OxDEG – Exploring the Flat Earth: Beliefs, Identity, and Rationality

um so yeah i think we've had a couple other people join i guess i can just give a quick intro to pix's work uh so peeks was a senior research fellow at the oii and now they are elsewhere they are at the ual's critical creative computing institute i always read critical platform studies group of which they are a co-director but um so senior leader senior lecturer and leader of the ma program at ual's creative computing institute and yeah they've gone all over the place with their work participatory action research and mixed methods and they started at mit and uh somehow we're here so i think that's as good enough an intro as i can really master and i will hand it over to you to peeks thank you tomas that is a perfect description can you all oh no i have to share my ice cream can you all see my slides now yes we can yes yes isabel i'm delighted to be here i'll say more about that in a moment but i just wanted to begin by acknowledging that today is one year after exactly on this day the murder of george floyd by the minneapolis police and just over the weekend there's some very bad news locally sasha johnson who at least if the new news is to believe um self-described as the black panther of oxford was uh shot in peckham which is the neighborhood that i currently sit in right now and is currently in critical condition in the hospital so um if any of you were participating in the black lives matter protests last year you might have heard sasha's name um this is a pretty disturbing situation i just wanted to acknowledge that kind of current time and place context um most of the talk today will be about exploring the flat earth uh i think it will also be a talk that's that's kind of full of surprises flat earth as as i'm sure you all know being here um is just a fascinating topic and for me um the there will be some personal aspects as well and so i just want to give a few trigger warnings for the pieces of sensitive content in the talk there will be some discussion of mental health uh issues and discrimination uh there will be some uh on the topics of bullying and harassment and i just that was the trigger warning for my first slide whoops sorry about that oh um as i mentioned a moment ago this talk um i expect will be very personal and intense it's the first time i've given this talk and it's also the first time that i've been back at oxford in the sense i guess i've actually been physically back in oxford this is the first time i've backed oxford like doing something even though i'm not physically back in oxford but you get what i mean um i left oxford in january um and yeah so this this talk will be interesting for me for that reason um yeah and uh all will be revealed in due time uh further disclaimers are that everything else say in this talk are in my estimation defensible on scientific grounds i will make every effort to hedge all the claims that i make at the level of my own subjective uncertainty and there is going to be plenty to discuss and nitpick about so i would just ask that you hold the questions to the end as best you can manage but um feel free to pop stuff in the chat and we can we can get to it at the end okay here's the poll uh isabella's going to help me out with this one which of the following best describe your beliefs about the shape of the earth the options are i am a hundred percent certain the earth is round and i'm not exaggerating you are 100 certain i am more certain than not that the earth is round i am more certain than not the earth is flat i am 100 certain that the earth is flat and i am not joking other or i'm not sure just give that another couple seconds for people to consider how's it looking isabel wow round earth has the early lead but it's too early to call it how many it doesn't say how many votes are in i can i can read them too if you like you've got about 61 of people have voted so far i'll just relaunch it for a second in funny case yeah um interesting it's actually um surprisingly consistent the results of such questionnaires um currently 60 of people are 100 certain that the earth is round 24 more certain than not 5 which looks like probably one person is certain the earth is flat and not joking and 10 are other uh just for comparison i posted a twitter poll uh that had really pretty similar results well actually a lot more other a lot of people who say other than follow it up with oh it's a oblong spheroid or whatever so being generous and grouping other around we have around 60 or 70 percent being pretty certain it's round potentially uh i'm just gonna give you some ballparks here for all of you who said you're not absolutely certain not 100 certain i for the purpose of this talk i'm going to group you as flat earthers welcome to the community um according to a couple polls that i took on mechanical turk you're in good company um of about at least 30 of those studies participants um and similarly in a qualtrics panel that i did which was uh trying to get a not a random sample but a representative sample of the united states population again about 30 were we're not completely certain so uh i think a lot of times people talk about the flat earthers as being like a fringe community but uh you know it might be that the emperor has no clothes there's actually a lot a lot more people who are uncertain than readily readily disclose that so thinking though in terms of the the flat earthers that you that you've probably heard about in the news um the people who go online and share memes and uh debate the merits of uh heliocentric versus geocentric models uh why why would someone in in that kind of particular uh not just online but online and offline community believe that they have not just um maybe be uncertain about the shape of the earth but actually believe that they've been lied to and that there is a global conspiracy that the earth is in fact flat uh just a couple reasons that people frequently give to lay the groundwork here for for thinking about this um space is that the space industry is 300 billion british pounds worldwide that is just shy of the total uh size of the tobacco industry which which we know is you know perpetrated a totally confirmed conspiracy for decades about the the health of cigarettes uh so the stakes are similarly high for the space industry in the united states the nasa budget is 63 million dollars per day that's enough money to make a hollywood blockbuster every day this is something that you'll hear flat earthers uh say sometimes and it's true as far as i can tell from from um crunching the numbers myself um which uh you know is is usually used in reference to things like images from space and that kind of uh evidence um the uk here locally aims to capture 10 of the space industry i think this might be the next 10 years um so 10 of that 300 billion uh there's also been just a lot of media coverage of flat arthurs themselves and kind of flat earth beliefs this you know unsurprisingly if you're familiar with kind of what the dynamics of uh information and disinformation um provides exposure to this particular set of beliefs and and provides a way into the into the world of flat earth for some people uh obama himself in a talk or in a speech said uh we don't have time for meeting the flight of society which which has made the rounds um and the u.n map looks a lot like the flat earth map the u.n map of the world and the