York at the same time he was a volunteer fireman in New Jersey and he was a volunteer fireman in New Jersey when September 11th happened and he was involved in the cleanup or rescue operation but he knew people that were and see hugely affected him as it affected the entire city of New York and all of America and arguably the entire world and it deeply affected him and he said as a result in 2005 he became a 9/11 truther said what he saw that day proved to him it couldn't have been the official story was true it had to be the case that the government was involved in bringing down those towers in in making all this thing happen he also said that in 2005 he suffered what he describes as a midlife crisis that leads him to live an off-the-grid lifestyle and that off-the-grid lifestyle since 2011 has involved drinking his own urine and washing in his own urine each morning because he believes that urine has all these curative properties he said that you're in Reverse is aging is helpful with AIDS with cancer with smallpox and more than 60 other conditions all of these different conditions he says can be alleviated or cured by drinking your own urine washing your own urine injecting your own urine using your urine as a magical cure for everything now Davis wasn't speaking about urine therapy and being able to cure cancer but he was selling a book about it he was there at this mutter of convention I didn't expect to be seeing someone who says you can kill cancer with urine speaking in a flat earth convention so Dave Kemp the flat earth in 2014 he said he came after looking at curvature calculations about the way that the world worked and he was interviewed on macedonian television and the arguments he made were very similar as the ones that we've already seen you know Antarctica the Explorers there found the edge of the dorm planes can't travel faster than the spinning of the world planes can't land on a runway if that runway is traveling at a thousand miles an hour how is a plane going to hit a runway that's moving at a thousand miles an hour on the ground similar kind of arguments what we've seen and he made these arguments in this Macedonian television program where he speaks for an hour and this interview on YouTube is one as the third biggest thing I think the third most influential thing of getting people to believe that the world is flat many of the people have I met at the UK flat earth convention came there because they saw this video of Dave explain into it and what happened with this video is you had that the host was not prepared to have these kind of arguments made that will interview a flat earther but they haven't really looked into flutter of arguments to understand what arguments were gonna be made and they were blown away by the types of organs being made because they haven't really done the research in it and then the last type of speaker I want to talk about is Darren Nesbitt Darren is but I think is the most fascinating speaker that I've met in the flat earth world so again he was a conspiracy theorists who believe that 9/11 was an inside job the Illuminati were in control the world the Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag operation perpetrated by the people who run the world he came he became a flat earther in 2015 I interviewed him in 2018 and the reason I think he was so fascinating were that the types of things he was saying to the audience I thought were entirely unexpected first of all he told the audience the most important thing is be your own authority don't listen to the authority of other people just if you can kiss just because they've got an impressive job title or an impressive job or impress her mental Authority it doesn't mean that they're right question it for yourself which thought was exactly what I would tell a flat earth audience don't just listen to people's authority look into their arguments see if those argument work he also said new evidence based skeptical research that's exactly what I would tell an audience of flat earthers do evidence based skeptical research look at the evidence be skeptical look into whether these things actually work so his two mantras were exactly what I would tell that exact same audience um the other thing he did that I thought was utterly fascinating was he shared what he described as the Flat Earth questionnaire a list of 10 questions you should ask yourself if you're a flat earther and the questions were yes-or-no questions where it was things like do you find more and more that you can only socialize with people who accept the truth of the Flat Earth do you find more and more about your conversations or people keep coming back to the Flat Earth do you find yourself believing that most people's problems would go away if they just accepted the truth that the world was flat and you can see in the audience as he's asking these questions people are smiling and nudging their friend and acknowledging themselves they can see themselves they're saying yes to these questions these questions describe their lives they can see themselves here and once there's enough of a murmur gone through the audience and enough of a sort of laughing and giggling is that everyone recognizes themselves needs questions Dave points out that these 10 questions are the red flag questions that you may be in a cult it's a cult questionnaire if you're saying yes to these questions these are signs that you might be in a cult and you should investigate whether what you believe is actually a cult belief which I thought was fascinating for a flat earther to be bringing this up to flat earthers but that flat earth may be a cult but he's still a flat earther so I think it something very interesting going on with with Aaron one of the reasons he thinks Flat Earth is a cold he says this model cannot possibly be true we can tell for certain this model can't be true using basic observations you said you know we've never seen the edge there's no photographs of the edge nor video of the edge we've got airplanes and drones and helicopters by now we would have seen something we've never seen any indication that there is an edge that there is a wall he said what about the distances in the north and south for the Flat Earth to be true the southern hemisphere would have to be extremely well I can't point at the screen unfortunately my my pointer the flat the Sun Hennessey would have be much more spread out because in a circular version a spherical version the world the submerse fear is going towards the the shortest part at the the point of the circumference but in a circular version world a flat version everything would have to be spread out around the edges and that isn't the case he said the northern hemisphere the southern hemisphere they both see different sets of stars how would that be true in this model where the northern hemisphere would be towards the center of the circle the southern hemisphere will be towards the circumference how would it be possible for someone in Australia and someone in South America to see the same constellations but nobody in the northern hemisphere in Europe could see them that would be impossible if the world is flat and we're all looking at the same set of stars then what about the equator and the observations we have of centuries of sailors sailing around the world and how long it takes we know about going around the North Pole and the South Pole is the shortest way to get from point a all the way around to point again and the longest way to that is to go around the equator but in this version that couldn't possibly be true because the longest way would be around the circumference which would be what we recall the South Pole said this can't possibly work it has to be lies it was given to you by the people who want to throw you off the scent about what