That's the point. They were always "crackpots". You need to be a crackpot to generate ideas that people aren't generating, otherwise everyone would generate them. This means you'll generate wrong ideas, but it also means you'll generate right ideas that people think are wrong.

>I definitely agree that conspiracy theorists reject authority and are contrarian, but most don't strike me as curious except for a superficial level.

They are definitely more curious than most people, as evidenced by the fact that they were attracted to the conspiracy theory in the first place. It's also not uncommon for an intelligent conspiracy theorist to be able to outargue a conventional person on a subject they care about, i.e. the Earth being flat or not.

>As for the list of things those people may or may not enjoy, the sheer amount of things polled and the small sample size give me doubts.

I think this field is pretty well established and this paper in particular is well cited, so among peers it doesn't seem to be contentious.

Conspiracy theorists are people who are obsessed with the "truth", so your observation supports the statement.

Being a conspiracy theorist isn't self serving, the only reason to be one is that you care so much about the truth to ostracize yourself. When such people have a well calibrated mind we call them geniuses, but most people get things wrong here and there and then they become conspiracy theoriests since they chase stupid theories.

That seems like a truly bizarre statement, how would that make sense? Some people would embrace ideas they would not believe in, to further the public's perception that there is an ongoing conspiracy? That seems perfectly lunatic. Wouldn't it make more sense for them to try to tie in that the conspiracy peddlers are incentivized to push completely insane theories in order to cover for other, true, conspiracy theories (e.g. the NSA's surveillance pre-Snowden leak).

Some have mental issues, that is a given, but that is not generally seen as a valid way to discredit or validate a theory (e.g. cleaning OCD is not seen as proof that hygiene is bad).

IIUC you're saying that those traits explain why many conspiracy theorists fall into that camp.

I don't like leaning on ancedata, but I think I've seen persons like that in every ideological camp I've encountered. So I'm a bit skeptical that it's strongly correlated with being a conspiracy theorist.

Internally consistent with uncertain if not delusional beliefs. This isn't insurmountable for all people, but I believe it is possible for a much larger proportion of the general public than is currently the case, with the right sort of education (logic, epistemology) of course.

> if you're willing to believe that every astronaut, airline pilot, and everyone else in a position to verify the curvature of the earth is in on it

Among many other things. This is a prime example of unnecessarily delusional thinking, I would say in part because the only place unrestricted group thinking actually takes place is within the conspiracy sphere, which is likely vastly over-represented by delusional people.

> to me the unreasonable premises are what make a theory have the "tinfoil" quality

To you, a poster on HN and therefore most likely a highly logical person. But can the same be said of the general public, who rarely exercise their logical capabilities, and whose mental model of reality is largely shaped by what they consume in mass media? And, is your assessment based on the ridiculous and often (but not always) misrepresented conspiracy theories that float into the mainstream, or is it based on a significant history of immersion in the culture? The difference matters.

> the idea that there's an international ring of powerful child sex traffickers is plausible; the idea that a specific person is involved is not as plausible until you have more evidence than a bunch of emails about pizza.

Might "a bunch of emails about pizza" be a good example of a conspiracy theory that was misrepresented?

Do you have any theories why there's so little media interest and outrage/suspicion in the general public about the Epstein affair, particularly considering there's plentiful evidence that protecting children, particularly when it comes to sexual matters, seems so effective at inflaming public emotions? And yet, when a case arises where there's plenty of smoke (although, very little of it that actually made it onto TV, which seems odd in itself), the result is little more than a collective yawn.

I think this situation is very interesting on many different levels.

Quiet a few of the misinformed are HN commenters.

Generally, the pattern appears to be "Foo is complex. Conspiracy theorist asserts there is a conspiracy making Foo complex. We cannot trust the mainstream experts because they are lying. Gishgallop with endless bad faith questions which take an enormous amount of time to answer properly but ultimately do not convince the question asker".

The general takeaway, for me at least, is that even the most intelligent person can be sucked into crackpot conspiracy. The problem is "I'm an expert in this field, this means I'm smarter than most" and then thinking that intelligence in one area grants you insights into others.

