Hacker News Reader

Comment by ezekg | Hacker News Reader

I might get labeled as a "conspiracy theorist" (homework: look up the origin of the term) for this, but I've been following Q for over a year now. There have been a lot of things that have been hard to explain, and other things that are flat out disgusting, to say the least. This new development with Jeffrey Epstein has caused many friends to start asking me questions about who Q really is, seeing as I've mentioned Jeffrey quite a few times over the last year. I've had some interesting conversations over beers about the QAnon movement.

Nevertheless, this "conspiracy theory" really has made the headlines lately, ay? I don't foresee this thread going well. :)

View on HN

The entire nature of conspiracy theories is that they seize on human cognitive biases; it's expected and normal that they concern recognizable patterns that are "hard to explain, to say the least".

> entire nature of conspiracy theories

A conspiracy theory is, very simply, a theory about the existence of a conspiracy. You're implying that such theories will focus on false positives; but you're completely omitting that sometimes, 'theories about the existence of a conspiracy' turn out to be true.

I'm saying "this conspiracy involves a documented series of facts that are hard to explain together" doesn't say anything about the validity of the theory. If there are other conspiracy theories you feel don't trade on this phenomenon, fine, but it's the phenomenon at play in QAnon and in the comment I replied to.

> "this conspiracy involves a documented series of facts that are hard to explain together"

I mean, that's a pretty good summary of the 'government surveilance' conspiracy theory, right up until the point Snowden proved it true.

As I read someone else say, some people are more attuned to much fainter signals; most of them are false patterns in noise, but sometimes they aren't. I just don't think we should throw the occasional baby out with the bathwater.

EDIT: I also don't think discussing such things should be a national security threat, which seems to me the actual story here.

Lumping all theories about current events into a single basket is silly. Remember that cigarettes causing cancer used to be a "conspiracy theory" and we had a more free press back then than we do now.

But you are right it is normal for people to think for themselves even if they are missing some / all their screws.

> we had a more free press back then than we do now.

How are you measuring this?

The point where it becomes a problem is essentially where thinking for themselves (good) transforms into being led astray by other 'free thinkers' who have realized they can exploit people's fear and skepticism. Q has been in many cases a money-making exercise for opportunists and not an actual exercise in truth-seeking.

Still, there are ways to handle situations like this that don't involve increasing government authority and censorship. Its probably impossible to stop idiots from spending money on scams...

The government exploits peoples fear and skepticism frequently. Remember the time when Saddam Hussian had links to Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction? The Iraq war will cost way more than any online opportunist and without those that question the narrative how could we ever have a chance of fighting these sorts of things?

Thinking for yourself is not an unalloyed good. It’s important to realize where you need to rely on expertise.

Q says that hillary clinton has secretly been arrested and is under house arrest. That the military chose trump to be president because that's the one part of the government that wasn't part of the evil plotting and that trump pretended to collude with russia so he could work with Mueller to take down the deep state.

You really have to ignore the vast majority of the conspiracy theory and focus on the vaguer statements and things he says about stuff already in the news to take it remotely seriously.

My favorite conspiracy theory was that the phrase conspiracy theory was created by the CIA to discredit people thinking that way. It's conspiracies all the way down! hahaha

"hard to explain" about what exactly?

Q's predictions about Hillary's and other people's arrests that haven't happened?

The photo of "secret" information that was simply taken off of another website?

All the other Q predictions that have been dead wrong?

Qanon seems to me to work like a crowdsourced cold reading act. They put out vague "breadcrumbs," wait for people to elaborate, and then feed the result back into the crowd.

Aggregating results of computation performed via standalone complex [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell:_Stand_Alon...

Just like one of my neural networks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com