How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories | Hacker News Reader

How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories

bbc.co.uk

97 pointsColinWright124 comments

I've been in these conversations several times recently. My tips:

Go in friendly. Make an effort to assume and embody good will and rationality. The premise of most conspiratorial thinking is very dichotomous. They see themselves as the open minded against dismissive, closed minded opposition. Don't play into this by being dismissive. Be generous instead and assume that they are truth seeking just like you.

Don't be too defensive. If you don't know the "proof" for Gm1m2/r^2, don't pretend you do. Spend time. Be proactive instead. What's the proposed alternative to Gm1m2/r^2 and why do they think that one is true. Instead of seeking out logical holes and dunking, seek out points you can concede. This creates a common ground and gives them permission to concede points too. Intellectual honest is a reciprocal game.

Make it an interesting conversation, not a game you're trying to win. Almost all of their exposure to the topic(s) is either monologue (probably youtube), or ridiculing/dismissive debate. Good faith dialogue will be a rarity. Be that. It often gets epistemological, and that actually is interesting.

Last, remember that almost no conversation ends with a change of mind. That happens later, if at all. What you can "prove" within the conversation is that not all spherists are closed minded, dismissive arseholes.

I'd also recommend doing it. There's a lot to learn here that transposes onto less fringy stuff... especially politics. You likely can't convince Democrat to be a Republican, but you can convince them that some Republicans have reached their conclusions with an open mind, good faith and good intentions. That's the myth which needs to be busted. Other myths are secondary.

Conspiracy theories are about people and their perceptions of other people, primarily. The object of the conspiracy is secondary.

In short, use the Socratic method.

(But then again, that didn't end well for Socrates - or did it?)

Have you ever had any success with this method; did you ever get anyone (sooner or later) to understand he had been deluded?

I've tried a few times and comprehensively failed. Now if topics like this come up in social settings (not that those happen anymore) I simply state my disagreement with their views and change the subject to something less confrontational.

I can vouch for it, it is very very effective, I discussed with a friend whom believed that a cabal of jews control the world and other one whom believed that the earth is flat

It should be noted that it is not easy to do, you need to have foundational knowledge of these topics and quick historical references to people/historical characters whom also made the "mistake" of believing what your interlocutor did, that way you can both set a reference for your interlocutor so he/she doesn't feel alone and as an outcast, and thread a narrative needle through history itself showing how people used to think that but now don't because of x, y, z evidence, think it like James Burkes idea of linking different topics through history, if anybody is interested I'd very much recommend listening to the Dan Carlin James Burke podcast episode and then checking James Burke books on it

But as OP said, I very, very much have enjoyed the conversations with "them" as I see them basically as adversarial journalists of sorts, asking some very tricky epistemological questions to which the foundations of modern science, history and modernity itself are built

And lastly a key, "There are no Good Great Men", everyone whom got to power in history is basically by definition Not A Good Person, and that is because just to get power at all one must play dirty most often than not. There are are just a very few select people whom we might look as being "Good"

I don't want to be rude, but your use of `whom' is wrong; `whom' is only used for the object.

Thanks I didn't know, I am one of these self taught English people

And as an addendum, you have to be kind.

We know our educational systems fail people, conspiracy thinking is what happens when critically thinking people lack the foundation to see the world around them and therefore start questioning the foundations of it, because again they are critical in thinking, after that first layer then you have socialization, ego, collective identities and other things that reinforce their loss aversion to changing their world view, but the core is critical thinking

Imagine this as if you were talking to a classical Babylonian, or to Plato itself and through foundational analogies such as the Anarchic Pirates of Plato you explain the world and logic

yes

Do you have any data on the form their mind is creating to hold these theories "true"? The form could be factual data (lists of things) supporting or disproving their theory, creative imagery (internally seen things) obscuring what is normally viewed as reality, or perhaps sound or voices in the form of hallucinations (internally heard things).

After armchair analyzing this for nearly 4 years, I'm pretty sure Trump is a "bigly visualizer" and has some ability? to make others see what he is seeing, while at the same time filtering facts that thinking mind might normally bring.

To clarify, when I mean facts I mean non-imagery or non- sound/vibration based data forms: words, labels, conditionals, etc., which are used to form a process which may be followed by another to arrive at the same "conclusion" to what is currently being seen through our collective awareness.

It would seem about 43% or more of the population of the United States is infected with a means of operation which eliminates or completely disables critical thinking mechanisms and relies exclusively on internal fabricated imagery or audio for their measure of "truth".

Maybe narcissism has gone mainstream here.

> Do you have any data on the form their mind is creating to hold these theories "true"

I can't address the rest of the comment, but I can address this

True and truth are what the collective believes it is true, you can see this from the Desert Storm invasion based on the "truth" that the Iraqi army was taking babies out of incubators, to the modern idea of Genders being exclusively binary when we have literal Roman emperors writing how much they love their teenage male lovers or South East Asian transexual and cross dressing.

Truth is what the group "deludes" itself to be, which will always be clashing with materialism and material reality

No - we cannot give up on the idea that objective truths exist. The idea of truth represents an objective reality. We can disagree on what we believe or feel, but a truth can exist even if zero people believe it.

"When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." -- Isaac Asimov

>>It would seem about 43% or more of the population of the United States is infected with a means of operation which eliminates or completely disables critical thinking mechanisms and relies exclusively on internal..

