LESSWRONG
LW

by Fivehundred
1 min read
96

-4

I found a website run by an interesting fellow called 'Wild Heretic' and it seems incredibly intricate and comprehensive. I've yet to see any other person argue as well for half so radical a claim. Think of this as an opportunity to examine arguments for highly unpopular views.

Wild Heretic believes that we live on the inside of a hollow sphere, lit by a half-light half-dark Sun at its center (he claims that light bends in order to produce the effect of rising and setting), that the moon is an optical illusion, that manmade satellites don't really exist, that the stars are light artifacts produced in the atmosphere and can never be seen above it, and he has a bunch of explanations for the other celestial bodies like comets and galaxies.

It all seems shockingly intelligent (aside from when he insists that the fact that the Earth doesn't move under your feet when you jump disproves heliocentrism). He also has nine main pieces of evidence for his model:

1. Some early modern maps have inversed latitude and longitude
2. Modern polyconic maps show more accurate sizes and shapes
3. 19th century balloon observations (that is, without an intervening medium) gave the impression of a concave surface
4. 4,000 foot plumb lines reportedly were farther away from each other at the bottom of a mine shaft
5. A laser shot between two posts (over water) seems to curve downwards
6. An old rectilineator experiment indicates a concave surface (the experiment has been criticized here)
7. Radar and radio wave horizons cannot be explained on a convex ball
8. Ships disappearing below the horizon are an optical illusion
9. Light bends upwards, which allows for the rising/setting illusion of the sun and moon

I would really like to know what people here have to say about this, since the comments on the site itself are very disappointing. (A lot of it does rely on a massive conspiracy involving scientists of many stripes, but it's probably best to overlook that.)

Personal Blog

-4

Can anyone refute these arguments that we live on the interior of a hollow Earth?
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[-]drethelin100

This is why we need downvotes.

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[-]Lumifer90

It's not "shockingly intelligent", it's an incoherent babble.

The babble is locally coherent in places, but once you take a bit broader view, it reverts to incoherency.

Going down crazy rabbit holes can be a fun anthropological expedition, but it's not an exercise in reasoning.

Reply
8jimrandomh
It may be a useful exercise. We know it's wrong because the subject matter is something we're familiar with; but imagine a similar body of work, confabulated by a similar process, on a subject we know less about. Would we still be able to tell there was something wrong with it? I'm not sure.
5turchin
The game may be dangerous. One sleepless night I thought to create rational theology just for fun, but possible arguments in my mind start to grow so quickly that I have to stop my thinking before I succeed.
0RainbowSpacedancer
Can you talk a bit more on this? I'm curious to know how you imagine talking yourself into believing something you don't believe, like some kind of double-think. And it seems avoiding scary thoughts is not a habit a rationalist would want to encourage.
5turchin
Ok, let's spend a minute to construct a rational theology. At first, we need to prove that God exists. There are several independent ways to prove it: 1) Simulation argument. We are most likely are living in the world created by some form Superintelligence. It may create miracles, afterlife, whatever, and prevent us from proving that we live in the simulation. If we accept simulation argument, we also should accept multilevel simulation model, with higherst possible superintelligence on the highest level. 2) Mathematical Universe Platonia. If all possible math objects exist, then most complex objects exist too, more over, complex objects are dominating by the number between all possible math objects (like large digit are dominating on smaller digits). Thus most complex superintelligent computer programs must dominate as pure mathematical objects (programs are mathematical objects). However, it contradicts observations: we see a rather simple world. Solution could be that each superintelligence in platonia create multilevel simulation, so most observers any ways are downstream of simulations. 3) All the hell break loose if we accept Platonia, because not only mathematical ideas must exist, but also any linguistically presentable ideas. Thus in Platonia idea of God is equal to the God existence. 4) Forget Platomia and Simulation. But anyway we are going to create benevolent superintelligence during AI self-improvement in the next decades. It will be indistinguishable from God. However, it will exist only future half of infinity. 5) Forget Superintelligence. If some exotic interpretations of QM are true, and consciousness cause collapse, we need one and only one instance of consciousness to do so for all possible universes. Surprisingly, it is me: I am the only consciousness being in the world, all others are p-zomby. (High danger of mania of grandiosity detected.) 6) The same way anthropic principle in its worst form says that all visible universe must exist onl
2eternal_neophyte
The panpsychism argument is probably the most compelling one among all of these. The problem with it is that if percepts are the basic substance of the universe howcome we have experiences that we cannot predict? It implies our future experiences are determined by something outside of our own minds.
0cousin_it
Or that our minds define a probability distribution over future experiences.
0turchin
One way to answer it is to turn to the solipsistic way - that is, there is no outside universe, but there are laws which convert one experience into the next one. I would not try to defend the point, as it has one clear weakness: it is not parsimonious, as it requires extremely complex laws to convert one experience in the next, and, more over, these laws are exactly the outside world, after some normalisation.
0eternal_neophyte
these laws are exactly the outside world That is my view precisely. One way out is to assert that there is at least one mind responsible for providing the percepts available to other minds, and from its perspective nothing is unknown and it fills the function of the "outside world".
0Lumifer
Something similar might be a useful exercise (e.g. cold fusion, maybe?). Hollow Earth has way too many immediate implications (so, how does gravity work? and why is GPS functioning? and lots of ways to see through hundreds of miles of atmosphere, shouldn't radars show us the Earth is concave if it's so? etc.)
1Fivehundred
Well, I don't know a whole lot about physics or the other subjects he talks about. It just seems very well-argued to me. Would you care to elaborate on what you think is incoherent?
[-]eternal_neophyte120

