> BUT - the human brain sees "enough" activity in the forum/web page to trigger an internal "critical mass" threshold, this creates "social proof" and the belie

> BUT - the human brain sees "enough" activity in the forum/web page to trigger an internal "critical mass" threshold, this creates "social proof" and the belief gets solidified. I think you're pointing out some important but extremely easy to overlook things here. How many newspaper articles, blog posts, and twitter/forum discussions have we had in the last two years about fake news and conspiracy theories, typically written in confident but grave tones? But of the people writing these things, how many of them really know what they're talking about? What is the source of their knowledge? What is the underlying source of the claims Jacques is making in the article we're discussing? How many of the people opining on such subjects actually spend any serious time within the communities they're reporting on? If the topic/culture was something other than the behaviour of conspiracy theorists (say, African Americans), do you think it would have any effect on how the information would be received by readers? In that case, I suspect a lot of people might fairly quickly wonder if the author actually happens to know as much as they claim, and I think it would be fairly easy to find plenty of anecdotal conversations on the internet to substantiate that prediction. The human brain "sees" all sorts of things. It can produce an instantaneous answer to most any question you ask it, whether or not it actually has much actual concrete data to work with. There are a variety of ways to control this default functionality, the major progress we've made with decreasing racial stereotyping in the last several decades is a good example. But that took a lot of coordinated messaging, education, and peer pressure, for a very long time. Despite that, we're still rather far from declaring mission accomplished. And that is just one topic - how many others do we have in this same category? I doubt we'll make much progress on these issues, especially now with the brutal efficiency of mass communication we've released into society (with hardly a second thought), until we can finally realize what the root of the problem is: the human mind. And it's not just "those other people" whose minds are flawed, the problem is with the base hardware and software itself - it's just easier to notice in some people than others, especially when it's constantly in the news.