IMO, it is about 100%. Conspiracy people are not less rational, or radically so, on average. People just aren't as rational as we believe ourselves to be. Many of our positions and beliefs are acquired socially in practice. Logic and reason are part of it, but remember that we learn from other people. We learn who to learn from. Trust plays a role.

As I said in the original comment, the epistemology can be interesting. In practice though, the sociology is often meta to epistemology

> Last, remember that almost no conversation ends with a change of mind. That happens later, if at all.

A core truth I wish I would remember more often.

>Are they quoting a fringe YouTube video (which may have been fact-checked and debunked)

We have got to get away from this idea that you can "debunk" something with some authoritative source of truth. That is just not how reality works, and the idea that you can "fact check" and "debunk" your way to a healthy, functioning system of rhetoric is absurd.

NO argument has EVER been won by somebody pointing to a third party "fact checker", and honestly the idea that there is some infallible arbiter sounds like it is lifted directly from an Orwell novel.

You d go faster humiliating someone in front of an audience over a silly argument for sure.

This comment resonates a lot with me. What I observe is that people mistake "fact" for "truth". A "fact" is the _interpretation_ of something that has happened. While truth is what objectively really happened. Most people can't detach their personal world view from an "absolute" reality and hence their "facts" are biased by the way how they _perceive_ the objective reality. But what's an objective reality? Everyone lives in their own subjective reality! And this is where their "facts" come from.

TLDR; The discussions around "facts" are totally useless to me. Unless you accept that someone who pushes through their "facts" does nothing else than pushing their worldview onto you. Everyone is free to learn "truth" through their own perception. Other people's "facts" don't support this much.

It's sounds like a teenage Solipsism, and its really boring and tedious for other people.

For whom it is boring besides yourself? Are you presenting a „fact“ or your opinion ;) ?

> A "fact" is the _interpretation_ of something that has happened.

This is not how I'd understand it.

From Cambridge dictionary: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fact , "something that is known to have happened or to exist, especially something for which proof exists, or about which there is information"

Objective reality doesn't have a native representation in human language. When an event is recorded in text or speech it is neccessarily an interpretation. Even in memory, the record of an event is a mere interpretation of reality.

I'd also argue the words "known", "proof," and "information" all require interpretation as well.

Let's take one of the older conspiracy theories: 9/11 was an inside job.

* "something that is known to have happened" - Yep, 9/11 did happen. And some people say they KNOW that it was an inside job.

* "especially something for which proof exists" - job of the CIA is to exactly prevent such a thing, they did not.

* "or about which there is information" - come on. I won't link conspiracy theory websites here.

So, in the end, your definition does not contradict that someone calls the 9/11 conspiracy theory a "fact".

The first point is debatable - but then you could apply the same logic to WW1 or any other history event.

Therefore, I don't like your definition of fact.

The second point is also debatable:

> Job of the CIA is to exactly prevent such a thing, they did not.

This is not a proof that 9/11 was an inside job. Alternative interpretation: they did not do their job well enough.

There's an old quote that I'm probably butchering, and I don't know who said it, but it goes along the lines of "you can't use logic to get someone out of something they didn't use logic to get themselves into."

I used to be someone who would perpetually argue with friends and family members who believed in all this conspiracy crap, usually devolving to me sending links to Snopes and Politifact and whatnot, but I later realized that it was completely irrelevant, and probably just made them feel stronger in their beliefs, since they could always just dismiss me as "in on it" whenever I said something they didn't like.

Nowadays, I honestly just don't talk to family members and (former) friends who believe in really problematic nonsense, since by the time that they've fallen into the QAnon rabbit hole, it's not like a beautiful and logical argument from me to going to have any effect.

I'm not sure what the best strategy for fighting this kind of weird mass idiotic groupthink is. There's a part of me that thinks that the best thing to do is to make fun of them and mock them, but of course that's a lot easier to do when it's not your friend of family-member on the other end.

I wonder if they're saying something similar though.

I don’t think mocking as a strategy will work.

I think attacking things from the side by targeting how to think critically rather than any specific topic is the best bet. It allows people to learn ideas without being immediately defensive.

Lesswrong is mostly this.

Pretty much everything you said also applies to religion which the vast majority of people in the world believe (in some capacity).

Believing clearly wrong things is a part of humanity - arguably the default - and people have to learn to overcome it.

> since they could always just dismiss me as "in on it" whenever I said something they didn't like.

I get this same effect when talking about vanilla non-conspiratorial things, agree with their concerns, and I've been asked what I think. Since I don't tow their party line by focusing my attention on the same bad people, I'm "othered" and written off. This is more pronounced when talking to people on the red team than people on the blue team, but happens with both.

A simple example is "GPS satellites tracking your phone". Trying to explain to people that the GPS satellites only transmit, but that it's applications on your phone spilling your location, so there are steps you can personally take to avoid that - it just doesn't work. It's like my model of the situation doesn't fit into their model, and rather than doing the work to understand what I'm saying, they'd rather continue with their comforting simplistic answer that generally combines defeatism with condemnation.

> I'm not sure what the best strategy for fighting this kind of weird mass idiotic groupthink is

If anyone has any ideas please share them. For basically any social movement, when I see it gets some traction I'll think finally people are starting to care. But then as things progress, the movement takes on a life of its own and heads in the wrong direction without fail. It's like instead of staying focused on the problem, opportunists looking for power supply a "solution" that steers the crowd into an easy non-answer to benefit themselves. And it doesn't take many of them, because once the red herring becomes the groupthink dogma, pointing out its problems gets you othered.

