The difference is that flat earthers have to go through such massive logical contortions to support their claims. Not to mention the idea that every technology company and government is coordinated on a massive cooperative conspiracy without any substantial leaks is laughable.

I'm not sure what research you are referring to. There's plenty of research I have available to me about astronomy and past endeavors to not only prove that the Earth is round, that people have been off the planet and that we have explored the galaxy enough to prove the earth is not flat. The only research I have not done is personally gone to space.

So are you saying that it's not real research unless I go to space and see for myself?

I saw it for myself on a Concorde flight. The altitude was so high the horizon was bent. Not just a little but a lot.

That's good, I might use it

The obvious parallel is the old story about hot water freezing faster than cold water [1]. An experimental character who notices this and gets laughed down by the vast and overwhelming majority of people who who only agree with consensus facts could logically end up in a /weird/ mental space.

They'd basically discover that they are surrounded by people who don't assess the facts directly, but do so through a lens of other people's opinions. It wouldn't take much to push them into conspiracy theories - clearly no-one around them is dealing directly with reality. Any who didn't take to conspiracies would probably be grounded enough to drive real change in the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect

It's not that the data is necessarily wrong, it's that the interpretation isn't coherent.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas, meaning it prevents the Earth from radiating heat captured from the sun. We know this for many reasons, one of which is that Venus has an atmosphere that's high in CO2 and it's the hottest planet in our solar system: over 800 degrees F. We know that burning fossil fuels puts CO2 in the atmosphere and we can use CO2 levels in glaciers to measure historical CO2 levels.

Given this, the statement that Earth's temperature increase can be contributed to pollution makes sense.

We know that plants and animals can change their physiology over time through breeding. If someone continuously inter-breeds the largest dogs from packs, then over several generations, the average size of these dogs will increase. Expanding this idea from 10s of generations to millions of generations, it's clear that these genetic changes could get diverse enough to create a completely different animal.

Given this, the process of evolution makes plenty of sense.

Believing these things doesn't make you more intelligent. However, it does demonstrate that you were better educated and developed better critical thinking skills as a result. The definition of critical thinking is being willing to reject an assertion if the known evidence doesn't support it.

You've seen pictures of the earth from orbit, right?

You probably mean that you haven't engaged in all of the crazy theories and arguments put forth by flat-earthers. But that's doesn't make your very simple observation-based opinion any less justified. Direct observation can and should eliminate the need for lots of hemming and hawing.

> Of course i believe in global warming, though ive never read a single paper / study on it.

There are many accessible descriptions of global warming and the evidence for it written for different levels (uneducated/child; HS-level; university-level).

> Of course i believe in evolution, i went to a school where they told me to believe it.

That sounds like a bad experience, and maybe that explains some flat earthing. When I was in school we were presented with a lot of concrete evidence for the evolution of the species, and Darwin's original was even required reading.

Overall I'd expect this to lead to you having more accurate beliefs than them, since even though the consensus is sometimes wrong it's usually right.

The fields of nutrition and exercise science are both fields where distrusting the scientific consensus is, in my opinion, the best epistemological stance. The reason being that researchers in these fields are making diet and exercise recommendations that cannot possibly be supported by the research they are doing. If you dig into these fields, you’ll find that the reason this happens is that scientists are just as susceptible to groupthink and politicization as any other group of people.

(Not to say the 'science' people are always right, but vaccines were a revolution, GW/CC relies fundamentally on a few, very verifiable premises and FE makes as much sense as saying the sky is red)

I.e. I had many friends in evangelical circles when I was younger, and "Is evolution a thing" was a topic of debate. But when somebody started to go through his/her convoluted head-canon to have history line-up with creation 6000 years ago, global flood as it happened in Noah's story and God somehow forbidding the process of speciation I can't help myself think that my model is just better.

I've seen eclipses of the moon. I've traveled through time zones. I've been far enough south to see different stars. I've seen photos of Antarctica and the entire earth from space. I've seen data on temperatures and CO2. I've read the Voyage of the Beagle.

And if you really want to do “research” you can disprove the flat earth theory with a buddy a few 100 miles away, 2 sticks a phone call and some sunshine.

I've gone up in a high building and used binoculars, which... honestly, is sufficient.

Can I ask in what country you went to school? Sounds like a strange approach to teaching biology.