Wow, you actually made me a bit optimistic about this! Indeed, if foreign propaganda makes things worse, that means the domestic conspiracy theorists are actually less crazy than they seem.
Glad I got my point across, I was really not sure it was clear.
My position is that this matter is complicated and it looks hard to gather more data. For example I can’t see a satisfying way to make surveys about what those people think. Especially : the “conspiracy theorists” that are actually prone to doubt could be so susceptible to this bias they if you ask them about the president being a lizard they would answer of course without actually believing it prior to the survey. (Maybe something to do with a very short term attention span coupled with a paranoid tendency?)
An idea I had been thinking about was maybe trying to survey not what they think, but how incoherently they think. Like saying that the moon landing is true but the earth is flat, or the earth is round but there is no gravity etc. But I haven’t thought too much about this.
But anyway, I definitely try not to be optimistic either. The problem is hard. I think the propaganda I see is actually probably crazier that people’s actual beliefs. But in case people are that crazy : it’s so dangerous and important that it should definitely not be ruled out.
Wow, you actually made me a bit optimistic about this! Indeed, if foreign propaganda makes things worse, that means the domestic conspiracy theorists are actually less crazy than they seem.
Glad I got my point across, I was really not sure it was clear.
My position is that this matter is complicated and it looks hard to gather more data. For example I can’t see a satisfying way to make surveys about what those people think. Especially : the “conspiracy theorists” that are actually prone to doubt could be so susceptible to this bias they if you ask them about the president being a lizard they would answer of course without actually believing it prior to the survey. (Maybe something to do with a very short term attention span coupled with a paranoid tendency?)
An idea I had been thinking about was maybe trying to survey not what they think, but how incoherently they think. Like saying that the moon landing is true but the earth is flat, or the earth is round but there is no gravity etc. But I haven’t thought too much about this.
But anyway, I definitely try not to be optimistic either. The problem is hard. I think the propaganda I see is actually probably crazier that people’s actual beliefs. But in case people are that crazy : it’s so dangerous and important that it should definitely not be ruled out.