I think the catastrophe we're now experiencing is from the wave of "normies" discovering conspiracy theories. Early Internet denizens went through this phase a long time ago, and had to contextualize wild theories within mainstream thought. Even if we found them very compelling, we couldn't just rant to everyone we met. But now that everyone and their aunt is on faceboot, not only can you repeat all the nonsense you've heard without being socially ostracized, you will actually gain popularity from it!

Exactly, my share of nuts in my feed are already convinced fact checkers are in the conspiracy, too.

Personally, I only try to have instructive discussion if I care about the person. Then it's time well spent. Strangers on the Internet? No, thanks.

Calling into question fact checkers is a good thing, skeptics should be welcomed. But I suppose there is a subjective line between reasonable skepticism and near-schizophrenic skepticism.

Sure. On the other hand, my newsfeed's nuts complain about fact checkers flagging their "nanobot infused COVID-19 vaccines by Bill Gates that can be controlled by 5G towers on command by Soros" posts as censorship and shills of the NWO.

Of course, fact checkers come with their own sets of biases, and any (educated) reader can identify those.

But the fact that reporters from all around joined fact checking campaigns is a good thing.

Their interests align with those of the population, even if the population thinks otherwise: you can't compete with trash media with real news and coverage, so either you crush them with "fact checking" and try to eventually deplatform them, or you become another Daily Mail and roll up your sleeves for a mud fight.

It won't stop hardcore conspiracy theorists from believing anything, but it will save me time from explaining my mom that no, Bill Gates isn't gonna inject us with microchips to have us located 24/7.

The Bill Gates ones are just the weirdest. I watched someone try to dig in to this a bit with someone pushing the idea that Bill Gates was trying to control us with vaccines/5g.

"Why would he do that?"

"Oh, there's money! There's lot of money in controlling people with vaccines. I know if I had that kind of power, I'd want to make money like that". (paraphrasing, but only just).

I think people have a difficult time comprehending the level of wealth/power someone like Gates or Bezos already have. Having wealth north of $100B is something only a handful of people will ever experience. To think someone has worked their whole life to get that sort of money, then... someone, would decide to say "I want to control people with vaccines because I can make a lot of money that way!" is ... off-the-radar silly. For a time, Gates had a lot more potential control over the information itself, and likely could have enriched himself even more directly, without needing to resort to medical intervention.

People are scared. The world is changing around us faster than many are able to keep up. Focusing your fears on a few outsized larger than life names to try to make sense of things is... I guess understandable to a point, but... these 'theories' can't seem to stand up to much basic logic.

A fact-check doesn't need to be done by an authority. Pointing out logic errors (i.e. correlation != causation, loops in chain of reasoning) in the argumentation can be done by anyone, and be understood by anyone willing to think.

> Pointing out logic errors ... can be done by anyone, and be understood by anyone willing to think.

Human beings are social animals, and people are likely to bristle at someone trying to poke holes in their worldview in that way, unless they have already established some kind of rapport. (Even the Socratic method expressed in Plato’s dialogues was practiced on people who belonged to the same city-state and social class as Socrates – and he eventually got charged and sentenced to death regardless.)

This is why one of the methods advocated for in curing people of conspiracy-theory thinking, is providing them a warm and supportive atmosphere where they feel part of a community, and not trying to challenge their ideas head on.

> This is why one of the methods advocated for in curing people of conspiracy-theory thinking, is providing them a warm and supportive atmosphere where they feel part of a community, and not trying to challenge their ideas head on.

Very interesting. I guess by creating a network of trust, they can begin to trust information from outside sources.

Where can I find information about this method? I have a friend that is deeply into conspiracy theories. The "head-on" approach has not worked, any advice appreciated. It's sad to hear that people give up on life-long relationships, I know I have a limit too but I try to remember who they were and recognize that they have good hearts but unhealthy minds.

That assumes the other party is acting in good faith; one can probably point out logical errors to the non-conspiracy arguer as well.

I mean (bear with me), you say the coronavirus is real because scientists say so? Which scientists? You're using weasel words and you're appealing to authority.

Ultimately, almost all arguments against conspiracy theories boil down to appeals to authority. Only a few people have personal evidence of the moon landing, the rest are relying on authority.

The main issue with convincing people who believe in conspiracy to return to orthodoxy is that there aren't many tools beyond appeal to authority. If your only tactics are appeal to authority and bullying you are not going to win many hearts and minds.

The threshold for self experimentation is raising though. One can buy a plane ticket or launch a rocket with a camera to see that the earth is not flat. Telescopes that can see evidence of humans reaching the moon are more attainable.

My guess is that's why more widely believed theories are increasingly elaborate or are those that require more effort to disprove.

Religions too seem to be evolving to increasingly abstract beliefs or face ever more mental gymnastics to justify. (Part of the reason I'm no longer a believer.)

"infallible arbiter sounds like it is lifted directly from an Orwell novel"

Actually, I think 1984 was more about the fact that the party was clearly not infallible but that ultimately that this didn't matter as all records were constantly rewritten to be consistent with what the party claimed was true at any moment in time.

"Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past"

So the solution is a party that is, in fact, infallible?

Using the word "debunk" when really you should either be using "refute" or "rebut" appropriately does not help.