I don't know a whole lot about physics or the other subjects he talks about. It just seems very well-argued to me.

These two facts are related.

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2TheAncientGeek
That is the kind of snark that is entirely justified.
2Lumifer
All of it. I recommend developing critical thinking skills.
0Fivehundred
This is not a good response. Surely you can admit this is coherent?
3Lumifer
First of all, reality is interconnected. If you are evaluating a hypothesis about reality (as opposed to an abstract puzzle), it should match everything you see. So, Hollow Earth. What are the implications? Clearly there is a vast conspiracy to conceal the truth. A massive, very expensive conspiracy -- someone has to generate all these photos made from space or from upper atmosphere, generate e.g. live video feeds from the International Space Station. There are no satellites, but GPS actually works, so there is some entirely unknown system which allows you to pinpoint your location anywhere on Earth. Gravity obviously works very differently from what the textbooks say. Etc. etc. If Hollow Earth is actually true, you should be much more concerned about things other than the shape of the planet. As to this specific example, it's misleading. Speaking at a very crude level, temperature is a measure of energy. The higher the temperature of something, the more energy that something has. If we are talking about gases (like the Earth's atmosphere), we can simplify it even more -- temperature is a measure of how fast do gas molecules move. However temperature (= speed) is a per-molecule thing. Let's take a cubic meter of space and put a single gas molecule in there. And let's make it move very fast -- as fast as it would take to correspond to 2500 degrees C. Will this molecule melt anything? Nope, it's energetic, but it's alone. The amount of energy it can transfer to something it hits is very very small. How much something gets heated in a, technically, 2500 C environment depends on the density of that environment. If the gas is very rarefied, meaning the number of molecules per cubic meter is small, you won't get much heat. If it's dense (lots of molecules), you get a lot of heat. That's why you can easily pass your hand through a flame (gas, low density), but you can't pass your hand through boiling water (liquid, high density) even though the temperature of the fla
0Fivehundred
I don't understand why you think this is a refutation. What is giving energy to the molecules in the upper atmosphere, if not the sun? And if it is the sun, higher density matter like satellites would would experience extreme heat.
2Lumifer
Not extreme heat. Satellites do get heated by the sun, certainly, but not to 2500 C. They absorb energy coming from the sun, but they also radiate energy -- the stable/average temperature depends on the balance of incoming and outgoing. Satellites have to manage this balance and they do. One very common method is reflective shields. Think about it this way -- why doesn't the whole Earth overheat?
1cousin_it
Yes, satellite cooling is a real technical problem. You're one Google search away from learning all about it.
0Fivehundred
The claim being made is that satellites should be exposed to temperatures nearly twice as hot as the melting point of iron.
2cousin_it
The claim is correct. The ISS is orbiting right in the middle of the thermosphere, and the temperature there is indeed higher than the melting point of iron. You're one Google search away from learning why the ISS doesn't melt. I know the answer, but it's important that you find it out yourself.
0Fivehundred
Ah, I already Googled but I got confused because the first guy who came up on the search seemed to be talking about something else. But I used a different phrasing and got the answer. FWI, Google isn't always reliable for refuting crackpots and Wikipedia is very unreliable. If I assumed that the latter represented the state of human knowledge I'd be forced to concede that most of what Wild Heretic says is true.
0cousin_it
If you're not an expert on some topic, and it's not too politicized, then I think trusting Wikipedia and using it as a starting point is the best strategy available today.
0Lumifer
On a hard-science topic, probably. On a topic is any way connected to culture wars, not necessarily.
0[anonymous]
Quick check, did you read my comment before replying? Every word of it? :-)
0phonypapercut
No. Temperature is not heat.
0James_Miller
Sometimes it can be. For example, refute the claim that the earth is flat and there is a general conspiracy to lie about the earth's shape so you can only use information which you personally gather.
5Lumifer
That's not terribly hard -- e.g. you can see the Earth's curvature from a normal commercial airliner -- but misses the real point. If there's a general conspiracy of such magnitude and pervasiveness, whether Earth is actually flat is likely to be the least of my concerns.
0lmn
Science is based on the principal of nullius in verba (take no one's word for it). So your attitude is anti-scientific and likely to fall a foul of Goodhart's law.
