11 ms·

I've engaged a few flat earthers to actually listen to their arguments and show them my own evidence that it's real (locating amateur radio satellites using dat

I've engaged a few flat earthers to actually listen to their arguments and show them my own evidence that it's real (locating amateur radio satellites using data shared by people around the globe and demonstrating the doppler effect on them). The response strikes me as being indicative of mental illness. And I don't mean that as an insult - I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis. Don't know if mental illness is going up or down - our understanding and perception of it has changed so there's hardly reliable data on it. I'd have to go through a similar thought process as this article. But I think it's a factor, beyond "new media". I suspect that the toxic politics in the US is a similar phenomenon, the way people are controlled by confirmation bias and can twist their way into believing "my guy good, other guy bad" under almost any circumstances.

tunnuz 6y ago
Also vanity. There is something really comforting into thinking that YOU have it all figured out and know the truth and you’re smarter than everyone else around you. And if someone proves you wrong, well then you have to face the hard reality that maybe you’re not that smart. And that’s hard to accept.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pier25 6y ago
Generally speaking, humans have always been (and will always be) irrational. Even the most rational among us make plenty of irrational decisions or have contradictory beliefs. We've replaced religion and witches with aliens, new age beliefs, flat Earth, reptile conspiracies, etc. I don't think it was that different a couple of centuries ago. I read in the book Supersense by the neuroscientist Robert Hood [1] that in a study that is repeated every year for the past decades, the percentage of people having irrational beliefs has remained constant. I don't remember the exact percentage but it was rather high. Something like 75%. [1] https://www.amazon.com/SuperSense-Developing-Creates-Supernatural-Beliefs-ebook/dp/B00245A4XW/ https://www.amazon.com/SuperSense-Developing-Creates-Superna...
- pdonis 6y ago
  > We've replaced religion and witches with aliens, new age beliefs, flat Earth, reptile conspiracies, etc. I think you are understating the problem. Aliens, new age beliefs, flat Earth, reptile conspiracies, etc. are fringe beliefs in our current society, and are recognized to be fringe beliefs. Religion and belief in witches, in the societies you are referring to that had those beliefs, were not fringe beliefs; they were mainstream. The people who were believed to be on the fringe in those societies--the people who were viewed in those societies the way we today view, say, flat Earthers--were people who did not believe in the mainstream religion and all of its claims. For example, in Salem, Massachusetts in 1695, people who said witches did not exist were the ones who were believed to be on the fringe. So the problem is not that individual people can have fringe beliefs. The problem is that an entire society of people, minus a few outliers, can have, and act on, beliefs that are later shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, to be not just wrong, but delusional. So the question we should all be asking ourselves is not, what is wrong with today's flat Earthers, but which of the mainstream beliefs we have today will end up being like the belief in witches in 1695?
  - pier25 6y ago
    > For example, in Salem, Massachusetts in 1695, people who said witches did not exist were the ones who were believed to be on the fringe. Indeed, but those people were highly religious Puritans that emigrated to the New World because they were prosecuted in England. https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/puritanism https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/puritanism When you put those kind of people in isolation and a high stress situation you get those kinds of behaviors. > So the question we should all be asking ourselves is not, what is wrong with today's flat Earthers, but which of the mainstream beliefs we have today will end up being like the belief in witches in 1695? Totally agree. For example, climate change denial.
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > When you put those kind of people in isolation and a high stress situation you get those kinds of behaviors. The Puritans were by no means the only people of that time who had mainstream beliefs that we now consider delusional. You'd be hard pressed to find any significant body of people of that time who didn't. > For example, climate change denial. I would also say, climate change alarmism. Which, if you are inclined to disagree (you might not be, I don't know, but I suspect at least some people reading this will be), illustrates another aspect of the problem: it's hard to improve mainstream beliefs when there is not general agreement over how to improve them--which new beliefs should take the place of the ones that are claimed to be wrong.
throw18376 6y ago
it is generally agreed that the modern environment can cause people to have depressive symptoms, and that in most cases these will never progress to full clinical depression. seems at least worth considering that the same is possible with psychotic symptoms. i think some conspiracy theorists might just have a kind of low grade mania or psychosis. not enough to stop them from functioning, but enough to make them see patterns that aren't there and have a hard time thinking logically about certain topics. this would also explain why many conspiracy theories nowadays no longer even pretend to be rational. With JFK or the moon landing, they would at least try to present evidence and make arguments, however distorted. But if you talk to a QAnon believer or many flat earth people, their arguments do not even have internal coherence -- it's just free association. All this being said, I think there should be a strong norm against trying to diagnose specific individuals with mental illness over the internet. But it's hard for me not to contemplate this as a possible explanation.
mynameishere 6y ago
I've engaged a few flat earthers... Let me rephrase that for you: "I've been trolled by a few of the world's most obvious trolls..." Really, man. The internet has been around. We've been around the internet. There's this kind of stupidity that's almost...meta stupidity, you know? Like, do you really not realize the flat earthers are putting one on? Maybe you're putting one on right now...because, how can you seriously be that naive?
- mistermann 6y ago
  Isn't it wonderful? :) Although, sometimes the irony seems just a bit too rich to be true...perhaps a Matryoshka troll?
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  I really wish that you were right, but you should consider the possibility that it's you who is being naive. I've met a real-life flat-earther (a relative of mine, actually) who definitely was not trolling. From sufficient distance flat earth beliefs are not really that different from anti-vax. Both employ the same questioning of conventional science and fall back on plausible-sounding but discredited theories. Yet, I don't think anyone would call anti-vax a troll movement. There's also a political dimension to these movements that should not be overlooked. If you have time, I highly recommend this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
- jcranmer 6y ago