> NO argument has EVER been won by somebody pointing to a third party "fact checker"

I don't think the article claims that.

How I understood it, a person at risk might be unaware that a video they watched has been proven false; in that context letting them know about it might help them.

Later the article says "always listen to people's deeper concerns".

The fact that most fact checkers run with terms such as "Mostly false" etc. makes it even worse.

Over the 2.5 years the number of conspiracy theories coming from my father in-law has increased dramatically. Initially I tried debunking them but that didn't work and often made things hostile.

What I've found helps keep things civil is to have a real dialog.

These ideas are shallow and built on soft ground, let them shoot the crazy idea out there, ask clarifying questions and peel the onion.

I take such an issue with the portrayal of conspiracy theories like this, that is black and white. As with everything, it's that they encompass a range of things. Many times people have called conspiracy on something that's turned out to be true.

It's just as anti-science to be extremely sceptical of everything as it is to be extremely susceptible. Some people believe in lizard people, and some think China is trying to undermine world security. One may or may not be more or less believable than the other.

Why should I — someone with many of my subjective ideas and opinions try and talk someone else out of their personal beliefs and opinions. And why is the BBC, arbiter of shoddy journalism providing me with guidance on how to do it?

In the article, the mother was attempting to indoctrinate her son with “lizard people” conspiracy theories from a young age, among other things.

At the extremes, these conspiracy theories are clearly false. The problem is that it’s not simply harmless to believe something so wrong at large scale. The believers aren’t just holding an opinion, they’re making decisions, taking action, voting, and even at times encouraging violence based on beliefs that are clearly wrong.

> The believers aren’t just holding an opinion, they’re making decisions, taking action, voting, and even at times encouraging violence based on beliefs that are clearly wrong.

Sounds just like the USA going to war over WMDs in Iraq. Clearly we need to give even more power to the mainstream press so they can act as the sole arbiters of truth.

Clearly is a pretty strong term. I'm sure skeptics arguing against Galileo would have used string words like "clearly" to dismiss his ideas.

>I'm sure skeptics arguing against Galileo would have used string words like "clearly" to dismiss his ideas.

The fact that people dismissing Galileo's claimed turned out to have been wrong does not mean people who dismiss COVID conspiracies or reptoids are equally as likely to be wrong.

People who believe in a conspiracy of globalist elite reptilian shapeshifters are clearly wrong. Clearly is a strong term, and it's justified in the case of such beliefs. There is no danger that in the future those who hold such beliefs will turn out to have been correct in hindsight, as Galileo was proved correct in hindsight.

Reasonable people can agree or disagree on reasonable conspiracy theories. Did Epstein kill himself? Maybe, maybe not. Did Trump or his staff collude with Russia? Maybe, maybe not. Was 9/11 an inside job? I don't believe it was but it's at least within the realm of metaphysical possibility. Are mattress stores just money laundering fronts for the Mafia? Probably not but it is weird how you can have, like, twenty of them on a single street. Who buys that many mattresses? How do they stay in business?

There is, however absolutely no need to give anyone who claims Bill Gates created COVID-19 as a pretext to tag people with mind control chips through vaccinations in order to harvest adrenochrome from their brains for satanic ritual orgies the benefit of the doubt. They. Are. Clearly. Wrong.

I must be a moron then, because I dont think they are clearly wrong. I would say their is clearly more going on then the government is telling us and Bill Gates is creepy as fuck.

It is kind of interesting to think about how we got here. If you question anything mainstream these days, or try to discuss an alternative viewpoint, the conversation almost always turns vitriol. It's unfortunate, because there have been a lot of "conspiracy theories" that have been shown fully- or partially-true with time, but people seem to be very cult-like in their beliefs, even if they don't truly understand their beliefs. It's odd to me, and I wish we weren't like this. I've lost a lot of friends in harsh ways because of things I have become more outspoken about recently, yet we had been friends for years beforehand even when I knew they had the opposing view -- I was simply too afraid to share my view for fear of losing friends. But alas...

Edit: it's kind of crazy that I'm getting downvoted for sharing something that I would've hoped people would agree with. I guess not, and this proves my point. Man, we live in crazy times.

A really interesting example of this is the whole glyphosate case that /r/environment goes nuts over.

On the one hand, nearly every scientific, health and farming community in the world says using glyphosate is safe. Yet there was a legal case that said otherwise - so /r/environment jumped on that as truth. Legal precedence science does not make.

Thinking like that also makes it really easy to create new laws, e.g. that homosexuality is an affront to god and should be illegal. Then claim it as scientific fact for the opposing side.

A lot of conspiracy theories are just slightly repackaged white supremacy and anti-Semitism. It's not hard for me to personally to cut ties with bigoted and hateful individuals.

Talking point #3: if somebody disagrees with you or the mainstream opinion, they're racist.

Give me a break.

If people are threatening the health and safety of other people (including uninvolved bystanders, not to mention people who disagree with them) based on their beliefs and opinions, does it not approach being your responsibility to do what you can to disavow them of those beliefs?

How does believing in something false threaten someones safety?

If it causes you to act in accordance with the false belief in ways that threaten someone's safety. For instance, you might shoot up Comet Pizza.

By refusing to follow the rules set by the medical authorities. Refusing to wear mask, not isolating when infected, etc...

