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[kaijyuu]

How to tell the difference between a conspiracy theory and a plausible hypothesis:

Are they assuming the conspirators are competent? If yes, it's bogus.


All real-life "conspiracies" are covering up people's incompetence and petty corruption. All the leaked data from intelligence agencies points to idiots with lots of money flailing in the dark.

[Starver]

So, only idiots spread conspiracy theories about hyper-competent coverup operations!

(Actually, that's probably true every-which-way...)

[TamerVirus]

It's like blaming the Freemasons for everything, even though the actual Freemasons have trouble deciding which bar to go to after lodge meeting

[Rolan7]

Little bit of comeuppance, at least:  Remember that "non-religious church" selling diluted bleach as an anti-Covid "miracle cure"?  After weeks (months?) of claiming the FDA and "Obama judges" had no jurisdiction over them, they finally got stopped.  Physically, with jail time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hze6Ky0cgcQ
yaaay I guess

[Bumber]

Huh, Kevin Sorbo(Hercules) is deep red conspiracist.

Maybe this isn't his world.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

DISAPPOINTED!!!

[martinuzz]

Conspiracy theorists are becoming more and more of a real threat to rationalism.  If it were up to me, I'd say it's about time that conspiracy thinking was added to the next DSM and those suffering from it need either be locked up in psych ward or put on antipsychotics. Or both.

[hector13]

Donald Trump said people should take the pandemic seriously and wear a mask and social distance and wash their hands



Only took him half a year, 4m cases and almost 150k deaths.

[Greiger]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hze6Ky0cgcQ
yaaay I guess

Oh hey Leonard French.  I should start watching him again.  He was educational.

And of COURSE it was my home state of Florida.  Why am I surprised at this point.

[dragdeler]

-

[Starver]

Donald Trump said people should take the pandemic seriously and wear a mask and social distance and wash their hand.

"Many people" are saying he sold them out/has been knobbled by the Deep State/he's doing 5he Gates's dirty work for them/etc...

Some of the more thoughtful are justifying it in a way they can ignore it:

That speech was not for us. If he doesn't pander to the sheep sometimes, he won't get reelected and then we'll be lost completely. He needs to play the game in order to stay the course for us.

That there is a special kind of Special, if even sincere (which I fear it is, at just a single reading).

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Beliefs aren't ever solid evidence of mental illness, that's not how it works. Mental illness is process-based.

For example, a person with schizophrenia may sometimes hear voices, but it is up to them if they believe those voices are real (and "real" is not as binary a question as you might think). Now sure, it's probably a positive sign of their health if they firmly believe the voices are just something malfunctioning in their mind rather than the spirits of the angry dead, but they still have schizophrenia either way, because they're hearing the voices. And even if they do believe the voices are the spirits of the dead, it doesn't necessarily mean they're worse off.

Many people not suffering a relevant mental illness believe in magic, or lizard-people, or conspiracies. And some people with mental illness probably aggressively believe that the world is boring and nothing ever happens out of good order, which itself just loops back around to being conspiratorial since the world is full of chaos. Some of the people who believe in lizard-people are ill, but you can clearly discern them from people who believe in lizard-people and are not ill through their behavior.

Nor is illness proof that a conspiracy is false. MK-Ultra's victims had a lot of mental illness that was induced by the conspiracy itself...including one Ted Kaczynski. Yet this conspiracy was real.

[Reelya]

Where the fuck did people's critical thinking skills go? Goddamnit, social media and the internet have completely neutered the average person's ability to actually use their brains.

They didn't "go" anywhere. These people never had critical thinking skills. We're basically giving everyone a megaphone now and wondering why we hear stupid shit loudly. They've always been stupid, they just didn't have megaphones before.

When I was young, i talked to a lot of friends and acquaintances who had clearly mistaken beliefs. Eventually you learn to give up on that. When 90% of people you meet express identical misinformation, what are you going to do? And this was before the internet.

[martinuzz]

(sober)
I actually will not believe that you truely believe what you just said, thus concluding I'm venting back at vents, I should probably go look at a treeline for a week or something I'm very irritable.

Indeed I don't actually believe that medicalizing it is the right solution.  I do however mean it when I say that conspiricy theories are becoming a real threat to rationalism.
I wish I had a solution for the exponential growth of misinformation. 

Sadly, and luckily we cannot undo the internet. 

What we can do is educate our children about the dangers of misinformation, and teach them about rationalism and empiricism before they lay eggs.
Re-educating those that are already far down the rabbit hole and that have already dug their heels in the sand, now that's hard.


EDIT:  however, when people start believing in conspiracies that are actually harmful to other people around them, like saying that Covid is a hoax, or a jewish conspiracy... That needs to be dealt with, but I don't know if that should be handled by the justice system or by the psychiatric care system (not nescessarily with pills, think more like how there are programs to deprogram cult/sect victims).
What is more humane? Criminalization or medicalization?

[ZBridges]

I think it is better to assign legal consequences to behaviors rather than beliefs.  It would be quite invasive for a nation to imprison you because you have an incorrect understanding of reality, especially if you are otherwise a law-abiding citizen.

[Starver]

"Free the P=NP one!"