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Under the Bayesian way to do science, you start off with some beliefs (”priors”) about what your trying to understand. You then devise experiments that either confirm or deny those believes. You then update your priors based on the data you see from the experiment.

A normal person might start off with, say, 70% belief that the earth is flat. They then look at some data (take an airliner around the world, look at pictures of earth taken by satellites, do some of those curvature measurement experiments, …). Each time they update their priors, and soon enough it becomes a 99.99% belief that the earth is NOT flat.

A flat earther, for some reason, starts off with a 99.99999% belief that the earth is flat, along with a 99.99999% belief that the government is trying to hide the fact from them. You show them some experiments, they might update their priors to a 99.999%. To convince them the earth is not flat, you would need a LOT of data. You might tell them to look at previous experiments done on this, but due to the 99.99999% belief that the government is lying, they would only have a 0.00001% confidence in the data reported by scientists. So it takes a lot more to convince them that the earth is not flat.

Now why did they start off with such strange priors? They’re probably conspiracy nuts. You can criticize them for that. But don’t call them unscientific if they are still doing experiments and updating their priors.

I am saying flat earth believes attract a lot of conspiracy nuts, and a lot of conspiracy nuts also believe in anti-semitic conspiracy theories.

That doesn’t mean flat earth believes cause them to be anti-semitic.

Are you denying Bayesian statistics now? I’d argue that is even more “unscientific” than denying the earth is round.

Flat-earth belief likely has secondary unwanted effects, like how all conspiracy theories eventually funnel into anti-semitism.

Correlation is not causation

They have their theory. It’s compatible with their experiments. They’re not being “unscientific”. What they believe makes perfect sense given their very strong priors against the possibility that the earth is round.

If you want to criticize them, criticize they way they obtained those extremely strange priors. Do not call people “unscientific” for doing science based upon different prior believes then yours. If everyone have the same believes, there would be no scientific progress.