A more extreme example of false beliefs causing great harm is the Holocaust that was caused by Nazis believing the Jews are part of a conspiracy to undermine Germany and were the cause of Germany's defeat in WW1.

False beliefs can cause a lot of harm to a lot of people in both personal level (not vaccinating your kids) and to the larger societal level.

If that belief leads you to assault (even just verbally) retail employees for requesting you follow basic hygiene principles in slowing the spread of a pandemic.

Merely believing in something false is harmless, but once in a while humans actually act on their beliefs.

Suppose a restaurant employee believes that the requirement to wash hands before returning to work is a hoax by the soap companies in order to sell more soap. If the employee believes this but never acts on it, fine. But if they stop washing their hands before returning to work, that threatens public health.

> Why should I — someone with many of my subjective ideas and opinions try and talk someone else out of their personal beliefs and opinions.

Because letting people operate on a false belief affects everyone else.

It's one thing to believe in homeopathy as curative - it's another thing to recommend it to people as sound medical advice, when there is no evidence that supports it.

It's one thing to personally believe in creationism - it's another when you insist on teaching it in schools, disregarding its empirical validity.

That's when real people, either the gullible or the vulnerable or even the ones in no position to resist, are hurt - either physically, as homeopathy can do, or intellectually, as science denial does, or even socially, as people vote against their own self-interests through an incorrect understanding of what's actually happening. You normalize this harm by allowing it to happen.

I'm not saying don't let people believe whatever they want. I'm saying it's important to insist they know where their beliefs end and where facts begin, because the alternative is them causing harm, justifying it under their beliefs, and you thinking that's alright then. Conspiracy theorists do not know that distinction between fact and belief.

You raise a good distinction between "conspiracies that turned out to be true" and "conspiracies in general", but you're talking at cross-purposes here. The article is discussing belief in clearly-false claims (as evidenced either by actual research on the subject or evaluation of the complete record), whereas you're using "conspiracy" in the classic sense of disinformation (claims which are true but where knowledge of their truth is suppressed until a later time). I would argue that, even with that distinction, the same default position to novel claims should be assumed in everyday life: skepticism, willingness to examine the evidence against the baseline, and openness to agreeing with said evidence should it meet a strong standard. This default position usually means you don't change your current behaviour unless the evidence is insurmountable, so: trust, but verify(!!!), all new claims before acting on them, and if that verification fails, repudiate and encourage repudiation from your fellow humans.

What's important also is that most people don't have the tools to understand how to verify information correctly, so even the method above only works if you understand how to verify anything. Scientific illiteracy, innumeracy, and herd mentality are common issues here, as is cognitive dissonance or poor methodology - the Netflix documentary "Behind the Curve" describes how flat Earth experiments typically start by rejecting the premise of a globe, conducting experiments that strongly fit the narrative of globe nature, and then dismissing those results as flawed and only highlighting those which seem to indicate anything other than globe nature. That's cherrypicking, and cognitive dissonance alone lets people conclude that that's not what they're really doing. These are ordinary people, like you and I, with an impressive capability to rationalize and a reluctance to challenge whatever gives them comfort - any one of us could end up like them, in the right conditions.

That's why it's important to arm yourself too with knowledge about practical epistemology. LessWrong is a weird community, but they seem to have better resources on this than many other places, so I recommend their wiki. Knowledge of the scientific method helps, as is knowledge of the historical method. Understanding how scholarship is a prerequisite to science - that is, it's not enough to have done an experiment to be a scientist, you also need understanding of the current state-of-the-art to be able to advance a meaningful argument and to be able to demonstrate correct understanding when asked - is absolutely critical (this is the number one reason why physics and math professors receive so many emails from crackpots advocating a new proof of the Riemann hypothesis and whatnot, because these crackpots either aren't aware of the necessity of scholarship or are aware but have never been subjected to a rigorous test of their scholarship).

For those hoping to talk sense into family or friends.

One site with an established track record of helping people out of false conspiracy theory rabbit holes is metabunk.org. They have mainly helped people with 9/11, chemtrails, and UFOs. The guy who runs the site has written a good book on it:

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/escaping-the-rabbit-hole-bo...

Read an excerpt at https://www.salon.com/2018/09/16/how-to-pull-a-friend-out-of...

It is the best resource I have found in many years of searching but if you can suggest others, please do so.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the interesting parallel with religion here. Belief in a deity is also --in some eyes-- totally irrational. It can cause similar harm and sometimes also divides families, e.g. when people want to 'get out': Jehovas witnesses, scientology, ...

Let's face it, collectively, we're not as rational as we like to believe.

Who’s we? I doubt anyone would claim that most people are rational.

Didn't some economists claim exactly that?

"economic man, is the portrayal of humans as agents who are consistently rational, narrowly self-interested, and who pursue their subjectively-defined ends optimally"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus

May I ask if you know why you use rules of that kind, with spaces only on the side opposite the insertion? I've seen that in print but only once.

What if the faith in God was rational? I mean to YOU it doesn't seem rational, but to the faithful it does.

I mean one logical, rational argument used is that the universe and life is incredibly complicated, we as "mere" humans cannot create it, and it's incredibly unlikely humans would develop like we did. Therefore, there must be intelligent design behind it.

See? Rational and logical thought. Dismissing people who think differently as being irrational is just alienating and pushing them away, entrenching them even more if you go in with a judgment and mindset like that. It would make you scoff at "these people", because they're irrational unlike you, the epitome of rationality and logical thought.

