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Comment by MeImCounting | Hacker News Reader

There is in fact a line between using discretion and critical thinking and falling prey to paranoid superstition. This is important because there are people who prey specifically on people who are vulnurable to conspiratorial thinking and they are very good at it.

For about half the population of the US right now if the Daily Wire or like Joe Rogan came out and said that refrigerators are a deep state conspiracy that has been transing the kids, that would be it. No more refrigerators. There would be piles of refrigerators miles high at landfills across the country and having cold drinks would be a sure sign youre a corrupted liberal.

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The thing about most conspiracies is that they need to have some "marginal plausibility" (I just made that term up). The refrigerator example seems going a bit too far. Hormones in milk might do the trick though. Cold drinks like Pepsi and Coke definitely have some potential.

Also rather than not having cold drinks going back to using ice boxes is probably the better option.

More seriously, we do live in a complex world, we can't function without trust but we also have to be open to changing our opinions based on new evidence. I'm just reading "How to talk to a science denier" and it's got some interesting takes on these topics.

>The thing about most conspiracies is that they need to have some "marginal plausibility

We literally had a wide spread conspiracy about secret DNA editing viruses that were controlled by 5G cellular antennas, because They™ wanted to mind control people and make them sterile for population replacement by Them™.

I’d say that it’s not about being plausible in any sort objective sense, but rather a successful conspiracy theory must reinforce existing beliefs and biases.

See also: Ultraterrestrials, and UFOs as satanic entities battling Jesus.

Well, virus can change your DNA. Cell phone towers being everywhere with people not generally understanding how they work or whether they pose health risks is another thing. You need to tell a story that the layman can't readily refute. Crazy government scientists engineering viruses that can be remote controlled by radio signals is "marginally plausible". The fridge story IMO doesn't qualify.

There's another category of fables I'd call "religious fables". Those are ones that can't be falsified. Feels like your other examples fit in those. Religious people believe all sort of things in these categories. They're not really related to the factual reality. This is different IMO from your run of the mill conspiracy theory because those generally have enough counter-evidence where you can make a reason/logic based assessment of the probability of true vs. false. An analogy is flat earthers pointing to some "evidence" that in their mind supports the idea that the earth is flat while ignoring the bulk of evidence demonstrating it's not. Even if you do not have the ability to directly observe whether the earth is flat or not you can weigh the evidence. It's true religion and conspiracy often intersect. Religion by its nature is belief without facts.

I don’t think people actually understand refrigerators any better than cellphones which are 41 years old at this point.

Create some story about the “hum” of an air compressor being linked to declining birth rates or whatever and someone will believe it. Keep harping on it long enough and it goes from a fringe idea to vaguely plausible surprisingly quickly. Just look at the Anti Vax movement and those are well over 200 years old.

The number of people that understand the details of how a refrigerator works is orders of magnitude higher than the number of people the really understand everything about cellphone technology. But yeah, the hum is not pleasant, has that been studied? ;)

I feel like for something to stick there does need to be more than that. But who knows, give it a try and see! If you look at the common conspiracies they seem to target more complex things.

Anti-vax is a lot more complex. There was Andrew Wakefield's fraud. There are real side effects for many vaccines. There are public health considerations. The science is definitely not at a fridge level. Pharma companies can have conflicts of interest. Maybe the original cowpox gives immunity to smallpox is more intuitive but mRNA vaccines that cause cells to make the Covid spike protein are not as simple. Covid vaccines were rushed to market (one can argue for good reasons) and they did have side effects (e.g. myocarditis, tinnitus?). Authorities have walked the line of being open about the considerations vs. trying to force public health policies, sometimes eroding trust while they do that. Even experts differed on some finer policy points. I know I was really upset with people who didn't vaccinate for Covid because I believed we could get herd immunity but then new variants showed up that were so more infectious and got around the vaccine where that didn't matter.

All conspiracies are based in reality.

All of them.

> understand the details… really understand everything

That’s two different standards, and only relevant if either of them was a significant percentage of total population. Most people don’t even understand why a refrigerator door gets briefly stuck after you close it. It’s practically a magic box that gets cold which is perhaps why they fall for conspiracy theories so readily, any explanation is equally plausible.

And sure at a high level I understand both, but to really understand a refrigerator the same way you would need to really understand 5G etc, you would need to know the actual pressures involved etc. People don’t know the chemical properties and makeup of the refrigerant. What’s the acceptable impurity levels. What lubricants are in use, etc. The physical geometry of all the mechanical parts and so forth.

One way to convince yourself that a fridge is simpler than a 5G cell system is to look at the science history behind them. The heap pump, the core concept behind a fridge, goes back to 1748 (Cullen). Radio goes back to Maxwell (circa. 1864) and Hertz (1886). Basically at the time that Radio was invented/discovered refrigeration along the lines of the modern fridge was well understood. The first cellphone was invented in 1973 and the first commercial cell phone was 1983. Lots of technologies in the latest generations that are pretty cutting edge and today's phone and technologies look like science fiction to someone from the 1970's or even 1980's...

Longer history can also imply complexity. A 2024 Honda Civic is way more complicated than a Model T.

Though ultimately yea a smartphone extremely complex. I’m just saying being able to have a high level understanding is very different than knowing how to maintain or design something.

Ahhh, pseudoscience. A refreshing cup of shit, isn't it?

Seeing as "(leaky and scrapped) refrigerators are damaging the upper atmosphere, allowing ionizing UV to reach the ground and cancering the everyone," actually happened and AFAIK is disputed by almost nobody, it's not that implausible. Hormones in milk is more plausible still because hormones are known to do that kind of thing, but the main knock against the refrigerator idea is that we already have fairly strong protections against leaky fridges because of the ozone.

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