Flat Earth Is Worse Than You Think

By Leo Gura - September 19, 2024

I spent hours studying the epistemic self-deceptions of Flat Earthers — just so that I can better understand how self-deception works. It’s not about the content, it’s about the structure, the psychology of sense-making in general. It doesn’t matter whether the Earth is flat or not, what matters is all the self-deceptive ways people make sense of reality.

Flat Earthers are astoundingly ignorant. It boggles the mind how self-deceived they are:

This is a good example of criticism of science from below. People like this make it seem like science does not have serious errors. It does. But before you can appreciate the delusions of science you first have to learn basic science and rationality.

The epistemic mistakes of Flat Earthers are not unique to Flat Earthers. They are common to all religious people, all ideological people, to all scientific, rationalist, materialist, atheist people, and all New Age spiritual people. The self-deceptions are just more subtle and more abstract at higher levels of scientific rigor.

It doesn’t take much intelligence to see self-deception in Flat Earth. It takes enormous intelligence to see the self-deception in materialism, rationalism, and atheism. And it takes even higher intelligence to see the self-deception in something like Buddhism or nonduality.

What’s amazing about this whole thing is that while you are busy laughing at the obvious self-deceptions of others, you yourself have fallen into those self-deceptions, just at higher levels of abstraction and subtlety. So your laughing isn’t merely innocent laughing, it’s a defense mechanism against serious philosophical inquiry.

The way an MIT scientist laughs at a Flat Earther, I laugh at an MIT scientist. But I’m also aware that my laughing is a cover for yet deeper self-deceptions within myself, a distraction from the real work. If you are still laughing at the stupidity of others, you haven’t yet realized the depth of the problem.

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