metal looks quite a lot like the flat earth now so those are some some reasons that flat earthers often quote um this is not just a united states or canadian phenomenon but actually there's quite a lot of activity here in the uk as well um i just now want to take a moment for everyone to reflect on your own beliefs again about the shape of the earth and and just to think about you know maybe when you were taught that the earth is round in school or when you dip to toe yourself into the kind of flat earth stuff online to to explore what people are talking about or maybe maybe an experiment or two that you've done yourself just to think about why all of us hold the beliefs we hold whether they are that the earth is round or that the earth is flat normally i would invite discussion at this point um but in the interest of time i'm just gonna fly through some typical things that people say when when uh when i've talked to folks about why they think in particular that the earth is round so a lot of people will say oh i've looked at a plain window and you can you can tell it's curved it's it's this is my favorite reason that people give because i've looked at a lot of playing windows and i have never seen i've never seen the current out of the plane window um david might be willing to share also some further investigation that david was able to do with that with a pilot in his network but yeah i think it's an interesting case because um it seems like people actually like rewrite their their memories in order to conform to their belief that the earth is around when thinking about what they see through a plane window uh i haven't systematically studied that but uh that's the impression that i've gotten from talking with people and also from from how i was thinking about it myself um when i first started thinking about this stuff uh people also say boats on the horizon um this one like probably this experiment probably will work the the idea is that if uh if there's a building or if there's a boat that's far enough away on the water then if the earth is round the boat or the building should dip below the horizon rather than disappear into the horizon and i've tried this myself as well and um i don't know i think my vision just isn't good enough so i got a i got a camera that has a big zoom but i haven't had a chance to get over to blackpool or bristol with my bristol right and i forget which one it is with my camera um one friend of mine claimed that they live in an apartment building where if you're on the bottom floor you see the sunset when you take the elevator you go up to the top floor and the sun is still there uh i haven't been good this person but i really would really love to check that myself because i've also tried this just like you're supposed to be able to stand up on the beach and see the sun after it's set um but i haven't been able to replicate that experiment experiment myself either um a lot of people will say time zones that one reason you might believe the earth is round is because of the way that you know one side of the world is dark and the other side is light um the geocentric model or the the flat earth model of of um earth geography actually uh you know has a particular way of accounting for for that uh possibility of time zones in a flat earth model so um you know there's at least an alternative explanation um flight times it turns out that uh because the the typical flat earth map is one with the north pole in the in the middle uh most of the flight times between locations aren't changed on a flat earth map versus on a on a globe um you have to be flying from some places in the in the southern hemisphere for there to be differences and there aren't a lot of flights from those places to each other um i have done the math in this one and the i'm sorry to say to the flat earthers that the round earth the random model checks out a lot on this particular test um another another fun one um that people sometimes mention is that like why would the moon be around and all the other planets would be around and the earth would be flat um this this pictured on the screen is a meme that kind of pokes fun at flat earthers by showing all the pictures of the solar system and the planets and then with the with the flat earth you know checks juxtaposed against all the around other planets um it's funny because the like the the when i i first became like i first came to understand more about the flat earth perspective just reflecting on the map of the solar system which like if you forgot the earth part of this diagram like that is not what the that is not what the universe looks like this is a totally you know cartoon version obviously of what the solar system looks like and in fact when you look at the shapes of celestial bodies like they don't they don't look like spheres at all like a lot of them like this is a picture of an asteroid that like i don't know would you call that brown would you call that a gloom um this one was in the music a couple years ago as like a especially unusual asteroid i don't know if y'all remember this i forget everything with it myself but um that to me looks pretty flat for a celestial body and according to the geologists uh i just learned yesterday from my twitter poll there's a special way of measuring the shape of the earth using some like physical simulations supposing that all the earth was covered in water and it was just um what's the shape based on that assumption plus the rotation the earth and gravitation something along those lines and this my very basic understanding of um what a geoid i guess is um would potentially be a different way to think about the shape of the earth which again like doesn't look i don't know it just doesn't look like a ball to me um so we go from thinking about the the shift of the earth to being a sphere to maybe the shape of the earth being like an oblong spheroid which is like okay so we're getting into like flat flatish round territory and then and then like geoid okay well it's not only flandish round but also like has these irregularities like you know what's going on here or this is just like maybe maybe maybe it's just a big pancake but with two sides um so i think that i think the fact of the matter is that most people just uh trust you know probably your grade school teachers or you know your primary school teachers and your and the fact that your gps works and scientists say that relies on the the earth being something like a sphere around and satellites work um it feels to me like this is this is the main the main like actual uh sources of evidence that people are using and thinking about um being so certain that the earth is round um so thinking about that that social context for beliefs about around earth and and also thinking about the social context of the flat earth community uh the first research question here is going to be how are the vast epistemic differences between round earther and flat earthers culturally and institutionally maintained and i have two hypotheses uh hypothesis one is that for most of you in the room you shouldn't be as certain as you claim to be that the earth is round according to a simply defined logical rational observer with the same evidence that you have it would not be 100 and two the fact that you claim to be so certain just makes you look ridiculous to me those are my two hypotheses okay so because according to the conversations that i've had