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Comment by PakG1 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, sure, but this all unfortunately feeds into the motivations of conspiracy theorists. Maybe it is what it is, but what can we do to stop the wave of noncritical thinking washing over the Internet, where people insist that they are the only wise ones? Are we just doomed? I realize that media has lost its credibility in the eyes of many, I just wish that there was a good amount of high-quality critical thinking to make up for the lack of reliable information, rather than the many low-quality conspiracy theories I'm seeing.

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I've always felt that conspiracy theorists provide a certain value to the internet. They are almost the vaccine itself to misinformation. The foreign pathogen that teaches the body to defend itself from a worse foe.

If you can't understand, and also form a series of arguments for yourself, as to why the tin foil hat conspiracy theorist is wrong, why the earth almost certainly isn’t flat, or run by a cabal of shapeshifting alien lizard people, 5G, etc. how are you going to respond to the more insidiously cogent arguments about other more important things that are just as wrong but harder to spot?

I personally credit my upbringing by my religious parents into creationism (the concept that the earth is only 6 thousand years old and evolutionary science is a conspiracy against God.) as what ultimately led to my development of critical thinking and healthy skepticism, as I dug myself out of that belief system and deconverted in my late teens.

I remember feeling so deeply and irradeemably stupid, for being so completely convinced without any reason or evidence. And then, as a result, feeling so desperate for a specific formula or system of thought that could let me avoid this kind of personal failing in the future.

Which led me to listening to debates, learning about things like burden of proof, and the preponderance of evidence. And the very simple and straightforward concept of spot checking whether a stated “truth” used by someone in an argument is actually valid, or if they are lying to bolster their points, expecting (correctly, unfortunately) that the vast majority of their audience will never even check to see if they are telling the truth or a lie.

How else are you going to teach someone to think critically without showing them the examples of what a bad argument is, and how to respond to it rationally? Tell them to just trust the “good” sources? That’s arguably worse than telling them nothing at all.

It certainly is largely the fault of our garbage public schooling system, but the existing penchant to call for the banning and censcoring of stupid conspiracies online as if it were some sort of panacea for stupidity itself is certainly not helping the problem.

I'm all for conspiracies when they don't cause harm, you think the earth is flat and chemtrails control your mind good for you buddy, now I know not to trust your judgement. But once you've go nevermaskers and antivaxers running around infecting and killing people, or pizzagaters shooting up restaurants the hands off approach becomes a public health issue. Conspiracy theorists have gone from benign to damn dangerous to have around.

It seems to me that conspiracy theories have also evolved from being mostly apolitical to being very based lately. It could be argued that the act of voting when being so blatantly misinformed and misled is itself a danger to the public.

Your conspiracy theory is a conspiracy fact when you think about peoples motivations.

Take the current virus. We realize that the republican version of 'it's a hoax and everything is fine' is a lie. But so is the democrat version of 'you need to never leave your house or you're a murderer'.

The simple fact is that without having solid numbers for:

1). The true infection rate.

2). The true age-adjusted mortality rate.

3). The asymptomatic r0 rate.

Any policy anyone suggests tells you more about the person suggesting it than about how effective it will be. It could be that reality is closer to the republican version, or the democrat one. But without a lot more science that no one is doing we will not know until decades down the line when people start digging up corpses and testing for the virus and finally doing some basic statistics.

And that's before we even look at what the economic impact is of the virus.

I don't think it's a democratic perspective to be on the safer than sorry "version of the virus".

But the safer side is a political battle.

Saving lives by preventing viral spread sounds good until the economic and societal damage of the preventative measures lead to more harm than they prevented.

Funny enough many of this and other virus worst symptoms are the bodies natural response to the virus. Inflammation for instance is the bodies response to damage, bit it can in turn cause more damage than the original source of issue.

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