  I'm not going to deny that trolls are definitely involved in Flat Earth, but I suspect that most of the adherents actually truly believe in it. The key thing to realize is that modern Flat Earth isn't just about Flat Earth; it's basically a (very heavily) syncretized modern Gnosticism. By that I mean that it combines several beliefs: * Absolute dualistic cosmology: there is an Absolute Good and Absolute Evil locked in a titanic struggle in which humans are the pieces. The forces of Absolute Evil are expending every effort to knock us off the narrow path to Absolute Good. * Gnostic notions of revelation: the path to salvation is mostly, if not entirely, dependent on the knowledge of the revealed truth of the universe. Acquiring this knowledge is difficult, and (following the above point) the forces of Absolute Evil are trying their best to prevent you from gaining it. But fortunately, those who have come before us can help us in the acquisition of knowledge. * Evangelism: once you acquire the knowledge, you must (as a good person should!) turn around and save as many people as you can by educating them on the revealed truths of the universe. And if they look at you like you're a rambling lunatic or try to "fix" your knowledge, then clearly they must be agents of Absolute Evil trying to drag you down with them. * The actual cosmology: [insert a mishmash of the cosmology [1] of several disparate religions here] and the Earth is actually flat. These kinds of belief systems, with a variety of substitutions for the last bullet point, have been around for millennia. Flat Earth isn't even the first such system in my short Millennial lifetime. The actual beliefs of these systems are less important than the fact that you have the revealed knowledge, which is also why people seem to be able to move very quickly from one system to another (as Flat Earthers basically all jumped ship to Qanon). [1] One of the things to draw attention to, from what I can tell, is that these sorts of beliefs tend to extract only the cosmological and supernatural beliefs from religion and ignore the moralist beliefs.
curiousllama 6y ago
It's interesting to me that you categorize irrationality with mental illness. I feel wuite the opposite. people make decisions based on many factors: logic, yes, but also past experience, common heuristics, mood, and situational context. A lot of what education is supposed to do is shape your instincts towards what is productive: there's no particular reason that reading history in my spare time should _feel_ productive, but it does. That feeling was shaped by my education. We've all been trained to think of arguments as logic. They're not; they're a conflict of mindsets, fully fleshed out states of being. Arguments are a facades on beliefs - states of being. That's not an illness; that's being human.
cactus2093 6y ago
I always assumed the flat earth thing was more of a troll/protest than a genuine belief, basically people just want to assert that "you can't force me to believe a certain thing". Even if in this case that certain thing is in the class of completely irrefutable facts, it doesn't really matter because they're just asserting their power to disagree. Like a toddler that gets in a mood where they just say "no" to everything. Trying to reason with that type of response is useless and it's also beside the point, the point is that they just want to exercise their free will. And they also probably are enjoying that it is frustrating other people. A mental illness framing is kind of interesting though, I've never really thought about it like that. It implies that it could be treatable, which I'm not really sure is true. Can you "treat" a troll?
qsort 6y ago
I don't mean to attack you, but I don't think you are approaching this the right way. There are exactly zero people who believe the earth is flat. Some join conspiracy groups because they are social outcasts who enjoy being part of a tight-knit group, while for the most part they are being isolated and rejected (sometimes, admittedly, because of faults of their own, unrelated to being flat-earthers). They aren't insane, they are desperately lonely.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > There are exactly zero people who believe the earth is flat. I don't think this is true. At any rate, if it is true, there are certainly a significant number of people who are giving an extraordinarily convincing imitation of believing that the Earth is flat. So convincing that it's hard not to allocate at least some probability to the hypothesis that they actually believe what they say they believe and aren't giving an imitation at all.
  - qsort 6y ago
    > I don't think this is true. At any rate, if it is true I'd be more inclined to follow this line of thought if this was about anything else. "The earth is flat" is not a claim that's false upon closer inspection of the available data, it's a claim that's prima facie false, it's in the same category of "the moon is made of cheese" rather than "we didn't land on the moon".
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > "The earth is flat" is not a claim that's false upon closer inspection of the available data, it's a claim that's prima facie false No, it isn't. We view the claim as absurd today only because we have the benefit of millennia of collection of evidence and arguments and theory that has established "the earth is round" beyond a reasonable doubt. But for a person who either does not have access to all that evidence and arguments and theory, or who simply refuses to believe them (and, as someone else upthread noted, it can be a valid heuristic strategy for some people to refuse to believe claims by other people that they can't understand for themselves, in order to avoid being taken advantage of), the claim that the earth is flat is not absurd, which means it's not prima facie false.
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
> I've engaged a few flat earthers to actually listen to their arguments I found the best thing to do is stop there. Just listen, observe, try to understand. Be patient. Unless someone comes to you asking a question, you're unlikely to change anyone's mind immediately, and even if they are asking opinions often change slowly if at all. When we tell people they're wrong, we push them away a little, and our sphere of influence diminishes.
seppin 6y ago
> I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis. The way i've heard it explained that makes the most sense to me: "people are convinced (rightly) that there is something wrong with our world and society, they just don't know what it is. Conspiracies provide answers and a framework to accommodate that feeling." The opposite of knowledge isn't no knowledge, it's bad knowledge. The creation of a parallel reality is not so unreasonable response to nothing nothing about our current reality. We all need something to hold on to.
olladecarne 6y ago
I think if you look at the brain as a neural network then it's easy to see how this happens. Not everyone is born to educated parents and receives high quality education. If a lot of the information your brain received growing up was bad, then you can easily reach bad conclusions. The collapse of institutions makes it worse because now no one trusts anything. So to many the information on the internet is as valid as the information in the textbooks. Then if you keep feeding the brain bad information it starts generating bad information. Lately I've been thinking of information as a "substance" that has been diluted by the internet. So the whole "organize and make all information easily accessible" motto of big G and the web in general has had the consequence of diluting the concentration of good information.
- randcraw 6y ago
  Yeah, I think our schools have long done US students a disservice in underemphasizing “information quality” — how to deal with incomplete, ambiguous, questionable, and bad info. A very large fraction of tests in school reinforce that every question has only one right answer. The notion of minimizing error is seldom even imagined. Instead it's taught that all learning must seek only one goal: “knowing the one and only truth”. Yet all too often, competing facts are not mutually exclusive and can change with time. And don't get me started on the poor coverage of concepts like “necessary” and “sufficient” in judging evidence in support of an assertion or model. After working in science for the past 15 years (drug development), I've come to appreciate how little in medicine we know in absolute terms. With any system as complex as the human body, generally the best you can hope for is to be less wrong.
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    Aristotle’s Physics is a good example how common sense ridiculed in our society while it > is to be properly understood as the physics of objects immersed in a fluid, air or water [1] Kindergarten children can engage in physics, construct their theories. And only much later learn that space bodies move differently and how that knowledge can be applied to the world around us. Trust experiment not authority. [1] Aristotle’s Physics: a Physicist’s Look https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/157866135.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/157866135.pdf
Fricken 6y ago
Throughout most of history people have believed wildly incorrect things, yet civilization carries on. Unless you're an astronomer or involved in some pursuit in which the shape of the earth is of material consequence, it just doesn't matter. Flat earthers find community and identity amongst other flat earthers, and that to them is of much higher significance than whether the earth is actually flat or not.