with people it seems that most often round earthers are relying on authority and social evidence i have to say a bit about my own credentials to establish my authority here as as a scientist so this is my you know institutional affiliations at mit in berkeley and oxford mmd where i did my phd in berkeley postdoc and oxford browns faculty you know lots of publications and awards and fellowships and whatever you know it's my my big credentials right there um moreover i am an expert according to oxford still on the oxford institute on the oxford internet institute's website um i'm an information study scientist who studies beliefs ideologies and institutions so you know presuming that oxford is best university in the world i guess that makes me a world expert in beliefs ideologies and institutions at least that's what it says on the oxford website so you should listen to me and i have tried a few things i mentioned before i tried checking flight times i tried uh looking at some boats and buildings after the horizon tried staring out playing windows testimony and you know it's honestly like two to two like like whoa like is it like wow just like counting those pieces of evidence um i don't know the jury's out um you can also think and think about the question of whether the earth is round or flat in just a completely different way so topologically speaking if you talk to many mathematicians we'll we'll tell you or be able to confirm to you that the cube is actually a sphere and do you think the earth is a cube i don't know uh similarly mathematicians might also be able to confirm to you that if you ignore antarctica which i feel like is safe you know assumption to make let's just forget about it antarctica for a second um then a globe earth would be topologically equivalent to a disk earth so you know if you think it's a sphere it's equivalent to thinking it's a cube which is equivalent to thinking it's a long rectangular prism if you think it's globe then remove antarctica it's still still a disk topologically speaking mathematicians don't lie also this is getting into a little bit more wild territory and i do not know physics so please if you if there are some physicists in the room i'd love to hear from you about the possibility of this potential explanation but what if the earth is flat and when you go to the north pole you just enter i guess this isn't quite accurate but on this map you'd go from the north pole to sample but um if you if you go to the you know one point where it's supposed to lead to the other on this flat map then actually you're just transported into an identical world that's in like a different space-time reality and they're just this there's just this infinite plane of worlds that we're traversing through as we you know stepped forward on any particular step um according to cornell scientists uh spacetime is an exciting mysterious world so who knows um for further discussion i would say um i don't like the conspiracy part used to catch me up because uh like why would the uk or why would china or why would other countries be participating in this in this global conspiracy um i don't know this isn't what i would consider the most strong evidence but i do have a personal anecdote that at least would be consistent with the the um presence of a global global cover-up of the uh the flat earth truth which is that i had this profile picture um this is a picture of me from a couple years ago and when i first was at oxford this was actually the profile picture that i gave to hr in order for them to put on the website um this you might notice is a picture in which i'm wearing a t-shirt from the flat earth international conference uh which is one of the places where i did my field work for this research and what happened was when they put this image on the website they cropped out the flat earth part of my t-shirt now it didn't seem to be enough because then there was actually quite a dispute that i had with my boss still about the shirt that i was wearing you know i don't know i'm not necessarily sure i guess the image to speed up the image that i had and and so ultimately i had to get rid of this picture entirely um yeah i mean the the oxford internet institute is one of the world's leading institutions for for the study of of disinformation at least regarded as such and and of course has ties to a variety of funding agencies national and international so if it could be anywhere i guess it would have to be here too um i also had a rather rather short time at the oii um joined in 2019 in june uh a five-year contract and i thought i was doing okay for for a couple years but ended up leaving in in january this year um still at summerville though well although i haven't been there in a while so i'll go to college um so my second research question is was i forced out of my role at the oai because of my flat earth research so this brings me to a more theoretical part of the talk in which i will aim to argue that we can characterize beliefs about the shape of the earth both flat earth beliefs and round earth beliefs as less epistemic and more normative in that we can think about round earth beliefs as being a social norm rather than something that is based on rational deliberation on observed evidence uh at least i would argue that a significant part of round earth beliefs have that character uh so to lay some definitions down social norm is the social norms are the informal rules that govern behavior in groups and societies and norms function to hold us accountable to each other for adherence to the principles that they cover norms often provide a solution to the problem of maintaining social order and one characterization of social norms in particular that i want to draw on here is that social norms at least some types of social norms are also associated with sanctioning behaviors so individuals who believe that a sufficiently large subset of the relevant group of population being analyzed expects is following a social norm if they expect that that large enough sub group of the population uh expects them to conform to that particular norm not just expects but prefers them to conform and may sanction behavior that does not conform to the norm so the important part of this characterization is that one indicator for for this type of norm is that when you when you break the norm uh the the punishment for breaking the norm or the sanction for breaking that norm is is disproportionate um relative to the action of having broken it um and thinking about earth beliefs as social norms i want to also draw in that second definition definitional component about how norms function to hold us accountable and provide a solution and a kind of functionalist view to to the problem of maintaining social order so to the extent that norms are something or some this particular kind of norm i'm talking about is is something that when you violated it you'll be sanctioned uh the way that around earth belief would be understood that way is that you're punished for for instance saying the earth is flat or really earnestly believing that um you're punished not because of the truth value of that belief but because of its threat to power and so to the extent that if round earth beliefs are a social norm that's upholding particular power structures then you're punished for not believing that the earth is round because that belief is a threat to power regardless of the truth value of