This seems more like an emotional intelligence problem than anything else.
Degrees are often conflated with education. People need to be able to think critically, something that is only partially practiced at a modern institutions. There's plenty of people who can tell you the facts of some field without being able to explain what a theory is, or how evidence works.
People in power, in the West, are disproportionately lawyers with humanities skills, or business types with no skills (lol). As our society increasingly fails, knowledge of math and science is increasingly important to convey truth. Politicians have long repeated repeated what experts tell them (when they are telling the truth), but now that they are repeating something they cannot well understand themselves, it just comes us stale / on faith alone.
> Lawyers are paid to defend their clients. Every politician is a lawyer by trade.
No, that would be true if "people paid to defend their clients are Lawyers". Lawyers offer a specific service to client, distinct from bodyguards and others who provide defense.
Politicians do want to get reelected, but there are many ways for that to be.
Nothing about politics is inherently sublimely, or sleazy things like ALEC inevitable. It rather the due to very specific problems in the US such as terrible voting systems.
> This is the expected result, anyway
To whom?
No, most conspiracy theories are based on ignorance or fallacious reasoning as well as mistaking cynicism for reason or critical thinking.
A lot of this, I think, is driven by people badly wanting or not wanting things to be true. Religious history is another good spot where you can see highly-trained researchers buy into their community's biases, but in the last many years, we've gotten better as a society at acknowledging that religion is the sort of thing that can go sour like this. We haven't gotten good at acknowledging this about other forms of allegiance to a community. Most of the QAnon stuff is driven by patriotism gone sour, and with the benefit of hindsight, we've absolutely seen historians write to fit their worldviews, but we're not as good at seeing it in real time, when it matters.
Never mind that theory alone and statistics alone are both recipes for bias (either flat out fictional narratives (Freud) or p-hacking and over fit crap (bad science).
At least when we erred on the side of theory, it was more "catchy" and better fit our narrative brains. Theory-based truths also derive more from subject-matter-specific reasoning, whereas statistics based truths derive more from subject-matter-agnostic reasoning.
I started reading this https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/01/the-sociologist-who-cou.... It does seem like Ulrich Beck was on top of lots of this stuff first.
And yes, that's more or less exactly what logic is in a sense... except the people I'm talking about skip the part about checking the base premises they are building their argument on - because they so badly want to arrive at a specific conclusion.
I don't know the answer. I don't know how you get people in general to plow through emotional reactions first and then give in to them only after a thoughtful process.
Education seems to help though, and lacking some other solution it seems a reasonable thing to focus on. Yet even that is now more of a political issue than it has ever been.
You need both the skills and the desire to seek the truth versus accepting whatever information galvanizes your preexisting belief and value systems. High hill to climb.
People believe what they want. I’ve seen many smart successful programmers spouting off crazy conspiracy theories.
Quite the contrary, many successful people believe they and they alone are responsible for their success, despite their contribution being less than that of others.
https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/learn/index.htm (Control-F “How common are mental illnesses?”)
Your statement was "People believe what they want."
You're both saying the same thing.
People who can't think critically never believe in conspiracy theories. They believe the official story every time.
I've never understood this argument against conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are the ultimate form of critical thinking.
I don't disagree with you, I'm just stopping right here. Like you said, it's a requirement. So contrarians are more likely to have it.
It's just a technical truth. It doesn't mean they're more likely to be right or that they have a better grip on reality. They just have one of the prerequisites, so they're more likely to have the thing.
Are there no conspiracies? Are all conspiracy theories necessarily untrue?
I don't really care about the group analysis stuff. Not gonna apply that kind of reasoning to anyone I come across.
People who believe in conspiracy theories rarely, if ever, change their minds. Everything is controlled by some small group that is pulling the strings.
Critical thinking doesn’t mean to never believe authorities. It means to actually be able to judge the evidence and the sources yourself.
Despite knowing the flaw of scientific institutions, I still trust scientists in general for ground truth facts, even when they get things wrong.
Hell, when I follow a known expert lecture and followed the citations for just the first lecture, I found minor errors or discrepancies.
I don't understand the major theories at the gut theories. I don't have degrees or the knowledge needed to understand them. I haven't followed the citations and look at the facts.
And the thing is: nobody in the world have time to follow the citations and see if it match up with what everybody else said, let along actually verify the raw facts and follow the thought process of the original scientists.
That being said. I am pretty sure that the modern world is based on a system of rational thought and technology built on the accumulated knowledge of generations of scientists.
You and I could easily weave conspiracy using ordinary facts.
This was believed by a Canadian friend who has a PhD, who is also addicted to Twitter.
Anyone who has the skills to find /pol/ and interact on that board has the digital skills needed to find true information. You don't just stumble upon that.
One notable example is climate change. Among Republicans in the US belief in climate change actually declines with increasing education.[2]. Higher education or reasoning facilities don't stop misinformation because misinformation isn't the result of a literal lack of information, it's a rationalisation strategy of adopting fact to preconceived beliefs, and if anything highly educated or capable people are more likely to be able to justify their assumptions.
This even literally shows up in the QAnon slogan which is "question everything". Conspiracy theorists virtually never lack the ability to critically think, if anything they think too critically.
[1]https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/de...
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/14/upshot/climat...