- seppin 6y ago
  > Throughout most of history people have believed wildly incorrect things, yet civilization carries on. Society has mostly been run by autocratic systems. If we are determined to make democracy work, conspiracy and anti-fact ideologies are existential threats.
  - Fricken 6y ago
    Democracy has worked in the past because most members of said democratic societies believe largely the same things. They don't have to be the correct thing, they just have to be the same thing. This was easier when information was more tightly controlled and curated. The internet has opened us to a Babylonia of different belief systems, which is not so good for functioning civilizations. Free speech was easier to defend before the internet when it wasn't quite so free.
    - seppin 6y ago
      > The internet has opened us to a Babylonia of different belief systems With all due respect, there is nothing 'new' about QAnon. It's the same recycled theories about santanic pedophiles tweaked slightly to fit new surroundings. I would argue a new banality of evil that Facebook/Instagram/Twitter provides, where dangerous lies reside right next to actual news and photos of people's kids.
sdht0 6y ago
One thing I have come to include in my mental model when interacting with people online is the existence of people who deliberately keep up the "stupid" facade, either with the intention of trolling (think 4chan) or with nefarious agendas, such a government-sanctioned trolling farms that we keep hearing about. This at least helps me rationalize away the worst parts of Twitter, Reddit, or Whatsapp shares. Confirmation bias also explains a lot. I remember seeing many anecdotes about Trump before the 2016 election that felt quite possibly true but turned out to be false on further investigation. As if the true things were not exciting enough. Moreover, I suspect that much of our perceptions, esp. on topics that we don't directly seek out, are based on just glancing at the continuous stream of clickbaity article titles that cross our feeds everyday without even clicking them. In isolation, they'd be harmless, but if the same articles appears across HN, FB, and Twitter, they make a mental impact. And these half-digested impressions then color our opinions when those topics come up in debate or discussions.
grenoire 6y ago
I think there is too much information around for the average person to filter and process and digest. All three are important parts of living in a society and it looks to me like even with e.g. economic issues alone, it's just very hard for (to be fair) anybody to keep up. In turn, people reach out to conspiracy theories to simplify the world around them with obvious answers and explanations. My theory, sort of.
- tankenmate 6y ago
  I have a similar vein of thought; Any sufficiently advanced technology (knowledge) is indistinguishable from magic -- Arthur C. Clarke So people just see competing ideas as a choice between two forms of magic. Add in identity politics and hey presto, changing their mind means denying themselves (a rather difficult thing for most to do). Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence. My evidence is better because your evidence is just your opinion.
  - dahart 6y ago
    > Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence. No, this isn't true. References to Dunning-Kruger need to die. I haven't seen a case yet where using Dunning-Kruger to explain behavior is not misinformation. Dunning-Kruger's data actually demonstrated that the more confident someone is in their ability, the higher their ability, statistically. There was a positive correlation in people's ability to judge themselves, in the experiments. The only question was why the correlation wasn't higher. https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...
    - sellyme 6y ago
      > Dunning-Kruger's data actually demonstrated that the more confident someone is in their ability, the higher their ability, statistically. It also demonstrated that the worst-performing individuals estimated themselves to perform MUCH better than they did, while the best-performing individuals expected to perform slightly worse than they did. This comports with the average reference to the phenomenon ("stupid people think they're smarter than they are, smart people think they're stupider than they are"). The article you linked for some reason makes this comparison: > So the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. [...] they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good. This is just categorically false, and the chart linked not one paragraph above completely torpedoes it. The bottom quartile of people thought that they would perform at around the 57th percentile. They clearly expected to perform better than more competent individuals. Perhaps the author meant to write "not that [they] think they're better than competent people do", which would be correct, but the rest of the conclusions seem to follow off of this flawed reading of the data.
rocqua 6y ago
I don't think that acting weirdly when confronted with your own irrationality is a sign of mental illness. Accepting that you were wrong is generally a hard thing. Admitting to someone else that you were wrong is similarly hard. If you get totally and irrefutably proven wrong by someone you are having a heated argument with, that is doubly hard. In order to respond correctly you need to, within a very short time-span: - Realize the argument makes sense - Accept your entire world-view, with a great many other related things, is wrong - Admit that you were wrong to someone who just a minute ago you were angry at, who you thought was making bad arguments, and someone you felt was attacking you. Doing that in the span of 10 seconds is really hard. I could easily understand how someone would fail, and instead get even angrier at the person making the argument. This certainly is irrational, but it is not a sign of mental illness. It is a form of irrationality that I am ashamed to admit I also have sometimes. I think a big deal in the on-line space. Is that there is barely a way to re-engage after a cool-down period. You can't come back to a discussion a few days later, having had more time to process. Especially with conspiracy theories, the shift in worldview that is required to accept that it is wrong is massive, that isn't going to happen over the span of a minute. Heck, it seems unlikely to happen over the span of a day.
- TallGuyShort 6y ago
  Yeah I could understand that. Depending on the forum though, I seem to see people have the same conversation repeatedly, like they're just as confident as they were before. Vicious cycle if that is what's happening - that they believe what they believed harder because it didn't feel good to feel wrong.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  But why has one "felt was attacking you" and was "angry"? It is about arguments not personalities. Better be wrong than ignorant.
  - rocqua 6y ago
    > Better be wrong than ignorant I think this is a hard mantra to put into practice sometimes. I definitely think many people who are not mentally ill sometimes do not abide by this mantra. Whilst I agree that it is better to be wrong to be ignorant, there are plenty of times where I hate being proven wrong. Sometimes that does get the better of me.
seanalltogether 6y ago
I would not be surprised to learn that flat earth theories started as satire online, but it slowly turned into a theory for people who didn't know any better. I would also not be surprised to learn that QANON simply started out as trolling and morphed into the weird following it now has.
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  In the case of q-anon, that is exactly what happened. 4chan trolls were throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what would stick. Q-anon happened to stick, and off the rails it went. There's been a bunch of people who have had "control" over Q in the past few years. The current Q, Jim Watkins, is thankfully the laziest and most boring of them, and hopefully the entire thing fades away after the election.
  - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
