Hacker News Reader

Comment by bananabiscuit | Hacker News Reader

Kind of a way of turning something obvious on its head and painting it as a negative. When you are interacting with people, there is pressure to conform to consensus reality, regardless of the merit of that reality. Anybody who goes against the grain, wether they are wrong, or correct and eventually vindicated, first has to face negative social pressure from their peers.

View on HN

This is definitely true. I find there's a certain irony in society that we condemn people who aren't sceptical of anything until they are then we condemn them again.

Some of the worlds greatest thinkers and innovators suffered social execution from their peers and were deeply depressed.

That's not really the mechanism at work here. Lonely people don't turn to conspiracy theorizing because they somehow happen upon "secret knowledge" that, in the absence of any external social pressures, spontaneously becomes apparent to them.

Rather, for these lonely people, conspiracy theories are how they project their own unmet emotional needs outward onto the perceived world around them -- as a coping strategy. They need to feel like they belong and are relevant in the world. This leads them to harbor resentment toward the rest of the world whom they perceive to be in league with an amorphous "them". The conspiracist's belief that he possesses "secret knowledge" about the world fulfills his needs for belonging and relevance by making him feel as if he is part of an in-group superior to the one he perceives to be alienating him[1].

But why do this through "secret knowledge"? Usually this is the conspiracy theorist's way of coping with some inexplicable world-changing event like 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the loss of their chosen political candidate in an election; they need to "know" why immediately, but cannot, and therefore move straight from the "thinking" stage (which requires holding uncertainty and multiple possible explanations) into the "knowing" stage (which is a kind of faith-based certainty about the world)[2][3].

1. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-bul0000392.pd...

2. https://overcast.fm/+CuhudQ56w

3. https://psmag.com/social-justice/thinking-vs-knowing-when-fa...

Very insightful comment. Do you also came across info on how to pull these people (mostly older) out of it?

Separate them from their sources of misinformation by blocking youtube/tiktok/etc. and give them better things to do with their time that fulfill their social and emotional needs for belonging and acceptance (e.g., community volunteering programs, family outings, meetup hobby groups, etc.).

Thanks for highlighting the role of "secret knowledge" in fringe theories (I say "fringe" not "conspiracy" b/c when you look at the "lost Atlantis" thing it may be just a story (Plato probably thought so?), or a plot by the establishment to gaslight the sheeple, or else something in between—a "true" story about a forgotten civilization that few know of (well actually no, but anyway) and still fewer believe in, for reasons that don't necessarily constitute a conspiracy).

While I'm at it I might just as well recommend David Miano's YouTube channel World of Antiquity, here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dHNq8SURTU to his video "LIES told by Atlantis proponents" (accidentally had this tab open. Coincidendence!??!! I don't think so!).

BTW another red flag that occurs across all these Ancient and/or Alien Civilization fringe theories is that the argumentation of the believers disparages certain groups of people, mostly non-Europeans—"they could've never achieved this level of precision, they were much too primitive".

> move straight from the "thinking" stage [...] into the "knowing" stage

I've seen this time and again, people who talk, argue and act as if it's enough for a thought to cross the mind, and it's already almost taken for granted, accepted as fact.

It comes across to most people as obvious and negative from the get go. They’re not antonyms.

That is one of the possibilities that are highlighted in the abstract, Amoung other theories, including that lonely individuals seek friendship within conspiracy communities. Humans are very good at post-hoc rationalisation.

The only difference between a genius observation and a conspiracy theory is whether it turns out to be true or not.

To be fair, most conspiracy theories are already proven obviously false.

Anecdotally in my experience, autistic people are a lot more likely to "not care" about social consequences and also more often think about or believe conspiracy theories. It's also not a bad thing to have some people believing in conspiracies, especially when the media/government decides that any stories about them are crazy conspiracies and everyone believes them.

Herd mentality means you share conspiracy theories with the herd, so they don't get recognized as conspiracy theories. Think Nazi Germany etc, that only gets recognized afterwards.

So you might identify more crazy stuff in autistic people who don't align with the herd, but if you sum up all the crazy stuff the herds thinks that is roughly on a similar level to an average autistic person, just that its all aligned in a thought bubble so people don't see it unless you look outside your bubble.

To illustrate, do you think a devout democrat feels an average autistic person or a republican believe in more dumb stuff? And vice versa. Regardless which of those sides are right it still adds up to a ton of crazy shit for the average herd.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com