Conversation

Jan 25, 2021

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

· Jan 24, 2021

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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224

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

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@QiaochuYuan

Jan 25, 2021

the world is INSANE. people are INSANE. governments are INSANE. "conspiracy theories" are a COMPLETELY NORMAL response to INSANE states of the world. a frame that positions "conspiracy theories" as wrong by definition is straight up gaslighting and we can do better

119

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

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@QiaochuYuan

Jan 25, 2021

like... you remember the jeffrey epstein stories right? i know it was a century ago but that shit actually happened! that was incredibly fucked up! god only knows what else like that is going on that will never see the light of day!

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

)

@QiaochuYuan

Jan 25, 2021

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

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@QiaochuYuan

Jan 25, 2021

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

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

8:53 PM · Jan 25, 2021Twitter Web App

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reminds me a lot of how scott ended his eichmann review

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I was super into conspiracy theories when I was younger. Feeling "in on the secret" is fun. Blaming people, rather than nature, is easy. And induction goes haywire if you can't experiment. For me at least, it was very different than "critical thinking".