TL;DR, assume the "other side" is just as smart and rational as you are, they just have different ideas.

If it were rational, it would also be falsifiable.

Let me ask you: what would have to happen for you to rescind your belief?

Also; at the risk of starting a discussion about religion: you haven't developed a logical argument by saying "universe is complicated -> deity". You've only moved the problem of "who or what created X" up one level to the deity. Who created the deity?

Rationality itself is not falsifiable, it relies on axioms that must be assumed true in order to work.

Edit: Treating rationality as something real as opposed to just a (very useful) figment of our imagination, i.e. something like a variant of Platonic Realism, is no different from any other religion.

I think the term "conspiracy theory" is perhaps unhelpful, and it also seems that people are lumping together phenomena that aren't necessarily all that closely related. If there's a group of people with some strongly held belief, not supported by evidence, about the government doing something evil then perhaps we should call it a "shared paranoid delusion". It's hardly a "theory" if they already believe it and it hardly involves a "conspiracy" seeing as it's perfectly normal for the government to plan things in secret, even things that aren't "evil".

How is calling something a "delusion" more helpful?

I am not sure that this is a helpful definition.

There are many opinions that could be described as "paranoid delusion" by its opponents but still have a high probability to be true.

For example many politics from Eastern Europe tried to warn their Western colleagues (before 2008) that Russia is not up for good relations with EU. This was labeled as Russophobia i.e. paranoid delusion.

Trying to understand global politics is a very difficult task and there are probably many false beliefs even on highest level.

It is also up to interpretation.

The submission system removed the initial "How" but I've put it back now.

The title "I talk to ..." is very different from "How I talk to ..." ... sorry if anyone feels misled.

This is clearly about the war in Iraq. And yes the victims are not simply the millions of lives destroyed in the region or the thousands of lives destroyed in western countries; but the victim is the truth itself and the population's trust in authority.

Are you one of those conspiracy theorists who believe we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan for oil and to feed our war machine and not because of 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction? FACT mainstream media published all kinds of articles saying Hussein had WMDs!

Are you trying to say our government and a compliant media lies to us to get us to accept actions that go against our interest?

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."

The article suggests "empathy," but often this is really just patronizing. It's about relationships, not "facts." Someone who believes there is a conspiracy identifies as an outsider to it. The only question is whether they are an outsider to their relationships as well. Discussing a conspiracy theory is usually the same as trying to explain a break-up to the person on the receiving end where the more you explain, the less convincing or final it is, with the real risk of exposing yourself to backlash.

The necessary condition for a conspiracy theory is for someone to believe they are a victim, and that they are being actively disenfranchised by a group who doesn't acknowledge it. Some are falsifiable, others not so much. Quite a few are even more true than they could ever conceive of.

The way I relate to the people I know whose lives are consumed by conspiracy theories is by setting clear personal boundaries for myself, so that when I inevitably diverge from their belief bubble, it's not traumatic because it's just outside the boundary on which we relate. I'd argue that if you want to deflect most conspiracy theories as a leader, professional, or even a manager, don't be empathetic, be magnanimous.

Recognize that there's some underlying payoff to believing this stuff.

> Psychologists like Jovan Byford from the Open University tell me that a good strategy is to try to get to the bottom of the person's legitimate concerns and to find out how they are feeling.

If you can find the payoff and substitute something else[1] the person will tend to return to "normal" on their own. It takes a lot of energy to fight the whole world.

([1] E.g. w/ the now-deprecated "Six-Step Reframe" https://gist.github.com/calroc/4719702 )

Use the "Meta-Model" from Neurolinguistic Programming.

> It is claimed that the Meta-model “yields a fuller representation of the client’s model of the world – the linguistic Deep Structure from which the client’s initial verbal expressions or Surface Structure, were derived” by offering challenges to its limits, the distortions, generalisations or deletions in the speaker’s language.

https://www.nlpworld.co.uk/nlp-training-meta-model/

Be careful, it's a power tool. You can easily alienate the person you're trying to reach.

This doesn't seem to offer insight.

It's:

1. Talk to them, for hours if you can.

2. Figure out where they're getting their information and see if it's already been debunked.

3. Don't be a jerk.

That's not very much 'how', unfortunately.

Actually, all three of those points are things that people (me included) regularly do wrong/don't do when engaging with conspiracy theorists.

1. Brush claims off as unimportant / ignore their messages in group chats instead of giving contra, leading them to misinterpret silence as tacit agreement.

2. If engaging, doing it very shallowly with platitudes like "check your sources" but never going over concrete examples with them.

3. Being a jerk about it.

Edit: not advocating/demanding you do all three every time you spot someone BSing on the webs. We all only get 24h a day. But if it's someone close to you and you're really concerned, all these three are good things to keep in mind and easy to do wrong, especially when things get heated.

I agree with you, but the article just glossed over it. It should've done what you did and expanded upon these points.

As it stands, the article is just "The story of Sebastian's Mum: a victim of conspiracy theories" which is a more fitting title and still interesting, but it's not really a guide, so I also agree with OP, it doesn't really offer insight.

Once I finished the article I was like "is that it?!"

What do you do when there are no concrete examples or relevant scientific facts at the time?

How do you counter a conspiracy theorist when they then also point out very real conspiracies that have definitely happened and are well-known and well-documented?

