Hacker Cinema
The Flat Earth
2017 · Film · documentary · 52 min
Directed by Ty Evans
Another super polished, overly produced debacle. Delivering the gnarliest skateboarding from this year’s new breed of rippers: Jamie Foy, Chase Webb, Carlos Iqui, Michael Pulizzi and Cody Lockwood. “If anyone knows where the end of the Earth is, can they take us there?”
4 positive2 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
6 comments on Hacker News
The flat earth documentary on Netflix was an interesting watch. The flat earthers concluded that they needed to do a different experiment when the results supported the conclusion that the earth is round.
Most of the people in the flat earth community were there for the sense of community and interaction with other people. That says a lot about why people hold on to illogical beliefs so strongly. Because society today has removed a lot of the regular social contact that existed in decades past, people are looking elsewhere to fulfill that need. I'm not a theist, but the fact that nearly everyone in our community used to go to church every weekend back in the 1980s filled a need that people have for socialization. Today my dad thinks it's lucky if they have even 8 or 9 people at the same church.
I figured your link would be this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
(Folding Ideas, "In Search of a Flat Earth")
He takes a couple of their claims seriously about what one will see when attempting particular experiments involving a very large lake, attempts them, sees the results one would expect if the Earth were curved, and reports this to some flat earth community forum, refining the experiment as they suggest ways he may have screwed it up, and continuing to find curvature (obviously).
The real story is how they react to contrary evidence delivered entirely on their terms, and where that community was heading four years ago (beware—I guess—that part also becomes necessarily "political").
[EDIT] I guess I buried the lede for this site's interest, which is that the video devotes a fair bit of time to how the Youtube "algorithm" took a little success for Flat Earth videos as a cue to aggressively promote them to people it identified as maybe liking them (those inclined to fall down that particular rabbit hole—which involves a lot more than just the specific belief that the earth is flat), but now flat earth is in decline, because that and other "algorithms" started sending the same folks to... Q-anon content instead.
Incidentally, there was a somewhat-big documentary on Flat Earth some years ago that included some folks from a flat earth convention trying some experiments very similar to the ones depicted in this video (involving visibility of objects across a large lake), with predictable outcomes.
The people fighting for those recordings at this point have seen reasonable explanations and dismissed them
It's like the Flat Earth documentary where a group crowdfunds an absurd laser and, when it demonstrates the Earth's curvature, reason that they need to "troubleshoot" that 'flawed' result.
There is always a hand to wave.
That's probably one way conspiracy theories happen. They also happen because it's been an evolutionary advantage to look for patterns and reasons even though sometimes there are none. Creating or subscribing to a conspiracy theory also can create a sense of belonging for an individual within a smaller group that subscribers to the theory that they'd never get in the main stream. There is a great documentary about the flat earth society that drives that point home well.
If only. There's a nice flat-earth documentary on Netflix. Some scientifically-minded flat-earthers designed and carried out not one but two experiments to "prove" the earth is flat. Both of them came conclusively on the side that the earth is not flat, but is quasi-spherical with a radius and rotation rate consistent with the scientific consensus. Remember, these experiments were on their own terms. They repeated them several times and they declared them "inconclusive". This is not someone you can convince by any means.
I saw the Flat Earth documentary and I wonder if model could maybe be applied to conspiracy theories, alternative thinkers thinking the same.