0Lumifer
Which particular part of my attitude is anti-scientific?
0lmn
That what you describe as the "real point" amounts to an appeal to authority.
0Lumifer
You misunderstand. The real point is that in the case we're talking about I suddenly discover that my picture of how the world is constructed is all wrong. Not only the world of physics, but the world of politics, culture, etc. as well. It turns out I don't really understand how it all works which should be very worrisome. And while mundane physics looks more or less the same (after all, I know how to go about my daily life without falling into the sky or somesuch), finding out that societies function in some entirely different manner than I expected is a good cause for alarm.
0lmn
Ok, now your just (intentionally?) missing the point of the hypothetical. Also, science can and has been (and certainly still is) wrong about a lot of stuff. (Nutrition being a recent less-controversial example.)
0Lumifer
Science is a methodology, not a set of conclusions. At any given moment in time scientists are definitely wrong about a lot of stuff.
0lmn
Agreed. Which is why the scientific approach is think about how to refute the claim that the earth is flat using only information you personally gather, rather than making snarky comments about the implausibility of the conspiracy.
2Lumifer
I disagree. Science is not about having to poke everything with your own finger. In particular, science is perfectly fine with having to deal with uncertain evidence. I think your approach went out of favour somewhere around XVII century.
0James_Miller
Last time I was on an airliner I looked for but could not see any evidence of the Earth's curvature. Don't religions show you can get huge numbers of people to believe things are that not true? And I bet some great religions were started as high level conspiracies to get populations to have beliefs useful for their leaders.
0Fivehundred
At risk of derailing the thread here, I'd say there are no examples you can bring of a politically created/patronized religion displacing native beliefs, assuming the mentality of the public didn't favor that religion. For instance, Anglicanism may have suited the British state well, but it wasn't arbitrarily forced onto a resistant Catholic population.
2Lumifer
"Convert or die" was a very popular proposition for many centuries. Take, I don't know, former Yugoslavia. The Bosnians are mostly Muslim, the Serbs are Christian Orthodox, and the Croats are Roman Catholic. You think that's because they all had different mentalities?
0Fivehundred
Did the Ottoman Sultans invent Islam?
0Lumifer
Given that you know the expression "Ottoman sultans", what do you think?
0NoSignalNoNoise
No. The Ottoman Empire started in 1299. Islam, and various very powerful caliphates, had existed for centuries before that.
0Fivehundred
Ugh... I'm talking about whoever created Islam or Christianity in the first place, and Lumifer's response didn't seem to acknowledge that. I am indeed aware that Islam predates the Ottoman dynasty.
0James_Miller
From Wikipedia: "During the Saxon Wars, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, forcibly Roman Catholicized the Saxons from their native Germanic paganism by way of warfare, and law upon conquest. Examples are the Massacre of Verden in 782, when Charlemagne reportedly had 4,500 captive Saxons massacred upon rebelling against conversion, and the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, a law imposed on conquered Saxons in 785 that prescribed death to those who refused to convert to Christianity."
1Fivehundred
Ah, I mean a religion that was created or originally propagated through patronization. Every religion has been patronized for political purposes at some point. Christianity is a pretty good example of a religion that was not useful to the authorities during its early years.
2James_Miller
Matthew 22:21 Jesus said "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's".
1Fivehundred
You're not giving the full quote, and even if he had said that, it wouldn't remotely meet any burden of proof for showing Christianity was probably created for political purposes. The behavior of the Roman authorities towards Christianity seems to offer more evidence against that, as well as the embarrassment for having their Messiah be crucified by a Roman governor.
0Lumifer
It helps if you're over an ocean and there are no clouds. Anything in particular you have in mind?
0James_Miller
Yes, but I would rather not say in part because I don't have proof and because I don't want to falsely signal to any of my future students that I don't like them believe of their religion.
4Lumifer
Ah yes, academia. The bastion of free inquiry and free thought. However I'm somewhat familiar with the early history of Islam and the idea of a "high level conspiracy" doesn't fit well. When Muhammad started having his revelations, he was basically a nobody and even after that for quite a while his fate was very touch-and-go.
0NoSignalNoNoise
