It would have been funny to have a real Alexa™ tell us something interesting about the current popularity of Flat Earth claims, and the people who disseminate those claims. The myth is funny only because of the condescension and scorn we tend to heap onto the past. Once again the premodern world is depicted as filled with ignorant rubes who thought the earth was flat. One scene from the Amazon Alexa™ ad playing on the flat earth myth. One of the scenes features a couple women doing laundry in the muddy street of what is surely meant to be a premodern village. The examples are meant, I suspect, to be humors (except the fake news one, which seems more a social commentary). The ad then cycles through a number of historical scenes with people calling out to other people named something like Alexa and asking them to do something. Ellen turns to her partner and asks, “What do you think people did before Alexa™?” The ad opens with Ellen DeGeneres asking her Alexa to turn the temperature down in the house as Ellen and her partner leave. Conveniently, Amazon ran an ad during the Super Bowl for their Alexa™ “smart speaker” that used the flat earth as a joke. If schools were better at teaching analytical thinking, that might reduce the appeal of conspiracy theories.It has been too long since I complained about a reference to the flat earth. Some conspiracy theories are irrefutable-the American government cannot prove, for example, that it is not storing dead aliens in a secret underground laboratory. (If “they” are so keen to deny it, it must be true!) Absence of evidence is taken as evidence of a fiendishly effective cover-up. Simply rebutting conspiracy theories may make adherents even more entrenched in their views. They are extremely common in dictatorships, where people assume, often correctly, that the authorities are lying. From there, pitfalls can be easily dismissed like photos of the Earth. They tend to be most popular among less-educated people who do not trust public institutions. The reality, says Davidson, is that the flat Earth, sun, moon and stars are contained in a Truman Show-like dome. One in ten say humans play no role in it.Ĭonspiracy theories are appealing because they offer simple explanations for complex phenomena, or because they let people believe they are in possession of secret knowledge that the powerful wish to suppress. A recent survey found that a third of American science teachers tell their students that climate change is driven in part by natural causes. Skepticism about climate change has infiltrated schools.
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