Evangelicals are looking for answers online. They’re finding QAnon instead | Hacker News Reader

Evangelicals are looking for answers online. They’re finding QAnon instead

technologyreview.com

40 pointsmjangle198540 comments

"Evangelicals" is large group of people with a lot of different backgrounds. As with all groups let us take this with a grain of salt. I do know a dozen evangelicals that know about Qanon but I know far more that don't have a clue what Qanon is.

The term seems to be used as a catch all for trump’s base

Which is not entirely fair, speaking as an ex-evangelical. Plenty of fully dedicated evangelicals disapprove of Trump. And while a disappointing number of them do approve, it's by no means a unified base.

I've met both kinds of Evangelicals. I think we need to figure out a term to differentiate between the normal Evangelicals and this strange subset of American Evangelicalism.

Support for Trump among Evangelicals has always remained steady at or slightly above 80%. The "strange subset" of Evangelicals are the ones who don't support him, the "normal" ones are the ones who do, by a wide margin.

Perhaps they meant normal relative to themselves (and presumably the reader), not normal relative to the group.

The word "subset" did trip me up for a second though.

agreed. The 'good kind' that I grew up with has always been a minority even within the communities we were part of.

It's pretty sad how underdeveloped the BS detectors of a lot of people are. I find it hard to understand how people can fall for QAnon but then I also find it hard to understand how anybody can be swayed by campaign speeches or political advertising but obviously these things work.

If they had a working BS detector, they would be into religion in the first place.

[EDIT]: meant to say "they wouldn't be into religion"

Perhaps you meant "wouldn't"?

Indeed

Bullshit doesn't have as much to do with it as you might think. These people are often in it because its a part of who they think they are. Also socially applied beliefs are often just acquired and accepted based on their immediate surroundings.

The foundational principle of Christianity (in America at least, in my experience) is believe something with no evidence it is true. They call it "faith". I was raised in small town Oregon and Texas going to Christian private schools and church for years, and that "faith" thing is absolutely their central belief. I remember clearly once when I was 9 finding the whole thing deeply illogical. Later in life I got a PhD in math, partly motivated by wanting to better heal my brain from how I was raised.

I'm not at all surprised Christians fall for Trump's lies and Qanon.

And the less evidence you need to believe the thing, the more faith points you get.

Every religion is based on faith, in the exact way you portrayed it. Faith by definition regards things that cannot be proven. If they could be proven, it would be knowledge, not faith.

Exactly, but I wonder how does affect the mind of a child, being raised for years into believing something that cannot be proved and getting reprimanded (often punished in the past) for questioning it.

Would an atheist be a better leader? In my opinion yes, but cannot prove it. What I'm sure about is that being educated into not questioning beliefs imposed from above makes people more easy to herd by bad leaders. I wish someone could do some independent unbiased research in this field, then make sure the results remain independent and unbiased even after publication.

I was in my early twenties before I stopped believing in things that, in hindsight, seem utterly unbelievable to me.

What I've struggled with for a long time is the realization that the person I was, believing all of that, wasn't some brainwashed religious nutjob. I was just as 'rational' then as I am now.

Even worse, if I'm fully honest with myself the paradigm shift wasn't primarily a result of my own rational thinking, but significantly affected by social issues that made it hard for me to keep sweeping various realizations under the rug. If not for the non-rational issues, I might've still been convinced born-again evangelical christian.

I don't think that, day to day, an atheist is a better leader than, say, a born-again evangelical christian. In my experience the quality of a leader is largely unrelated to the 'paradigm' they buy into. There are so many aspects to being a 'good' leader that are entirely unrelated to the version of reality one ascribes to.

Where I /do/ think there's a really issue, is that by and large born-again evangelical christians are less 'anarchic' than atheists in their approach to leadership, and that they tend to operate in environments that are more homogenous. So it's possible that a terrible evangelical leader gets away with it because they keep moving within a very homogenous environment.

but I'd argue that this problem is possibly just as much the case with particular SV-style leaders. Or C-level people in a broader sense. I more than once felt that the processes that led to certain people occupying high-level positions in the companies I worked it were not that different from what I experienced back when I was 'in the fold'.

Perhaps it's not the same, but I'd definitely argue that it's a blind spot for 'atheists'. The idea that somehow they are not as susceptible to the dynamics of, among others, the Evanglicals.

True. But Evangelicals have a unique position at this moment in their ideological history, where their leardship is aggressively backing someone who defies their core tenants. Such a crisis of faith happens in all religions from time to time, but in this moment for this group, it is now. As such, "find a new sect they doesn't require me to reconsile such things" is at peak likelihood for many of that faith.

I'm not at all surprised your comment has been downvoted to oblivion.