The worst part is conspiracies like to hide under the motto of "I'm just being a good skeptic". However, a good skeptic needs to actually dig deeper than just surface level assertions. A good skeptic needs to look into the counter claims to their conspiracy. What are the sources? Do the actually point to data or are they just naked assertions? Do the sources reference only other conspiracy websites? Do they have references? If this claim is actually true, why is it rejected by the mainstream? Who is actually benefiting from hiding the truth?

This issue is something that seems odd to me. Why are blatantly ridiculous theories lumped in with things that have some possibility of truth under one big 'conspiracy theory' label? Things like flat earth and lizard people are so obviously ridiculous yet the media seems to treat theories like that the same as theories that question government or corporate motives or other such things as equivalent.

No. That's a huge stretch, if not an outright strawman. There's equal textual support for the more charitable interpretation that many people aren't getting enough of these positive feelings in less Manichaean or conflict-inducing ways. Even as they accept the importance and legitimacy of climate change (for example) they don't get excited by participating in activism on that issue. Conspiracy theories are a way to jump-start those feelings, and often the discomfiture of others is part of the appeal. It enhances the rush. A healthier mind seeks out meaningful engagement without turning it into combat.

> All ideologies are conspiracy theories > ... > the only thing that makes one more meaningful than another is their falsifiability and predictive power

Perhaps you're unaware of the fact that, according to people who actually study these things, non-falsifiability is one of the defining characteristics of a conspiracy theory. So no, not all beliefs are conspiracy theories. "If you disagree you must be part of the conspiracy" is a well known trope, even among comedians. Which brings us to...

> I'd argue that calling people conspiracy theorists is the most reliable indicator that someone has been fully atomized.

So they simultaneously hold delusions and reality-close beliefs/thoughts etc, as is common, but you describe them as conspiracy believing nutjobs. What I construe the article as saying is that we ascribe a negative tint to delusions, rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt that there is a meaningful reason that they have this belief and not just that they're nutjobs, it could be evolutionarily advantageous or cognitively economical or just the best explanation at hand in a short time-frame for their unique life-experience. What I mean is, since you're calling them nutjobs you're agreeing that calling beliefs delusional is not a neutral description. But I also get that you mean that they still have the capacity to produce and share knowledge, with the multidimensional example of some nonrigorous beliefs and some more reality-grounded beliefs or skills.

Vetting others beliefs is great, especially from crowds and people with authority.

Who knows if you're rational by saying those with least agency are those who care more about truth than clout, but I found this article inspiring because of the hopeful message of influencing reality, for example with the optimism-bias example, and so to try it out, maybe try challenging your belief that crowds are unconvinced by articles and that truth pursuers have less agency. Good journalism, if you can find it, does exist and meets these beliefs head-on. I admit that it could go the other way, your life experience could give you excellent reasons to have these beliefs and they could serve you well, but I don't have the lens to see it immediately.

I've had my fair share of delusions that turned out to be long term positive, because the world is complex and our minds small, if we push far enough we will discover more elaborate reasonings for good hunches that epistemologically initially were on unsure foundation.

We do know what happens with conspiracies, and it is our neurological processes and societal processes getting stuck in just the right way.

Take 2 forces -

1) Human brains are pattern recognition machines

2) A particular person always goes against the grain

With these two forces alone, this person will always orient their pattern interpretations against what is held by the "majority".

None of these things are bad, they are quite useful to the majority when someone tells them that tulip mania (for example) is irrational.

A book that I keep thinking about years after I read it, is Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_Explained).

While the topic is religion, its more an examination of beliefs, superstition and cultural norms through the lens of anthropology, evolutionary pscy, and other cognitivie theories.

Relevant to our discussion is it highlights how often brains encode information in odd ways, to increase recall, or just as a quirk of our mental wet ware.

A common example in cultures around the world are objects of a category, say Mountains/ancestors, that have an aberration or trait of another category (Eat people/are incorporeal)

Our brains fill in the necessary blanks - no one worries about the structure of the mountains digestive tract, or why ancestor spirits seem to be so human or don't dissipate in the wind/randomly follow movement rules for corporeal people.

