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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Seems like the background behind that is that Scott Alexander has sometimes entertained weird ideas. He's been open about at one time believing a conspiracy theory himself, for a little while.

That screenshot doesn't actually say what about neo-reactonary stuff he thought was interesting, just that there is some. The rest is left to your imagination, and Scott Alexander's enemies want you to imagine the worst.

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> He's been open about at one time believing a conspiracy theory himself, for a little while.

Absolutely disgusting. How could he?? But which one? MKULTRA*? Operation Northwoods*? Flat earth? Illegal domestic surveillance by the NSA*? Operation Gladio*? Tell us which one, so that we may denounce him!

* Oops, this one's real lol

Lost underwater city.

There are some suspiciously man made looking natural rock formations underwater that look like part of a pyramid. Scott even scuba dived there to check them out. I'm not sure how much conspiracy is involved.

I think people underestimate how hard it is to evaluate the validity of ideas. Most people think they are open to new ideas, but actually have a pre-configured bias system that automatically accepts or rejects any incoming ideas. If you are actually willing to entertain new ideas, you have to run with something for a while while you figure out if it makes sense or not. You have to suspend parts of your existing belief system and reexamine assumptions you have made before. You will probably change your conclusion a couple of times in the process.

Dismissing conspiracy theories is the safe thing to do. It also does not require any effort, intelligence or insight on your part. I admire people who are willing to actually engage with ideas like that, even though it does not seem feasible everywhere all the time.

And conspiracy theories is one of those places where bullshit asymmetry is a large problem. The vast majority of actors are arguing in bad faith, and attempting to determine if the individual is arguing in good or bad faith requires an immense amount of energy in itself. Simply put attempting to entertain anyone here will almost always lead to failure. This then leads to people thinking that every conspiracy theory is worth ignoring which leads to another type of failure in the cases they are not.

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