    > 4chan trolls were throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what would stick. Q-anon happened to stick, and off the rails it went. It's just like how 100% of the memes are created on 4chan, the mechanism is the same, applicable from cat pictures to political propaganda. Since 2016 or so, there has been much talk about "weaponized memes" on 4chan that was mostly a meme by itself initally (I was a witness there in 2016), but based on the situation by now it's unfortunately surely a real thing, and even MIT Technology Review has an article [0]. It feels surreal. What an interesting time to be alive! A bunch of random grassroot web dwellers can create something out of nothing by natural selection and genetic exchanges, and by attracting conspiracy zealots in this process, it will eventually become big enough to make an impact on national politics. 20 years ago, it was a Sci-Fi plot. Although Usenet already foreshadowed many social aspects of online communities (I could find conspiracy materials even from the early ARPA archives), but nowhere influential. One comment mentioned the changed perception of free speech before and after the 2010s, and this is an important contributing factor. Perhaps the society will learn to better adapt the new meme order in another decade. [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/24/132228/political-war-memes-disinformation/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/24/132228/political...
- 6y ago
imdoor 6y ago
Or maybe it could be that, given their prior beliefs, the reactions to your arguments are, in fact, _rational_ in a Bayesian sense? I think, with Bayesian probabilities, you can have a setup where, given the same data and two different prior distributions, you end up with two wildly different posteriors after updating the initial beliefs. Unfortunately, i don't have an example at hand but i remember there is a very interesting passage on this phenomenon in E. T. Jaynes "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science". Can anyone else expand on this?
Siira 6y ago
The problem is actually economical IMO; Fools don’t have a skin in the game, and don’t lose anything from having false beliefs. They would be perfectly capable of discerning the nonflatness of Earth if their lives depended on it.
- biolurker1 6y ago
  My favorite way to end an argument is usually prompting a bet...
UncleOxidant 6y ago
I'd guess there was a time in the US when if insisted the earth was flat it could have possibly gotten you committed to an asylum.
savanaly 6y ago
Have you considered as an explanation the concept of "epistemic learned helplessness"[0]? [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
hdjdjdjs 6y ago
I have the same experience with Republicans.
mikedilger 6y ago
I think it's a failure of leadership. I believe that stupidity is and has always been widespread and in normal times the more intelligent ideas have the widest subscription, even among the stupid. But when leaders fail to [be open, be objective, act in good faith, stick to the truth], then even the stupid can detect that they are being played and they rebel and seek alternative facts. So my theory is that leaders are currently gaming the populous rather than leading them, and that this is so obvious to everybody that trust in leadership and institutions has gone out the window. Scott Adams has recently asserted that about 90% of what we are being told is not true. I'm don't concur with Scott on that figure, but clearly even smart people have lost trust in leaders/institutions. When the news refuses to report on 25% of newsworthy stories because they either make Trump look good or Biden look bad... when the news claims it's perfectly safe to protest BLM issues in the streets during a coronavirus pandemic... when even judges are clearly acting in bad faith (Julian Assange extradition case, Michael Flynn case)... when the Supreme Court becomes (or is perceived as becoming) the arm of a political party rather than an objective trustable institution, then the populous loses faith in the leaders/rules/institutions and we get widespread rioting, violence, a hell of a lot of stupid ideas, and perhaps hopefully some positive changed buried within all that somewhere.
- jlbnjmn 6y ago
  > leaders are currently gaming the populous rather than leading them, and that this is so obvious to everybody that trust in leadership and institutions has gone out the window I agree with that assessment. My limited and probably wrong interpretation of history indicates that in general, behavior will now tend towards revolutionary.
NoPicklez 6y ago
My opinion is this is due to a reduced level of trust that we place in either each other or large companies/organisations. It is known among the business industry that trust is lower than it was historically. Companies and people are increasingly seeming to engage in shadier and shadier practices, or we're becoming more aware of it. This erodes the level of trust we place in each other, research bodies, governments, policing and science etc. In addition, where someone with an extremist view might be considered an outgroup, historically their views might have been suppressed among their peers or shutdown. Now they can engage online with thousands if not millions of other people who believe in the same out group ideas, potentially strengthening their view point. One of the interesting psychological discussions is around people with extremist views such as flat earthers. These individuals are often minorities or outcasts of society and as such, many of those with extremist views form bonds with like minded people and their relationships and well-being are tied to those relationships. What this means is that not only are they less likely to respond pragmatically to opposing viewpoints, but that they would struggle to actually change their ways given that their relationships are tied with this belief. And if they were to believe differently, they would have to say goodbye to those bonds.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  In addition, where someone with an extremist view might be considered an outgroup, historically their views might have been suppressed among their peers or shutdown. Now they can engage online with thousands if not millions of other people who believe in the same out group ideas, potentially strengthening their view point. Not only that but those with out-group positions are great for those with agendas and willing to play along. Anti-vaxers are fodder for anyone looking for angry nuts to turn loose on their enemies etc.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    > anyone looking for angry nuts to turn loose on their enemies Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786278 (although he puts his cutoff point at 25% of the angriest part of the population, with no value judgements on nuts. In the age of social media, it ought to be easy enough to generate memes along the lines of his survey questions to see who forwards them.)
webmaven 6y ago
> The response strikes me as being indicative of mental illness. And I don't mean that as an insult - I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis. You may find these resources useful: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-someone-when-facts-fail/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-s... https://jamesclear.com/why-facts-dont-change-minds https://jamesclear.com/why-facts-dont-change-minds https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/words-matter/201810/why-people-ignore-facts https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/words-matter/201810/... https://ed.ted.com/best_of_web/hI9YSFHW#review https://ed.ted.com/best_of_web/hI9YSFHW#review https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds/ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont... https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/this-article-wont-change-your-mind/519093/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/this-art...
DavyJones1983 6y ago
> The response strikes me as being indicative of mental illness. And I don't mean that as an insult - I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis. This thinking is dangerous. You open the doors to labelling every opinion that isn't considered rational or part of the status quo to be a product of mental illness. e.g I find those AI generated pictures of people that look like real photos to be mildly disturbing. It is clearly irrational, however I don't think people could claim I am mentally ill because of it. Currently there is a push to make racism a mental illness. I see no evidence of that at all. I've spoken to some people that have gone on the "Iron March" and they aren't mentally ill (tbh they are just losers IMO but they are pretty harmless as most of them are NEETs living with their parents).

