I would classify many conspiracy theorists as being very skeptical, but not very critical.
Very skeptical, in the sense that they question how an eclipse works and demand a satisfactory explanation. They also notice that the man on the street cannot provide one.
Not very critical, in the sense that they then insist that the math doesn't work out for the explanation on the NASA website on the basis that the diagram is not totally to scale.
Obviously if you plug in the actual sizes and distances of the sun and moon it all checks out, but they never take the time to actually follow the logic closely enough to realize that.
At the Dawn of the Second Age, I was engrossed in the project of shedding the mortal Christian evangelical/fundamentalist coil I had slowly suffocated in for most of my formative years.
This was an intellectual project, involving, as it did, addressing head-on the “best” (most rational/cogent) Christian apologetics I could find, and then setting myself to the task of poking holes in them.
This happened to coincide with the early Golden Age of the internet, and so naturally I found myself embroiled in a few time-intensive, and unproductive —but informative — online debates with believers. Back when that topic of debate was still a Thing.
One issue I quickly came up against was the fact that someone who was, say, a biblical literalist (“the Christian Bible is the actual word of God, AND it is literally true AND inerrant in every single detail” — I.e., it is, basically, a dictation) could not be truly be beaten in a debate.
No matter how silly Biblical literalism may sound: I can assure you, if you debate a motivated Christian literalist (or some related proxy, such as a Creationist)— you will almost certainly lose.
So for me the question became: WTF?? (—and this was LONG before “wtf” was even an abbreviation). After all, it SEEMS like this project SHOULD BE fish in a barrel, right? I mean, here — you just:
Step 1: comb the Bible for any narrative that purports to be actual, real history
Step 2: find ANOTHER account of the same event in the Bible (there are many!)
Step 3: compare the two, detail-by-detail
Step 4: note ANY discrepancy or difference, no matter how minor
(e.g., [version 1]: “…and the Dark Lord sent 14000 chariots of Uruk against the sons of David”
vs
[version 2]: “…and the Chosen of Elohim did battle with the hosts of the Dark Lord, which numbered 18000 chariots of Uruk….”)
Step 5: Revel in your glorious victory!!— you have found an error! BOTH chariot counts cannot logically be simultaneously correct! Collect your profits!
So, what happened? Why does this NOT work in practice?
The key to remember, I have come to believe, is that “True Believers” of ANY and ALL kinds (Christian Biblical literalists, 9/11 Truthers, Moon Landing Hoaxers, JFK-anything-ers, vaccine deniers, QAnon, etc etc etc) invest an ENORMOUS portion of their identity on their belief system.
I.e., their belief system is very likely to be a much bigger part of who they are than your nonbelief is to you. Being “a believer of [any given X]” means far more to them than being “a skeptic about [X]” does to you.
Prove it? Okay— Truth or Dare: how much time and effort have you, yourself, personally, spent reading about, and then developing, rehearsing, and perfecting arguments to demonstrate that, scientifically, the Earth REALLY ACTUALLY IS a sphere?
(The Dare?: spend all your free time for the next 5-10 years doing so)
But True Believers DO read about their pet theories. They read about them a lot. A WHOLE LOT. They study it, devour it, memorize it. The read books about it, and blogs, and magazines (those still exists), and newsletters. And books. And books about both the belief AND about DEBATING said belief with people like YOU. They spend countless hours surrendering to, essentially, a confirmation-bias feeding-frenzy, and they do so with a ferocity the likes of which most of us mortals have probably never studied ANYTHING.
So, yeah: in days gone by, Biblical literalists/inerrantists would usually wind up eating my lunch in these online debates, for the simple reason that THEY knew the source material (the Bible) much, MUCH better than I did. Or even aspired to. They usually had heard of and anticipated my objections. They often could quote friggin’ CITATIONS.
So, unless my interlocutor, by dumb luck, just happened to be really REALLY bad at debating, I typically got my skeptical ass handed to me.
So— and here’s the punchline: sometime much later, I recalled a line of timeless Wisdom and Truth from the late, and irreplaceable, Douglas Adams… a line that seems to capture the crux of this dynamic.
For those who know the story, if memory serves, I believe this is Ford, speaking to Arthur:
“We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.”
There are two broad poles of conspiracy theorists— the theorists and the undiscerning believers— there are people like you describe who are able to array a vast range of facts on their side. They are like Richard Hostadter describes of a certain kind of paranoid writer of his day:
"The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes."
But then there are people who smoke a lot of pot and watch ancient aliens videos and believe every conspiracy theory under the sun so long as it has a certain kind of cache as forbidden knowledge. These people notably don't have facts on their side, but they can dismiss anything that counters any of their positions as being manufactured evidence.