The same applies for conspiracies. Somehow when people discuss conspiracies, the agencies involved have super human coordination, error checking, wealth and power.

I find there's an over-obsession with logic in some discussions too; as in, ancient-greek-style modus ponens stuff. To me, that's not particularly interesting when it comes to the real world[1]; after all, logically-speaking we could just be a brain in a jar, or whatever.

An argument being "logical" (as in, not self-contradicting) is not enough to make it credible; it's just a very low bar, which lets us dismiss the most nonsensical claims quickly. Arguments which cross the "logical" bar should also align with empirical evidence, have a likelihood that's at least comparable to alternative explanations, etc.

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I don't think "conspiracy theory" has quite become a thought-terminating cliche yet. It can usefully describe a common failure-mode in thinking.

In particular, conspiracy theories become less and less likely as they're inspected closer and closer; e.g. requiring even more people to be "in on it" (making it less likely to be kept secret), requiring ever-more elaborate epicycles to explain-away observations/experiments/events, etc. They can't be disproved, but who cares? That's not a good enough reason, on its own, to affect anything.

Another legitimate use of the phrase "conspiracy theory" is a particular case of "affirming the consequent" (i.e. getting implications the wrong way around). For example "if X is true, Y would make so much sense", where X is the "conspiracy" and Y is some well-known/self-evident fact about the world. This might be true, but the mistake is to treat Y as proof of X: this would give us "if X is true, Y would make so much sense, so X is true", which is an elaborate way of saying 'if X is true, X is true'. Here Y isn't actually proof of anything, it's just a distraction.[2]

[1] In artificial contexts, like mathematics and programming, I find logic to be fascinating and rich; e.g. I spent a lot of time studying topics like type theory and co-induction at grad school!

[2] The "logical fallacy" here is assuming (X -> Y) -> (Y -> X)

PS: From a bayesian perspective, 'if X were true, Y would make so much sense' is evidence for X. It's not proof, but it makes X more likely (essentially by ruling-out the potential for Y to disprove X). However, (a) the change in likelihood depends on the prior probability, if X were wildly unlikely then such weak, indirect evidence cannot make up for that; and (b) this sort of nuance of probabilities is negligible compared to the wild chains of "logic" spewed by the conspiracy theorists I know.

Is there not such a thing as conspiracy fact? Aren't some conspiracies, in fact, real? It seems both sides of the political aisle have pet conspiracy theories these days, so it's really hard for this to hold water anymore.

> people who don't understand facts

As another commenter said, people will usually agree on the clear and present facts, e.g., Donald Trump won the presidency. Where you'll find more disagreement is on rationale: either he won because he gave a voice to the discontented American working class, or he won because he worked in cahoots with Vladimir Putin to subvert American democracy.

People don't refuse to acknowledge the obvious state of affairs. They have different interpretations, based on different values and credibility heuristics, of the likely impetus for that state of affairs.

>people who are highly opinionated about things they don't understand, etc.

aka virtually everyone. How many of us know enough to hold our own with the experts in something that we're "highly opinionated" on? If we can in anything, it's very narrow. Are all of our other opinions invalid now? Humans use credibility heuristics to try to determine who is right about something, and then they follow based on that.

> are not behaving logically

I dunno, it sounds logical to me, at least in the practical sense. If we pretend we live in a world of infinite resources and time, you might be right, but considering the constraints of reality, the logical approach seems to be to have and express opinions in the moment according to one's best judgment, since everyone else is going to be doing that too. Just gotta try not to be too haughty about it.

> They can have valid concerns and still be behaving irrationally. You clearly think these are mutually exclusive but they aren't.

I agree someone can have a valid concern and also behave irrationally. I don't agree this is what you started out saying, though.

>Appreciate the multiple snide attacks, though.

No offense intended. Edit deadline is passed, but I wasn't thinking I put any such things in. My apologies if you felt I was being condescending or passive-aggressive.