tunnuz 6y ago

Also vanity. There is something really comforting into thinking that YOU have it all figured out and know the truth and you’re smarter than everyone else around you. And if someone proves you wrong, well then you have to face the hard reality that maybe you’re not that smart. And that’s hard to accept.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pier25 6y ago

Generally speaking, humans have always been (and will always be) irrational. Even the most rational among us make plenty of irrational decisions or have contradictory beliefs. We've replaced religion and witches with aliens, new age beliefs, flat Earth, reptile conspiracies, etc. I don't think it was that different a couple of centuries ago. I read in the book Supersense by the neuroscientist Robert Hood [1] that in a study that is repeated every year for the past decades, the percentage of people having irrational beliefs has remained constant. I don't remember the exact percentage but it was rather high. Something like 75%. [1] https://www.amazon.com/SuperSense-Developing-Creates-Supernatural-Beliefs-ebook/dp/B00245A4XW/ https://www.amazon.com/SuperSense-Developing-Creates-Superna...

pdonis 6y ago
> We've replaced religion and witches with aliens, new age beliefs, flat Earth, reptile conspiracies, etc. I think you are understating the problem. Aliens, new age beliefs, flat Earth, reptile conspiracies, etc. are fringe beliefs in our current society, and are recognized to be fringe beliefs. Religion and belief in witches, in the societies you are referring to that had those beliefs, were not fringe beliefs; they were mainstream. The people who were believed to be on the fringe in those societies--the people who were viewed in those societies the way we today view, say, flat Earthers--were people who did not believe in the mainstream religion and all of its claims. For example, in Salem, Massachusetts in 1695, people who said witches did not exist were the ones who were believed to be on the fringe. So the problem is not that individual people can have fringe beliefs. The problem is that an entire society of people, minus a few outliers, can have, and act on, beliefs that are later shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, to be not just wrong, but delusional. So the question we should all be asking ourselves is not, what is wrong with today's flat Earthers, but which of the mainstream beliefs we have today will end up being like the belief in witches in 1695?
- pier25 6y ago
  > For example, in Salem, Massachusetts in 1695, people who said witches did not exist were the ones who were believed to be on the fringe. Indeed, but those people were highly religious Puritans that emigrated to the New World because they were prosecuted in England. https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/puritanism https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/puritanism When you put those kind of people in isolation and a high stress situation you get those kinds of behaviors. > So the question we should all be asking ourselves is not, what is wrong with today's flat Earthers, but which of the mainstream beliefs we have today will end up being like the belief in witches in 1695? Totally agree. For example, climate change denial.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > When you put those kind of people in isolation and a high stress situation you get those kinds of behaviors. The Puritans were by no means the only people of that time who had mainstream beliefs that we now consider delusional. You'd be hard pressed to find any significant body of people of that time who didn't. > For example, climate change denial. I would also say, climate change alarmism. Which, if you are inclined to disagree (you might not be, I don't know, but I suspect at least some people reading this will be), illustrates another aspect of the problem: it's hard to improve mainstream beliefs when there is not general agreement over how to improve them--which new beliefs should take the place of the ones that are claimed to be wrong.

throw18376 6y ago

it is generally agreed that the modern environment can cause people to have depressive symptoms, and that in most cases these will never progress to full clinical depression. seems at least worth considering that the same is possible with psychotic symptoms. i think some conspiracy theorists might just have a kind of low grade mania or psychosis. not enough to stop them from functioning, but enough to make them see patterns that aren't there and have a hard time thinking logically about certain topics. this would also explain why many conspiracy theories nowadays no longer even pretend to be rational. With JFK or the moon landing, they would at least try to present evidence and make arguments, however distorted. But if you talk to a QAnon believer or many flat earth people, their arguments do not even have internal coherence -- it's just free association. All this being said, I think there should be a strong norm against trying to diagnose specific individuals with mental illness over the internet. But it's hard for me not to contemplate this as a possible explanation.

mynameishere 6y ago

I've engaged a few flat earthers... Let me rephrase that for you: "I've been trolled by a few of the world's most obvious trolls..." Really, man. The internet has been around. We've been around the internet. There's this kind of stupidity that's almost...meta stupidity, you know? Like, do you really not realize the flat earthers are putting one on? Maybe you're putting one on right now...because, how can you seriously be that naive?

mistermann 6y ago
Isn't it wonderful? :) Although, sometimes the irony seems just a bit too rich to be true...perhaps a Matryoshka troll?
AlexandrB 6y ago
I really wish that you were right, but you should consider the possibility that it's you who is being naive. I've met a real-life flat-earther (a relative of mine, actually) who definitely was not trolling. From sufficient distance flat earth beliefs are not really that different from anti-vax. Both employ the same questioning of conventional science and fall back on plausible-sounding but discredited theories. Yet, I don't think anyone would call anti-vax a troll movement. There's also a political dimension to these movements that should not be overlooked. If you have time, I highly recommend this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
jcranmer 6y ago
I'm not going to deny that trolls are definitely involved in Flat Earth, but I suspect that most of the adherents actually truly believe in it. The key thing to realize is that modern Flat Earth isn't just about Flat Earth; it's basically a (very heavily) syncretized modern Gnosticism. By that I mean that it combines several beliefs: * Absolute dualistic cosmology: there is an Absolute Good and Absolute Evil locked in a titanic struggle in which humans are the pieces. The forces of Absolute Evil are expending every effort to knock us off the narrow path to Absolute Good. * Gnostic notions of revelation: the path to salvation is mostly, if not entirely, dependent on the knowledge of the revealed truth of the universe. Acquiring this knowledge is difficult, and (following the above point) the forces of Absolute Evil are trying their best to prevent you from gaining it. But fortunately, those who have come before us can help us in the acquisition of knowledge. * Evangelism: once you acquire the knowledge, you must (as a good person should!) turn around and save as many people as you can by educating them on the revealed truths of the universe. And if they look at you like you're a rambling lunatic or try to "fix" your knowledge, then clearly they must be agents of Absolute Evil trying to drag you down with them. * The actual cosmology: [insert a mishmash of the cosmology [1] of several disparate religions here] and the Earth is actually flat. These kinds of belief systems, with a variety of substitutions for the last bullet point, have been around for millennia. Flat Earth isn't even the first such system in my short Millennial lifetime. The actual beliefs of these systems are less important than the fact that you have the revealed knowledge, which is also why people seem to be able to move very quickly from one system to another (as Flat Earthers basically all jumped ship to Qanon). [1] One of the things to draw attention to, from what I can tell, is that these sorts of beliefs tend to extract only the cosmological and supernatural beliefs from religion and ignore the moralist beliefs.