I think there's definitely something in the fantastic, enchanting element to some kinds of conspiracies. A popular pseudohistory theory at the moment is the Tartarian empire, populated by giants with advanced technology which was supposed washed away in a mudflood. Some of its proponents see evidence of this theory in mixed stone and brick walls— and so simply taking a walk outside or looking at pictures of old buildings provides a feeling of looking into a hidden world. The sad thing is, investing time in actually learning the facts also opens up a deeper world of knowledge and mystery.
The most common leftist conspiracy theory is feminism. I believed it like all of my friends until I tried to prove it and found I couldn’t. Everyone assumes the existence of the patriarchy but never agrees on a definition… and any definition that corresponds to reality doesn’t justify an oppression narrative.
This took me a long time to realize precisely because feminism is chock full of extremely intelligent and knowledgeable women, so how could they all be wrong? They aren't stupid or ignorant, quite the contrary, they’re just not good at thinking and/or are relying on the heuristic that smarter and more knowledgeable people believe it so questioning feminism seems like a waste of time.
Yes, heuristics is key. That applies broadly to a lot of smart liberals. Ruxandra Teslo calls liberals “lazy but well-intentioned”. My personal experience confirms this too.
The problem is that many conspiracy theories (9/11 and JFK being classic examples) are obviously true, or rather, that the mainstream narratives around them are obviously false. Intelligent people who investigate them impartially overwhelmingly gravitate towards that conclusion, which, if it became established wisdom, would destroy the Western sociopolitical/epistemological order. So enormous resources are devoted to propping up the lamestream false narratives. Cass Sunstein's "cognitive infiltration of conspiracy movements" designed to "disable the purveyors of conspiracy theories" by spreading "beneficial cognitive diversity" via ridiculous theories like Flat Earth is a byproduct of that dynamic.
Like Scott, I would fall for the occasional conspiracy theory, because well, for much of the same reasons. I came out of it, but I overcorrected. I hope I've found a decent balance since, which took years, but skepticism, critical thinking, utilizing Bayesian thinking (even if I didn't know what Bayesian meant at the time), and keeping an open mind are all crucial. Why that is good was self-evident to me, but also in part because on rare occasions, the conspiracy theorists turn out to be right (or at least partly right in ways their opponents are reluctant to admit). It also helps to be humble and avoid hubris, but few people get clicks this way.
I would classify many conspiracy theorists as being very skeptical, but not very critical.
Very skeptical, in the sense that they question how an eclipse works and demand a satisfactory explanation. They also notice that the man on the street cannot provide one.
Not very critical, in the sense that they then insist that the math doesn't work out for the explanation on the NASA website on the basis that the diagram is not totally to scale.
Obviously if you plug in the actual sizes and distances of the sun and moon it all checks out, but they never take the time to actually follow the logic closely enough to realize that.
At the Dawn of the Second Age, I was engrossed in the project of shedding the mortal Christian evangelical/fundamentalist coil I had slowly suffocated in for most of my formative years.
This was an intellectual project, involving, as it did, addressing head-on the “best” (most rational/cogent) Christian apologetics I could find, and then setting myself to the task of poking holes in them.
This happened to coincide with the early Golden Age of the internet, and so naturally I found myself embroiled in a few time-intensive, and unproductive —but informative — online debates with believers. Back when that topic of debate was still a Thing.
One issue I quickly came up against was the fact that someone who was, say, a biblical literalist (“the Christian Bible is the actual word of God, AND it is literally true AND inerrant in every single detail” — I.e., it is, basically, a dictation) could not be truly be beaten in a debate.
No matter how silly Biblical literalism may sound: I can assure you, if you debate a motivated Christian literalist (or some related proxy, such as a Creationist)— you will almost certainly lose.
So for me the question became: WTF?? (—and this was LONG before “wtf” was even an abbreviation). After all, it SEEMS like this project SHOULD BE fish in a barrel, right? I mean, here — you just:
Step 1: comb the Bible for any narrative that purports to be actual, real history
Step 2: find ANOTHER account of the same event in the Bible (there are many!)
Step 3: compare the two, detail-by-detail
Step 4: note ANY discrepancy or difference, no matter how minor
(e.g., [version 1]: “…and the Dark Lord sent 14000 chariots of Uruk against the sons of David”
vs
[version 2]: “…and the Chosen of Elohim did battle with the hosts of the Dark Lord, which numbered 18000 chariots of Uruk….”)
Step 5: Revel in your glorious victory!!— you have found an error! BOTH chariot counts cannot logically be simultaneously correct! Collect your profits!
So, what happened? Why does this NOT work in practice?
The key to remember, I have come to believe, is that “True Believers” of ANY and ALL kinds (Christian Biblical literalists, 9/11 Truthers, Moon Landing Hoaxers, JFK-anything-ers, vaccine deniers, QAnon, etc etc etc) invest an ENORMOUS portion of their identity on their belief system.
