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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

The game is you're expected to arrive at the most extreme political ideology so you can to remain relevant on social media...?

Seriously though, I sent the article to my Dad as he seems to believe everything is a conspiracy theory; the EU is a German project to win the Second World War (I know), climate change is made up by governments for some reasons and a plucky band of fossil fuel companies and right wing bloggers have uncovered the truth, the war in Ukraine is The West trying to sell arms and it's their fault for inviting Ukraine into NATO (which hasn't happened AFAIK?)... you get the idea.

We live in a time described excellently by the article even if you are not the target of it's point, the fact that this conspiracy-theory-isation of society exists and an extremely high percentage of people seems to be playing it to some extent.

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Conspiracy-theory-isation exists because people resent being told what they are supposed to believe by an authority they do not trust. I'm personally very opposed to forcing them to trust, to ramming the truth down their throat. Instead what I would prefer is that these people are given the tools to find the truth on their own. Simple tools that can be trusted just because they are simple, that do what they are supposed to, no more no less.

They could be technological, software, or maybe even something as simple as teaching people about rhetoric and how to manipulate people so that they can detect other people doing it. Teaching people about logic and fallacies. Teaching people how to infer motives.

> I'm personally very opposed to forcing them to trust, to ramming the truth down their throat. Instead what I would prefer is that these people are given the tools to find the truth on their own.

But they think they've already done this. They used the Tools That The Ivory Tower Elites Hate like YouTube and Facebook, found the extreme crackpot content, and convinced themselves that with these tools they have finally found the truth that those nasty authority figures have been trying to hide from them!

> Conspiracy-theory-isation exists because people resent being told what they are supposed to believe by an authority they do not trust.

I keep hearing this theory, but it just begs the question: how are these people deciding which sources to trust? What makes them trust Fox News, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Alex Jones rather than other "mainstream" news?

Somehow, I don't think the problem is a lack of tools. Something deeper is going on.

> I keep hearing this theory, but it just begs the question: how are these people deciding which sources to trust? What makes them trust Fox News, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Alex Jones rather than other "mainstream" news?

Abstractly, the same way ~everyone does: heuristics, confirmation bias, post-hoc rationalization, etc. On a relative scale, some people's methodologies are better than others (often much better), but on an absolute scale they are almost all bad.

If unpopular opinion X turned out to be reality, early adopters/investors would come out ahead of skeptics - think how ridiculous quotes from internet nay-sayers now appear.

If you can make your opinion reality, by either persuading or bullying people into accepting it, you don't need to trust it - you can just choose it and act accordingly. Politics is just religion without the anthropomorphism. Societies and civilizations need to be rational all the way down, just as people are not creatures of pure logic.

People always want explanations to things we simply don’t have good answers, maybe because we don’t have the information or because there is money to made selling macho pills online or just because a people don’t want to face reality. It is fundamentally a form of escapism that I think am we are all by default detectives in a thought game trying to find proof of diets that will make us live longer or find the true reason global warming is happening is sunspot activity.

> I'm personally very opposed to forcing them to trust, to ramming the truth down their throat.

They may feel no such scruples about doing so to you, though. Reciprocity is a good heuristic for many social situations, but when it goes wrong, it can go really wrong.

>I would prefer is that these people are given the tools to find the truth on their own

You have a high degree of trust in humanity's capacity for rational thought, don't you?

That trust is misplaced and will backfire if you ever have to rely on it

These kind of people say that the "tools" you suggest we give them are actually just attempts by the Illuminati to keep them down. At a certain point, they just refused reality, and instead insist they know more than you.

Plz tell your dad if he ever wants to grab a non-alcoholic beer and vent about you, I'm down.

I'm kidding of course. He and I would be able to talk for days about other things, though. You and I, true to the OP, would probably rate each other not worth each other's time after 5 seconds. This is the inoculation I spoke of in my other comment. It's a powerful mechanism.

"Do you know who owns and controls the station you're watching? Does the truth you know rely on its funding? Does it matter? DOES IT MATTER?!?" --kmfdm

You’re not kidding are you. I think you’ve misunderstood the point of the article and started playing the game it talks about in the comments. Well played.

I see that you are trying to increase divides and create anger and hate. Why do you do that?

I think that’s my destiny. No, really.

I know a lot of crazy conservatives who believe a lot of crazy things. They are almost all older.

They also all have these stories of genuinely crazy, but factually true, things that eroded their trust in institutions and consensus narrative over the past several decades or more. So their bar has been lowered to the point that conspiracy theories seem more likely than not.

As I get older, I can see reality hammering on my bar, pushing it lower.

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