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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Writing endless books and articles about how you’re engaging in wrongthink by questioning official narratives isn’t the solution, never has been, and never will be. For as many words that are written about the rise of conspiracy theories, I haven’t read a single one that tries to explain their appeal and origin in a neutral way, without having a condescending tone throughout. At some point you have to ask yourself: is your goal to actually persuade people, or is it to make them feel stupid?

To me it seems like a basic failing of psychology. If you want to stop people believing in fringe theories, then understand how they arrived at their position, engage them on their own terms, and acknowledge that (usually) there is a kernel of (often metaphorical) truth at the center, even if it’s been warped beyond recognition into a bizarre conspiracy theory.

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About 13 months ago, there was this conspiracy theory about a pandemic in China. Conspiracy theorists and untrustworthy alternative news outlets were trying to sow dangerous misinformation about the Chinese government doing mass lockdowns and roundups of its own citizens. Even if this pandemic does exist, it isn't transmissible human to human. And wanting to close our borders and prepare is just xenophobic alarmism. The tens of thousands of Chinese people pouring into our airports are just tourists. The preponderance of video evidence of Chinese soldiers in hazmat suits rounding people up was just created by Russians in a sound stage somewhere, and can be dismissed without watching them.

There was even more elaborate fake news, like expat Facebook groups in China coordinating getting foreign citizens out of the country -- all carefully choreographed lies.

Luckily, I was banned in late January for telling people that they should wear masks as a precaution. Facebook and Twitter protected you.

In all seriousness, I am actually sure that a year ago there were smug academics and journalists having meetings about how they could counter these "lies".

And in February I was getting a lot of flack for suggesting it would be prudent to wear a mask despite what WHO CDC and other authorities were saying.

Maybe I inhabit a different world from others, but this was not a conspiracy theory - at least if you had at least one friend from mainland China.

However, I think that people were right to push back against strong claims about a novel virus. At the time it was unclear whether this was another SARS or MERS, not quite as bad, or something worse. We didn’t even know for sure whether it bound ACE2 or DPP4 before mid February.

Hindsight is 2020 and I am very skeptical of anybody who claims they knew anything about the SARS-CoV-2 virus with any degree of certainty back in January.

The fact that the Chinese government was reacting to is so severely was all the evidence required.

And all I wanted was temporary travel moratorium while data could be gathered, and some temporary mask mandates.

We ended up doing it anyway, but we did it the hard way, after it was far too late.

I had no real idea of the nature of the virus, but I knew full well in December 2019 that we should be closing the borders and stockpiling supplies. Things would surely have turned out better for all of us if we hadn't tolerated big tech interfering in the news.

But sadly, for so many people, they trusted the debunkers and really believed it was all fake news. I can't imagine what a shock it must have been for them.

>Writing endless books and articles about how you’re engaging in wrongthink by questioning official narratives isn’t the solution, never has been, and never will be. For as many words that are written about the rise of conspiracy theories, I haven’t read a single one that tries to explain their appeal and origin in a neutral way, without having a condescending tone throughout. At some point you have to ask yourself: is your goal to actually persuade people, or is it to make them feel stupid?

I'm unsure if you meant this to be read as a criticism of the book, or a general statement. The book seems to embrace the ideas that you're suggesting are missing. E.g.:

>Show empathy. Approaches should be empathic and seek to build understanding with the other party. Because the goal is to develop the conspiracy theorist’s open-mindedness, communicators must lead by example.

> Avoid ridicule. Aggressively deconstructing or ridiculing a conspiracy theory, or focusing on “winning” an argument, runs the risk of being automatically rejected. Note, however, that ridicule has been shown to work with general audiences.

One book that took on the subject in a neutral way was Des hommes, des dieux et des extraterrestres: Ethnologie d'une croyance moderne by Stoczkowski, Wiktor (I'm not sure if it was published in english). Unfortunately I can't recall much of the book - I've read it ages ago. It was an anthropologist's study of groups who believed people originated in outer space.

the point isn't to understand conspiracy theorists -- the point is to crush and humiliate them such that the owners of society can safely continue engaging in hostile endeavors without criticism or awareness.

Ironically it's the actual owners of society who have benefited from the BS conspiracy theories tied to climate change.

This is a conspiracy theory, you know? Who would these mysterious owners of society be? Are they spreading conspiracy theories themselves maybe, for personal benefit?

Rich people. The people who own controlling interests in fossil fuel infrastructure. It isn't really a "theory" so much as public knowledge. Fossil fuel industry has been funding disinformation campaigns about climate change for decades.

As insane as this sounds, we've seen time and again that conspiracy theorists are fundamentalists. It's like trying to convert a Taliban member to Christianity. It is not going to happen no matter how hard you try with soft methods.

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