I'm sure we could collect as many theories about conspiracy freaks as there are conspiracy freaks, on the ground that most of psychology is speculation.

> Indeed, evidence to the contrary is not sufficient to disprove these theories.

That's one of the attractions of conspiracy theories -- most of them can't be conclusively disproven, because most require proof of a negative, which is an impossible evidentiary burden, for reasons given here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russells_teapot

Conspiracy theorists and crackpots have a lot in common. One thing they share is the idea that, unless their critics can disprove their beliefs, the beliefs must have merit. In other words, they hold the opposite of the null hypothesis (the idea that an idea with no evidence is probably false) -- they also unfairly shift onto others their own burden of evidence.

> The funny thing is these people are otherwise quite intelligent and capable of rational thought.

Intelligence is no assurance of reasonable thought processes. For that, one must understand logic and certain scientific principles, like accepting the burden of evidence for one's own ideas, and being willing to sincerely doubt one's own conclusions. I have always suspected that conspiracy theorists (and crackpots) never learned the basics of evidence and research.

I am fairly sure that like a lot of the current fever around conspiracy theories, the vast majority of people are doing it simply to wind people up - and it seems to be super effective. It's a new counter-culture.

When it comes to the vocal conspiracy theorists you see online, I think they really get a kick out of believing that they're just smarter than everyone else. "Everyone else" being the 99% of the population who they label as "sheep" because they agree with science or facts that are "too obvious."

The other spectrum of conspiracy theorists however, may just really want to believe in their fantasy world.

You know it was once a conspiracy theory to say the Earth wasn't flat. And it was once considered blasphemy to say putting leeches on your body didn't help an illness.

There's a reason why the term "conspiracy theory" is thrown around by the media so much...it's because they know a certain subset of people have been socially conditioned to bypass critical thinking if the term has any association with the underlying topic.

How is questioning and discussing things worse than blindly believing what you're told? Even when what you're told has no backing by science or logic when compared to the associated "conspiracy theory"? (for example, covid began by someone eating a bat-burger vs. the "conspiracy theory" that the Wuhan lab, with public documents showing funding signed off by Fauci, was experimenting with super-viruses, and one of the workers in close proximity caught the virus.) I'll never understand this.

More educated people are less likely to do that. Also people who have no financial incentives to propagate such falsehoods are less likely to propagate it.

Flat earther movement is a good example. Some members made a business out of it to advance their personal goals. Like the guy that launched himself in a rocket to "check if earth is flat", but actually just liked lunching himself in rockets and similar things (had history of that), and claimed to believe in flat earth so that gullible people pay his bill.

We can't resign ourselves to defeatism and think that nothing can be done because people are stupid and ideas are toxic. Yes, some people are stupider and some ideas are more toxic then others but we shouldn't let that cloud the simple fact that we allow to exist the multitude of positive force feedbacks that promote more toxic ideas and more stupid people. We should work on those things first.

> I wondered if it'd be possible to make a honeypot website ...

Yes. We should forcibly mix those dumb ideas with solid education on the subject. Confront the two. Debunk one with the other in-place. At many different levels of complexity to reach as many people as possible.

You want to post you antivaxxer theories on facebook? Sure but your readers will get solid science next to it by courtesy of Facebook algorithm instead of ads and crap similar to yours.

A similar heuristic is someone who gets robbed at gunpoint by a black person, and then claims that all black people are violent. It's interesting how society seemed to be able to not only get over that popular form of stereotype (which is indeed not identical, but is also similar), but now largely abhors it, yet the very idea that not all "conspiracy theories/theorists" are identically flawed is considered (with no supporting evidence whatsoever) impossible.

> You can’t be theoretical in conspiracies. You can either prove it (or at least know facts others don’t) or you are crazy.

Is this a theory/opinion, or a fact? If it's a fact, can you provide some supporting evidence &/or reasoning?

I mean, I can certainly agree that this very much seems to be all that most people are currently capable of, but to say that humans are not capable of it at all, but they are capable of conceptualizing theories in virtually all other fields, seems rather odd.

