I feel like the author started with a good analogy, but then missed an important angle that more readily explains the "crazy" part of crazy beliefs: In a suffi

I feel like the author started with a good analogy, but then missed an important angle that more readily explains the "crazy" part of crazy beliefs: In a sufficiently-large workplace, you'll start to encounter office politics and the office "culture", both of which end up influencing the makeup of the employees in that workplace - be it through hiring decisions, promotion/demotion decisions, and even terminations (voluntary or otherwise). Before you know it, the overall culture and political environment of that workplace becomes entrenched. It's a sort of internal cronyism - one which maintains consistency within the organization, rather than a pursuit of meritocracy or an attempt to appease an external force. Taking this metaphor to the brain, once a belief is "hired", there's a certain barrier to "firing" it; even assuming there are no labor laws in the State of Brainia, there's a bit of a sunk cost in each belief that makes it undesirable to "fire" that belief, and therefore each belief has some impact on the "workplace culture" and "office politics" of the mind: each belief will impart its pressure on other beliefs, forming cliques and pushing out beliefs that don't conform. Thus lies the path from reasonable things like "I believe pharmaceutical companies will do whatever they believe will maximize profit" to... less reasonable things like "I believe Bill Gates is using COVID vaccines to inject 5G tracking chips in the global population". And worse, that's what makes it so difficult to actually convince someone about the craziness of such beliefs: those beliefs are already entrenched. Instead of trying to un-entrench such beliefs, it's better to address the proliferation of misinformation at the source: by propagating "inoculation" beliefs that entrench themselves before the "crazier" beliefs can take hold.