the world really looks like the people who control the world and want to make people doubt the Flat Earth they put this out as a lie that people couldn't possibly believe if they really investigated it what I thought fascinating about that was after pointing out why this model has to be a lie the next speaker who gets up and talks about this model nobody in the audience seems to be disturbed by that nobody the audience says well what about the last guy who just proved this model was wrong everybody goes back to accepting this model it's not about having to figure out exactly what version of the world is true it's about accepting that what everybody else think is false once we accept that it doesn't matter what flavor of true we are we just know that everyone else is wrong so what does Darren Nesbitt believe well he's short a version the world that he says works much better and his version the world where you can travel across the North and the South in the same amount of time and the equator takes the longest to get across his version is this and so you can see there for the the points of the diamond across the the center that will be the longest way that's the equator that would take the longest to get from point A to point B and going across the North and the South would take about the same amount of time so this isn't a terrible model but it does suffer from some drawbacks and if you look at it for long enough you might spot a couple of those problems with this model for if this is what the world actually looks like and one of those problems is the edge you know if you sail towards the west eventually you drop off the edge into whatever is beyond that but Darren Nesbit says that's only if you believe that there is an edge but if instead what is actually happening is there's a four dimensional time-space warp going along each of those edges this all starts to make sense because now if you travel to the West you go through the time-space warp and you reappear back from the east like pac-man you go off to the left you come back onto the right you can travel forever the pac-man version of reality now I look at this model and say well actually this does fit a little bit better with observations about the world so this is better than that circular version better than the flat disk version but this time space warp having to invent a four dimensional time-space warp is a bit of a problem but this model can be improved if you just hold it up and Bend that Diamondback words until the yellow line meets the yellow line and the red line meets the red line and what you then have is a three-dimensional object that allows all the things that Darren talked about but doesn't require the invention of it four dimensional time-space warp and in fact if you take more measurements than just at the North Pole South Pole in the acquainted you take multiple measurements all the way along that photo mental time-space warp to see what happens where you appear on the other side and connect those up you get back to a sphere so I think what's happening is Darren is actually rejecting the Flat Earth model and getting in my opinion closer and closer to a sphere and I hope one day he'll able to get back to the sphere I don't know whether he will but I'd like to believe that he's able to investigate his own ideas enough to get back to a sphere so though some of the different types of speakers and some of the different ideas that that we saw presented the Flat Earth conference but how do we know that these aren't true what about those arguments that flat-earthers make that seem so persuasive to people how do we explain some of these things well I think I can explain a few of them for example this is from a Flat Earth meme this Flat Earth meme is called show me the horizon show me the curvature where is the curve in this image it's very clear that the horizon is very clearly flat this is straight from their literature straight from their means but even in their image if we apply a ruler you can see there's a curvature it meets in the center it doesn't meet right at the edge there's very clearly a gap it's just that the curve is very very subtle and this is what's going on unfortunately is that this is what the world looks like you know twenty four thousand nine hundred and one miles in circumference but we never get to see it like that or very few of us ever get to see the entire world in one view we don't get to see the curvature fully in our own sphere of vision we don't even get to see that much curvature we don't even get to see that much curvature we might get to see a bit like that much curvature and when you compare that to the circle already just by zooming in on an initial circle we get flatter and flatter and flatter and the problem is we aren't built to comprehend the scale of the world our minds are built to deal with the everyday things that we see in our lives they aren't built to deal with magnitude of that size and so when if when you appeal to someone's good instincts you appeal to what they can observe and then it's very hard to persuade someone that what you're looking like know what you're looking at right now is a curve it's just too subtle for you to notice you have to read them to stand the model and understand how subtle that curvature actually is dunder stand why the horizon looks flat then we have this thing about airborne objects your cannonballs flying helicopters flying how is it possible that a cannonball can fly through the air on a spherical world and not shoot off to one side a thousand miles an hour because you spin away from it what this is missing is that when the cannon ball leaves the cannon if the cannon is traveling at a thousand miles now to the west so is the cannon ball when it leaves the cannon twas already traveling at a thousand miles an hour in that direction and it travels through air that's also spinning at a thousand miles an hour and there's that preservation of momentum which isn't instinct it doesn't feel true it doesn't feel at a good level true you have to read understand the physics of the world to understand why this is true and it's a great illustration of this this is a trampoline being pulled by a tractor at 20 miles an hour and you can see this man in the in the red he's gonna jump up and down on this trampoline and you're good tells you that because the trampolines moving the second he leaves the trampoline he's gonna fly backwards as the trampoline he's gonna hit that wall or he's gonna go up and over the wall and land on the ground as the trampling moves as he does he leaves it but actually what happens is because he leaves a trampoline traveling at 20 miles an hour he preserves that momentum and he lands back he's actually traveling in an arc and landing back on the trampoline this doesn't feel true but it works when you look at the physics when you really investigate the physics you have to really understand the model that you're dismissing and interrogating before you're able to do the work about it so it's not about going with your gut it's about going with an understanding of what's going on the same is true with the water argument about water bending about water traveling uphill this is a chap who at the UK convention said I can prove to you the world is actually flat and I can prove it using a glass of water he said if I pour a glass of water over my head which he did on camera he said you'll see that the water runs off my head he can't stick to the size of my head it won't all just stay on this spherical object it'll run off and if there was water on a ball earth all that water would roll off the earth it can't stick to a ball but what they're missing is again they haven't fully understood the model ed is missing this is one of their means this is straight from Flat Earth literature saying