The reason santa lives at the north pole is because it is the exact centre of the flat earth.

The funniest part is that he thinks the ice shelf is 5-10,000 feet tall.

Yes! The complete contempt and disdain in his voice when he says the word 'gravity' almost made me do a spit take.

My favorite part of the video is perhaps how he represents the "Giant ice wall" by alternating between pictures of random icebergs and blatantly photoshopped images of random icebergs.

I don't think they're photoshopped, since the Antarctic ice shelf is rather large, there are probably places you can photograph the calving face extending to the horizon

You lack imagination

A combination of stubborn, contrarian and self-satisfied can achieve the same results in a person of average intelligence. Throw in a touch of Schizotypal personality disorder and you've got a flat Earther!

Aristotle wins again.

I can only understand the stupidity of others via my understanding of my own. I swear I try and be as stupid as possible, how does this keep slipping through the cracks?

I am not convinced this is real, either. Dunno if he's trolling for the lols of it, or if he's a paid disinformation agent a la David Icke, but he seems to be having WAY too much fun with this for him to be a genuine flat-earth theorist.

That said, belief in weird stuff is not an indicator of stupidity. On the contrary, from what I have seen so far, this Stinky Cash person (dog?) is probably of above-average intelligence, as he is able to formulate new and interesting arguments in defense of his position.

When you believe in stupid shit, belief is an indicator of stupidity, otherwise belief comes with a criteria of falsifiability that is actively sought.

However, having comments disabled is an argument that he is genuine. If you want the hate-dumb-cash to roll in, you let people go to war in your comments, since conflict reinforces the prejudices of your side.

I don't think anyone in Camp Icke can afford a Correct the Record style push. Or even a McDouble and fries at this point.

http://www.michaelshermer.com/weird-things/

Even Icke himself is pretty smart! "Common sense" gives us this idea that intelligent individuals (whose judgement and expertise we are taught from a young age to trust) hold to factually-accurate beliefs, beliefs which are based on a solid foundation of evidence and reason. But in fact, a growing body of scientific evidence and clinical studies tells us that is rarely ever the case: our beliefs are formulated, first and foremost, through emotional imprinting that occurs at a fairly young age. Reason and evidence, in the absence of serious experience with - and an active commitment to! - rigorous critical thinking, tend to manifest only later (if at all), and reason is primarily invoked, not to *determine* beliefs, but instead to *justify* them. If the horse is reason, and our conclusions the cart, then we live in a proverbial cart-before-horse situation, one which is incredibly difficult to escape from - particularly for those of us who are intelligent, yet ignorant of critical thinking.

In other words, people overwhelmingly "think" back-to-front. We draw conclusions first, reason them out later, and the only significant difference between "the stupid" and "the intelligent" is that "the intelligent" are better able to rationalize and defend their irrationally-formulated beliefs (which, ironically, can lead to some of the WORST ideas becoming the MOST entrenched)

Criteria of falsifiability or you're only accurate by accident.

You can't choke the truth to death on word salad.

Basically, if your question is: "is this person intelligent or stupid?", do not try to approach it by asking "what are this person's beliefs?" Instead, ask "how well can this person defend his beliefs?"

"How well can this person defend his beliefs?" is a meaningless question. They can't defend them to me worth a fuck, but that doesn't mean they can't convince another idiot.

"Does this person know how they would know if they are wrong about their beliefs" is all that is required. You wont find ten humans in a time zone that does this, however, so I'm probably just being a dick about it.

Ummm, yes? Of course you're only accurate by accident! That's part of the point.

If you don't want to read what I wrote, then please read the link I have provided; it's important to know this stuff, Mr Dumpster, so that you can have a better appreciation for the world, and the actual role that intelligence plays in it.

"Does this person know how they would know if they are wrong about their beliefs"

No, epistemology is not a function of intelligence, it is simply a function of education (a very specific, and sadly increasingly rarified, subset of education), and is still sadly subordinate to the intrinsic irrationality of belief.

Again, getting back to your own comments re: the criteria of falsifiability, this is not just me saying that intelligence and belief are back-to-front: numerous scientific studies have been done into this matter, and the evidence suggests that one's intelligence (i.e. one's capacity for reason and abstract thought) plays little or no role in the initial formulation of beliefs, which in turn, leads to plenty of highly-intelligent people who are nevertheless quite wrong about things (see also: Marxism, Christianity, and whom was the best captain on Star Trek). The contrary claim - our folksy, backwoods-wisdom that "correctness is a function of intelligence, ergo intelligent people tend to have correct beliefs" - has been shown to be false. Repeatedly.


We can even see evidence for that here, wherein Mr Stinky Cash - himself a man of above intelligence - is able to offer up a pretty coherent defense for a belief which most of us would consider to be complete nonsense. YOU, then, attempt to rationalize the incongruity between what is observed (:1: "this man is clearly wrong, yet he is able to speak and use a computer") and the irrational, falsified belief which has been imprinted upon you by your upbringing (:2: "wrong people must be dumb, so dumb that they can neither speak nor use technology").

Now, you yourself are a fairly clever person, so of course we see you trying to twist and turn - perfectly in keeping with the behavior of intelligent people who have been caught in the snares of a false belief - when the solution to your own confusion is perfectly obvious to those of us who have kept abreast of the actual research: your belief (:2:) was incorrect. 'Intelligence' and 'correctness' are not correlated.

Ah, but that is the beautiousness of critical thinking.

He wants me to believe his claims are true.
I want to know if he knows how to falsify his own beliefs.

These two problems we have are what are called auxiliary problems to one another, because finding a solution to one also works to find the solution to the other. It can't help but work in both our favors to have this criteria if what he says is true.

This is a higher level of critical meat noise than listing the fallacies and other jargon based rules of thumb. You will find it serves you well in your future endeavors to argue in favor of the Star Wars Prequels, my young apprentice.