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A flat earth is popular among iGen – kids who grew up with the internet

Denyse O'Leary
February 7, 2019
Cosmology, Culture, Intelligent Design, science education
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(

Hellerick projection of Earth sphere as flat/
/CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Various parties are looking for someone to blame:

I am still stunned that there are seemingly average people walking around today with the firm belief that the world is actually flat. The numbers, while still small, are also surprisingly high. In a recent survey only 84% of those surveyed were confident that the Earth is “round”. The rest expressed some doubt, were confident the Earth is flat, or were unsure. For those 18-24 only 66% were confident the world is round. (The survey was presented as a dichotomy between round and flat – it’s hard to say if this had any effect on the responses, but we’ll put that aside.) Belief in a flat Earth correlated with being young, religious, and poor.
Steven Novella, “What Drives the Flat-Earthers?” at Neurologica

It correlates more with living in a culture where there is an academic war on science waged by old, rich, naturalists for their own advancement. Ditto the war on math.

Put another way: Getting answers right is no longer considered a plus; it’s a suspect quality. So then, people believe what they want.

Most of Novella’s piece has to do with people who seriously espouse a flat earth as opposed to people who check the box and go back to their Twitter feed, surely the vast majority. It won’t be fun when those people have responsible positions, imparting their knowledge of the world.

Note: In the same spirit, they accept a multiverse where everything is true. Spares thinking. 

See also: Historian: Darwinists Kept The “Flat Earth” Myth Going, To Attack Opponents Of Their Views

and

Surely The Flight From Intellectual Curiosity Relates To Flat Earth Beliefs Among Millennials

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Comments
VM, what about accounting for Coriolis effects in gunlaying, etc? I think Great Circle flight routing is also relevant. KF kairosfocus
Folks, this on cosmology may be helpful: http://iose-gen.blogspot.com/2010/06/cosmology-and-timelines-of-world.html#cosmointro KF PS: Notice, how a copy of a 1246 book illustrates sphericity of the Earth. (E.g. Contrary to a popular dismissive myth the debate Columbus had was over the SIZE not the roundness of Earth; and as Magellan demonstrated, his critics were right. Ignoring Eratosthenes' calculation, let us notice that Earth is patently a 3-d entity. In a Lunar eclipse our planet's shadow falls on the Moon, and always in the arc of a circle. The only 3-d object that always casts a circular shadow is a sphere.) kairosfocus
For the VAST majority of people, it simply DOESN'T MATTER whether the Earth is flat or not. So I don't see the big concern. After all, people also don't know how Banking actually works, what the military is doing overseas, or even what "50% more" actually means. And of course NONE of these things has any effect on day-to-day life, at least right up until something goes blewie! But as both a Geographer and an Artillery Officer, I KNOW that maps are BASED on a FLAT Earth. That is, really smart guys come up with really fancy ways (e.g., Universal Traverse Mercator, etc.) to Project a portion of the ROUND Earth onto flat paper. And so any map you pick up does in fact show a Flat Earth. And pros understand that there are errors as you get away from the center of the projection. But most users of maps simply never think about the map having ERRORS built in. vmahuna

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