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Comment by Aperocky | Hacker News Reader

It's some interesting psychology.

I've had discussion with a guy in lab of a top university and they believed 911 was an inside job. steel beams and all that.

It doesn't seem to correlate to technical ability, there are something in psychology that draws a certain type of people towards conspiracy and in which they go into a mental state where normal explanations are removed from their logic and they go seek outlandish explanations or slightly hard to explain things and turn a twist into it. I don't understand why but I think a pretty decent amount of people subscribe to this kind of thinking.

Neurology researchers here, please give us answers.

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> they believed 911 was an inside job. steel beams and all that.

911 is definietly a conspiracy. A bunch of telecom engineers acting in unison with dispatchers and first responders. There is no other explanation how else police/emt/fire brigade shows up when you dial that number and tell them about an emergency. But what it has to do with steel beams I don’t know. \s

Joking aside: I have noticed that sometimes when I preceive that everyone around me thinks X i feel an urge to think the opposite of it. I only had mild and inconsequential cases of this (opinion about shows, products, etc), but I can imagine that this type of contraryness in edge cases can convince people that everyone is wrong about some important historical event. And it seems once they convinced themselves their belief is stable enough to make them stick with it.

Obviously hating Game of Thrones when everyone was raving about it feels very different from subscribing to conspiracy theories, but maybe the phenomena is similar, just one latches on to a different subject?

> Joking aside

Good thing you mention or I fell for it (that you meant it seriously, not that I believed in the conspiracy). Poe's law in effect.

But that's the thing. People who believe in conspiracies are susceptible to them. For example, they could've lost their trust in society, or smoke a lot of pot, or have a friend or two who are into it. Very much like a cult.

And I am saying that as person who was into conspiracies, who lost faith in society, who used drugs (psychedelics, mostly), and had a severe psychosis (not at all related to the previously mentioned though but stress from another factor).

Funny that that's the conspiracy you reach for to make the joke. Not the one where people planned in secret to send people to the United States to learn how to fly airplanes so that they could hijack commercial airlines and commit suicide attacks.

Hating Game of Thrones is perfectly justified. :-)

It's a shame they ended it after seven seasons and left most of the plot lines hanging.

Was their argument rigorous or obviously irrational? On the spectrum of plausibility from lizard people to JFK, 9/11 doesn't strike me as especially delusional. I believe we sometimes don't differentiate well enough between abnormally suspicious people that act rationally from the clearly deranged. Non-consensus views could be a sign of either but a failure mode a different set of smart people have is to write off anything non-consensus merely because it's low status.

Clearly not rigorous as the main point (steel beam don't melt) they talked about has already been debunked by approximately 200 articles.

> steel beam don't melt

you should probably reword that, “steel beams don’t melt at the temperature jet fuel burns at”.

Not a neurology researcher, but always seems to be people with really good pattern recognition intell. They connect dots well, blessing and curse etc.

Indeed. As someone with experience of extreme manic psychosis, it is the pattern recognition/dot connection algorithm kicked into absolute overdrive. Spurious correlation abounds when afflicted with such a condition.

Thankfully my experience was acute and triggered by drugs, so a few years of anti-psychotics and refraining from anything other than cannabis and alcohol in moderation have let me stop taking the anti-psychotics and at worst I experience cyclothymia, which I've decided to just live with and not medicate.

This sounds like ~the plot of the film Pi.

I'd say they may connect dots quickly, but not necessarily well.

steel beams don't melt jet fuel

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