if rivers are running to the sea those rivers on a globe earth would have to go uphill whereas on a flat earth those those same rivers once you flatten it out are running downhill and that makes sense but what they're missing is they think gravity is doing that it's pulling down and at the top of the curve is pulling straight down but at the sides of the curve it's pulling perpendicular to the curve that's the model of gravity they have in their head and if I apply that model of gravity to their même they're right the water has to be running uphill at those sides if gravity is doing that but gravity isn't doing that gravity's pulling towards the center of the curve so gravity's actually doing that at every different point is pulling directly towards the center of the circle and if we applied that version of gravity to their own meme we can see pretty clearly that at each of those sides the water is running downhill but you to understand the world before you dismiss it you can't just dismiss something based on the first thing you can think of to dismiss it you have to really understand it first they make this argument a lot about what about aeroplanes traveling they say this is a flight from Merson Sydney to Santiago and it refueled in in America this they say makes no sense in a globe model why would they have to come all the way to the northern hemisphere to come all the way south again this can't be true but if we apply it to a Flat Earth model it's a straight line this makes suddenly way more sense this has to be true the airplane movements themselves prove the world has to be flat and not spherical but again what they're missing is what they're really looking up here are they looking at planes that are just refueling or are they looking at planes that are also changing their passengers because how many people are going directly from Sydney to Santiago or back again or how many of them are trying to go from Sydney to America or Sydney to Europe and they're using America as the place to interchange and that's what's actually happening they change their their passengers and actually what's really interesting is since that meme was created by flat earthers saying the only way to get from Sydney to Santiago is via America it's no longer no longer true because it turns out more people want to go from Sydney to Santiago that it's now commercially viable and Qantas flies directly from Sydney to Santiago a direct flight and the direct flight only takes 14 hours because it takes a shortcut over Antarctica over the arctic circle and is able to shorten the fight in that way so what have I learned from spending time with flat-earthers from investigating this movement from trying to understand this well I think I've learned a few things it's very easy to say that these people don't care about science and I think that's false I think they do care about science it's not that they reject the idea of science I think they want to be scientific I've met flat-earthers who are doing scientific experiments you know they're putting cameras in their gardens on tripods to watch the way the moon moves across the sky and then to pull up those calculations into the official figures and compare them to what the moon should be doing and when they find your discrepancy between their figures and the official figures they say that's because the official figures are lies because the world isn't actually round it's flat what they're missing is the the methodology they're using isn't very accurate then we've moved the tripod slightly they may have slightly refocused the camera there they're measuring isn't fully accurate but they trying to do something scientific there maybe aren't very good at investigating their own models and understanding the flaws in their methodology what they're trying to measure and how it measures it but they are trying to be scientific I think it's not about rejecting science but I think this movement is much more about value systems and beliefs and rhetoric it's these ideas of common-sense arguments that hit you in the good before they hit you in the head they they make you feel like the answers right before they make you think about the evidence for it and I think with a lot of people they come to the Flat Earth movement because it fits something in the way they already saw the world so when you ask them why do you think the world is flat and they talk about curvature calculations that isn't why they think the world is flat that's how they continue to justify thinking the world is flat they think the world is flat for lots of other reasons you know because they believe the world is 6,000 years old and the Bible's literally true or it might be because they believe that there is an Illuminati in control of everything and that the the fact that the world is round is just another of the lies that they tell you that's why they believe the world is actually flat and that the reasons they tell you is just how they try and persuade you and how they just define themselves but for a lot of people you get to your conclusion and then you find the evidence to justify why you made that decision why you made that leap I think that's what's going on here I think YouTube has a massive role to play and I can come to that in the question - people are interested what I've learnt is there isn't one Flat Earth belief we might think that the world looks like this to a flat earther but actually there's multiple different models there's a circle earth the infinite plain earth the enclosed world the diamond world one guy I met thought the earth was in a giant cosmic egg shape I could have gone on for a long time about that idea if you're going to speak to a flat earther and trying to try to get them to question the version the world that they see you first have to understand what version of the world they think about there's no point talking to someone about the Discworld when actually they believe in the infinite plane worlds because your arguments will make no sense because it won't be about what they have in their head you have to listen to people understand them before you can start to argue and debate and converse with them but it's also important to understand that flat earth isn't just one belief yes you believe the world is flat but you also might believe that the Bible is literally true the world is 6,000 years old that Satan is everywhere that Satan is in control of NASA that the Illuminati New World Order run the world and that they may or may not be Jewish in doing so that that vaccines are evil that medicines alternative medicines and kills for cancer are true that chemtrails are poisoning us that flu rides poisoning us all these things exist together and if we see Flat Earth in isolation we miss the bigger picture I think the bigger picture is it's not about accepting a belief I think it's much more about rejecting the mainstream belief rejecting a conventional view of the world everyone else is wrong in the way they see the world they are the sheeple they are the followers and I've got this knowledge and I'm part of the the community that has accessed this secret knowledge that access to this the real truth of what's going on my eyes are open I've taken the red pill I think that's what's going on here much more I also think people come to the Flat Earth belief for lots of different reasons and for some people some of those reasons might because of a traumatic event a personal crisis and I think we shouldn't dismiss that and we should be sympathetic and empathetic when we talk to people for that reason there are people I've met who I think and I haven't spoken about today who I think have gone who come to the Flat Earth belief at a time in their life when they were experiencing a personal crisis and they felt like there was nothing they could