At my work, in the break-room, is a loud annoying TV —— ¡we do have Closed captioning, so we do not have to subject everyone to loud annoying audio! In it played the WorldCup. It was night here and day in Moscow. I commented that anyone believing in a flat Earth is an idiot because the Sun is either above or beneath the plane of the Earth; so now, it should be either night everywhere or day everywhere. At this point a Flat-Earther piped-up:

He said that the round Earth is a conspiracy to discredit the bible. Then he demonstrated his grasp of theology and what flat means:

He said that we live on the inner surface of a sphere with an illusory sky. I had to choose between attacking his theology or the inverted sphere. I started with theology:

I pointed out that The bible waffles between disc-shaped plane and a square plane under a firmament t with water on all sides. The sky is real. Then I attacked the inverted sphere:

The ground drops away about a decimeter a kilometer. Since we are in the sphere, the sphere, this should be reversed. If sphere projecting the illusion of the sky is 100 KM above us, the ground should intercept the sphere 1,000 KM away. The the ground should curl upwards because we are inside a sphere, bringing the horizon closer, but the central sphere curving away should cancel this, making the horizon be about 1,000 KM away.

Although we are in a valley, the hills are not vey high. We should be able to see the Pacific Ocean looming over the hills to the west, the Sierra Nevada to the east. The Redwoods to the north. The San=Francisco Bay and its cities to the south, and Sacramento to the South East. Looking straight out horizontally, we should see ground. Scanning from nadir to zenith, we should see ⅔ ground and ⅓ sky. It would look like we live in the bottom of a giant bowl.

He said that he would check his theology and think about it.

I recommend that we watch the Flat-Earth-Debunking videos of Greater Sapien.

is this a joke? no-actually yeah, people can be that stupid

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Although what we should observe in his flat world helps. given that his belief is based on theology, pointing out that his model clashes with theology is most likely to get through to him. Maybe I shall succeed and he will believe that the Earth is a flat disc under a hemispherical firmament.

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A lady at my new workplace is a believer that GMO's are harmful to human health. :(

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The can be if the GMO is a Man-Eating VenusFlyTrap:

Seriously, GMOs are a great idea. ¿Have you heard about the fucktards destroying Golden Rice? They sentece children to blindness out of their irrational paranoia. Organic food is also bullshit.

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The ground drops away about a decimeter a kilometer. Since we are in the sphere, this should be reversed. If sphere projecting the illusion of the sky is 100 KM above us, the ground should intercept the sphere 1,000 KM away. The the ground should curl upwards because we are inside a sphere, bringing the horizon closer, but the central sphere curving away should cancel this, making the horizon be about 1,000 KM away.

Your math sounded a little fishy, so I checked it with some basic geometry. The horizon would be a little over twice the number you gave, straight shot (a bit further if you follow the curve of the ground, of course); 2,249 to the nearest kilometer, in fact. Getting the numbers so wrong in your explanation doesn't lend itself to being convincing to whoever you're trying to convince; you're lucky that Earth-shape-denialists don't usually know math.

Another prominent mistake is that the way you tell it, he just said the sky was an illusion, and then you proceeded to create this concept of concentric spheres with a 100 km radius difference. If he didn't say that himself, then he can validly dismiss your criticism as putting words into his mouth (strawmanning). Perhaps he did say it, and you just missed that part in your recounting. But knowing how you work, I wouldn't be surprised if you made this wild assumption about his position completely on your own.

Debunking something inadequately or incorrectly is worse than not debunking it at all. In the process of trying to defend their position, your opponents will usually find any mistakes you made and use them to dismiss your position and strengthen their own. It makes it harder to take the belief down with accurate arguments later.

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I commented that anyone believing in a flat Earth is an idiot because the Sun is either above or beneath the plane of the Earth

I generally hear flat-earthers claim that the sun is a spotlight as a counter to this argument. IMO There's little reason to bring it up when their conspiracy already has it covered.

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> “Your math sounded a little fishy, so I checked it with some basic geometry.”

It was an impromptu-estimate. At the time, I knew that it would be accurate to only 1 SigFig. What is important is that his model predicts that we should see Mount Shasta and Lake Shasta looming above the hills to the NorthEast.. His model fails epically. ¿Have you never done a quick calculation using approximate values of only 1 SigFig to see whether something is possible?

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Yes, I heard that argument too, but it has the problem of the not explaining how the Sun and Moon appear to rise and fall above and beneath the horizon. Just a quick 1 SigFig-Estimate on the back of an envelope shows that they fail epically.

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I guess I wasn't really clear the first time: The calculation you describe doesn't make sense. It's not just that the numbers are estimates, it's that the process you use to get there is silly. It makes about as much sense the way you wrote it as the math a flat-Earther is likely to use; a starting value that's kind of connected to the topic, followed by a series of vague claims about various stuff that somehow spits out a different number without any actual mathematical calculations. I just used the Pythagorean theorem (the square of the radius of the outer circle minus the square of the radius of the inner circle equals the square of one half the cord on the outer circle that is tangent to the inner circle); but I can't figure out for the life of me what you were trying to do.
And no, 1,000 is not within one significant figure of 2,249. Did you mean magnitude? Because it's within an order of magnitude, but that's quite different from a significant figure. This casual misapplication of basic math terms doesn't convince me that you knew what you were doing; it only reinforces my point that incorrectly debunking something makes ‘skeptics’ look stupid, which in turn makes it harder on those of us who actually know what we're doing. I'm not even sure you know what an estimate is, at this point. It seems like what you really mean is pulling numbers out of a hat and hoping they land somewhere in the vicinity of reality.