curiousllama 6y ago

It's interesting to me that you categorize irrationality with mental illness. I feel wuite the opposite. people make decisions based on many factors: logic, yes, but also past experience, common heuristics, mood, and situational context. A lot of what education is supposed to do is shape your instincts towards what is productive: there's no particular reason that reading history in my spare time should _feel_ productive, but it does. That feeling was shaped by my education. We've all been trained to think of arguments as logic. They're not; they're a conflict of mindsets, fully fleshed out states of being. Arguments are a facades on beliefs - states of being. That's not an illness; that's being human.

cactus2093 6y ago

I always assumed the flat earth thing was more of a troll/protest than a genuine belief, basically people just want to assert that "you can't force me to believe a certain thing". Even if in this case that certain thing is in the class of completely irrefutable facts, it doesn't really matter because they're just asserting their power to disagree. Like a toddler that gets in a mood where they just say "no" to everything. Trying to reason with that type of response is useless and it's also beside the point, the point is that they just want to exercise their free will. And they also probably are enjoying that it is frustrating other people. A mental illness framing is kind of interesting though, I've never really thought about it like that. It implies that it could be treatable, which I'm not really sure is true. Can you "treat" a troll?

qsort 6y ago

I don't mean to attack you, but I don't think you are approaching this the right way. There are exactly zero people who believe the earth is flat. Some join conspiracy groups because they are social outcasts who enjoy being part of a tight-knit group, while for the most part they are being isolated and rejected (sometimes, admittedly, because of faults of their own, unrelated to being flat-earthers). They aren't insane, they are desperately lonely.

pdonis 6y ago
> There are exactly zero people who believe the earth is flat. I don't think this is true. At any rate, if it is true, there are certainly a significant number of people who are giving an extraordinarily convincing imitation of believing that the Earth is flat. So convincing that it's hard not to allocate at least some probability to the hypothesis that they actually believe what they say they believe and aren't giving an imitation at all.
- qsort 6y ago
  > I don't think this is true. At any rate, if it is true I'd be more inclined to follow this line of thought if this was about anything else. "The earth is flat" is not a claim that's false upon closer inspection of the available data, it's a claim that's prima facie false, it's in the same category of "the moon is made of cheese" rather than "we didn't land on the moon".
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > "The earth is flat" is not a claim that's false upon closer inspection of the available data, it's a claim that's prima facie false No, it isn't. We view the claim as absurd today only because we have the benefit of millennia of collection of evidence and arguments and theory that has established "the earth is round" beyond a reasonable doubt. But for a person who either does not have access to all that evidence and arguments and theory, or who simply refuses to believe them (and, as someone else upthread noted, it can be a valid heuristic strategy for some people to refuse to believe claims by other people that they can't understand for themselves, in order to avoid being taken advantage of), the claim that the earth is flat is not absurd, which means it's not prima facie false.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago

> I've engaged a few flat earthers to actually listen to their arguments I found the best thing to do is stop there. Just listen, observe, try to understand. Be patient. Unless someone comes to you asking a question, you're unlikely to change anyone's mind immediately, and even if they are asking opinions often change slowly if at all. When we tell people they're wrong, we push them away a little, and our sphere of influence diminishes.

seppin 6y ago

> I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis. The way i've heard it explained that makes the most sense to me: "people are convinced (rightly) that there is something wrong with our world and society, they just don't know what it is. Conspiracies provide answers and a framework to accommodate that feeling." The opposite of knowledge isn't no knowledge, it's bad knowledge. The creation of a parallel reality is not so unreasonable response to nothing nothing about our current reality. We all need something to hold on to.

olladecarne 6y ago

I think if you look at the brain as a neural network then it's easy to see how this happens. Not everyone is born to educated parents and receives high quality education. If a lot of the information your brain received growing up was bad, then you can easily reach bad conclusions. The collapse of institutions makes it worse because now no one trusts anything. So to many the information on the internet is as valid as the information in the textbooks. Then if you keep feeding the brain bad information it starts generating bad information. Lately I've been thinking of information as a "substance" that has been diluted by the internet. So the whole "organize and make all information easily accessible" motto of big G and the web in general has had the consequence of diluting the concentration of good information.

randcraw 6y ago
Yeah, I think our schools have long done US students a disservice in underemphasizing “information quality” — how to deal with incomplete, ambiguous, questionable, and bad info. A very large fraction of tests in school reinforce that every question has only one right answer. The notion of minimizing error is seldom even imagined. Instead it's taught that all learning must seek only one goal: “knowing the one and only truth”. Yet all too often, competing facts are not mutually exclusive and can change with time. And don't get me started on the poor coverage of concepts like “necessary” and “sufficient” in judging evidence in support of an assertion or model. After working in science for the past 15 years (drug development), I've come to appreciate how little in medicine we know in absolute terms. With any system as complex as the human body, generally the best you can hope for is to be less wrong.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  Aristotle’s Physics is a good example how common sense ridiculed in our society while it > is to be properly understood as the physics of objects immersed in a fluid, air or water [1] Kindergarten children can engage in physics, construct their theories. And only much later learn that space bodies move differently and how that knowledge can be applied to the world around us. Trust experiment not authority. [1] Aristotle’s Physics: a Physicist’s Look https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/157866135.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/157866135.pdf

Fricken 6y ago

Throughout most of history people have believed wildly incorrect things, yet civilization carries on. Unless you're an astronomer or involved in some pursuit in which the shape of the earth is of material consequence, it just doesn't matter. Flat earthers find community and identity amongst other flat earthers, and that to them is of much higher significance than whether the earth is actually flat or not.

