I'm finding it extremely hard to separate signal from noise in the social and legacy media spheres right now. I'm waiting for things to settle.
Then I realized that it is always a conspiracy theory until it is too late.
If you are potentially impacted, you have to do your own homework, and learn from your mistakes.
Step 1: do I need to have an informed opinion
Step 2: Do I need that opinion NOW
Step 3: WHAT do I need to know NOW
There is a vast amount of conspiracy theorizing that people could avoid by following this approach.
Workers have been pushing to get a single day of paid leave per month and threatening a strike - but rail bosses have greedily ignored them to give more money to their stockholders (ie, themselves too). Then Congress voted to force a bad deal.
What you could do is to get informed and see the results of this blatant corruption.
If you decide you are curious and actually want to care about railroad safety, dont react to the current crisis, "hit the books" and read some actually informative material about past events.
/s
In one lens, what you say is true. But that is because {true, confirmed, and supported} information comes slow from breaking events. And especially when money / harm is at stake, someone is usually willing to lie or hide the truth.
But viewing what you said through another lens, it can be easy to see this as confirmation bias (or other similar cognitive biases) that underweights all of the times you suspected a conspiracy, but where no causality was proven. As the joke goes, economists have predicted nine out of the last five recessions.
Be careful to remain at least as skeptical of social media posts as you are of companies, governments, the wealthy, and those in power.
Belief in multiple conspiracy theories can erode a person’s ability to remain rational. It seems to me that lots of Flat Earthers, for example, base their belief system more around who they chose to reject, than necessarily being accurate about what specific ideas they choose to believe.
I agree with your last paragraph in the sense that we should all be forever curious and we should spend a lot of trouble to reevaluate our errors in belief. That said, “do your own homework” seems to be misinterpreted by many as “reject all information from official sources”, which is a terrible idea.
If you're in that area, it'd be prudent to get out if you're able. It's systemic contamination. You don't get to go back in time for a mulligan if it turns out to be bad.
It's always played down. Nobody ever says "we really fucked up this time so you ought to fend for yourself." It's been, what, 10 days? There's barely coverage, and there's no transparency.
There's still lead in the water in Michigan...
There's zero critical thinking being applied because they (whomever they are) have been building up belief leveraging mistrust of the government, mistrust of corporations, mistrust of science (related to the actual chemicals involved) and false information about the facts of the derailing.
It's very similar to the way that Trump and company brainwashed their followers into almost overthrowing the US government. I won't be surprised to find out it's being done by the same people as before.