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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
it IS critical thinking. there is NO DIFFERENCE between the mental activity a "conspiracy theorist" is engaging in and the mental activity of making sense of the world that we are all engaging in all the time
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Louisa 🌈👭
@LouisatheLast
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Reading a Reddit AMA with a former Q believer and he had a really insightful thing to say: “Conspiracy theory thinking hooks the brain because it feels like critical thinking.”
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
it is actually *hard* to have true beliefs, it is *so so so hard*, there are *so many things* getting in the way, and one of the biggest is refusing to entertain outrageous hypotheses because they would *seem unreasonable to your ingroup*
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
the impulse to dismiss "conspiracy theories" out of hand is the same impulse that went into dismissing covid as a problem last march / april. there were "alt-right" people able to get this right b/c they did not care about seeming reasonable to people who read the fucking NYT
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
the inverse of "conspiracy theorists" is "sheeple" and obviously it's not the nicest word but it's pointing at a real phenomenon, a real way in which people *have their minds domesticated*, and it is every bit as harmful as "conspiracy theorizing," the harms are just much quieter
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