Can you think of any reasons why people's conceptualization of conspiracy theories/theorists is so unlike virtually every other idea? Why is it that otherwise logical people are unable to exercise logic when the topic arises, but instead revert to almost purely heuristic reasoning, often accompanied by an inability to realize that is what they're doing? Surely there must be some underlying cause behind this mysterious anomaly, no?

To some degree, of both "frequency of escape" and "magnitude of harm", both of which are valid variables to be considered within the aggregate of all(!) variables related to conspiracy theories (of which these are but two, contrary to popular consensus).

> A racist conspiracy theory that posited, contrary to all evidence, that our previous president was born in another country, combined with some conspiracy theories popular among "the Tea Party movement" as they were known, propelled our current president into office, where the theories have snowballed and escalated into shots fired in a pizza parlor, protesters murdered by car, protestors murdered by gun, illegal voter intimidation, and a significant chunk of the population not quite ruling out the possibility that a huge chunk of elected officials and others are part of a cabal of devil-worshipping pederasts who drink the blood of children.

This is an interesting sentence, and certainly a popular story. The interesting part is that it uses epistemology as a tool for dismissal ("contrary to all evidence"), but then proceeds to assert several other complex ideas that involve coordinated behavior between multiple people (there's a word for this sort of thing: conspiracy theory), and does so with no concern whatsoever for whether evidence actually (and entirely) supports it.

> There are people on this page, right here at HN, stating misleading nonsense tangentially related to QAnon. The spread of this stuff is pervasive already.

There are various forms of misleading nonsense on this page. For example, numerous people asserting that QAnon, and conspiracy theories (conspiracy theorists) in general, "are" or "believe" certain things. If one pays close attention to these threads every time they appear on HN (or elsewhere, be it social media or formal media), one may notice that the asserted descriptions are always very vague, and always only include the very worst/silliest of ideas that exist within the communities - very often, ideas that really don't have high consensus agreement in the actual communities themselves. And again, with no with no concern whatsoever for whether the assertions are actually true.

The same talking points can be observed in every thread on these subjects, but one talking point you will rarely make an appearance: what is actually true? What is the actual(!) truth of what is discussed/believed among actual conspiracy theorists, as well as what is the actual(!) truth of of each discrete idea (and the sub-ideas within each)?

It is very concerning to me how easily such a powerful subconscious heuristic can be mass installed into the minds of the populace, even those of the relatively competent critical thinkers here on HN. This heuristic is roughly:

if [an idea has been labelled a Conspiracy Theory], then therefore [the epistemic status is FALSE]

How often does the output of this heuristic make an appearance (as a rhetorical, unchallenged axiom) in this thread (and in all others)? I would say: extremely frequently.

How often does the fundamentally more important heuristic make an appearance: what is actually true, at a discrete level? I would say (as an understatement): rarely.

If truth and rationality is truly on the side of the "anti-conspiracy" side of the divide, you'd think it would be child's play to "destroy conspiracy theorists with facts and logic". And yet, what accompanies the heuristic seems to be an inoculation to any epistemic challenges: circling of the wagons, typically via insubstantial/rhetorical dismissals (ad hominen character attacks), appeals to ends justifying the means, or simply downvoting + silence.

Please pay attention to what is really going on in your countries, and in your media. I do not ask that you believe anything specific, but only that you always ask: what is the actual truth? And also, when forming your worldview, do not consider only what you see (or are told, often without any actual evidence), but also what you do not see.

Pay attention to what portions of reality are freely discussed in the media (and in turn on social media), and the manner in which they are discussed (watch out for framing via a small set of perspectives that are not inclusive of all details). Observe the nature of the ideas being asserted (are they specific, and supported by logic and evidence, or vague conspiratorial slurs?). Compare specific claims (like "X's believe/say Y") to what is actual reality - which requires going and seeing for yourself. It is regularly recommended that climate change "deniers" "educate themselves on the facts" - be careful that you are not holding them to a standard that you are unwilling to meet (or even acknowledge) yourself.