The Qur'an wasn't written down until a while after Muhammad's death, by which time there was an incentive for leaders to edit it for their own benefit. See also Emperor Constantine I's efforts to quash dissent within the Christian community in order to make it more politically unified.
0Lumifer
True, but so what? I am sure there was editing, but I am also sure that the post-standardization Koran was very similar to the floating set of surahs at the time of Muhammad. You can't just substitute one set of religious teaching for another this way.
0Fivehundred
Yes, that's precisely my point. Religious doctrines get sorted out over centuries so that the most viable survive. People who deliberately set out to create their own cult can't match this.
0Lumifer
They can get lucky. Example: Joseph Smith.
0Fivehundred
Sure, but (without even mentioning how much it takes from mainstream Christianity) Mormonism is... 150 years old. How many Quakers do you see these days?
0Lumifer
What is the point that you are making? Religions get born, go through natural/social selection, some survive -- for some time, some do not. This is all uncontroversial, as far as I know. When you set up a new religion, you don't know how successful will it be, but the probability of it becoming very successful is not zero.
0Fivehundred
It's a safe assumption that any religion with ancient roots was not made up by someone for political purposes.
0Lumifer
I don't see why. Religions mutate and evolve.
0Fivehundred
I admit it's possible for components of a religion to be taken from political propaganda (certain parts of the NT fit the bill), but inventing the idea as a whole... I can't see how that would work out. Except maybe in the case of Islam, but even then it was just grabbing on to the coattails of Judaism and Christianity.
1Lumifer
So you can see. And the example is the second most popular religion in the world.
0Fivehundred
I'm not sure it counts. Muhammad certainly existed. Most of the theology wouldn't have been made up as you describe. I'm really just talking about the origin story, since whether Islam actually came from Arabia isn't certain.
0Lumifer
I haven't read anything which doubts that. What is the alternative theory?
0Fivehundred
The idea as I know it comes from Patricia Crone, but it's been picked up by other historians like Tom Holland. Basically, it claims that Muhammad came from Jordan and the idea of Islam originating in Medina was an attempt to 'Arabize' the new religion.
0Lumifer
Ah, interesting. But it seems that this "Revisionist" school is about critically analysing Koran and hadiths -- basically not taking them at their word which is entirely reasonable. The claim that Islam didn't originate in Arabia is mostly limited to Crone and even she looks to have abandoned this claim: Wikipedia says "Later, Patricia Crone refrained from this attempt of a detailed reconstruction of Islam's beginnings".
0Fivehundred
Um... did you read the following sentence? She didn't abandon the idea at all. And there's at least one major work that argues for it: 'In the Shadow of the Sword.'
0Lumifer
I did read the following sentence and noted that it does not have any footnotes attached to it -- as far as I can see it's an unsubstantiated assertion by some Wikipedia editor. Besides "I'm not going to admit I was wrong, I just will stop talking/writing about this" counts as abandonment in my book. As to Tom Holland, he is a writer, not an academic. Pop science, of course, has a rather large liking for outrageous claims.
0Fivehundred
Refraining from a 'detailed' reconstruction seems quite reasonable. In history, you don't generally have to explain how something happens to assert that it did. Holland is indeed something of a pop author, but once you've translated Herodotus it's hard to claim that you have no real expertise in history.
0Lumifer
That does not apply to outside-of-the-mainstream views. History is a very big subject. Translating Herodotus does not give you any insights into VI-VII century Arabia.
0Fivehundred
It does indeed. Evidence that x is true is not the same as an explanation of how x occurred. For instance, we can see that an ancient city was burned down around a certain year, but not know for what purpose or by whom. You just complained that he wasn't an academic.
0Lumifer
With straightforward archeological evidence, yes, it does. But if you are talking about a different interpretation of well-known sources, it's not like you have new facts -- what you are offering is a new narrative and that needs, basically, to make sense. "Making sense" here implies fitting into a larger context better than the old narrative which, in turn, involves better explanations of how and why things known to happen happened. The point of that was to draw your attention to the criteria for his work. An academic (outside of gender studies and such) generally has to be very careful about his claims and very explicit about the evidence he uses. There are a lot of safeguards against jumping to conclusions and shoddy scholarship tends to be ruinous to a reputation. A popsci writer, on the other hand, has incentives to produce an exciting and controversial story which will sell well.
[-]Stabilizer60

