Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?", because there is a big difference between people who think the world is flat and people who think there is something fishy about, say, the Jeff Epstein saga. In this case we seem to be talking about the conspiracy mentality questionnaire [0]. So they've found a correlation between loneliness and what seems to be a 5 question survey.

To me, this says that lonely people probably have more time to reflect on the world. For example more social people don't have time to keep track of, say, the financial and electronic tracking systems that have been developed over the last 20 or so years. They really are quite frightening considering what the Nazis achieved in 1940s tech. The next industrial genocide may well be unprecedented. How alert people are to that fact is probably correlated to Q3.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3639408/pdf/fps...

Saving people a click:

1...many very important things happen in the world, which the public is never informed about.

2...politicians usually do not tell us the true motives for their decisions.

3...government agencies closely monitor all citizens.

4...events which superficially seem to lack a connection are often the result of secret activities.

5...there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions.

That's a pretty awful poll. 3 is essentially a statement of fact, 5 is describing any "dark money" PAC, and 2 is a healthy skepticism of people who are asking to have enormous power over us.

I dunno about awful, it is exactly what it says on the tin - do people have a "conspiracy mentality"? It is just easy to misinterpret as a negative when it is not.

Note: That's the final five questions in a 38 question survey with 33 primer questions about specific conspiracy theories. It wasn't just 5 questions.

Are you sure? The Conspiracy Theory Questionnaire is 38 questions but the CMQ is 5 questions. Today's HN link talked about the CMQ. And figure one lists 5 observed indicators which I took as a hint.

You can grep for "The 38 items administered in this study [dubbed the Conspir-acy Theory Questionnaire (CTQ) by Darwin et al., 2011] con-tained 33 items measuring the belief in specific conspiracy theoriesand five items assessing participants’ general tendency to believe inconspiracies or their conspiracy mentality. We refer to these latterfive items as the CMQ (see Appendix for complete item wording)." in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3639408/pdf/fps... to see the context of what I'm going off.

> Are you sure?

Yes. What I said was accurate.

> The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?"

Everyone here seems to be missing the 'essence' of the study and article. Do these conspiracy theorists influence global pandemic policy? Do flat earther conspiracy theorist affect global climate change policy?

That's what the article and the 'study' is ultimately implying. That lonely conspiracy theorist flat earthers are controlling global policy.

Some think reptilians are controlling the world. Nature and these 'researchers' think that lonely conspiracy theorists living in their mom's basements are secretly controlling the world.

No one is claiming that "lonely conspiracy theorists living in their mom's basements are secretly controlling the world." But it is obvious that some conspiracy theories such as replacement theory, the trans "groomer" panic and COVID conspiracy theories have become mainstream within certain political demographics. QAnon actively hampers real efforts to combat sex abuse with their phantom fears of leftist sex-slave cabals. People within the Pentagon who believe in alien abductions and Skinwalker Ranch are interfering with legitimate counterintelligence work.

Pretending all conspiracy theorists are just "lonely" and harmless people who have no real effect on the world is simply naive.

> No one is claiming that "lonely conspiracy theorists living in their mom's basements are secretly controlling the world."

The article and the study is.

> But it is obvious that some conspiracy theories such as replacement theory, the trans "groomer" panic and COVID conspiracy theories have become mainstream within certain political demographics.

And certain conspiracy theories like 'lonely conspiracy theorists in living their mom's basements are secretlly controlling the world' have become mainstream within certain politcal demographics.

That's my point. Neither side are 'lonely conspiracy theorists'. Both sides are part of major political parties.

> Pretending all conspiracy theorists are just "lonely" and harmless people who have no real effect on the world is simply naive.

Yes. So stop being so naive. Most of these conspiracy theories on all sides are being pushed by major media outlets like nature and major political parties.

There isn't actually such a big difference between flat earthers and other conspiracy theories. The common theme is that it's the opposite of science or the scientific process.

Conspiracy theorists filter out anything that doesn't align with their theory and go to extremes to support their world views. E.g. flat earthers believe that all airline pilots are part of the conspiracy to hide the fact that the earth is flat. The scientific process, to contrast, would drive you to try and falsify your theory via experimentation, and the flat earth theory is so easily falsifiable.

If you look at vaccines, or climates, or 9/11, or those guys that believe nobody was killed in some massacre, they all use the same sort of logic (or shall we say non-logic). Despite overwhelming evidence they stick to their version of "reality", they never seek counter-evidence, they believe everyone but them is part of a ploy to hide the real reality from everyone. They don't trust experts or scientists.

It's not impossible to have conspiracies in the real world. But I'd say those are rare. The more people are involved the harder it is to keep a secret. There are also situations where the evidence isn't necessarily pointing overwhelmingly one way or another, and there is science that later gets refined or even overturned as more data/knowledge is acquired. Science isn't necessarily absolute truth, it's just the model that best explains the observable phenomena.

> Despite overwhelming evidence they stick to their version of "reality", they never seek counter-evidence, they believe everyone but them is part of a ploy to hide the real reality from everyone.

