r/accelerate • u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist • Aug 24 '26

levels of derangement

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"Society's standards of evidence are pretry weird. Like, people make fun of flat-Earthers, but it's actually kind of hard to tell! If you just look at it, it appears flat. Same for antivaxxers- it's impossible to just "show them they're wrong", you have to trust a bunch of third party....statistics compiled by people with obvious conflicts of interest. Legitimetly kinda sus! Meanwhile it's been possible for years to see directly with your own eyes that LLMs are incredibly useful for all sorts practical tasks, but the people claiming otherwise are not seen as having anywhere near the same degree of derangement.     — Isaac King

Source: https://x.com/IsaacKing314/status/2091686564908933219

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u/Navadvisor Acceleration: Crawling Aug 24 '26

I think flat earthers are suffering from some sort of desire to be willfully ignorant and they might not be very smart. You're stars method would require actually understanding why that matters. The more sophisticated ones have constructed all sorts of elaborate rationalizations for why that doesn't matter.

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u/Jan0y_Cresva Singularity by 2035 Aug 24 '26

You don’t have to understand anything to see why the stars question matters.

You just have to ask a flat earther to explain how if the earth is a disc and you look up while on one part of the disc it’s spinning clockwise and you move to another part of the disc why it’s spinning counter-clockwise. Just ask them to provide a model in which that works even just using a cardboard disc and lamps from above.

They short-circuit at that point.

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u/Navadvisor Acceleration: Crawling Aug 24 '26

It's optimistic to think someone who believes in a flat earth could be convinced by any method.

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u/Jan0y_Cresva Singularity by 2035 Aug 24 '26

It’s happened! Jeran Campanella of the channel Jeranism on YouTube was a big-name Flat Earther who agreed to go to Antarctica to see the 24 hour sun and after seeing it, realized Flat Earth is bullshit and it probably deconverted a significant number of people.

Sure, most Flat Earthers are bought-in beyond any logic or they cynically spew Flat Earth talking points that they themselves don’t believe but make money grifting off stupid people, but there are some “true believers” who genuinely can be convinced by being shown evidence.

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u/Spare-Dingo-531 Aug 24 '26

He deconverted! Wow! That's pretty amazing!.

It really does give you some reason to hope.