connect with and then they came across this idea and it spoke to something in them and when you meet someone who's been through a crisis or even a mental health crisis you know it might be that they are completely cured of that there it's completely over the issues that they had but during the period of crisis they've changed the direction they were heading and now they're perfectly fine again they don't realize they're heading in a completely different direction and I think we have to understand that there is a personal element to this and be empathetic towards that ID and I think the overall take I have is that if we want to try and reach people and the reason I'm a skeptical activist is I want to try and reach people I want to try and increase the level of critical thinking in the world increase the level of people who are trying to access as best as we can the reality around us based on evidence and I think they want to do that the way we can do that is by understanding not by mockery I don't think people change their mind because you've called them names because you've felt that you've told them how superior you are to them how inferior they are to you I think they changed their mind by making a connection with them by feeling they've been listened to by feeling they've been connected with and I think if we're going to reach people I think that's the way that we do it by trying to be understanding by proving to them that were in them and by reaching them at an interpersonal level humane level first so that's my talk thank you so much for listening I'll be happy to take questions but thank you thank you a lot it was a very information lots of information a very enlightening and lecture I believe everybody here was as blown off as you right now so we're opening for questions if we're watching online you can send the questions through the email yeah respond G la palabra saw a hobos people to bear and for questions from the audience please Amanda from the math department computer science department actually have you ever met a flat earther that has read project and in that case whether it they find it inspirational or heretical so this question does come up quite a lot and I have to admit and this isn't a good thing to admit I've never read any terry pratchet I'm aware that they have the Discworld idea I think I think they will have read it and I think I'm not sure they have multiple different views on it some might say well you know they're drawing on drawing on truths to make a fiction others will say well they just that it's ridiculing us with these ideas because they know it's true and they want to sort of suppress it but others might think it's a work of fiction and an enjoyable but yeah I don't know how they personally feel too too strongly about it now and you got a question about anything at all you don't be shy anything at all oh there we go so hi my name is Pedro I'm a philosopher and I'm interesting about what you fault about technology's rose special about YouTube you mentioned that so yeah so so I think YouTube has a huge role to play and I've worked with the BBC on investigating this this too so I think the reason YouTube is so influential is is this recommendation algorithm this idea that you're watching a video it recommends you the next video and and how YouTube used to do that and they've tried to change a little bit is they would say YouTube obviously want to keep you watching their business model is how many hours are being watched all the time it allows them to sell more and more expensive advertising to say millions of hours per day are being watched so the more time you're watching the better and what they used to do is they they would say if a video is being watched a lot if people many people are clicked on it this must be a good video and what they would miss there is that some people would click on a video because they believed it some people would click on it because they thought it was silly and fun some people click on it because they wanted to do their own video making a rejection of every single one of the points and then watch the video 10 times to go through every single one of the points in detail YouTube wouldn't see three different audiences they'd see one audience three times the size this must be a really good video look at all these people watching it and so be more likely to watch it to raise it that way they changed a little bit after a while and said if you click on it and you only watched the first 10 seconds you move on it kind of been a very good video so will now say the amount of time in total that video has been watched so if you have an hour-long video and you have lots of people making it all the way to the end that's much better than lots of people watching a series of five-minute videos so the long video is that you make it to the end of even if you're watching it because you want to say how much fun it is and how silly it is or if you're watching it because you want to debunk every single argument you're going to watch all the way to the end to do that and so you're still giving all this attention to this video so YouTube would would I identify videos based in that kinda way and they flank videos up that are potentially interesting based on this kind of how much time have been watched and then they would start recommending videos to people and we know from from him from studies that something there's a huge number of people who use percentage of video people who will watch the first thing that's recommended to them on video on YouTube you finish watching a video you may even have the autoplay set so one video finishes the next one recommended will play and so people were starting to watch the recommended video and YouTube would say well you're watching this video of the Earth from space we'll see if you're interested in Flat Earth video if you are interest in that video if you do click it well you like the Flat Earth video so we'll show you another Flat Earth video because maybe that will keep you watching if we can tempt you to watch another video we'll keep you watching once you've watched a couple they say well you really like Flat Earth videos so we're going to keep giving you Flat Earth videos now and this starts to change the way people see the world because they see so much of this content so that was one of the ways that it was done to work is that once they started to show you a video they would continue showing more and more videos of that kind of way and the other way that people got into watching initially is that when you search for certain terms some of the most sensational titles will be the ones that you clicked on so if you search about you know the videos of the Earth from space and there was a video saying this video from the Earth from space is wrong and the lie by NASA that sensationalism makes you say oh that's interesting I don't think it's true but I'm gonna watch it anyway and so you can get people in in that kind of way now I think this is something that's very very similar I think to the way that Google used to be with search ring or search ranking now it used to be that you could put a sensational title to your website with lots of keywords that had nothing to do with your website but were very popular keywords and people click on it thinking that oh this must be about that particular thing and so Google changed the way that they would rank websites so that you couldn't cheat in that way and people would find a new way of cheating you know hiding text in white on a white background so when you search for certain words you can't read it in with your eyes but the computer can see that it's there and Google changed so that didn't work anymore so you had this constant battle between check Google changing the way it worked and people trying to find