Conspiracies definitely do happen and have been perpetrated by institutions that are supposed to be regarded with the highest trust, such as the people tasked with protecting us with their intelligence. How do you restore faith in those institutions?

Would you have argued against MK-ultra before having known it was real?

But it's something that most of these disproportionately basement-dwelling isolatees don't get, though. I mean, no, it's not a surprise to say that people who gravitate to very online centers of disinformation tend to be socially isolated. But even so, treating the isolation is a feasible thing.

Stated more scientifically: the hypothesis here is that isolation causes conspiracy mania. So treat the isolation. Most people don't do this, we just yell at or about these folks online.

Seems like it's worth a shot to me.

A lot of the conspiracy theorists I encounter online are long-term married people in their late-50s/early-60s.

Or 20-somethings who, judging by their profiles, spend 2 ~ 4 nights a week in a bar.

It doesn't seem like social isolation quite explains it.

It doesn't even succeed in showing readers how not to be a jerk: "Present facts and evidence neutrally, the experts say."

A god may have facts, but we mortals have only evidence, and theories that explain the evidence more or less well. Is this not the central principle of science?

But following scientific explanations requires certain skills, such as mathematics. And the mass media, including even Scientific American, do not print equations. So popular journalists treat scientists as, in effect, alternative gods, whose opinions may be weighted according to prestige, or by how well they flatter reader's prejudices, but cannot be otherwise tested or analyzed.

Conspiracy theorists merely take more or less this same dysfunction to its extreme: a circle of Youtube pseudo-scientists, perfect conformity to reader's prejudices, and perhaps no numbers at all.

Trying to pull someone out of a conspiracy theory rathole is very scary and difficult. There is a ratchet mechanism whereby whatever you do or say can be interpreted as further evidence for the conspiracy, and no matter how you push and pull they just go deeper.

This article offers zero useful advice on how to overcome this extremely pernicious, scary and increasingly prevalent problem.

The idea of memes being as something potentially dangerous should be more widespread. Maybe a different word should be used since it's colloquially used to refer to funny pictures with a caption, but I would pay for a service that used e.g. GPT-3 to detect fake news and flag them in my browser. I would trust a human moderation team to update the list for me, since even being aware of a meme lets it begin to take root in your mind. [0]

(Also known as the illusory truth effect[1])

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2958246 [1] https://fs.blog/2020/02/illusory-truth-effect/

My personal experience has always been that fact checking fails with the more extreme cases -- in that it wins the argument but fails to win over the person. In fact, that kind of win often seems to "inoculate" the person against anything you have to say in the future.

When facts and logic fail, I usually fall back on the other two of the good old Greek trio: ethos, pathos and logos.

First you need to understand what feelings are driving these individuals. Usually it's fear and uncertainty. Until you address the root cause of those feelings (which usually differ from person to person), no amount of fact checking is going to have a permanent effect.

The other thing is to build mutual respect, even if you don't agree with the person. Branding someone an idiot is generally not considered a winning strategy when it comes to persuasion.

"BBC's specialist disinformation reporter"

Well that sounds ominous.

Do you know of the flat earther that in effort to prove the Earth is flat, he proved that it is round? He didn't accept it and came around with some other reason. This has got to be a mental condition that scientists have yet to study. At this point it's impossible to talk to true conspiracy theorists as stupidity is chronic by nature. Feed them the colorful pills to keep them at least subdued most of the time is probably the best strategy.

Hard to read this with a straight face, after Snowden and Julian Assange. Snowden is still in exile, and Assange is tortured in Jail. This is the price for proving deep state "conspiracy theories".

There's a wide gulf between believing that "the government can listen in on any conversation" and "the government is comprised of lizard people".

The article is about the latter.

Wikileaks was a place for consciences objectors to reveal government corruption, and it quickly gained respect in the eyes of the public. With the arrest of Julian, and the downfall of Wikileaks. We are now left with much less reputable places to disseminate that information. I take issue with the article, because it attacks and delegitimizes independent investigative effort. Unfortunately that effort is now done in the dregs of the internet in places like 4chan, and now disseminated by less reputable people like Rudy Juliani.

"Lizard" people is modern abstraction for evil/corrupt people. Similar to angels and demons. We call the earth round, when in fact its a little oval, and has mountains that protrude out. Abstractions can be true on some level of resolution, but in fact be false in the absolute sense. The article doesn't really invalidate the sentiment that some people in government are corrupt. Which is probably the right sentiment to hold, even if arrived through the wrong fact.

It's perfectly reasonable to believe that corruption exists in government. It's not reasonable to believe government is so corrupt that Tony Blair is probably a space lizard wearing a human skinsuit or that Hillary Clinton probably drinks the blood of child sex slaves.

Snowden immediately fled to US adversaries and Assange was knowingly working with Russian intelligence agencies.

Many of the behaviors associated with followers of conspiracy theories sound like behaviors associated with addiction disorders and abuse victims much like people susceptible to joining a cult. Some of those behaviors include socially isolated belief systems, security reenforcement, gullibility, loss of identity, loss of independent reasoning, and so forth.

I am creating a new account just for this: Social Media is the source of a lot of misinformation and there is no way to fix it other than reducing its usage.

Social Media increases information availability and by its very nature will always spread false information as fast or faster than the truth.

This ideal that we can fight misinformation with more truth is absurd.

That was interesting, but I'm now far more interested in a post covid interview of Brian Lee hitchens (in the article a covid denier until he and his wife got it, his wife then died).

