There are well over 500 FE'ers in the current membership register.
Oh wow! I was sooo wrong in my interpretations of the numbers of adherents involved! Sorry for being so deliberately deviant jroa!
The fact (?) that there's apparently over 500 flat earthers—and not the mere 400 I quoted—obviously changes everything. That makes it all the more obvious that those 7 billion round earthers must be wrong in actuality. That additional 100 flat earthers really changes the balance of opinion entirely doesn't it?
And thanks for pointing that out jroa. It's almost enough to make me accept the flat earth belief now. (Sorry, that was a mean little joke wasn't it hehe?)
The truth is not the truth because of statistics. In fact, statistics have nothing at all to do with truth.
Virtually everyone used to think that blood letting and leaching would "balance the humors" and cure diseases. Today, most people understand that this is not true. According to you, it was the truth hundreds of years ago and time caused it to not be true today. This is a retarded way of thinking.
Do you really not understand that the majority of people can be wrong? Statistics is not about finding the truth; it is about finding the likelihood. You should really learn the difference.
I have to agree with jroa on this one, the statistics you're citing don't prove anything. Furthermore, there isn't any evidence to back them up. You're assuming that the 500 members all believe the Earth to be flat, and none of the rest out of 7 billion believe the Earth is flat. So this is a poor way to advance your argument, based on obviously faulty numbers.
Even if you say, and I think we can probably all agree on this, that the numbers are heavily in favour of the non-flat believers, it's still a poor argument. What you need to address is
why the majority might believe it. In the case of blood letting, it was a practice that actually did work in some cases, and this theory of the humours seemed to make sense to people at the time since there wasn't a better explanation available. Today, "Round Earth Theory", i.e. modern physics basically, is the best available explanation based on the current data.
What happens as I see it, the best, most sensible theory tends to get accepted by the majority of people. Of course that doesn't make the theory "right" - no theory is ever "right", it's just that now we have more and better ways of measuring things, which should make our theories better at explaining and predicting phenomena.
So now since we have better data, we have better theories. These get adopted by the scientific community as, if not "right", then at least the best avenue in which to direct their time and money researching. Then these get communicated to the public at large. Since most people aren't scientists, they tend to accept these theories as "right" or "true", or at least they "believe". In this sense then it's the correctness of the theories that inform the statistics.
If I'm right about the relationship between how good a theory is and how many people believe it, then ausGeoff probably does have a point in citing the statistics (
if he can actually back up the numbers with real data), but of course what he can't do is say "because 89% of people believe it, then it's true". Which I don't think
is what he's saying, although that's what jroa
says he's saying. So jroa is probably making a bit of a straw man to knock down here.
tl;dr Statistics may not prove anything in and of themselves but it's not wrong to cite them in support of your argument as long as they are real numbers you didn't just pull out of a hat.