a way to cheat it and Google fixing that cheat and finding a new way to work and eventually Google got to a place where it's pretty good it's not perfect but it's pretty good at eradicating these directions these false websites that are trying to cheat your attention but Google did that because commercially they're a search engine and a search engine that returns you irrelevant results is a search engine people won't use it's a terrible index and people go to Bing or they'll go somewhere else Ask Jeeves you know they'll find a different way of doing it so Google commercially were incentivized to fix that problem you check YouTube isn't a search engine it's an engagement engine it's an entertainment engine so so long as they're still being sensational as long as they're keeping you watching hour after hour after hour it doesn't matter whether what they're returning is relevant it only matters that it's engaging that you watch it and I think one of the issues with YouTube is that they don't have commercial pressures to fix it or if they do those pressures aren't as significant as they were for Google so they are stopped trying to change things but they have this kind of engine in place that drives people to a more extreme position because it goes through sensationalism and then they're recommending and they're recommending and they're recommending of the algorithm does that they're not doing a purpose but the algorithm is blind and just returns you what it thinks will fit now I think that's true not just a flat earth I think that's true of some of the other things that we see exacerbated by social media exacerbated by extremism for at via YouTube I think we see it in misogyny online lots of people are pointing to all the men's rights activists and these types of ideas of you know feminism is an evil thing that's ruling the world and these types of extreme radicalizing is driven by the same kind of sensational engine and recommendation engine I think we see it with white supremacy too I think we see it with some of the more extreme politics that we're seeing around the world driven in the same kind of way so there is this technological driver and unfortunate I'm normally a pretty optimistic person but I'm pessimistic here because I don't think YouTube have for for YouTube to fix this they'd have to say we need to stop making as much money we need to find ways of making less money but by doing a public good and I don't think YouTube are incentivized to do that I think they'll still want to try and chase the money they'll say we're fixing it but how well they fix it I think I'm yet to be very convinced that they'll do a very thorough job fixing it okay Leah amaura from physics suit so the main point I think is really that there is not one belief of this is the basic point because human beings are completely crazy we know we know for everything of human history and what we call science it is something that starts with some rationalization and then very very slowly all the time and generations which is one point that it is the main line and also this thing about the earth and this comes from the beginning of our understanding and it was very difficult to reach some common sense about it now if you look really what happened at the Galileo's time it's not at all trivial and it was not possible to decide for one theory or or another it was really a kind of belief either you have the belief or you don't have the belief so science goes very slowly reaching something that there is one one thinking but then this comes out to be destroyed but by by somebody that it is out of the mainstream always and the point is that we are in a very difficult moment nowadays there is not one belief about anything any longer and especially if you see politics everything that rules in fact women power it's completely crazy if you want to look what is being described sit among lawyers and among judge it Brazil they are all completed credit there is not at all something to be fine as a direction or something that everybody agrees not at all and the point is that science is not unique it's not only that there is one Flat Earth belief there is not one science belief it's maybe many small things that are considered to be scientifically proven but they don't join each other so you make as a physicist there are lots of things in which I believe but I know that everything about life and human beings it's out of scientific knowledge on a real sense so lawyers even use rhetoric to defend opposite points of view yes that's considered to be ok so I think what is wrong is to believe that humankind is rational III agree I do agree that functionally we aren't instinctively rational beings and I think skepticism is a perverse instinct that an science in a way is a perverse instinct that gets us to a better place but you have to fight against some of your natural inclinations to do so you have to in any given time what you want to be doing is say I think this thing how do I prove that I'm right that's our instinct to do that I think I'm right how do I prove that I'm right and the way to really get anywhere is to say I think this thing how do I prove that I'm wrong if I run out of ways to prove that I'm wrong maybe I'm right and I have to hold on to the idea that maybe I'll find a way to prove myself wrong one day and that's how we were able to investigate the world and start to make scientific disk and discoveries about the nature of reality the nature of the universe not by saying I have an idea I'm going to prove it right but by saying I have an idea I'm going to try as hard as I can to prove it wrong and when I run out of ways to do that maybe I can accept it as true but that's it goes counter to our nature it goes counter to what our gut tells us is the way to be but it's the only way to progress things forward is to try and prove ourselves wrong and hold on to the idea that we may still be wrong one day even if we tried everything we can we may still be wrong we get that the chances of it get less and less the more work we do to prove that we're that try and prove that we're wrong and fail but you have to hold on to the idea that all knowledge is essentially provisional but some knowledge is more provisional than others because it's been more and more proved you have another question from anyone fantastic hi my name is Marisa I'm founder Chima spheric science department and my question is what we can do as scientists to change the Flat Earth belief and so we did should we do something should we worry about it so I think we should worry about it not necessarily because people think the world is flat but because these other beliefs that come alongside of it and I think accept it some people will say well I think the world is flat there's no harm there it doesn't matter let them think that it's silly and I totally disagree with that I think it's important that we do continue to be connected to people because if you teach people to accept that consensus and investigation and expertise is wrong in one area you undermine the value of consensus and the value of expertise in all areas so I think it is important we reach them and I found this when I was at the the UK's Flat Earth Convention and there were journalists there he was saying well isn't this fun isn't this silly and said well you could report it that way but if you really want to know what's going on do you see that couple over there who've got a baby with them go and ask if the child's vaccinated ask them if tomorrow that child took ill would you go and take them to a doctor who you think are being run by big farmer in the Illuminati and chemtrails and all this stuff or would you go and see someone else because I think once you were abandoned people and say you're over there you disagree with us I don't care about you