You only need to live through a handful of conspiracy theories turned conspiracy fact before the debunk-everything skeptics annoy you just as much as the complete lunatics.

How could this article avoid the term "Steele Dosier"? Honestly?

It's a UK article on a UK website, for most of the intended audience the term "Steele dossier" would be meaningless.

When they said "she's a specialist on the human toll of misinformation", I had high hopes she was someone who talked at length about how the BBC helped fabricate evidence to justify Tony Blair's war on Iraq. Apparently not.

Hilarious. Funny how these things end up at the top of HN so quickly :)

What's funny about that?

That's easy. Tell them to stop watching CNN, Foxnews, BBC, MSNBC, etc.

> Are they quoting a fringe YouTube video (which may have been fact-checked and debunked), or people in the echo chamber of a conspiracy-minded Facebook group?

Yes. Youtube algorithm favors establishment media and these poor conspiracy minded souls are being bombarded by establishment conspiracy theories 24/7.

> Specialist disinformation reporter, BBC News

There you have it folks. BBC News specializes in disinformation reporting. :) That title is orwellian but then again, orwell based the ministry of truth after the bbc and his time working as a bbc propagandist in india during ww2.

The biggest conspiracy theorists are upset at the little conspiracy theorists. Nobody likes competition it seems.

Conspiracy theory is a fun 2020 buzzword because it’s such a powerful rhetorical attack. You can take something that is fringe and proven by data to be untrue (such as flat earth) and then lump it together with something that is simply unknown or politically embarrassing (what is on Hunter’s laptop?) and then treat them the same?

The new way is actually just to suggest it’s Russian disinformation, and then suddenly that embarrassing thing about your family simply goes away.

There is no such thing as a conspiracy theory. Every conspiracy theory in existence can be explained in terms of math, technology, physics, psychology and behavioral biology. They are conspiracy theories because the average person refuses to believe basic science that was discoveres i the early 1900s.

It's 2020 and if you use science and technology from the early to mid 1900s in the right way people get confused and they believe there is some strange conspiracy.

Here is an example, I can get people to do things with online advertising. If I get people to do the right combination of things with the right combination of advertising it looks like magic to people who don't know about advertising, psychology and neuroscience.

I'm failing to see the connection between "looking like magic" and "being a conspiracy theory", but I'd argue that the mechanism doesn't really matter. From a certain perspective, your advertising might take away some part of their free will, and _that's_ the part that makes them uncomfortable.

Right but specifically a conspiracy theory involves malicious and powerful actors.

>A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation

So 5g mind control, moon landing is fake, earth is flat are all examples of conspiracy theories. No matter how much science you apply to demonstrating the theories are incorrect, the conspiracy theorist will simply provide more ways that the lizard people are tricking us. It's irrational by definition.

I stress about this. I encounter plandemic types far too often in texas. I've tried so many different strategies to convince them of the public health crisis, that if they would at least just wear a mask it would help. I never get anywhere. Is this the fatal flaw of the species? Our vulnerability to disinformation? Considering the creation of disinformation can be scaled cheaply to staggering heights, will this halt our progress?

Agreed, and you don't want the answer to those questions.

On a side note:

Its easy to understand why people believe in the whole mind control thing. It's just advertising and sometimes its people running "Debility, Dependency and Dread" on other people to re-train them without having an understanding of what "Debility, Dependency and Dread" really is. For some reason people have a difficult time making the logical leap that humans are mammals. Everyone wants to believe that we are better than all other mammals in a way that none of that is possible.

BS.

The US Govt reading middle-manning internet connections was pants-on-head stupid conspiracy theory until Snowden

I strongly disagree. That theory (before Snowden) was never in the same category as flat earth, QAnon, lizard people, faked moon landings and the like.

Yeah, that was the first thought that crossed my mind when Snowden happened: not "oh shit, they are listening!" (I knew that before, for a very loose definition of "to know"), but "oh shit, advocates of crazy conspiracy theories will cite this as precedent for decades".

Except it wasn't. Carnivore was a thing that people knew about, and the US government backed away from it when it was publicized. Total Information Awareness was a thing that was known and not a conspiracy theory. The Patriot Act was a thing that took a lot of steps towards a surveillance society.

Snowden's information was just a confirmation that the US government was pursuing these things in secret when doing them in the open failed. It's not a lizard people/flat earth/q-anon level thing. There was plenty of "prior art" for the Snowden revelations.

There are conspiracies. I have never seen or heard of one that turns the world upside down. They seem to be all continuations and expansions of bad behavior that is currently accepted as fact.

> There is no such thing as a conspiracy theory. Every conspiracy theory in existence can be explained in terms of math, technology, physics, psychology and behavioral biology.

I don't know whether that is true of every conspiracy theory, but here is one example that supports your point:

While finishing up teacher's college, I was paired with a maths teacher who believed in 9/11 conspiracy theories and who mentioned them in class. From his point of view, a delayed "explosion" lower down in the tower was evidence that the destruction was planned. Left in an awkward position, I did the only thing I could think of: I used math. Simply put, the time that it would take a shock wave to propagate through the steel structure matched the delay so the "explosion" did not prove his conspiracy theory. That was one heck of a teachable moment that transformed an otherwise abstract math lesson into something that could be applied to every day life.

(Edit: clarification on the intent of the calculation.)

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