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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

A very good analysis of this whole thing is "In Search Of A Flat Earth" by Folding Ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44

Essentially, professing absurd beliefs is a sort of shibboleth to demonstrate in-group membership. The absurdity is the point, because it differentiates them from outsiders. Normal people make true or factual statements all the time, that's not a good differentiator! The statements need to be false and/or absurd to function for their intended purpose.

The Flat Earth mythos isn't even that outlandish compared to mainstream religions, and well within the same wheelhouse as the type of beliefs used to identify the in-group in cults. Scientology comes to mind, but there are many others.

I highly recommend watching the entire video, because there is a lot more to the phenomena than I initially suspected.

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I remember reading a kind of similar thing about religious rituals and rules in a game theory book. In many religions the church provides a lot of social support and benefits to members and they want those benefits go to people who actually believe in their religion.

The book included a cartoon showing a man eating a hamburger at a church picnic, with a thought balloon that said something like "I can pretend to love Jesus for a free hamburger!".

Requirements like tedious rituals you must regularly attend or various intrusive rules you must follow your personal life impose a significant cost on joining the church. The guy who will pretend to love Jesus for a free hamburger might think twice if the deal is that he has to forgo sex until marriage for free hamburgers.

The idea then is that the rituals and rules impose a high enough cost that it isn't worth it just for the benefits and support the church provides. Only people who actually believe--the kind of people that would join even if they weren't getting a social network and physical benefits from it--will put up with the rituals and rules.

Churches with food pantries will feed anybody who walks in off the street and tells them they are hungry.

Don't confound the story with facts

I suspect there’s also a psychological feedback effect where the more you pay for something the less likely you abandon it.

Thanks for clueing me in to Dan Olson. That was a brilliant video / documentary, even if long. The neoreactionary mindset actually makes (a very narrow kind of) sense in this context.

Likely his best video - and one I recommend - is the multi-hour analysis of NFTs entitled "line goes up" (which also touches on other elements of the blockchain ecosystem).

It (likely) had a non-trivial causal impact on breaking down the NFT hype cycle which we now see to be largely dismantled.

That video really is astonishingly good and would have won him awards if shown on television instead of YouTube.

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