Such arrogance. Faith (of any kind) increases humanity.

How do you know?

I've generally heard the randomly, unbacked quote: "Up to a third of the population is easily swayed by any kind of persuasion/marketing".

I don't know the exact percentage but it is certainly non-zero. Given that many elections in recent memory are won by margins of <10%, it doesn't matter if the majority has a BS detector since that majority isn't the target of "mechanized persuasion" aka A/B testing based advertising.

If there is minority of population with low BS threshold they will only matter if there are only two parties and the rest of the population is also closely split.

The thing about bullshit detectors is, they tend to work well for most people towards things they don't feel strongly about or things they're opposed to. It's when it comes to things that validates a person's already held beliefs that the bullshit detectors tend to get inaccurate as it were. At least from what i've noticed with people anyway.

When we want to believe something we ask ourselves, "Can I believe it?" and the answer is almost always, "Yes".

When we don't want to believe something we ask ourselves, "Must I believe it?", and the answer is almost always, "No".

I've been noticing this in myself, I think it's boils down to conservation of energy.

But boy could I have saved a lot of effort by spending a bit more a bit sooner to hone some beliefs.

> It's pretty sad how underdeveloped the BS detectors of a lot of people are

Sometimes they're not just underdeveloped, but completely and voluntarily turned off. Those who believe in bullshit conspiracies and as a result find themselves surrounded by other people believing the same absurdities are the hardest to convince. They might have been depressed loners before, and no matter how absurd their beliefs are, they introduced them into some form of society, and more importantly gave them a purpose in life.

Case in point, a friend of mine who believes every conspiracy his facebook friends throw at him. One day we were arguing about chemtrails, and after heavy reasoning and proof showing that it's all a lie from my part, he had nothing more to reply, so he went with "well, ok, then I want to believe in chemtrails, is that clear?". It might be that they need a bullshit story to feel them unite, then stronger, which would be like gold for conspiracies creators. QAnon very likely feeds on that.

It's difficult to have a good ear for BS if you don't come from an environment where reliable institutions have the most influence. Today an educated person believes a lot of facts that are but bullshit in day-to-day experience: that the sun and earth are orbs in a vacuum held by gravity, that quantum phenomena exists, etc..

These are things that are difficult to verify but that we take by faith from reliable institutions (the more inquisitive and those with the privilege to be able to do so would have independently verified a couple of these claims and taken the rest on faith). And there are also many seemingly reliable institutions that mix up falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims among the more readily verifiable.

It's only a sidenote in the article but I'm kind of interested in the part where facebook are taking qanon pages down. Which ones and with what justification?

Wouldn't the justification be that it is their platform and they are not required to permit free speech?

Bans normally come with a reasoning beyond "I do what I want lol". I'm curious what it might be.

Qanon is just another religion gullible people believe something without proof because it feels good.

QAnon is fueled by quite a bit of hinky stuff that has gone on over decades.

There is a need to discuss restoring confidence in institutions.

in my experience QAnon is the political arm of 4Chan.

certainly its roots a and strength is/was 4chan based.

The fact that people who's social and even fiscal success is based in the circles of the evangelicals, are finding themselves very comfortable in the QAnon world just seems like a natural fit.

But it stretches much further than that. I know people that are Deep QAnon consumers that are non religious, living in very secular countries and have logic based (read IT), white collar type jobs.

Don't let yourself forget that gullible and willfully misled comes from all shapes and sizes and from all sectors in society.

>in my experience QAnon is the political arm of 4Chan

This is a spurious claim to make. Do you have any evidence of this? 4chan and 8kun have different owners who both hate each other.

Spreading gossip about problems as big as this does nothing good.

i see misinformation from BLM etc every single day on twitter. how come now one cares about this misinformation or gets upset or writes articles about it?

Could you give some examples?

during the riots there was some video going around where it was dark and you could here gunshots. the caption of the video said a 12 year old unarmed girl was killed by police. prominent people were spreading it...

it turned out later that it was a 30 year old man who had just murderer someone and had a gun in his hand

Whataboutism isn't productive. Best to have conversations about the topic at hand or create a new one if you want to bemoan BLM twitter posts.

As I understood it, they're not bemoaning BLM twitter, but the (supposed) double standard.

Fair enough. I guess I just reject the premise that BLM twitter comments that could be considered misinformation aren't analysed by the people who come across them. Furthermore you can see far right disinformation on Twitter and Facebook on a daily basis. Maybe it's due to the fact that the modern BLM movement hit mainstream with George Floyd whereas Qanon has been around for years now? All I can say is they're not apples to apples comparisons so there's little value in pointing your finger and the other side when compared to actually discussing the topic at hand.

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