> I always find it interesting how when these things get revealed, nobody seems to update their priors on "conspiracy theories" going forward. A couple weeks af

> I always find it interesting how when these things get revealed, nobody seems to update their priors on "conspiracy theories" going forward. A couple weeks after these stories break it's back to making fun of "tinfoil hat" people and acting like it's all a big joke. I wonder if it's some kind of deep seated coping mechanism to refuse to update beliefs on stuff like that Me too, but despite having thousands of threads containing millions of comments on this topic over the years, we seem to never make any forward progress on these things. Maybe this approach is not optimal, perhaps not even remotely? Something very common I've noticed in threads like this: notice how many people make what appear to be factual statements (they are stated in the form of facts), for which there is quite literally no way to acquire the knowledge in the first place. And also consider: these conversations are taking place on Hacker News, and presumably, the intelligence level (actual knowledge, capacity to execute logic with skill, etc) here is much higher than one would find in more normal communities. As a though experiment: what if a way could be found to coerce the people in a community to behave differently than is being done in here? So, rather than each person imaging what is true (and then proceeding to believe that what they have imagined is actually true), what if people instead wondered what was actually true. This is much closer to how things work in science/engineering/software, and those domains tend to very reliably produce good results, and if this approach works there perhaps it could also work in this area as well. Do you think this "way out there" theory may produce better results? (And if you have any recommendations for even greater improvements, I am all ears.)