The author's explanation of why people are vulnerable is certainly abstract and post-modernist. Your explanation of why people get locked into conspiracies, th

The author's explanation of why people are vulnerable is certainly abstract and post-modernist. Your explanation of why people get locked into conspiracies, though, is missing desire. People want there to be a masquerade. You've (potentially) explained why some people don't have the skills to avoid tricking themselves. The question of why we willingly fool ourselves is very deep. I think post-modern theory needlessly multiplies entities but there is something to be examined here. It's in the same realm as gambling, unfocused fan-fiction, soap operas and Dragonball Z. Some people really like it when something very unlikely happens. One of the things that motivates them is this feeling that there really must be something "more" than what we see or know and another thing that drives them is the feeling of vindication when they turn out to have been right. Imagine being so hooked on the feeling of being right whene everybody else is wrong that you will believe a hundred unlikely things for every likely thing you accept. "There's just gotta be something else... something we've got wrong. There just has to be. Look at Galileo! Look at Columbus!" Ridiculous legends of men who were right against all opposition. Each ridiculous idea they believe is like another bill fed into a penny-slot machine. The more unlikely the idea the better. This gambling dynamic is why flat-earth has come back. It's the most ridiculous bet on a dark horse that can possibly be imagined. Literally billions of devices around us operate on the basis of a spherical globe surrounded by satellites. It is one of the most proven and believed models that has ever existed in the human span. If it were wrong, and a flat-earther were one of the few people who had seen the truth? Winning the actual state lottery couldn't compare to the high such a person would get from that. For the rest of life, any argument would be answered "yeah, maybe, but I knew the earth was flat back when everybody was a round-earther." But it takes the internet and selection algorithms to produce an alternate universe in which even the most credulous crackpot can defend flat-earthing with a straight face. So when I look at your solution (teach critical thinking) I mostly agree with it as an immunization against this tendency, but I wonder how well trained people have to be for it to hold against selection. If I were suddenly in a world where Google was actively censoring my feeds, how long would it be before I believed some screwed-up stuff? I have a friend who is brilliant, trained in law and science and philosophy, who watches Fox news and believe the President is really turning a corner and taking the country in the right direction. Before the election he believed Trump was an unmitigated and incompetent ass... back when that was what Fox was saying. I'm not sure we can educate people enough to overcome the desire to choose a satisfying falsehood.