INTRODUCTION
What Is Bullshit?
bull·shit (bo′ol′shit′) Vulgar Slang n. 1. Foolish, deceitful, or boastful language. 2. Something worthless, deceptive, or insincere. 3. Insolent talk or behavior. bull·shit·ted, bull·shit·ting, bull·shits v.intr. 1. To speak foolishly or insolently. 2. To engage in idle conversation. v.tr. To attempt to mislead or deceive by talking nonsense. bull·shit·ter n.1
In February 2017, just two days before the 2017 NBA All-Star Game, superstar Kyrie Irving made some interesting claims in a podcast that ended up receiving more attention than the game. He stated:
This is not even a conspiracy theory. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat.… What I’ve been taught is that the Earth is round. But if you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel, the way we move and the fact that—can you really think of us rotating around the Sun and all planets aligned, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what’s going on with these planets [finger quotation marks on planets]? Because everything that they send—or that they want to say they’re sending—doesn’t come back.… There is no concrete information except for the information that they’re giving us. They’re particularly putting you in the direction of what to believe and what not to believe. The truth is right there, you just got to go searching for it.2
Kyrie isn’t the only one. When online surveyor YouGov conducted a survey asking over 8,000 US adults, “Do you believe that the Earth is round or flat?,” only 84% of respondents felt certain that the Earth is round. A total of 5% expressed doubts, 2% affirmed a flat Earth, and 7% weren’t sure.3 Even more, over 226,000 Facebook followers of the Flat Earth Society dispute the Earth’s curvature by promoting the false belief that the Earth is flat. However, when someone like Kyrie Irving, a world-famous basketball star with over 4 million Twitter followers, promotes these kinds of claims, they will gain a lot of attention.
But did Kyrie actually believe what he was saying, or was he merely bullshitting?
As a social scientist, I take Kyrie’s claims very seriously. I don’t take them seriously because I think Kyrie is correct—I know his claims make as much sense as arguing that the Moon is made of cheese. I take them seriously because, as a researcher who studies bullshit, Kyrie’s claims fit a pattern of behavior I see deployed over and over again. A belief in a flat Earth would make sense if there was genuine evidence of a worldwide conspiracy to fake decades of space exploration, a denial of many branches of science, or discoveries of new forces and laws of nature. But it doesn’t really take any of this—all it takes is a mindset that completely disregards truth and genuine evidence. In other words, all it takes is bullshit.
Kyrie encourages us to seek the truth by finding concrete information and “doing some research.”4 That is a classic bullshitter move—ignore the overwhelming and convincing evidence by implying the real answer is not based on commonly accepted evidence or is actually unknown.5 Although I won’t pretend to know what Kyrie meant by “research,” had he actually approached the question of the Earth’s shape scientifically, he would have determined that the answer is certainly not “flat.”
If Kyrie wanted to approach this question scientifically, he might have taken a glance at readily available scientific evidence on the issue. Scientists love using this method of analysis because critically evaluating a bunch of studies is much easier (less costly and time-consuming) than conducting their own experiments. There is well-documented evidence: of the Earth’s shadow on the Moon when the Earth passes between the Moon and Sun (i.e., lunar eclipse), the fact that sunrise and sunset do not happen at the same time all over the world, our perspective at sunset, the shapes of other planets, and the fact that worldwide space research programs have gathered massive collections of satellite images—all supporting the belief that the Earth is not flat. As a critical thinker employing evidence-based methods of reasoning, I feel confident that the Earth is spherical. Why? Because multiple, independent sources of inquiry converge—with evidence—on the same conclusion that the planet we live on is shaped much more like a basketball than a hockey puck.
If historical records don’t satisfy Earth-shape skeptics like Kyrie, there is always value in experimental replication (an essential piece of the scientific method). One very simple demonstration was conducted over 2,000 years ago by the Greek scholar Eratosthenes. Eratosthenes determined the shape of the Earth by putting a stick in the ground and doing a bit of math. He was aware that in Syene, the Sun was directly overhead on the first day of summer (June 21), casting no shadows at noon. Eratosthenes was in Alexandria, nearly 500 miles north from Syene. He planted a stick directly in the ground in Alexandria and waited to see if a shadow would be cast at noon. Sure enough, the angle of the stick’s shadow measured about 7 degrees. Now, if the Sun’s rays are coming in at the same angle at the same time of day, and a stick in Alexandria is casting a shadow while a stick in Syene is not, it must mean that the Earth’s surface is curved.6 Of course, Earth-shape skeptics could also try out Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan and Spaniard Juan Sebastián Elcano’s route of circumnavigating the globe. Magellan and Elcano set sail from Seville on September 20, 1519, sailed across the Atlantic, passed the southern tip of South America, sailed into the Pacific and Indian Oceans, around the southern tip of Africa, and returned to Seville on September 6, 1522.7 If you don’t have three years to circumnavigate the Earth, you might take Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager’s route by air—they were the first to do so—which they completed in nine days. In short, there are many routes to get to the same conclusion.
Kyrie isn’t alone in believing something that isn’t true. Many people still believe you can see the Great Wall of China from the Moon, despite the fact that Apollo astronauts confirmed that you cannot.8 Many people believe that one human year is equivalent to seven dog years, although dog age actually depends on the size and breed of the dog (after 7 years, a Saint Bernard is 54, but a Maltese is only 44).9 It’s often said that you lose your body heat fastest through your head, despite the fact experts have shown humans to be just as cold if they went without wearing pants as if they went without wearing a hat.10 People continue to insist that giving children sugar makes them hyperactive, despite the fact that virtually all tests show that sugar does not cause hyperactivity.11 And many people still believe that vitamin C is an effective treatment for a cold, despite the fact that experts have demonstrated little to no evidence that this is true.12
Yet, sharing these facts often don’t persuade people who never believed in science in the first place. If someone believes that it is more likely that thousands of scientists, worldwide, are colluding in a conspiracy to hide the true shape of the Earth, then explaining otherwise won’t get you very far. Despite the public criticism Kyrie received for his flat-Earth theory, he stood firm and remained unconvinced, saying in 2018, “I don’t know. I really don’t,” and added that people should “do [their] own research for what [they] want to believe in” because “our educational system is flawed.”13 It is one thing to suggest people do their research and another thing to make claims about things one clearly knows nothing about—but something tells me Kyrie hasn’t really cared to look at genuine research evidence.
I’m not interested in insulting Kyrie. But as a scientist who happens to study the insidious consequences of bullshit, I am invested in the value of genuine evidence and the blind spots in our reasoning. We should believe the Earth is spherical because that is where compelling evidence, from multiple independent sources, leads us. Flat Earthers, like Kyrie, assume the Earth is flat and chase evidence in support of their claim. But no one has a vested interest in the Earth being round or flat, only in the shape offered by evidence-based methods of reasoning. This is why, as a scientist, I would have absolutely no problem accepting that the Earth is flat if this conclusion were supported by genuine and convincing evidence.
Copyright © 2021 by John V. Petrocelli