anymore you leave them to all these terrible ideas as well so I think it is important that we do do reach people and I think the most important way to do that I think there's lots of way to do it the way that I choose to do it is to try and first of all maintain the fact that these people are people I hate the idea of people especially who are very involved in skepticism they moved and skepticism for long time and they say I'm a skeptic so I'm right and I'll tell you the truth I'll tell you what's right and I'll just give you the information and it is a give people a fact and they'll change their mind and if they don't I don't care I think that's nonsense people don't change their mind like that and the idea that we as skeptics and scientists that we try if we try and elevate ourselves to being perfect we miss the fact that we're also flawed I guarantee I have some beliefs that are completely wrong I don't know what they are and when I find them I'll try and change them but you have to admit that what you have to accept that we're always flawed and that these people aren't worse than us it's just their flaws are different and we can see these flaws and try and correct them and if someone can see mine hope for the old trying correct those two so I think by continuing to reach people by by putting humanity into it by accepting that we aren't flawless perfect purveyors of all knowledge that we can be wrong about things that we are all part of the society together and the by joining everyone together we get further forward together I think that's the way that we can do it now I'm fortunate that I I'm not a scientist I don't have a PhD I don't have a title I don't have that to defend I think it's very useful for this movement to be able to say this doctor she knows everything about this she is the expert and I'm gonna cook I'm gonna communicate that and introduce her and you can hear from her to help from expert but I'm also going to talk to the patient I'm going to talk to other patients in these areas and try and have a plurality of voices of which expertise is one of those but I think if we over rely on expertise and say we're right because we're experts I think that's when we cut people off and people can't connect with that we have to remember how we talk to each other and the way that we communicate is through stories we tell stories all the time it's how we how we reach people and if we can find the way to put the stories back into the work that we're doing we can then use those stories to deliver accurate data rather than say the Cystic the statistics say that you're wrong and that's all that matters it isn't all that matters how you can convey those is what really matters and whether people can go along with you and the way that I try and tell this is through a personal story of the conversations I've had and the interesting things that I've found as well as trying to tell the scientific information too because I think it means that people can con tune in and hear it in a way that if I just said here's why the world is actually round here's what flat earthers say isn't this wrong isn't it ridiculous aren't they stupid nobody would listen and I feel terrible about myself for saying it that way so yeah we have to maintain that humanity I think we have two questions that came from email first from Gustavo Balki would you say that the main problem with the the flat earth way of thinking is there a priori approach which other problems in their approach to reality to how they look at the earth would you say appear in their way of thinking yeah that's a tricky thing to to answer really I think I think a big part of the problem is what I was saying a moment ago I guess is that that failure to look for ways up there wrong it's first and foremost I'm right and I can support that through all of this evidence I can prove that I'm right for these reasons but if you're never looking to prove yourself wrong you don't actually ever see what's really going on and I think that's what we see a lot of the time the Flat Earth movement is finally the first argument they can find that that proves themselves right and the first thing they think they can find that proves the other side wrong whether that a full understanding of the other side or not I think a lot of the time flat earthers don't spend the people in the flat earth movement that I've met haven't spent the time really understanding what the round earth model is so they will come up with arguments like if you're in Australia you're upside down and you'd fall off they'll come up with arguments like helicopters can't you know planes can't travel faster than the spinning of the earth which aren't really understanding what the world is like it's finding a reason to dismiss something without having to spend the time understanding it so I think that pattern 140 doesn't just apply to what shape the world is it applies to these other things too you know what is the the background of NASA how old is the earth do vac scenes work they apply the same level of thinking to it and the same assumptions that I must be right about something I'm gonna prove myself true rather than I have this idea how do I disprove it and and I think that's the main problem I see in this that this area of thinking next question that came from the Mayo comes from Alfredo job or I'll rephrase a little because he makes a question very pointed about Brazilian situation but I think we can generalize it a little you said that a lot of extreme beliefs come with with flat roof and far-right ideas misogynistic ideas creationism very toxic forms of religious extremism how do we deal with with this peripheral beliefs you're defending an ideological approach friendly approach this with this work with political extremism oh I think so and I do just want to clarify when I talk about extreme misogyny and white supremacy I'm not saying those are in the Flat Earth movement but I'm saying that the path that people use to get to Flat Earth that path is very similar to radicalizing people to these other positions so I don't want to say that you know flatter I'm not saying flat earthers are all extremist honest but I'm saying their radicalization process was very similar so I just want to clarify that but in terms of how we reach people I think dialogue is is absolutely the way I think and I think treating people with humanity with respect not calling them names and assuming they're stupid or inferior I think that's the way that we reach people is to carry on keeping connected I'm not saying it's very easy to say they believe something that is totally different to me so they can be over there and I never need to think about them but I think we need to solve bring people back and I think that's also true of political extremism and the way that you can reach people and have them check their ideas and question their ideas I use an analogy for the way that I go about it that I think is useful the analogy is if you look at what would happen an asteroid was going to hit the earth okay the Hollywood way of fixing that problem is you send up a team of miners with a nuclear bomb send a Bruce Willis on a spaceship and he blows an asteroid up and the asteroid in reality if you did that if you blew an asteroid up that was heading towards the Earth all those pieces of asteroid would just rain down on the earth you wouldn't fix the problem as you just spread the devastation and that's what happens when you're arguing with somebody who disagree with you and you hit them head-on with an argument big explosion devastation nothing productive that's what happens when you when you do that but if you talk to astronomers about the way that we would actually deal with an asteroid impact now as you see that the asteroid is on a collision course and you send up a