Yeah but you're basically describing ideologues here. This is how the vast majority of political activists approach the world where, last time I checked, parties even pretending to do things by scientific consensus are rare and they tend to not, in reality, refer to much science.

> If you look at vaccines ... they don't trust experts or scientists.

My mother just caught COVID last week. I was told - by people confidently claiming to speak for experts - that this wouldn't happen after she and the rest of the population were vaccinated because the spread would cease. I personally doubt the experts actually said that because they tend to be accurate in their field of expertise but good luck with that perspective around the time of the vaccine mandates.

I suspect even more than lack of trust that the issue is experts are so rare in politics that people don't recognise them when they do turn up. There are a lot of unexperts playing pretend on such topics and expert opinions are subject to misrepresentation.

This is partly why I said science isn't truth. Science evolves. And the virus evolved.

I don't recall any scientist promising Covid would be eradicated by the vaccines or that nobody would get sick. Even diseases for which really effective vaccines have been available for some time have not been eradicated. I'm pretty sure the scientific consensus at the time was not exactly "the spread would cease". There was some talk about herd immunity and what that means.

Another problem is that experts aren't always the greatest communicators and the science is hard to communicate.

You'd be unwelcome on a lot of social media platforms back in 2020-2021 for those vaccine conspiracies you're spreading. The issue is, all that was true for the entire pandemic. The science didn't "evolve" on the vaccines, where we ended up was the most likely outcome from the start. The scientists knew that, but the people who trusted experts didn't manage to figure it out. They were too busy panicking to listen to anyone.

I agree public health officials in certain countries did a poor job. For the most part they were medical professionals who aren't necessarily experts (though some of them were and some countries had expert advisers to set policy). There were many unknowns and it wasn't clear what to optimize for.

Public health is tricky and you might be faced with various dilemmas getting people to potentially do something that might not be beneficial for them as individuals for the (supposed?) sake of the community. Supposedly one reason why masks were not recommended, despite their sort of obvious effect on respiratory diseases, was to prevent a run on masks that are needed by medical teams. Is this sort of white lie ok? Would telling the truth result in a higher toll for medical professionals? This isn't simple. What I mind more is the sort of doubling down on the obviously wrong advice when the shortages weren't there any more, which seems to be an ego thing.

I think the science was decent and there was access to most of it. There were real gaps in terms of where the virus was going to go and the new vaccines. What was lacking was not really science but rather common sense and maybe what we may call engineering. Science is too slow to react to emergencies.

Clearly the pandemic was a traumatic event for humanity with long term consequences, including erosion of trust.

> I agree public health officials in certain countries did a poor job. For the most part they were medical professionals who aren't necessarily experts (though some of them were and some countries had expert advisers to set policy). There were many unknowns and it wasn't clear what to optimize for.

That is a bold claim you might want to walk away from. 3 posts ago you were holding up vaccine conspiracy theorists as people who, and I quote, "Despite overwhelming evidence they stick to their version of "reality", they never seek counter-evidence, they believe everyone but them is part of a ploy to hide the real reality from everyone. They don't trust experts or scientists.".

Now a few posts later you're suggesting that That the public health officials aren't experts in public health and that their policies were not based on settled science.

When you are insulting a large group of people who's position was, basically, "we don't think public health officials are doing a good job, we aren't satisfied with the evidence you're showing us and we want freedom to make our own decisions" it is probably a mistake to suggest that the public health officials were doing a bad job, often not experts and caught lying with the purpose of stopping people acting in their own best interests. It makes the conspiracy-minded theorists seem pretty reasonable.

Of course in the pandemic, this is the point where people who were claiming to be following science bought up the fact that the vaccine was certain to stop transmission of COVID and it was basically advocating in favour of murder to say otherwise. Turns out that was not the case so they've had to stop doing that.

Maybe it's a bit too strong. I do think there was a real problem with having medical professional in charge when their discipline and expertise were not the perfect match to the real world problems we were facing.

Their policies might have been based on "settled science" (e.g. research on respiratory diseases from the 70's) but I think that wasn't really the appropriate way to handle things as the pandemic developed. It might have been appropriate for day 1 but officials IMO lacked the ability to adapt to the changing reality.

The actual policies varied a lot between countries which is why I qualified my statement.

At the end of the day, you can be critical without being conspiratorial. I'm open to new information that supports the idea that the way health officials handled the pandemic was optimal but given that different jurisdiction gave conflicting advice so that seems counter evidence.

There are many specific examples that come to mind. If we can't critique the response then there's not going to be any learning. Experts and science are not perfect.

Again, point taken and maybe I'm a bit too strong, but that's what I'm trying to get at.

EDIT: i.e. I've no issue with people that are being critical after examining the evidence. These people are not conspiracy theorists and that process is a healthy part of making progress in science and policy. That's not the same thing as people saying Bill Gates put 4G chips in the vaccines or some other mysterious behind the scenes forces or conspiracies.

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