edmo: The internet has convinced a lot of idiots that they are appreciated geniuses.

I have had multiple conversations with legitimate, not pulling my leg nor pranking me, flat earthers and it is both enlightening and sad. At the end of the day, I think a lot of people buying into it want attention and want to feel special. They know "the real truth" that people that spent tens of thousands of dollars on degrees are blind to and indoctrinated against.

It's pretty silly, because I will sit down and try and explain, (to the ones that don't shout a barrage of abuse and conflicting and absurd questions such as: "have you been to space, then how do you know it's real?"), that the very cell phone they are using to communicate with me relies on cell phone towers that must account for the curvature of the Earth with their placement. That even in very flat places like Kansas, or Nebraska cell phone tower density is much higher than you think you would need because of the curvature of the Earth.

Not to mention things like GPS would not work without special relativity (they all use Tesla quotes to say Einstein is wrong) and gravity (which many dispute as buoyancy because it's difficult to explain how gravity works with a flat Earth), has been proven many times over with different experiments and devices we have developed based on calculations that use gravity.

But all they do is blather on about how there is not proof, it's all a conspiracy, it's all lies. It really is a cult of attention, which is why I am hanging up my hat and moving on to other things. At the end of the day, I posed to them that they should get whatever capital they had and make a cell phone or radio tower that operates on flat Earth principles. If they could do that, they would be billionaires. But no, they just want to sit and spin conspiracies in their echo chamber.

You would think with Khan Academy and youtube we could have more people learn and contribute to improving the world, but the fumes of conspiracy are a potent blend, and why try and learn and apply math to the world when you can just say it's wrong and people who use it are lying and then garner praise and attention for it.