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posted by mrpg on Monday February 18 2019, @11:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-blame-YOU dept.

Researchers believe they have identified the prime driver for a startling rise in the number of people who think the Earth is flat: Google’s video-sharing site, YouTube.

Their suspicion was raised when they attended the world’s largest gatherings of Flat Earthers at the movement’s annual conference in Rayleigh, North Carolina, in 2017, and then in Denver, Colorado, last year.

Interviews with 30 attendees revealed a pattern in the stories people told about how they came to be convinced that the Earth was not a large round rock spinning through space but a large flat disc doing much the same thing.

Of the 30, all but one said they had not considered the Earth to be flat two years ago but changed their minds after watching videos promoting conspiracy theories on YouTube. “The only person who didn’t say this was there with his daughter and his son-in-law and they had seen it on YouTube and told him about it,” said Asheley Landrum, who led the research at Texas Tech University.

[...] Some said they watched the videos only in order to debunk them but soon found themselves won over by the material.


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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday February 19 2019, @10:38PM (1 child)

    by edIII (791) on Tuesday February 19 2019, @10:38PM (#803718)

    It's not feelings, it's the lack of critical thinking skills. That I do believe has been engendered by public/private education for decades now. Standardized testing and politics made test scores more important than anything else, and what did we get? A bunch of multiple choice bullshit which I railed against in high school. Part of the reasons I had such trouble in school was I hated the boring shit of having some knowledge shoved down my throat in the form of doing it over and over again, without having any conversation as to the "why". Perform several hundred calculations and write out the answers, but let's never talk about WHY the math acts the way it does. Same with history. I could ace a test as fast as my pencil could move, but remembered nothing about that course even 2 or 3 years later. That was because nothing was discussed, there was no critical thinking exercises to figure out why the events in history happened the way they did. All that mattered was getting the right pencil mark in A, B, C, or D. Even that was beyond stupid, because anybody with a brain capable of critical thinking would see that A & B were wildly off the mark, C was plausible in a way, and that left the right answer D. So it wasn't even that hard. The tests I appreciated the most were the question and answer type tests that actually asked me to explain my answer and why it was correct, and not just that it was correct. Those tests were rare.

    I think the lack of critical thinking skills in public schools, and the emphasis on the correct answer in multiple choice is the cause for some of this. So removing the egotistical part of the GPs argument, it has some merit. Shit you learned just by multiple choice has far less lasting effect than a discussion with an intelligent teacher that walks you through the arguments, uses the words "critical thinking", and attempts to actually teach you something. Otherwise, I can kind of see their attitude, "They never explained anything, they just told me what was correct, and I had to pass tests that asked for that correct answer. Why is the Earth not flat? They were obviously afraid and controlled and couldn't talk about it".

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 20 2019, @03:05AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 20 2019, @03:05AM (#803833) Journal
    Umm, sorry, I don't get the point of your post. Even if one doesn't learn critical thinking skills in school, there's plenty of other places to learn them to at least a rudimentary degree. It takes a special sort of determination to go Flat Earth.