seppin 6y ago
> Throughout most of history people have believed wildly incorrect things, yet civilization carries on. Society has mostly been run by autocratic systems. If we are determined to make democracy work, conspiracy and anti-fact ideologies are existential threats.
- Fricken 6y ago
  Democracy has worked in the past because most members of said democratic societies believe largely the same things. They don't have to be the correct thing, they just have to be the same thing. This was easier when information was more tightly controlled and curated. The internet has opened us to a Babylonia of different belief systems, which is not so good for functioning civilizations. Free speech was easier to defend before the internet when it wasn't quite so free.
  - seppin 6y ago
    > The internet has opened us to a Babylonia of different belief systems With all due respect, there is nothing 'new' about QAnon. It's the same recycled theories about santanic pedophiles tweaked slightly to fit new surroundings. I would argue a new banality of evil that Facebook/Instagram/Twitter provides, where dangerous lies reside right next to actual news and photos of people's kids.

sdht0 6y ago

One thing I have come to include in my mental model when interacting with people online is the existence of people who deliberately keep up the "stupid" facade, either with the intention of trolling (think 4chan) or with nefarious agendas, such a government-sanctioned trolling farms that we keep hearing about. This at least helps me rationalize away the worst parts of Twitter, Reddit, or Whatsapp shares. Confirmation bias also explains a lot. I remember seeing many anecdotes about Trump before the 2016 election that felt quite possibly true but turned out to be false on further investigation. As if the true things were not exciting enough. Moreover, I suspect that much of our perceptions, esp. on topics that we don't directly seek out, are based on just glancing at the continuous stream of clickbaity article titles that cross our feeds everyday without even clicking them. In isolation, they'd be harmless, but if the same articles appears across HN, FB, and Twitter, they make a mental impact. And these half-digested impressions then color our opinions when those topics come up in debate or discussions.

grenoire 6y ago

I think there is too much information around for the average person to filter and process and digest. All three are important parts of living in a society and it looks to me like even with e.g. economic issues alone, it's just very hard for (to be fair) anybody to keep up. In turn, people reach out to conspiracy theories to simplify the world around them with obvious answers and explanations. My theory, sort of.

tankenmate 6y ago
I have a similar vein of thought; Any sufficiently advanced technology (knowledge) is indistinguishable from magic -- Arthur C. Clarke So people just see competing ideas as a choice between two forms of magic. Add in identity politics and hey presto, changing their mind means denying themselves (a rather difficult thing for most to do). Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence. My evidence is better because your evidence is just your opinion.
- dahart 6y ago
  > Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence. No, this isn't true. References to Dunning-Kruger need to die. I haven't seen a case yet where using Dunning-Kruger to explain behavior is not misinformation. Dunning-Kruger's data actually demonstrated that the more confident someone is in their ability, the higher their ability, statistically. There was a positive correlation in people's ability to judge themselves, in the experiments. The only question was why the correlation wasn't higher. https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...
  - sellyme 6y ago
    > Dunning-Kruger's data actually demonstrated that the more confident someone is in their ability, the higher their ability, statistically. It also demonstrated that the worst-performing individuals estimated themselves to perform MUCH better than they did, while the best-performing individuals expected to perform slightly worse than they did. This comports with the average reference to the phenomenon ("stupid people think they're smarter than they are, smart people think they're stupider than they are"). The article you linked for some reason makes this comparison: > So the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. [...] they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good. This is just categorically false, and the chart linked not one paragraph above completely torpedoes it. The bottom quartile of people thought that they would perform at around the 57th percentile. They clearly expected to perform better than more competent individuals. Perhaps the author meant to write "not that [they] think they're better than competent people do", which would be correct, but the rest of the conclusions seem to follow off of this flawed reading of the data.

rocqua 6y ago

I don't think that acting weirdly when confronted with your own irrationality is a sign of mental illness. Accepting that you were wrong is generally a hard thing. Admitting to someone else that you were wrong is similarly hard. If you get totally and irrefutably proven wrong by someone you are having a heated argument with, that is doubly hard. In order to respond correctly you need to, within a very short time-span: - Realize the argument makes sense - Accept your entire world-view, with a great many other related things, is wrong - Admit that you were wrong to someone who just a minute ago you were angry at, who you thought was making bad arguments, and someone you felt was attacking you. Doing that in the span of 10 seconds is really hard. I could easily understand how someone would fail, and instead get even angrier at the person making the argument. This certainly is irrational, but it is not a sign of mental illness. It is a form of irrationality that I am ashamed to admit I also have sometimes. I think a big deal in the on-line space. Is that there is barely a way to re-engage after a cool-down period. You can't come back to a discussion a few days later, having had more time to process. Especially with conspiracy theories, the shift in worldview that is required to accept that it is wrong is massive, that isn't going to happen over the span of a minute. Heck, it seems unlikely to happen over the span of a day.

TallGuyShort 6y ago
Yeah I could understand that. Depending on the forum though, I seem to see people have the same conversation repeatedly, like they're just as confident as they were before. Vicious cycle if that is what's happening - that they believe what they believed harder because it didn't feel good to feel wrong.
sergeykish 6y ago
But why has one "felt was attacking you" and was "angry"? It is about arguments not personalities. Better be wrong than ignorant.
- rocqua 6y ago
  > Better be wrong than ignorant I think this is a hard mantra to put into practice sometimes. I definitely think many people who are not mentally ill sometimes do not abide by this mantra. Whilst I agree that it is better to be wrong to be ignorant, there are plenty of times where I hate being proven wrong. Sometimes that does get the better of me.

seanalltogether 6y ago

I would not be surprised to learn that flat earth theories started as satire online, but it slowly turned into a theory for people who didn't know any better. I would also not be surprised to learn that QANON simply started out as trolling and morphed into the weird following it now has.

