Airplanes don't exist (a parody of the conspiracy theorists)

[FlatAssembler]

I apparently can't post such long threads here, but I've posted that parody on several Internet forums, like here:

http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=124565

Edited April 15, 2018 by FlatAssembler
Something went wrong on my Internet connection.

[John Cuthber]

There are other similar ideas.
https://www.unilad.co.uk/viral/theres-a-theory-that-australia-doesnt-even-exist/

Most of them see to be parody of the flat earthers  etc.

 

The interesting question is how do people come to believe stuff that's really just as daft as these spoof posts?

[FlatAssembler]

Well, I was once a Flat-Earther. I simply didn't think about it too much, I was just basically parroting whatever other Flat-Earthers are saying. They have some seemingly sensical arguments, such as "The horizon appears to rise with you as you climb.", but most of their arguments are simply nonsensical. But they had hundreds of those arguments. I was thinking like "Well, it doesn't make sense to me, but I can conceive there is something I am unaware of, so that their arguments actually do make sense." I was manipulated and indoctrinated. I didn't think enough to realize that their claims are impossible even if you give people super-human powers to lie and keep secrets and that it's easy to find pseudoscientific and pseudophilosophical arguments for whatever thesis you can come up with.

[dimreepr]

4 minutes ago, FlatAssembler said:

Well, I was once a Flat-Earther. I simply didn't think about it too much, I was just basically parroting whatever other Flat-Earthers are saying. They have some seemingly sensical arguments, such as "The horizon appears to rise with you as you climb.", but most of their arguments are simply nonsensical. But they had hundreds of those arguments. I was thinking like "Well, it doesn't make sense to me, but I can conceive there is something I am unaware of, so that their arguments actually do make sense." I was manipulated and indoctrinated. I didn't think enough to realize that their claims are impossible even if you give people super-human powers to lie and keep secrets and that it's easy to find pseudoscientific and pseudophilosophical arguments for whatever thesis you can come up with.

That's where critical thinking comes in handy, it reminds me of a recent ad campaign for shampoo, in which they basically said: "we're selling millions of bottles of this shampoo... you should buy a bottle to find out why".

[FlatAssembler]

The critical thinking skills we are taught in schools don't work in real life. We are told not to trust Wikipedia. In reality, Wikipedia is one of the most reliable sources of information on-line. We are being encouraged to study things (like biology or history) we cannot easily verify. In reality, if you try to do that, even if you do come to the truth, you will misunderstand everything. We are told it's important to know how to debate. In reality, debating on Internet forums is usually counter-productive. You can't discuss with someone who values ad-hoc hypotheses over reasoning and experiments. And so on...

[Strange]

Just now, FlatAssembler said:

The critical thinking skills we are taught in schools don't work in real life. We are told not to trust Wikipedia. In reality, Wikipedia is one of the most reliable sources of information on-line.

It seems that logic needs to be taught in addition to critical thinking.

Saying that Wikipedia is not to be trusted is not to say it is wrong or unreliable. 

2 minutes ago, FlatAssembler said:

We are being encouraged to study things (like biology or history) we cannot easily verify.

Since when have these not been verifiable. You know biology is a science, right?

3 minutes ago, FlatAssembler said:

In reality, if you try to do that, even if you do come to the truth

I think that only religion deals with "truth".

[dimreepr]

35 minutes ago, FlatAssembler said:

The critical thinking skills we are taught in schools don't work in real life. We are told not to trust Wikipedia. In reality, Wikipedia is one of the most reliable sources of information on-line. We are being encouraged to study things (like biology or history) we cannot easily verify. In reality, if you try to do that, even if you do come to the truth, you will misunderstand everything. We are told it's important to know how to debate. In reality, debating on Internet forums is usually counter-productive. You can't discuss with someone who values ad-hoc hypotheses over reasoning and experiments. And so on...

Ahh, I see, you're not trying to parody conspiracy theories you're trying to justify them, that's not going to work out too well here.

[Strange]

3 hours ago, FlatAssembler said:

I apparently can't post such long threads here, but I've posted that parody on several Internet forums, like here:

Your argument based on Torricelli's law is both incoherent and irrelevant. Real conspiracy theorists at least pretend to have a valid argument.

[John Cuthber]

Critical thinking skills allow you to make judgements about the relative merit of 

"Don't trust WIKI" and
"Don't trust the person who told you not to trust WIKI".

Critical thinking is all about working out what is trustworthy in what circumstances.

 

Incidentally the "planes don't exist" is, of course, invalid.
But superficially, it looks "sciency" and it will fool some people, just like the flat earthers do.

[FlatAssembler]

Since when have these not been verifiable. You know biology is a science, right?

You've horribly missinterpreted what I was trying to say. I meant to say that it's much better for students to study programming than history or biology, because, when a student reads something about history or biology, he generally has no way to verify if that's true. When one studies programming, it's easy for him to verify that what he learns is true simply by copy-pasting the code examples into the compiler. Even when something he reads about history and biology is true, he is more than likely to misunderstand it. Think of how many times you've misunderstood something about programming, even when you could easily check it using the compiler.

Your argument based on Torricelli's law is both incoherent and irrelevant.

And how are the arguments used by the Moon-landing conspiracy theories better?
 

[John Cuthber]

On 4/15/2018 at 3:17 PM, dimreepr said:

Ahh, I see, you're not trying to parody conspiracy theories you're trying to justify them, that's not going to work out too well here.

I think we may have crashed into Poe's law here.