that belief in some of my own um explorations of this idea i've talked to some people and i once met a taxi driver who had previously been a pilot i was actually it was a wild coincidence because it was while i was leaving the flat earth conference that i had attended and driving back to the airport and i was telling i was telling the taxi driver about how i had just been at this flat earth conference and and they had told me that they were a pilot and so i asked oh you know do you ever see the shape of the earth from from your pilot's seat and they just completely stopped talking about that and changed the subject completely and i felt like this person just thinks i'm crazy um i've had friends ask me if i'm okay when i talk to them about this research i've i've almost had like it felt to me like i've almost lost friends because of talking about this this kind of work most colleagues think i'm joking asking for proof is not allowed entertaining the possibility that the earth is not round is not allowed under this social norm so what is this particular fear that is driving the sanctioning behavior behind challenging people who or punishing people who who challenge the notion that the earth is round uh i think we can start to understand this by looking at some social theory on deviance as madness uh the great french philosophers of the 20th century have have helped us understand how characterizations and psychiatrics around what are characterized as mental illnesses like schizophrenia are related to the ability of people to perform and work in the capitalist society or to not work or to not want to work the various um and you know historically also medically diagnosed but but now more kind of just commonly um misogynistic beliefs about uh women's sanity or insanity cape man has has quite cogently argued is simply uh or in great part at least uh just a component of the kind of cultures of patriarchy and uh and domination um along gender lines in our society [Music] similarly gender dysphoria trans trains um being transgender and trans issues are still medicalized and treated as mental health issues and to be to be trans is uh at least to be trans and suffer from gender dysphoria is not just a diagnosable medical condition and often one of the barriers to getting gender affirming health care but actually technically labels you as mentally ill according to the diagnostic and statistical manual using psychiatrics and one thing that all of these three examples share is is the way that these forms of deviance are in opposition either to capitalist power structures or power structures around gender and we see in each case this deviance that you know might come from wherever being being naturalized or internalized as as madness uh and along with that i think comes this fear of madness or fear of being labeled as mad it also turns out that a lot of a lot of rumors if you look at the literature on on rumors in particular not just misinformation or disinformation rumors are statements that are at the time that they are circulating unverified so could be true or false and it turns out multiple studies this isn't this is by no means there's vitamins and consensus on this um and some of the literature and fake news goes up opposite to this conclusion but um there have been several studies that have shown in particular context that that most rumors either are true or have a grain of truth in them or i would say are expressing some some [Music] facet of truth or perhaps even just some feeling some true feeling and this the previous researchers have also looked at as a way of again explicitly challenging these uh political power structures so not only is there a well-established literature of deviance as being uh characterized as as madness i think in a way that is consistent with the kind of um like censorship for lack of a better word of of those kinds of deviant behaviors or perspectives um just the same there's a well-established literature of of these you know what we call rumors or unestablished facts that often get a pretty bad rap especially in disinformation or misinformation um actually being in some cases these uh you know tools for counter power and it becomes really clear uh in this under this view why so many national governments are interested in disinformation research and in combating disinformation uh because if we understand rumors or deviant beliefs as challenging power structures um i think you know of course sometimes they're gonna be uh like white supremacists spreading this information that um that i that i've also done research on trying to trying to understand and stop but i think often outside of those cases that i think are reprehensible there are many other cases that seem to be mostly just political and i consider the state's investment in combating that as uh just confirmatory evidence for for that relationship and some forms of disinformation to power especially since the state doesn't actually seem very concerned about white supremacy so just to give you a little bit of another kind of shake to see by comparison if i were to say oh i think the earth is flat i'm not going to say that because i i mean i i don't i don't think there's a lot of things probably around but just just for a comparison to understand how these epistemological claims can have these normative dimensions uh a few a few other statements that i might make that i do believe are that british royalty are racist and this is something that i've offended my british friends by saying or that most police officers are racist this is something that i hope you know a lot of people in the audience are sympathetic to but i imagine uh maybe obviously a couple of you aren't and certainly many people would be quite offended by a belief like that along the lines of british royalty being racist um if you don't think that can you imagine a black queen of england um there's been this recent news about the the reporter who did an interview with princess diana just before princess diana died uh and it made me look back at the interview and uh the win the way that this is now being covered in the media it's you know it's a bit strange but um when i look back at the interview it just it reminds me so much of the of the meghan markle interview with with oprah and i don't know just makes me think you know um along the same lines i mentioned sasha johnson at the beginning of the talk um who's the black house matter activist who's who's um shot over the weekend uh and what's being described in the news i don't know any more than what what's being presented in the news about it but um what's being described in the news as a drive-by shooting um and being characterized by a lot of sources is probably gang warfare i think that is you know maybe but it sounds like a way to um really uh i don't know racially characterize the situation in one that i think is plausibly like very plausibly targeted attack so was i forced out of the role my role at the oai because of my flat earth research that was the question and what i've just laid out is a kind of explanation or understanding of flat earth beliefs from the perspective of round earth beliefs being a social norm for which you are sanctioned against um and so are flat earth beliefs threat to oxford or why would they be and what about academic freedom um well unfortunately there are some confounding factors in in uh exploring why i might have uh felt forced out of