henrikschroder 6y ago
In the case of q-anon, that is exactly what happened. 4chan trolls were throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what would stick. Q-anon happened to stick, and off the rails it went. There's been a bunch of people who have had "control" over Q in the past few years. The current Q, Jim Watkins, is thankfully the laziest and most boring of them, and hopefully the entire thing fades away after the election.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  > 4chan trolls were throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what would stick. Q-anon happened to stick, and off the rails it went. It's just like how 100% of the memes are created on 4chan, the mechanism is the same, applicable from cat pictures to political propaganda. Since 2016 or so, there has been much talk about "weaponized memes" on 4chan that was mostly a meme by itself initally (I was a witness there in 2016), but based on the situation by now it's unfortunately surely a real thing, and even MIT Technology Review has an article [0]. It feels surreal. What an interesting time to be alive! A bunch of random grassroot web dwellers can create something out of nothing by natural selection and genetic exchanges, and by attracting conspiracy zealots in this process, it will eventually become big enough to make an impact on national politics. 20 years ago, it was a Sci-Fi plot. Although Usenet already foreshadowed many social aspects of online communities (I could find conspiracy materials even from the early ARPA archives), but nowhere influential. One comment mentioned the changed perception of free speech before and after the 2010s, and this is an important contributing factor. Perhaps the society will learn to better adapt the new meme order in another decade. [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/24/132228/political-war-memes-disinformation/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/24/132228/political...
6y ago

imdoor 6y ago

Or maybe it could be that, given their prior beliefs, the reactions to your arguments are, in fact, _rational_ in a Bayesian sense? I think, with Bayesian probabilities, you can have a setup where, given the same data and two different prior distributions, you end up with two wildly different posteriors after updating the initial beliefs. Unfortunately, i don't have an example at hand but i remember there is a very interesting passage on this phenomenon in E. T. Jaynes "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science". Can anyone else expand on this?

Siira 6y ago

The problem is actually economical IMO; Fools don’t have a skin in the game, and don’t lose anything from having false beliefs. They would be perfectly capable of discerning the nonflatness of Earth if their lives depended on it.

biolurker1 6y ago
My favorite way to end an argument is usually prompting a bet...

UncleOxidant 6y ago

I'd guess there was a time in the US when if insisted the earth was flat it could have possibly gotten you committed to an asylum.

savanaly 6y ago

Have you considered as an explanation the concept of "epistemic learned helplessness"[0]? [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...

hdjdjdjs 6y ago

I have the same experience with Republicans.

mikedilger 6y ago

I think it's a failure of leadership. I believe that stupidity is and has always been widespread and in normal times the more intelligent ideas have the widest subscription, even among the stupid. But when leaders fail to [be open, be objective, act in good faith, stick to the truth], then even the stupid can detect that they are being played and they rebel and seek alternative facts. So my theory is that leaders are currently gaming the populous rather than leading them, and that this is so obvious to everybody that trust in leadership and institutions has gone out the window. Scott Adams has recently asserted that about 90% of what we are being told is not true. I'm don't concur with Scott on that figure, but clearly even smart people have lost trust in leaders/institutions. When the news refuses to report on 25% of newsworthy stories because they either make Trump look good or Biden look bad... when the news claims it's perfectly safe to protest BLM issues in the streets during a coronavirus pandemic... when even judges are clearly acting in bad faith (Julian Assange extradition case, Michael Flynn case)... when the Supreme Court becomes (or is perceived as becoming) the arm of a political party rather than an objective trustable institution, then the populous loses faith in the leaders/rules/institutions and we get widespread rioting, violence, a hell of a lot of stupid ideas, and perhaps hopefully some positive changed buried within all that somewhere.

jlbnjmn 6y ago
> leaders are currently gaming the populous rather than leading them, and that this is so obvious to everybody that trust in leadership and institutions has gone out the window I agree with that assessment. My limited and probably wrong interpretation of history indicates that in general, behavior will now tend towards revolutionary.

NoPicklez 6y ago

My opinion is this is due to a reduced level of trust that we place in either each other or large companies/organisations. It is known among the business industry that trust is lower than it was historically. Companies and people are increasingly seeming to engage in shadier and shadier practices, or we're becoming more aware of it. This erodes the level of trust we place in each other, research bodies, governments, policing and science etc. In addition, where someone with an extremist view might be considered an outgroup, historically their views might have been suppressed among their peers or shutdown. Now they can engage online with thousands if not millions of other people who believe in the same out group ideas, potentially strengthening their view point. One of the interesting psychological discussions is around people with extremist views such as flat earthers. These individuals are often minorities or outcasts of society and as such, many of those with extremist views form bonds with like minded people and their relationships and well-being are tied to those relationships. What this means is that not only are they less likely to respond pragmatically to opposing viewpoints, but that they would struggle to actually change their ways given that their relationships are tied with this belief. And if they were to believe differently, they would have to say goodbye to those bonds.

joe_the_user 6y ago
In addition, where someone with an extremist view might be considered an outgroup, historically their views might have been suppressed among their peers or shutdown. Now they can engage online with thousands if not millions of other people who believe in the same out group ideas, potentially strengthening their view point. Not only that but those with out-group positions are great for those with agendas and willing to play along. Anti-vaxers are fodder for anyone looking for angry nuts to turn loose on their enemies etc.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  > anyone looking for angry nuts to turn loose on their enemies Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786278 (although he puts his cutoff point at 25% of the angriest part of the population, with no value judgements on nuts. In the age of social media, it ought to be easy enough to generate memes along the lines of his survey questions to see who forwards them.)

webmaven 6y ago

> The response strikes me as being indicative of mental illness. And I don't mean that as an insult - I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis. You may find these resources useful: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-someone-when-facts-fail/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-s... https://jamesclear.com/why-facts-dont-change-minds https://jamesclear.com/why-facts-dont-change-minds https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/words-matter/201810/why-people-ignore-facts https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/words-matter/201810/... https://ed.ted.com/best_of_web/hI9YSFHW#review https://ed.ted.com/best_of_web/hI9YSFHW#review https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds/ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont... https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/this-article-wont-change-your-mind/519093/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/this-art...

DavyJones1983 6y ago

> The response strikes me as being indicative of mental illness. And I don't mean that as an insult - I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis. This thinking is dangerous. You open the doors to labelling every opinion that isn't considered rational or part of the status quo to be a product of mental illness. e.g I find those AI generated pictures of people that look like real photos to be mildly disturbing. It is clearly irrational, however I don't think people could claim I am mentally ill because of it. Currently there is a push to make racism a mental illness. I see no evidence of that at all. I've spoken to some people that have gone on the "Iron March" and they aren't mentally ill (tbh they are just losers IMO but they are pretty harmless as most of them are NEETs living with their parents).