Hacker News Reader

Part of the conspiracy theorists’ standard self-defense toolkit is training their followers to believe that all mainstream sources of news, science and education are hopelessly compromised and should thus be studiously ignored.

How do you propose to educate someone who believes that?

View on HN

A focus at the grade school level of using evidence to reach a conclusion instead of having a conclusion and backing it with evidence. For adults who already have their beliefs set, having someone close to them slowly analyze their beliefs helps.

Also, realizing that sometimes the conspiracy theorist are right. How to draw a distinction between secret CIA projects or NSA spying verses faking moon landings and contrails. Getting conspiracy theorist to focus on true conspiracies might be far easier than getting them to drop conspiracy theories in general.

This is one of the reasons I'm not in favor of much of the deplatforming that has been going on. It's not just that the mainstream sources are supposed to be compromised, but they are actively trying to silence the speaker. When YouTube, Facebook, etc. _actually do_ silence people (at least on their respective platforms), they now have proof of at least that claim.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com