oxford and the oxford internet institute um including just a few months into my being here a speech that i gave at the one of the ucu strikes um pictured here in which i i complained about a couple things going on at oxford and the oxford internet institute besides their dedication to round earth beliefs and one of those at the time was the the announcement of the of the schwartzman uh center for the humanities for anyone who's who was who was at the lai when i was at the oa i'm sure that you're sick of hearing me talk about this um but i just i feel some duty uh to to the oxford internet institute and to to the students especially there uh to continue to preach the good word about this stuff um the the schwarzman center um was an exciting development for the university of oxford because the gift given by uh billionaire stephen schwartzman was of unprecedented size and a boon for the humanities at the university what's option not at the top of the headlines for the schwartzman center is that it turns out one of the reasons that schwartzman was willing to give this gift was because he insisted on there being an ai ethics center in the center for the humanities and when the vice chancellor agreed to this that is when this plan for the center for humanities became a reality um the university had been planning to create a center for humanities for a long time and be trying to fundraise for that and schwartzman was willing to do that if the university was willing to also develop this a ethics center which hadn't been in their plans previously for for that center for the humanities schwartzman is a confidant of trump um ceo and chairman of the blackstone group which is one of the largest private equity firms in the world and became one of the largest rental real estate owners in the world after buying up repossessed houses from people who had had their houses taken away from the banks and then in some cases at least renting those houses back to the people who had just had them repossessed schwartzman is also interesting because um as someone interested in ai ethics uh he seems to be interested in a very particular kind of ai ethics just looking at you know i haven't been following this too closely but when when the when the announcements were first coming out last year about what the first talks at the the schwartzman center for ai ethics were going to be um i just noticed that a lot of them were featuring these kind of libertarian thinkers and people who are going to have a very particular view on what ai does and could do um and it turns out that that oxford is not the only place where schwartzman is creating these centers but but also at mit and at the singapore university in china which is the top university in china and it is very reminiscent to me of the concerted campaign that the koch brothers undertook in the united states in order to influence the kind of political climate there through universities and investment in universities um what i find especially ironic about this situation and i'll tie this back to flat earth in a moment is that the oii had to raise i don't know if they've done this yet i'm kind of you know been gone for for a few months since my information is out of date but at the time that i was there the oi would have to raise i think it was something like 20 million pounds to fundraise to be in the building at all like the the the oai because it's in the social science division wasn't the direct beneficiary of this gift that was for the communities division and but they still wanted or you all still wanted to be in the building yet at the same time that this fundraising initiative for 20 million pounds is going on there are many graduate students and graduate students of color in this year post george floyd when anti-racism is like the word on the street that are not just far from fully funded but really struggling and i think this contradiction speaks for itself but it's also related to the second thing that i that i had complained about in that in that speech i gave at the ucu industrial action now a year and a half ago or so which was also that i have heard credible reports of bullying and harassment of all sorts almost any sort you could imagine at the oii perpetrated by several faculty members faculty of student bullying and harassment that has been ongoing for years without meaningful accountability and this really made me mad um i did a lot of work around trying to address this while i was at the oxford internet institute um institutional work and the students were doing that work before me and continue to and i i hope there's been progress uh but i can't tell from the website um and part of what a part of what i talked about in in the speech that i gave at the at the uc industrial action was how was how casualized labor and staff turnover and student turnover is part and parcel of why this kind of culture can be maintained where there is a culture of disbelief or at least expressed disbelief among the faculty and among the senior management in the department and the connection between that casualization or precarious academic labor and precarious students is that the cycle it seems to me is people who can tolerate this environment are people who don't see or don't understand the environment are the people who stay and those who can't tolerate it or those who are affected by it tend to be the ones who leave and what this has created in my view is a very dire situation for the oxford internet institute where in a year again of increasing attention and scrutiny to anti-racism globally the department has lost all nearly all its faculty of color and i don't know i left too and who remains i don't know um so this is an example of what miranda fricker calls in in the in miranda freakers and analytical philosopher um kitson has also um explored this kind of argument kidson is a major inspiration for me uh is this this is an example of epistemic injustice which is in various ways the disenfranchisement of people's particular um lived experiences as testimony or his forms of testimony either along the lines of dismissal so not believing someone just because of a particular characteristic you maybe don't believe in because of their race or their gender or from hermetically not even having the concepts potentially to express uh the the situation that you're in um so thinking about belief and disbelief at the oii you don't believe your own students that bullying harassment is a major issue yet you trust people you don't know that the earth is around you trust these scientists you trust you know i guess you know your teachers but um this is this is the contradiction that i want to point out and and end this talk with which is that the type of evidence you rely on for believing the earth is round that that kind of social evidence that testimony from others that you consider reliable or unreliable that social evidence underlies your belief that the earth is round and very likely and it's the same type of evidence for the sexism racism bullying harassment that's at the oi yet you are not applying the same epistemic standards it seems at least in your expressions of belief for those two different facts so speaking purely from a logical rational standpoint if you don't believe racism bullying and harassment are endemic at the oai then logically speaking it's the logic that's telling you not me you should also be a flat earther sorry to break the news