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I remembered that the horizon drops over a decimeter per kilometer. I figured that the sphere of the illusory sky has to be at least 100 KM above.a decimeter is .1 meters. The horizon should contact the illusory sphere at about 1,000 KM away. I did this bit of mental math while talking in less than 1 minute. Although it is likely that the inside-of--a-sphere-earther will probably never change his mind, showing that his model does not comport with what we using simplified mental math shut him up.

¿Have you never done a quick-and-dirty calculation in your head in less than a minute to do some basic reality-testing (¿Is it even possible? or ¿is this just a silly idea?)? That is what I did.

Post scriptum:
The 1 SigFigs are the inputs (1 decimeter, 100 KM, et cetera) and the final approximate output (we should see objects about 1,000 KM away).

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You repeating what you previously said doesn't make it more sensible. An unfounded assumption about the shape and location of the illusory sky, followed by a calculation that only works if you ignore the spherical shape that you had just assumed… it's not indicative of his position that he couldn't form a reply, it's indicative of your incoherency.

There is a difference between an estimate, which is general numbers plugged into sensible arguments, and what you did, which was general numbers plugged into something that only sounds like an argument if you don't know geometry.

And you double down on your mistake when you insist that you were actually talking about significant figures, because it wasn't accurate to even a single significant figure, which, since your inputs are correct (one by definition, even), implies your method is horribly flawed.

You did a quick and dirty calculation, and it was mistaken. You can either own up to that, or sit there and stubbornly insist that you're perfect and never make errors.

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I do not know what your problem is. I showed in less than a minute that the horizon would be much farther away, thus poking an hole in his model. ¿Have you ever heard the saying “Perfection is the enemy of good enough.”? I knew that the true figure might be less than have the size or twice the size, but the important thing is the prediction that it would appear that we live in a bowl and can see objects at least hundreds of kilometers away. That blew the model out of the water.

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You showed… if we take your unfounded assumptions to be true and let you make up new rules of geometry. In other words, you didn't show anything. You could have made the bowl point without stumbling through the unnecessary assumptions and logical leaps that you ended up using; but instead you tarnished your response with cracks in your own argument that someone can poke holes in; holes in your own argument are just as bad as holes in your opponent's argument. Your argument wasn't ‘good enough’, it was shoddy. You've basically fallen back to admitting that you were wrong but that it's okay because you were wrong for the right cause… sorry, that's not how that works.

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So, if I'm understanding this correctly, the flat-earther doesn't understand what flat means, and instead claims we're inside a sphere instead of on a sphere.

Walabio then decided to toss arbitrary numbers at it, because math sounds impressive, and if the "flat"-earther isn't good in math, that can sway him. Essentially he said, "1+1=7." Then went on to describe how 7 doesn't fit reality.

Now the response is, "well, 1+1=7 may be wrong, but it's good enough. The other person's actual point was worse."

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> “Walabio then decided to toss arbitrary numbers at it, because mathsoundsimpressive, and if the "flat"-earther isn't good in math, that can sway him.”

I ballparked the numbers on the fly using approximations in my head. I made it clear to the inside-of-a-sphere-earther that these numbers are approximate, but the important thing is that we should be able to see at least hundreds of Kilometers and it should seem that we live in the bottom of a bowl.

Badly Draw Turtle believes that I should have told the flat-earther to hold 5-to-10 minutes, do the exact calculation and told the inside-a-sphere-earther that we should see 2,249 KM. I defend what I did because I did not have time (10-minute break already half gone) and the results are right enough (we should appear to live in a bowl and see far-off objects.

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My point is not that you should have done an exact calculation, my point is that the calculation you DID do has systemic flaws and so it's just chance that you were off by a multiple of 2. You could have been off by a multiple of 2000, because your method doesn't work, even as an estimate. At what point would you admit that you made a mistake? How off would you have to be?

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Update:

After learning that the bible says that the Earth is a flat disc or square with an hemispherical dome over it, my coworker does not know what to believe. I got him watching the videos of Greater Sapien. If I had to guess, I would guess that my coworker will believe that the Earth is a flat disc or square under a dome because that is what the bible tells him to believe.

I may not have further updates. I have to work with my coworker; so now, I cannot pester him. If he does not come to me, I shall have nothing to report to you.

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Why did you reply to every single comment? You tagged me five times and yourself seven times. That's incredibly inefficient.

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I figured that you all might be interested in the inside-spherer becoming a not-surer and shit reply down the line was the simplest way to do it.

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Can I opt out of your notification system if you get an update? I don't particularly care.

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Sure.