I don't have time to refute each of arguments, because there're too many. But consider number 5 in your list. He describes a laser experiment that he claims cannot be accounted for on the current picture of the Earth. But if you think it through, it is perfectly well accounted for.

Here's the version of the experiment performed by the two Polish guys on a lake. They place two stakes 2km apart. The stakes have lasers attached to them at 30 cm height from the surface of the water. They measure the height above the surface of the point at which the laser beam... (read more)

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3Fivehundred
Thank you! That's the kind of thing I'm looking for.
0Stabilizer
Sure. His arguments look pretty easy to refute using some basic physics and some Google searches. Let me know if you find any other argument of his that you find particularly compelling and I'll take a crack at it.
0Fivehundred
Hmm, his argument that stars can never be seen anywhere at high altitudes (excepting the 'fraudulent' NASA photographs) doesn't yet have an unambiguous counterexample I could find. He doesn't deny that the stars must be higher than the atmosphere but think they only become visible near the ground. But the articles on the solar equinox and the solstice are probably the best on the whole site. Or they just seem that way to me, because I don't know enough math to refute them.
0Stabilizer
Stars become invisible at high altitudes because the Earth becomes very bright compared to the stars. This happens because when you are higher up, you see more of the sunlight reflected by the Earth. This happens because at higher altitudes more of the Earth is visible to you. Thus, your eyes or your cameras cannot distinguish the relatively dim light of the stars. The sky still appears black because there is no atmosphere to make the light scatter and give you feeling of being light outside that you experience on the surface of the Earth. You can see the stars if you are on the night side, you have good cameras, and you set the focal point to the sky. I'll get to the equinox thing later.
2dogiv
This doesn't actually seem to match the description. They only talk about having used one laser, with two stakes, whereas your diagram requires using two lasers. Your setup would be quite difficult to achieve, since you would somehow have to get both lasers perfectly horizontal; I'm not sure a standard laser level would give you this kind of precision. In the version they describe, they level the laser by checking the height of the beam on a second stake. This seems relatively easy. My guess is they just never did the experiment, or they lied about the result. But it would be kind of interesting to repeat it sometime.
0Fivehundred
Would Snell's Law possibly explain it? Someone claimed to me that it makes light refract more with decreasing altitude.
0Lumifer
Don't you want to get a handle on basic physics first, before going natural-law-hopping across Wikipedia?
0Stabilizer
Thanks. You're right. I mis-interpreted their experiment as written. I'll try to read it again to see what's going on and see if it's explicable.
[-]Manfred40

"Refute" is usually not an objective thing - it's a social thing. You can probably prove to yourself that pi=3 is false, but if you write "pi=3" on a sheet of paper, no argument will make the ink rearrange itself to be correct.

