Comment by iamben | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamben | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Having been around quite a lot of conspiracy based stuffs, I have to disagree with the statement you make about the impact.

Conspiracy theories are a slippery slope. You might not believe something at first, but they are peppered with enough truth that you begin to accept them all because one part was right. "Question everything," as they often tell you. The problem is, facts and science usually comes from people in authority - the people you're told to question. So you begin blanket distrust all "authority". Which ends up being anyone telling your something with authority. Government, science, medicine, police, Greta...

I'll happily question - but the problem comes when your bias won't let you trust anyone or anything. In fact you deliberately take the opposite stance because "they lie" and they're probably "out to get" you. Then it really is dangerous - and you feel clever, because it's like knowing some secret knowledge the rest of the world doesn't - because the "sheeple" believe the spoon fed lies.

I have a name for this. Contrarian theory. Contrarians are superficially similar to skeptics.

I think conspiracy theories should be seen as a symptom of low quality education, and that makes it a big deal.

It's not that I disagree - but I know some incredibly smart and educated people who are fully invested in conspiracy theories.

Whilst I'm sure there's probably something in it, it's definitely not always the case.

I repeatedly see very intelligent and successful people outright reject the possibility that conspiranoids can be intelligent but misguided. I think conspiracy thinking ("conspiranoia") is orthogonal to educational attainment/quality. I think it's much more likely that we are all susceptible to conspiranoia thinking (we all have the same cognitive biases and we all use good-enough but imperfect heuristics to decide who/what to trust), but that some of us just haven't been introduced to one we are amenable to by a person of trust+authority. Given enough {theories, people we trust, exposure} we will all start falling for some or many of them.

Of course the dumbest of us will fall for more theories, including the more incredible theories, but to pretend like any one person is immune is to ignore the step 1 of a 12 step program.

Do you think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself? If the answer is no, then congratulations, you're a conspiracy theorist. Do you feel poorly educated now?

There are plenty of people with a high quality education who go around talking about how specific rich groups run a massive conspiracy to subvert democracy and promote bad political views. (Indeed, most politically engaged people I've encountered believe multiple such theories.)

I know enough not to do seek it out anymore but I will admit that some of the better conspiracy videos on youtube are pretty convincing if only because they take advantage of how your brain (system 1) decides truth. A lot of political documentaries work the same way.

At the onset of the Coronavirus, the media and medical advice was to NOT acquire masks for daily wear to prevent spreading. My knowledge from Asian nations encouraging masks wearing to spread the disease was counterfactual to what the government was saying.

The people at Star Slate Codex supposed that this was to limit a run on masks.

Dr. Faucci just last month admits, yeah we lied about it at the beginning to prevent a run on masks.

The conspiracy folks in this case were correct. I am not including myself in the echelons or intelligence the SSC provides, but smart people were able to suss our this was a conspiracy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com