body with enough mass to hang around near the asteroid that the gravitational pull of just being near it over time very very slowly will alter the direction that asteroid is moving and eventually you may not even realize the path has changed but eventually that gravity will pull it away so it's no longer on a collision course and that's how you change people's mind you don't do a head-on you do it by being near them by being connected to them by asking little questions by continuing to be the person in their lives that they love and respect and just by saying I'm interested in this but when I try and follow it I struggle to understand this how do you explain this because I can't follow you and I want to understand why you think that way and if you do that and you're not trying to do everything all at once you can slowly get people to redress and reassess what they think and even change their mind as a result but it takes time and you have to be invested in them as people and they have to be invested in you in people you won't do it in a facebook argument with a stranger you will do it if you're spending six months talking to your brother-in-law who might have some strange beliefs and you do it without being insulting you do it without being dismissive or patronizing and condescending you do it by being honest and respectful well question there marceline mashita from quest of science and it's to toffee theoretical physics my question is how can you be reasonable with the people who'll deny effects because it's not in my opinions not kind of a lack of in knowledge but they're denying facts don't think so I can play chess against pigeons I guess it can be but I think the key is to not play chess I don't treat it as a debate or a game I if I was in a room where I was expected to play chess with a pigeon I might spend my time trying to understand learn about pigeons you know cuz I've got this opportunity with the pigeon in front of me to study pigeons yeah they don't and so that you're right they don't recognize the rules of the game and I think that that is true and you are when you were in a position where you have to debate with someone and I think it does change depending on the purpose of the conversation that you're having if I'm when I interview people who I disagree with the purpose of my conversation isn't to change their mind but it's to understand as much as possible about what they think and maybe I'll give them the questions that will change their mind later on but I'm not trying to do it in that conversation that would be very different if I was in front of a large audience and I had you know a flat earther there and it was me versus a flat earther and debate in a debate I'd have a different tactic because in that place I'm trying to influence the audience but even then I think when you go head-to-head with somebody what happens is you come up with arguments that they've already thought about and they've already thought about them and they already have a rebuttal and you just go through a dance that they've done a million times and you might have done a million times when you're talking to a creationist who thinks the world is 6,000 years old if you do all the things that they're expecting they're expecting them and they give you the same old defenses all the time and no one really learns anything so you have to think of a different way of doing it and in that way I try and have a conversation and I try and turn it into an actual conversation rather than an aggressive debate to try and say well tell me a bit more about that and when I come to that point here's where I struggle to so how do you explain this bit of it because I struggle to follow you there and if you do that what happens is instead of their defenses going down you you can open them up and you can you can walk around their belief with them and you can walk around the maze that's inside their head and if you're doing that and you're able to have it in a way that people are buying into the conversation and they they genuinely think you're interested the only way to do that is to be genuinely interested you can walk around that maze an occasion you can say let's turn left here and there's a wall they didn't always there because they've never done that before because the only time they've ever talk to people they disagree with has been the same conversation you've had a million times so you so boring by having a collaborative approach you can actually go in a different direction but you have to be very careful about the audience that you have and when it comes to a subject like homeopathy for example I don't do debates about whether homeopathy works because there's a completely settled subject and if I go on the radio as I do quite quite often in the UK and they say well we're gonna have a talk about you know I've got a homeopath here we're gonna talk about how great homeopathy is and they're gonna say it's great and you're gonna say it's wrong we'll have this debate I said well we're not gonna have this conversation because you wouldn't have the homeopathy on if I wasn't there so by me being there you're facilitating these arguments that they're arguments to be heard and then people will call in and tell you how great homeopathy is and then it works and what you've done as a show is just tell that the audience that homeopathy works so I don't get involved there I say there are genuine questions to be had but that isn't one of them so it's picking and choosing the battles and the battles you choose treating them not as a battle but as a conversation and that's how I go about it and when I do meet someone in a or a interview someone who is being particularly aggressive fortunately the places in which I typically interview people my listeners know that and there's nothing I like more than when I talk to someone I talked to a guy who was an eighth denialist believed that aids didn't really exist he believes it's all consequence of immoral lifestyles and he was very aggressive to me and I felt great I don't need to do anything to prove your arguments wrong here because your tone and the way you're insulting me in the way you're condescending me is doing it all for me people who hear this will say this isn't a nice man I'm not invested in what he has to say so it's about understanding the audience and picking your battles I think people the rise of Flat Earth beliefs but don't you think that we are going to see soon the down of the flash yes yeah I think it's too much attention and it will fade out so much more dangerous these things that are really something to do with the life of people people believe in what they want to believe fight against it's useless so yeah I would disagree I understand so I do say you're saying and I think it's it's valid but I think there's a few things with that first of all you are right that Flat Earth belief is starting to go again it's not and gets much smaller but I think the reason it's getting smaller isn't because it was left alone it's because people turned attention to it and so you had a flat earth belief and then people were saying some things that people found interesting and spoke to people's good level and it got bigger and then it got bigger enough to a point where scientists and people start to see how big it was getting and say this is ridiculous and then it got bigger enough that people who are not only good at figuring out why it's wrong but are all excellent are communicating it they were turning their attention to it and at that point it starts to get smaller again because people first encountered through the debunks first so I think by giving it some attention it actually collapsed the bubble it expanded and then it collapsed for that reason I think I also think Flat Earth is a good case study in understanding