“To hold on to a false model, such as a flat Earth, requires dismissing evidence that conflicts with your model. Flat-Earth believers say they distrust all evidence that they cannot directly sense. A picture can be fake. An explorer's account can be fabricated. Sending people to the moon in the 1960s could have been a Hollywood production. If you limit what you believe to only things you can directly experience, and you are not an astronaut, then a flat-Earth model is what you end up with. To maintain a false model, it also helps to surround yourself with other people who have the same false beliefs, thus making it more likely that the inputs you receive are consistent with your model. Historically, this entailed physically isolating yourself in a community of people with similar beliefs, but today you can achieve a similar result by selectively watching videos on the internet.”