Conspiracy Theorists Aren't Ignorant. They're Bad At Epistemology.

It's surprisingly tricky to argue with a conspiracy theorist

I probably know less about science than most people who think the earth is flat do.

Okay, that’s not quite true. I have knowledge of lots of claims of science—that the big bang happened, that evolution is true, that the earth is round, etc—that people who think the earth is flat don’t have. But in terms of my knowledge of the science surrounding how one shows the roundness of the earth, I, like most people who think the earth is round, probably know less about it than most people who think the earth is flat.

People are often baffled by the widespread success of conspiracy theories. Among well-educated liberals, for instance, there’s a common attitude that conspiracy theorists are just deeply ignorant about various facts. One might say something like “how do conspiracy theorists believe X when Y.” Yet if one actually talks to a conspiracy theorist, they’ll have something to say about Y—likely something that is hard to refute on the fly.

The problem with conspiracy theorists is not that they’re ignorant of a few basic facts. They often have a shockingly large store of knowledge—just watch a debate with this guy, for example. It’s that they are bad at thinking. They accept improbable theories, largely neglect higher-order evidence, and are bad at judging the plausibility of a view.

There was a guy who would often come to my campus to yell about the earth being flat. I’m sure he could win an argument on that topic with most random people—for he came with real arguments. They were not good arguments, but he had more things to say than most people. The problem with his thinking was not that he was ignorant of a basic fact, but that he thought that positing a global conspiracy with thousands of actors that has somehow been ascertained by disproportionately scientifically illiterate internet sleuths was a better theory than thinking that there is some unknown explanation for apparently strange features of water.

At one point, for instance, he started talking about there being two different kinds of eclipses that only makes sense if the earth is flat. The reason non-conspiracy theorists reject this is not that they have some specialized knowledge about eclipses, but because they accept, based on higher-order evidence, that there’s not some deep hole in our understanding of eclipses that has eluded all the top science journals.

This is why it’s very difficult to argue with conspiracy theorists. They probably know more about the subject than you do—and it’s hard to argue in a debate from higher-order evidence. Mostly the reason not to believe conspiracy theories is that the experts don’t, and it’s likelier you are wrong than that they are.

Yet failure to recognize this fact leads inexorably to people smugly dismissing conspiracy theorists as ignorant rubes. No, they’re not ignorant rubes. They’re bad epistemology rubes. As Scott Alexander says:

When I was a teenager I believed in a conspiracy theory. It was the one Graham Hancock wrote about in Fingerprints Of The Gods, sort of a modern update on the Atlantis story. It went something like this:

• Did you know that dozens of civilizations around the world have oddly similar legends about a lost continent that sunk under the waves? The Greeks called it Atlantis; the Aztecs, Atzlan; the Indonesians, Atala.

• Various ancient structures and artifacts appear to be older than generally believed. Geologists say that the erosion patterns on the Sphinx prove it must be at least 10,000 years old; some well-known ruins in South America have depictions of animals that have been extinct for at least 10,000 years.

• There are vast underwater ruins, pyramids and stuff. We know where they are! You can just learn to scuba dive and go see them! Historians just ignore them, or say they’re probably natural, but if you look at them, they’re obviously not natural.

Teenage me was impressed by these arguments. But he also had some good instincts and wanted to check to see what skeptics had to say in response. Here are what the skeptics had to say:

“Haha, can you believe some people still think there was an Atlantis! Imagine how stupid you would have to be to fall for that scam!”

“There is literally ZERO evidence for Atlantis. The ONLY reason you could ever believe it is because you’re a racist who thinks brown people couldn’t have built civilizations on their own.”

“No mainstream historians believe in any of that. Do you think you’re smarter than all the world’s historians?”

Meanwhile, I learned to scuba dive and checked out a site where Hancock said there were underwater pyramids. They were definitely there!

Nobody was under any obligation to handhold me out of my Atlantis beliefs. But the #1 Google rank for “site about how Atlantis isn’t real” is a scarce resource. Article space on skeptic blogs (podcasts were still years into the dystopian future at this point) was a scarce resource. And when people frittered these scarce resources away on a thousand identical pieces saying “lol you’re stupid and racist if you believe this, haven’t you heard that conspiracies are always wrong?” - and never on any explanation of the GIANT UNDERWATER PYRAMIDS - yes, I feel like I was wronged.

Eventually I lifted myself up by my own bootstraps. I studied some of the relevant history myself (less impressive than it sounds, Wikipedia was just coming into existence around this time). I learned enough about geology to understand on a gut level how natural processes can sometimes produce rocks that are really really artificial-looking - yes, even as artificial-looking as the ones in the picture above.

More important, I learned something like rationality. I learned how to make arguments like the one I use in The Pyramid And The Garden. I realized that, for all their skill at finding anomalies, the Atlantis books couldn’t agree on a coherent narrative of their own. Some placed Atlantis in the Atlantic, others in the Pacific, others in Antarctica; some used it to explain artifacts from long after others said that it fell. For a while if I squinted I could sort of kind of smush them into a single story, but that story had even more anomalies than normal historians’. Eventually I gave up and joined the mainstream.

I’m not angry at Graham Hancock. I see no evidence he has ever been anything but a weird, well-meaning guy who likes pyramids a little too much. But I feel a burning anger against anti-conspiracy bloggers, anti-conspiracy podcasters, and everyone else who wrote “lol imagine how stupid you would have to be to believe in Atlantis” style articles.

Either these people didn’t understand the arguments for and against Atlantis, or they did. If they didn’t, they were frauds, claiming expertise in a subject they knew nothing about. If they did, then at any moment they could have saved me from a five year wild-goose-chase - but chose not to, because it was more fun to insult me.

This is very right! The reason I reject the Atlantis theory is not that I have some specific explanation of all the stories about lost continents, but it’s that I estimate the probability of there being some explanation out there as quite high.

Yet people have this hubristic notion that they know more than the conspiracy theorists, that they’d never fall for a conspiracy theory because they can do basic googling. This is not true. The reason most people reject conspiracy theories is that they are conformists—they just believe things that sound normal. This is a pretty good heuristic for forming true beliefs—if smart people mostly think your belief is crazy then it probably is. But it’s a huge mistake to think that you have identified the specific object-level reasons most conspiracy theories are wrong.

Not only does this hubris lead to people like Scott getting trapped believing in conspiracy theories for decades, it makes it so that when people end up debating conspiracy theorists, they get crushed. A recent hilarious example was a debate between YouTuber Tom Jump and Ryan Dawson. Dawson thinks that the Israeli and U.S. governments were intimately involved in 9/11.

Mr. Jump seemed to think it was a good idea to go into a debate with a guy who has been obsessively looking over a topic for 20 years with no prep. As a result, he was completely trounced, even though his position was probably correct. He didn’t appreciate the difficulty of arguing with a conspiracy theorist on the facts.

Conspiracy theories are mostly improbable. But arguing with them on the object level—haggling over the details of what happened on 9/11, for instance—is very difficult and requires a truly vast array of knowledge. The average person cannot do it, and the idea that conspiracy theorists are just ignorant of basic facts is a delusion that people cling in order to feel superior. The truth is, most conspiracy theorists probably know more about the topics that they discuss than you do.