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Comment by pineaux | Hacker News Reader

I dont think conspiracy theories are for dumb people. I think its mostly for people that dont feel understood. They see the world is telling them a narrative but despite this narrative, they have no great job, no great life partner or no great status in their community, they feel there must be something that is preventing them from getting these things. They go in search of an explanation and find it. They get hooked on the simplicity of these narratives and find them so satisfying.

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Conspiracy theories are for people who need to believe there is order and purpose in the universe. They need to believe someone is in charge pulling the strings because the alternative, that it’s all just chaotic randomness, is too hard to deal with.

I believe in order and purpose, I have a fairly strong spiritual practice. I pray, I meditate, I view my life as a journey, I believe I was put here for a reason.

I'm don't believe in conspiracy theories however, because I'm mature enough to accept that sometimes bad things happen for reasons other than "evil underground cabal of satanists".

especially this one - these people seem like they're in denial about their actions causing climate change causing their catastrophic weather, so they invent invisible bogeymen to blame.

I imagine that when they get dumped by their girlfriend, they'll blame it on George Soros manipulating her via 5G raditation instead of "well maybe she didn't like you being an abusive alcoholic who cheated on her?"

I know several people who are smart, happy with their jobs, and are massive conspiracy theorists. I think they have a kind of Dunning-Kruger syndrome: they are very successful in their fields, which leads them to believe that any explanation that makes sense to them must be true. It is the case some of the time, but occasionally it tricks them into believing in stupid theories that do not really make sense. Some Nobel prize winners famously went down that hole, who were very successful and admired before turning bad.

> they have no great job, no great life partner or no great status in their community, they feel there must be something that is preventing them from getting these things

My friend works in IT and earns probably in the 99th or 98th percentile in the country. It's not that. In fact I don't think economic wellbeing is related at all. Poland has been doing great economically for the last 30 years, and yet the conspiracy theories are spreading.

I mostly blame social media. Previously if you wanted to know how the climate works you looked it up in encyclopedia, watched some TV or asked a teacher. They mostly weren't spreading bullshit.

Now you search internet and there's so much bullshit confirming all your wrong ideas you can spend weeks reading just that.

PiS state media absolutely destroyed my grandpa. In the recent years, he went from being someone whom you could talk to to someone that only speaks about how Tusk is devil and so on.

I used to live in Brazil, and I saw a similar situation: a significant chunk of very intelligent and competent, high-earning, IT workers were very much into those theories.

I also know a huge amount of conspiracy theory believers in the medical area. Also otherwise competent.

If anything, the correlation with loneliness or low status was reverse: the richer and high-status, the more blatant and visible those beliefs were. People in low-prestige professions, or poor? It was very rare to see them talk about it.

The theories are often complex from the standpoint of how they work, or even the motivations. They are simple un how they assign blame. We all like having goodguys and badguys neatly separated with a single linear function. That is much more appealing than admitting we are all partly to blame for pretty much everything that affects all pf us, and that even the worst actors often have some good motivations and qualities. In addition to the appeal of simple humans, the complex conspiracies seem to appeal to people with very good pattern matching intelligence. Also, sometimes, conspiracies are real, and that doesn't help.

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