to you this only applies to people who are in particular management or powerful positions i would actually heard about any of this stuff before but none of whom i think are actually in this audience um but to take this back to my research questions um my first hypothesis that for most of you in the room you shouldn't be as certain as you claim to be that the earth is round i think that i have uh at least hopefully presented to you a um you know coherent argument if not a compelling one um but my my initial hypothesis that that that you claim to be certain makes you look ridiculous to me i don't think that i don't think that hypothesis held up for me after after working through this argument because um if you claim to be certain that the earth is around you should also be certain about the climate and the department and i don't know i think it's reasonable to be certain about both of those things so what's ridiculous to me is not your beliefs about the shape of the earth but about the contradictions between your beliefs so um this this poll is a research question and i'm curious to see the answer to this research of will this talk be censored by the oii um the options are yes it will be censored by the aoi no it won't be maybe or i'm the event coordinator and i promise to post it or i'm the event coordinator and sorry this talk is too dangerous to post oh no that would be bad news i'm not the um event coordinator so i can't say that the event coordinator is not allowed to vote in this poll because she's running it it's logistics just for the record fair enough i mean that's that's the talk so we can we can see the result of those and then go to discussion i think we have about 20 minutes for discussion do you want to wait for the the results to come in or do you want me to uh throw the first question your way oh first question please thank you okay statement that was great um the uh i think the the uh the slide which which began with the heading speaking truth to power for me i think that was uh really the the connective tissue throughout it and i liked it i loved it uh i will do what i can to ensure that this is posted but um well we shall see don't make any promises that you'll regret from us well this is a voluntary position um so okay the the first question um i think hendrick had had a had a question about 20 minutes ago um i'm just going to read it verbatim and um and then you can chew it over or if you'd like time to kind of give it some thought then uh just let me know but okay so i would be interested in how peaks entertain the possibility that the earth is flat with friends and colleagues it's one thing to investigate flatter theories and models and try to accommodate them with scientific or personal knowledge it's another thing to dismiss all the available scientific knowledge and make use of the various tools of science denial red herring's misrepresentation of evidence and homonym attacks the latter is quite regularly done by members of the flat earth community so that that i think yeah the crux of it is that that first bit i would be interested in how peaks entertain the possibility that the earth is flat with friends and colleagues yeah thanks for the question um i i'm definitely yeah not oops come here yeah let's start i'm sorry yeah i can hear you okay um yeah i think i mean i i'm not personally familiar with like the details of all of the flat earth mathematical models and that kind of thing um so i couldn't um i couldn't defend all of the flat earth arguments in such great detail but most people that i talk to just actually haven't thought about it very much and so a lot of the a lot of those kind of like frequently asked questions like different like plane windows and flight times i mean the same kinds of things come up a lot and so uh you know when i started out this project i was actually one of the 100 certain i mean i kind of like i don't know it's not like i think it's still a modern business i don't know i don't it's hard to like i don't even know if i believe in the quantification of belief in that in that form but um when i started this project i was definitely like planning to prove flat earthers wrong or whatever um and it's actually funny because it's a meme in the community too and i say that as if it's a community i'm part of but i'm not like i don't interact i just observe really um except to the extent that i'm like i don't know i guess that's compliment um but there's this meme that like a lot of people come to the community trying to try to disprove that the earth is flat and then come to find that is actually like kind of hard and i very much fit into that stereotype of like a lot of the a lot of the simple tests you can do without a lot of planning or without doing a lot of like math and geometry uh actually not that hard to or kind of not that easy to get um positive results for around earth and so um yeah kind of like if you try out a few things and nothing's working then you start to really question the basis for people's beliefs okay awesome i haven't seen any follow-up from hendrick so let's assume that is a question both posed and answered um i have just a a question well yeah like a prompt if you will not so much a question um at one point um you were discussing rumors and power and uh you you used a ter there was a turn of phrase in there that i was just hoping you could kind of pick up on and like expand on a little bit more it was just you mentioned something to do with disinformation as tools for counter power and i like i'm i suppose i'm i'm somewhat familiar and other people in this uh session will probably be familiar with that in some contexts um but maybe not this one yeah you know it's me it's just sort of not the milieu i've heard it uh within so i'm just kind of curious can you kind of expand on what like what you mean by that and how you see this fitting into that uh yeah i mean first of all i want to make clear that the stuff i was saying about the oei climate is i do not consider disinformation under the definition that disinformation is intentionally false uh information i mean i think that is um you know true rumors that are a form of counterpower in that case um and in general i think this information itself is a term is um is never maybe often not accepted except in the most cartoonish cases of like fake news sites created by russian you know propagandists or whatever that um like i don't know i've never met one of those people i don't actually know what they're thinking but um you know at least the abstract picture of that like evil other making fake news just for the pure sake of like um you know undermining uh another nation um i think usually disinformation is just like just like propaganda it's usually it's usually not like totally false it's usually it's more it's more about like exaggerating the kinds of things that are going to resonate with people and to that extent i mean i think the idea of counter power is there are these institutions like oxford and like you know british democracy and british monarchy and everything else the these structures of power that are um maintaining the positions that people have in society whether those are high positions or low positions and the idea of counterpower building counter power is uh more or less just organizing resistance and building institutions alternative institutions or counter institutions that are not even necessarily a threat to those