irrational beliefs because it isn't tainted by the possibility of being true you know when it comes to ideas of GMOs you know it's very hard you can't point to a single fact that proves that GMOs are actually safe you have to understand an awful lot about it to understand why that it's just another new technology doing something we've been doing for centuries but doing it a different way it's a lot more involved with the thing to understand before you knew that it's definitely safe similar with when it comes to social issues that white supremacy misogyny things like that you can't point to a single fact that proves those ideas are wrong but you can point to facts very clearly with a flat earther prove it wrong so by understanding the Flat Earth we can understand irrationality untainted by the possibility of it being true understand the processes that drive it the process that reinforce it and then once you understand that skeleton you can see how that skeleton applies to these other beliefs and whether we can learn anything about them I also think with flat earth you're absolutely right that believe in the world is flat is not as dangerous as believing that vaccines don't work but those two ideas aren't separate I haven't met many I haven't met many flat-earthers who believe vaccines are safe I've met many flat-earthers who believe the Holocaust happened well my favorite questions to ask Flat Earth is is before we get into details of Flat Earth tell me about the Holocaust what do you think and so many would say well I don't think it really happened all there's no evidence it was six million Jewish people so I think Flat Earth isn't just one belief it is a cluster of beliefs and it may be the thing that's kind of bringing a lot of people together some numbers of people together around that belief but it isn't by itself at the heart of it it's about irrationality it's about inability to see through rhetoric it's about inability to recognize what's a good argument a bad argument and by using Flat Earth as a case study on that you can then apply those principles to other things as well so we can move them into vaccines and I'm also fortunate that I do this for a living so I don't spend all my time on Flat Earth I do spend my time on the vaccine and homeopathy and alternative medicine and cancer kills this is just one avenue of it so we don't have to we do have to prioritize but we aren't so limited in time that we only have to focus on one thing so yeah well we'll have a one final question we are unfortunately we're getting ahead of time it comes from from the mail from Marcelo Porte waling who is an astronomer and the physics teacher do you think that changes in the educational system for instance introducing proper scientific thinking and middle level schools would be effective to avoid the irrational beliefs developing like Flat Earth yeah I do and so I get asked this question quite a lot people ask me when I give talks about weather when I give talk about alternative medicine for example people say should we teach critical thinking in school should we teach children that homeopathy doesn't work and I say yes and no and that we absolutely should teach critical thinking but we shouldn't tell kids what doesn't doesn't work just it and think that that's the job done because the last thing I want is for kids to learn that homeopathy is ineffective because it's just sugar water and when they walk down the street they laugh at the homeopaths clinic there and they walk straight into a chiropractor or they walk straight into a cancer cure clinic because they've learnt a list of things that do and don't work but haven't learned the process of figuring things out I think what we need to be teaching is how we know what's true how we check ideas the way we can verify things that instinct the principle of going against your instinct to say I have an idea how do I prove it wrong that's kind of fundamental in scientific thinking and I think actually you know the philosopher was here earlier and I think philosophy is a great way of doing that we undervalue the process of philosophy the values of philosophy which is how do we know what's true how do we understand how we we can recognize truth in the world around us and figure stuff out I think that's really really key and one of the things that I've been doing a little bit in the UK is I give a version of this talk to schools now it doesn't go into all the different flat-earthers and the psychology because it's much more school appropriate but what I do is I give ten reasons to believe the world is flat and I don't tell the audience that I'm not a flat earther I say here are ten reasons we should believe the world is flat and I take them from the most common arguments I see from flat-earthers and I say you know they flat earthers say question everything question everything all the time and I give them the ten arguments and then I in the middle of a talk I say we should question everything let's question me let's go back over those each of those ten arguments and see if we can see if there's anything wrong with each of those ten and how what's actually really going on and so you can then use that to say this is how you can do rhetoric to be persuasive but how we have to go through that we have to look through and see what's really at the substance and how we get to that substance and I think that's one of the principles and again I think flat earth is quite a useful teaching tool for that because it's got elements that are fun and silly but you can you really use it to demonstrate the scientific method to demonstrate how we can check ideas and to prepare people to be critical thinkers to repair students to have those skills to then apply those skills elsewhere thank you Michael very great lecture in the question and answer section so this is the this was the last installment of our seminar about what can learn from ignorance and I think Natalia would have to make a final announcement before we close the similar I just like to thank you all for oh here for coming and who've been following us through this hell cycle of seminars which was an initiative of the Institute of Advanced sciences he even studies here in University of San Paolo and the Institute question of science and we hope we can ever we can have another cycle or seminars next year but I really wish to thank well very special person who really was the octet of the whole event and that's Lenin because the Barbra he was the one who came up with the idea of having a cycle of semanas about ignorance and what we can learn from ignorance and I think that it developed really well and everyone who has been follow following all of our meetings knows that this is what university is all about is what is for us to get together and discuss things that are relevant to critical thinking and to our development as think and scientists so I want to thank personally Lenny he's very shy but he's here and I want us all to if you if you can come up front please so that people can can see you I think this is the man that will should be applauded in because he's the one that said is set this whole thing together and I hope that next year we can have something else entirely different maybe do you want to say a few words I just would like to thank you all for coming you Natalia for your kind words and Marshall for the excellent talk on the right offered a flattered belief and I hope we continue to discuss discussing the topic of ignorance because there is a lot of it in this world and there so there will be a lot to talk about thank you thank you all for joining us in this cycle of semanas and I hope next year we'll have some old

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Length: 105min 8sec (6308 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020