I believe I've had some success with ridiculizing conspiracy theorists and displaying outrage, but only among people who already respect me as a peer and with w

I believe I've had some success with ridiculizing conspiracy theorists and displaying outrage, but only among people who already respect me as a peer and with whom I've had long and fruitful conversations about other topics before. Also, these people were supposedly trained in critical thinking, which might have helped a bit. With strangers, this is almost impossible. Most conspiracy theories are designed to be hard to debunk, and people who believe them are unable to distinguish good testimony from bad testimony when direct evidence is not available. You end up fighting about the credentials of experts, and although it's in reality very easy to distinguish real experts from fake experts or real experts with fringe opinions, in the end all testimony will have become somewhat doubtful to the conspiracy theorist after a long discussion, which in turn makes them fall back to their default position rather than at least turning agnostic. As for conspiracy theories, in my experience almost all genuine conspiracy theories fail with explaining the motives. Like in good detective story, if there is something fishy with the motive or explaining it requires complicated and unsubstantiated background stories, then that's probably because there is something wrong with the explanation in the first place.