About two months ago I revived my Quora account. This was, in retrospect, a mistake. The question and answer process is quite
hopeless, even when compared to Reddit, and since that time I have got a
dailyish email digest of questions and answers.
The first day’s missive wasn’t too bad. There was a nice mix of physics (what if a grain
of sand at ~c hit the Earth? – not much really) and theo-scepticism (ie
don’t two passages in the bible contradict each other – perish the thought that
the bible might be errant!). The second
was good with some stuff about electrons, quarks and ethics.
The next day there was a trick maths question (written to
imply addition, but actually leaving other operations open) and then they kept
coming. The most recent versions are of
the ilk “A couple go to the movies, they have two children together, he has three
children and she has four, of which two have two children each while his children
only have one each. How many people went
to the movies?” – the answer (noting that I have not checked) is two. The couple went to the movies, not the couple
and all their progeny. The answer for
the latter, unasked question is 14.
Similarly, with the farmer who takes X eggs from a population
of Y eggs. He’ll have (in his immediate
possession) X eggs. If he owns all the
chickens that laid the eggs and the law says ownership of a chicken means ownership
of all eggs laid by that chicken, then he owns (and thus has) Y. It’s not a maths question, it’s a vagueness
of the word “has” question.
Anyways … less than two weeks in there was this question “Is
The Flat Earth Society serious?” Then I
started getting more evolution denial questions (How did the Platypus come to
be if evolution does not explain it?)
And the flat earth questions became more common and, frankly, more troll-like. I have to admit that I have looked at a
couple, but in the past week or so the headlining topics have been:
Have you ever met a flat-Earther
who finally converted to globe Earth? What made him/her change his/her mind?
Can you show an example of some
perpendicular object viewed from far away that is seemly tilted due to the
curvature of the earth?
Why can't the ISS take a picture
of Earth and prove to the Flat Earth Society that Earth is not really flat?
Can someone show me solid proof
of the earth being a round planet and not flat, other than NASA and their
photos?
Perhaps I am to blame for clicking on a couple of these
topics, but I am getting pretty sick of them.
There’s the constant battle between the monkey brained part of me that
does want to know what an actress that I don’t know who starred in a show that
I didn’t watch looks like today and the rational brained part that knows that
1) even if I did want to see what that actress looks like, I’ll be forced to
look at photos I have even less interest in before getting my endorphin reward
of seeing what I was seeking, and 2) letting myself be click-baited today allows
the machine hone its click-baiting skills to get me again in the future.
So, I am going to purge myself of future interest in the
stupid questions by stating here and now that the Earth is flat.
In fact, it’s very, very flat with a deviation of less than 0.2%
from a perfect oblate spheroid and about 0.33% from a perfect sphere.
If the Earth were entirely covered in water, and ignoring
the moon, the surface would still be an oblate spheroid because that’s the
shape it would assume such that the forces zero out – the combination of gravity
and centripetal force due to rotation – which is another way of saying that the
surface of the Earth is flat (in terms of spacetime).
What they should be saying, if they aren’t just trolls, is
that the Earth is a disk – which it clearly isn’t.
---
Part of the “controversy” is that a YouGov survey concluded
that a ridiculously high proportion of “millennials” believe that the Earth is
flat. However, the survey was as bad as
a Dolly quiz. “Dolly” was a teenage girl’s
magazine which used to have hilariously bad quizzes, so “Dolly quiz” is my go-to
smackdown on any poorly worded survey – the YouGov survey is worse than usual. These, I kid you not, were the survey question and options:
Q: Do you believe that the world is round or flat?
Option 1: I have always believed the world is round
Option 2: I always thought the world is round, but more
recently I am skeptical/have doubts
Option 3: I always thought the world is flat, but more
recently I am skeptical/have doubts
Option 4: I have always believed the world is flat
Option 5: Other/Not sure
So what does “flat” mean (they mean planar, don’t they)? What does “world” mean (should they not have used
the term “Earth”)? Can’t the Earth be
both flat and round (isn’t a standard dinner plate both flat(ish) and
round(ish))? What does “always” mean (I
have no clear recollection of what I believed when I was 4 years old, but I am reasonably
confident that, when I was two, I had no belief about the shape of the planet,
so doesn’t that mean that I have not always believed the Earth is spherical)? Why
skip between “believed” and “thought” (are not thinking and believing distinct)?
I’d have to go with Option 5. Not only that, I think (believe?) that anyone
who answered anything other than Option 5 is either lying or misunderstood the
question (as asked).
Of course, you could interpret the question and give an answer
based on your interpretation rathe than the question as asked, but people will
interpret the question differently. The
Earth isn’t round, it’s an oblate spheroid (oh ok, it’s round if you cut it through
the equator, but nowhere else – although the cuts do go from almost perfectly
round to mostly round as the cuts get closer to going through both poles). And it’s very flat. So strictly speaking it’s more correct to say
that the Earth is flat. Sphericalish,
but nevertheless flat.
And then there are the people who’d look at the stupid
question and give a stupid answer. I’d
say that, hopefully, the company controlled for that, excluding obviously
stupid responses (the question should have been one among many
questions – and it clearly was since they were able to split the data up by
age, gender, religious affiliation, political affiliation, region, etc), but
then this is the same company that posed this stupid question.
What’s really odd is that the analysis implies that the more
religious you are the more likely you are to believe the Earth (or world, whatever
that means) is flat. But the more Republican
you are, the more likely to are to believe that the Earth is round. I’m not an expert on American politics, but I
would have put the Republicans are more religious than Democrats, so there’s
something odd going on there. Perhaps it’s
just that trolls are more likely to do their trolling for the Republicans?
This all just reinforces an opinion that I developed years ago –
don’t rely too heavily, if at all, on opinion polls and their like.
