Flat-Earth Resurgence

[skepticalbip]

..... Not everyone is able or willing to go through the motions at the break-neck pace we expect from people. ......

True. Not everyone has the ability to become a theoretical physicist or aeronautical engineer and some with the ability are not willing to put forth the effort to achieve that level of knowledge. Which is good because we also need clerks and manual laborers.

 

[bilby]

I never did homework; it's simply impossible for me to handle the concept.

If there's more work than can be done during school hours, then the school hours should be extended.

I have a very compartmentalised perspective, and simply refused to accept the idea that school could encroach on my free time; to me it was no more or less strange than the idea of disrupting classes - which was allowing free time to encroach on school. People who disrupted school, or demanded that we do homework were best ignored, so that's what I did.

I never got a degree; but everyone I work with has one, and they all simply assume that I do too. An absence of academic qualifications makes finding a good job harder, but certainly not impossible, and stops being a problem altogether once you have ten or fifteen years of work experience - you have to start at the bottom, but in a well run company, ability and competence soon ensures promotion; and experience and good references from this year are worth far more than a degree from two or three decades ago.

My path was certainly not typical, and going through the traditional academic route is probably a lot easier (for those who have the right mindset), but this idea that the lack of a degree or of formal qualifications is a guarantee of menial work and poverty, is in my experience not correct - and I think a lot of kids who don't fit the mould into which the system tries to hammer them suffer terribly as a result.

It's not like a degree even gets you a guaranteed job anymore. They have become a proxy for general intelligence and ability, but they actually never were a measure of that, and the use of the BA or BSc as a 'filter' of prospective employees is likely doing as much harm as it is good, on both sides of the interview room.

TL; DR - Lots of smart people don't have a batchelor's degree; and lots of people who have batchelor's degrees are not very smart. We shouldn't torture children to get them a qualification that is ultimately not that meaningful.

 

[Malintent]

I only recently stumbled upon what seems to be a real segment of the "truther" movement, at least on youtube (yeah, don't tell me, youtube): The "Flat Earth Conspiracy".

It seems to be a rather recent phenomenon - most or all of the videos are from the last couple of years, and a lot of the people commenting approvingly say something like "I used to be a globe-believer myself half a year ago". I know a "Flat Earth Society" has been in existence for the better part of a 100 years, but I always thought this was a marginal phenomenon even among the circus that is the US Christian Right. But by the looks of it the idea is spreading within that biome.

Now I'm a genuine fan of  Hanlon's razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"), but I find it hard to fathom that much stupidity. So I'd be very thankful about any evidence, ever so incidental, that the Flat Earth Movement is something other than 1000s of voting age adults in industrialised societies with internet access thinking that triangulation was made up by the masons/Jesuits/NASA. Some suggestions:

1. The Flat Earth Movement is a mission to divert rationalists from the real battles, to take there time away from arguing against the conspiracy theories/anti-science beliefs that really matter (along the lines of "Fuck it, let'em 'teach the controversy' when it comes to evolution or climate change, as long as we don't have to teach the controversy about the shape of the Earth*
2. A meta-conspiracy against conspiracy theorists: Along the lines of "let's make the people who've seen through our machinations look stupid by creating a ton of puppet accounts that make-believe spread the truth about the Rockefellers/9-11/the evolution hoax while also prominently professing a believe in the flat earth, so we can always say 'but anyone who claims to have evidence for this probably also believes the earth is flat', so the regular joe will turn away from those other ideas" (this one has actually been proposed by some right wing conspiracy theorists: "the man" created Flat Earth to distract us from population engineering (aka chemtrails) etc.)
3. I large scale high-school project: High school science teachers have created those Flat Earth channels to test their students understanding of the subject by letting them argue against those ludicrous arguments.
4. Whatever else you can think of...

Please, someone... anyone? Give me one argument not to believe that actual adults in their thousands believe the Earth is flat and NASA invented trigonometry! This one time, I'll take a very flimsy one.

You picked the wrong razor. You need to explore "Poe's Razor"... Poe's Law (first constructed by Nathan Poe in reference to some outlandish claims made during creationism / evolution debates), basically says:

"Extremist views are indistinguishable from parody"

So, Poe's philosophical razor would be:

"Never attribute to Extremism what can more easily be attributed to Parody"