dominant forms of power um although i think it's often conceptualized that way and it's almost in the word counter power um i think they can also just be a refugee or just be just be some institutions that that keep people safe that that the existing dominant institutions don't keep safe and so to the extent that disinformation or more broadly propaganda can play a role in that there's of course a long history of came from tearing and you know calling it propaganda sounds like a negative thing but um you know just like advertising or any form of mass communication or persuasion uh the idea of putting out your own frame and putting out your own frame in a way that will bring others towards your cause um i think is i think is one way uh that social movements have to operate awesome okay um so i i see um oh some more questions um so okay this is a great one the the devil's advocates have come out of the woodwork um this is a great question from paula shepard um do you think we should extrapolate this logic that is like always don't be 100 sure to other conspiracies like those followed by anti-vaxxers and those opposed to 5g and so on and so on like it was like i was kind of referring to a moment ago i don't think like like when i think about my own beliefs about the shape of the earth i can pray like i'm pretty sure like i would be pretty darn surprised if it turns out the earth is is flat i mean that would be like wow like wow i think that would be the most surprising thing that i've ever ever learned maybe um i i just don't know if quantification is particularly useful or a particularly useful way of thinking about belief um i don't know this is another thing that um that that we could go back and forth on just like what beliefs are or um whether it's even useful to be using beliefs as a part of our like ontology for how we how we think about human behavior um the ways that people experience the world um i do think though to the extent that my my larger point here is one about having empathy for people who hold beliefs that are uh that there are normative forces against at least in at least in this particular zoom conversation um i do think that that point about you know we should be treating these people as human and as uh and you know seeking to understand where they're coming from um and also doing that with the with the with the understanding that people usually have reasons or people's reasons for things might not map on to like how you or i think about the reasons we have for certain things we say our beliefs beliefs that we might feel we have um and so you know if being an intellectual equals in a way yeah and and not even intellectual equals because i think intellectualism is is one of the paradigms that like probably a lot of us here are caught up in uh yeah i think that it's just as just as easily seen as differences in values uh compared to differences in beliefs and i think 5g here is a little bit of an easier argument to make since i since i expect that people here are a little bit more hostile towards tech than than you are towards um you know people who might challenge public health efforts which i think like i personally don't want to like i'm not i'm not in the business of trying to undermine like the coven vaccination program or whatever so just you know politically speaking from my own value system i wouldn't want to be exploring that as a particular example but i i don't want to cut you off but i there's a there's a bunch of hands now oh are there i didn't even see that and and also my band with this oh yeah sorry okay yeah conveniently justice there's there's plenty of questions to be asked i think you get the point yeah okay so um if i can pivot to julia julia do you want to just pose this question because we're basically i'm getting i'm getting questions through several channels here yeah um hi peaks um i have a question from an anonymous i want to can you hear me yes okay uh i have a question from an anonymous member of the oii uh student body which is do you think that formal avenues are the best method for addressing bullying and harassment at the oii well such a difficult question yeah feel free to skip it i guess think um you know it's been a while since i've been a student and i've never been a student at the oii um but in my understanding and you know i've experienced some of this on some of the stuff in my own right it's just like a junior scholar or the whatever the son like whatever they call me um early career researcher um but yeah i mean it's quite a bind uh there there's definitely real risk in putting forward formal complaints and the odds are stacked against you and and it's not your job it's it's the department's job and they already know or they should know because because of everything i was just saying uh so yeah i don't know i think it's on them yeah thanks so much for answering that and thanks for speaking out on this okay um i think the next person was david david siteman david do you want to just pose your question directly yeah sure thank you um thanks very much peeks um i'm ha i'm not quite sure what i want to say um i want to give you a parallel case which um has been ex long explored in the philosophy literature which goes by the slogan brain in a vat in other words how can i tell that i am not a brain in a vat it's the sort of matrix problem um i also that's so leading up to that i want to take us back to um old style anthropology edward evans pritchard witchcraft oracles and magic 1937 um which introduced the idea of secondary elaborations in other words you can always make up come up with an explanation that preserves the phenomena to maintain you whatever theory you wish to this or set of assertions which you wish to associate so worrying about testing may not be helpful in other words we have to think far more about ideology and power all the things that you've actually been talking about and i in and i think that worrying about testing it sort of takes us down the wrong source of rabbit hole my final comment is that increasingly i think that well to summarize i don't believe in belief in other words belief is a particular english european um euro-american concept that has been immensely polluted by ideas from um christianity and islam all those semitic religions um and as analysts it's not helpful what i do find more helpful are ideas from um robert brandon the philosopher about he talks about things like commitments in other words what do you actually do somebody in the chat side talking about making bets that's one aspect of it but i mean how do you how much difference does it make to your life and if it doesn't well fine but i mean you know you will find people with particular what english speakers will call beliefs and it makes a difference so so my question is what difference does it make to believe in in this uh thanks david yeah i think that i mean we've had most of those conversations before i think just um privately and they're all great points uh i think we we agree substantively probably on all of them um although i would love to learn more from you about how belief has been polluted by judaic religions or abrahamic religions i think i don't know the details of that um yeah i think uh so when i was preparing this talk i was thinking about uh what to do and what i wanted to say and you know i was i was faced with a situation where i only have so many hours i can prepare this talk and uh like i think