I.e., their belief system is very likely to be a much bigger part of who they are than your nonbelief is to you. Being “a believer of [any given X]” means far more to them than being “a skeptic about [X]” does to you.
Prove it? Okay— Truth or Dare: how much time and effort have you, yourself, personally, spent reading about, and then developing, rehearsing, and perfecting arguments to demonstrate that, scientifically, the Earth REALLY ACTUALLY IS a sphere?
(The Dare?: spend all your free time for the next 5-10 years doing so)
But True Believers DO read about their pet theories. They read about them a lot. A WHOLE LOT. They study it, devour it, memorize it. The read books about it, and blogs, and magazines (those still exists), and newsletters. And books. And books about both the belief AND about DEBATING said belief with people like YOU. They spend countless hours surrendering to, essentially, a confirmation-bias feeding-frenzy, and they do so with a ferocity the likes of which most of us mortals have probably never studied ANYTHING.
So, yeah: in days gone by, Biblical literalists/inerrantists would usually wind up eating my lunch in these online debates, for the simple reason that THEY knew the source material (the Bible) much, MUCH better than I did. Or even aspired to. They usually had heard of and anticipated my objections. They often could quote friggin’ CITATIONS.
So, unless my interlocutor, by dumb luck, just happened to be really REALLY bad at debating, I typically got my skeptical ass handed to me.
So— and here’s the punchline: sometime much later, I recalled a line of timeless Wisdom and Truth from the late, and irreplaceable, Douglas Adams… a line that seems to capture the crux of this dynamic.
For those who know the story, if memory serves, I believe this is Ford, speaking to Arthur:
“We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.”
-Douglas Adams,
Life, the Universe and Everything
There are two broad poles of conspiracy theorists— the theorists and the undiscerning believers— there are people like you describe who are able to array a vast range of facts on their side. They are like Richard Hostadter describes of a certain kind of paranoid writer of his day:
"The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes."
But then there are people who smoke a lot of pot and watch ancient aliens videos and believe every conspiracy theory under the sun so long as it has a certain kind of cache as forbidden knowledge. These people notably don't have facts on their side, but they can dismiss anything that counters any of their positions as being manufactured evidence.
I think there's definitely something in the fantastic, enchanting element to some kinds of conspiracies. A popular pseudohistory theory at the moment is the Tartarian empire, populated by giants with advanced technology which was supposed washed away in a mudflood. Some of its proponents see evidence of this theory in mixed stone and brick walls— and so simply taking a walk outside or looking at pictures of old buildings provides a feeling of looking into a hidden world. The sad thing is, investing time in actually learning the facts also opens up a deeper world of knowledge and mystery.
The most common leftist conspiracy theory is feminism. I believed it like all of my friends until I tried to prove it and found I couldn’t. Everyone assumes the existence of the patriarchy but never agrees on a definition… and any definition that corresponds to reality doesn’t justify an oppression narrative.
This took me a long time to realize precisely because feminism is chock full of extremely intelligent and knowledgeable women, so how could they all be wrong? They aren't stupid or ignorant, quite the contrary, they’re just not good at thinking and/or are relying on the heuristic that smarter and more knowledgeable people believe it so questioning feminism seems like a waste of time.
Yes, heuristics is key. That applies broadly to a lot of smart liberals. Ruxandra Teslo calls liberals “lazy but well-intentioned”. My personal experience confirms this too.
The problem is that many conspiracy theories (9/11 and JFK being classic examples) are obviously true, or rather, that the mainstream narratives around them are obviously false. Intelligent people who investigate them impartially overwhelmingly gravitate towards that conclusion, which, if it became established wisdom, would destroy the Western sociopolitical/epistemological order. So enormous resources are devoted to propping up the lamestream false narratives. Cass Sunstein's "cognitive infiltration of conspiracy movements" designed to "disable the purveyors of conspiracy theories" by spreading "beneficial cognitive diversity" via ridiculous theories like Flat Earth is a byproduct of that dynamic.
Like Scott, I would fall for the occasional conspiracy theory, because well, for much of the same reasons. I came out of it, but I overcorrected. I hope I've found a decent balance since, which took years, but skepticism, critical thinking, utilizing Bayesian thinking (even if I didn't know what Bayesian meant at the time), and keeping an open mind are all crucial. Why that is good was self-evident to me, but also in part because on rare occasions, the conspiracy theorists turn out to be right (or at least partly right in ways their opponents are reluctant to admit). It also helps to be humble and avoid hubris, but few people get clicks this way.
Your article reminds me an old one from a German Italian blogger I read years ago: The Mountain of shit theory. What do you think about conclusions? https://mountainofshit.altervista.org/the-mountain-of-shit-theory/2023-09-09/