This is one of the problems with a falsificationist idea of scientific progress, where we never prove theories true but make progress by proving them false. If evidence against a theory appears (e.g. the ability to see different stars from different parts of the earth might be thought of as "refuting" th... (read more)

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0TheAncientGeek
Criticism is a much wider concept than falsification. You can criticise a theory for having too many patches to work around apparent problems.
[-]turchin30

I think that Wild Heuretic doesn't actually believe in what he is writing, but he is attention whore and troll.

On the other side, if a skilled rationalist would meet moody Omega, and Omega said: you either present best possible proof of the flat earth, or I will kill you, the result may look something like this.

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0[anonymous]
Meh. Surely any of us could do better than that!
[-]Oscar_Cunningham20

I really don't understand the "old maps" argument. I mean the surface of a ball is the same as the surface of a spherical hollow, so the maps should look the same anyway.

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1Fivehundred
Thought it was worth posting, but even he doesn't think it's very convincing on its own.
[-]Heretic10

"AS ABOVE SO BELOW"

Hypothethesis, with some issues.

Without doing research or being influenced by any previously made statements or research, I began to play with the thought that we could in fact actually be living in a massive cave. The asteroids that land on our plain, actually come from the cave ceiling.

The cave is so large that we cannot with the naked eye see this ceiling. But there may be a way we actually do at a certain time- at night, when the "stars" are visible.

Down on the ground we have caves, both underground and inside o... (read more)

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[-]eternal_neophyte10

Let's assume all the arguments linked are in fact sound. First obvious question is does he offer anything that resembles a falsifiability condition? If not then he doesn't present anything remarkable or particularly difficult to dispatch with since his is a scientific, material hypothesis.

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0Fivehundred
Nearly every link provides falsifiable claims, although some are difficult to test.
2eternal_neophyte
Those are a lot of links to sift through though - can you give an example of just one? :)
0Fivehundred
Many are given in the words themselves, so I don't see why you're asking. The laser between posts?
[-]ReaganJones100

Hello everyone, I am from USA. I am here to share this good news to only those who will seize this opportunity.I read a post about an ATM hacker and I contacted him via the email address that was attached in the post. I paid the required sum of money for the blank card I wanted and he sent the card through UPS Express Delivery Shipment, and I got it in 3days. I got it from him last week and now I have withdrew $50,000 USD. The blank ATM card is programmed in a way that it can withdraw money from any ATM machine around the world. Now I have so much money to... (read more)

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[-]Good_Burning_Plastic00

Meh. You can have two systems of coordinates related to each other by r_1 = R_Earth^2/r_2, theta_1 = theta_2, phi_1 = phi_2, t_1 = t_2 and as per general relativity both will give you the same answers if you use them right. (But one of the two will be much much easier to use right than the other.)

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[-]metatroll00

Like the UMMO cult and Fomenko's New Chronology, that site is a psyop run by an intelligence agency, an experiment in creating a minority with an isolating and controlled belief system. We all actually inhabit a set of giant flying saucers, with artificial gravity coming from the bottom half and an artificial sky projected on the top half. "Long-distance travel" always involves a temporary illusion of some sort while we are ferried from one flying saucer to the other.

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[-]Oscar_Cunningham00

The first argument that comes to my mind is that General Relativity is a very beautiful theory. By the time of Newton the scientific establishment was already fixed on the idea of a spherical earth. If this was a massive conspircacy then it would be very weird that, after the conspiracy had already fixed which hypothesis it was going to favour, Einstein found an elegant piece of mathematics that was consistent with the hypothesis that they had happened to pick.

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