The problem isn't that some people believe the Earth is flat. The problem is that it's no longer disqualifying.

If one person believes the Earth is flat, that's not an issue. The problem is that much of the country has organized itself into information bubbles. Those bubbles can be large enough to span entire congressional districts and even entire states. Those states elect representatives and senators. These days, the Senate and House can be split by a single vote on some issues. We live in a world where there's a very real possibility that a state will elect someone to office who believes things as wild as "the Earth is flat" and they will be the deciding voice on critical issues facing us today.

Beliefs inform actions. I believe the building I am in is not on fire and I am conducting myself accordingly. If I believed the building was on fire, my actions would be quite different. It is naïve at best, disingenuous at worst, to pretend that someone’s beliefs exist in some magic bubble that does not have any effect on the world around them. When people believed in witchcraft, real people were burned. Even before the pandemic, people that did not believe in the science supporting vaccinations led to real outbreaks of real disease that killed real people.

I believe procrastinating on HN makes me less productive and here I am still procrastinating. I'm not acting on my own belief. And yes beliefs do mostly exist in "magic bubbles" without any special impact on the world at large. I hope you realize a lot of people have also died because of unscientific beliefs that seemed scientific at the time. The idea of censoring of wrongthink is nothing new. There are still many countries today which still practice such policies and I don't think you'd want to live in such places.

> And yes beliefs do mostly exist in "magic bubbles" without any special impact on the world at large.

> I hope you realize a lot of people have also died because of unscientific beliefs that seemed scientific at the time.

“Beliefs mostly don’t effect the world…people are dead because of false beliefs” Which is it? What people believe mostly doesn’t matter, or people’s incorrect beliefs have been life or death matters often?

> I believe procrastinating on HN makes me less productive and here I am still procrastinating. I'm not acting on my own belief

You are acting on it by talking about it to other people. But good job picking a belief so low stakes that you can try to pretend that your beliefs that are literally your map of the world, don’t determine how you act in the world.

> The idea of censoring of wrongthink is nothing new.

Neither I nor the parent comment talked about that. Just that what people believe is important and has real world ramifications. It isn’t being “insecure” in my science to worry about people that think physics isn’t real, or vaccines aren’t real, or that killing someone that doesn’t believe in their god is required, or people with certain skin colors are biologically predisposed to violence, or that there is a vast global conspiracy going back hundreds of years to trick people about the shape of the earth.

If majority of humans acted upon majority of their beliefs, the humanity would have destroyed itself several times over. You cannot have good ideas without bad ones. How would you learn anything otherwise. I don't know what are you talking about then if not about censorship? Are you only asserting: bad people do bad things?

I don't know why, but it seems that of all the silly ideas out there, flat-earthers have a special place in the minds of some people here on HN, since they are brought up so many times.

Believing that the Earth is flat is mostly harmless. Believing that vaccines cause autism, that covid is a hoax, etc is actively harmful to society and actually kills people (more often then not not the one who believe it in the first place).