that if i were to be if i would be like okay i want it like i'm going back i'm going to oxford to give a talk and like david is a senior academic um i've got to like address the comments that david has made of my work to make this talk better like that would have been i think what i would have done a few years ago if i were trying to like make this talk really tight theoretically and and much more in line with the disciplinary standards of anthropology and and i still hope to publish at least some of this some someday and your comments will be really helpful for for you know playing that kind of publication game um but i think you know what i wanted to do in the end instead and where i wanted to focus my time and energy was exactly as you say communicating about what i think is the most important thing that i could be talking to this audience about and and i you you phrase it really well that that uh talking about evidence seems like it's missing the point and i i wouldn't have um noticed this if you hadn't pointed it out but i mean i do think that's ultimately what i what i came away from those you know conversations i had with people about round earth beliefs right like no one seems to be basing their beliefs mostly i mean a few people i've talked to have like really thought about this stuff a lot but um the both people who think you're who's around and people who think that's why actually the flat earth has thought about a lot more but especially people who think the earth is round um you know they don't rely on tests it's not about it's not about the like hard direct evidence uh and that's exactly the point where you know when thinking about the second kind of component of my talk focused on bullying and harassment there's always the response is always from from a university or from a from an organization or from an institution you know where's the evidence uh you know we don't have any evidence that like it's and and we don't carry forward that that kind of epistemology which is a social epistemology that that we use to understand the world and thinking about physical reality in the case of the the shape of the earth where even though it's a physical reality we're still relying on testimony ultimately and foremost and and yet not in this other case that i think is actually vastly more important uh and so i'm right there with you and i think that um you know that that type of thinking and you know thinking about social theory and like the contingency of scientific discoveries has has greatly informed my own scientific practice uh which i wanted this talk to also exemplify um i mean i think that you know to many people in math or physics um i came from a math background and computer science background the the talk that i just gave wouldn't wouldn't even be considered research you know like it doesn't look anything like research in the physical sciences or or mathematics or the mathematical areas but um like you know maybe i should have given you all consent forms before giving this talk because like to some extent i'm just like i don't see what i'm doing here is separate from from the other work thank you very much that's excellent peaks um so there's about six minutes left well there's exactly six minutes left i was 100 certainty i can say that um there were sort of two halves in a certain sense to the to the talk and it's your six minutes to do with what you want so i have kind of two questions they one leads down the left hand path and one the right one you know is is where we're back at flat earth beliefs per se and it's it's about it's about that uh the other uh more to do with bullying and harassment at the oii uh how do you wish to proceed a or b gosh if i had my way i would just go hide under a desk even have a bed or a blanket it's up to you tomas okay b it is okay um anonymous uh a student's question again um really relating back to to the points you're making about epistemic injustice again um this i'm just gonna again read this verbatim i'd like to hear their thoughts on how to change the culture at the oii it feels like this is impossible at the moment and nothing is working to ignite change what can we do yeah it's a really important question i mean again you know obviously i haven't stopped trying here i am but the calculus that i determined for myself upon deciding to leave uh like i mean i did feel forced out um but i didn't but but i felt like i could have resisted that force like i think i could have you know i could have fought and stayed i just didn't think i could do that and uh be the same person whatever that means i couldn't do that and have like a high quality of life and it really it's really like as a student right now and you don't have such an easy option i mean it's not easy to leave a job it's even harder to leave a degree program i think because there's such a clear such clear goals and endpoints um and you know my calculus was this isn't going to change anytime soon and my being at the institute would just make it a less safe place for future students because they might see that i'm there and see that i'm doing work to try to change something and thereby think this might be okay uh and you know i got some advice from from a wise friend along those lines and decided that yeah in my estimation i couldn't i couldn't crack the code i think uh i'm happy to talk about it more um if you want to send me a note but whatever is necessary i think it's gonna it would have to be a major undertaking and such a major undertaking could have different forms and personally with everything going on in the world i didn't i didn't have the energy for that got it okay well um i guess we we have two minutes there are other questions that maybe if people want to pose we can follow up in an email we can we can find ways of carrying the conversation on um the different different conversations that are ongoing here um i guess i i can just say thank you so much for you know a talk that led us in many different directions and that where there was clearly so many layers of like personal and and this is really interesting research unto itself and there i could tell that you know you've yeah we've you've put a lot of yourself into this and so that's much appreciated um so i think isabelle do you have any kind of uh you know logistical parting thoughts i know that this was recorded so um we can we can share the recording after the fact and we'll figure out how that works thank you everyone for attending um i was just going to go as far as saying thank you so much for your time peaks and um tomas do you want to just briefly mention the talk happening in a few weeks time the week 8 talk yes so details to follow uh further details but leonie schulte kate simm mia hassoun i think that's on yes monday of week eight uh if you're on the mailing list already you'll get the info that way you can find it through twitter as well you can find it on your facebook page you can ask a friend you can send me an email but if you would like um to know more about that um please just yeah let us know thank you so much everyone have a wonderful rest of day and we will see you at the next talk take care thanks everybody

Channel: Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Views: 2,117

Rating: 3.4210527 out of 5

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Id: W73Mw8ZY7Jk

Length: 84min 45sec (5085 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 01 2021