I am not convinced. I feel there could be a huge variance in how people actually believe there conspiracies. And it look extremely hard to estimate it.
Of course I have no doubt that there are/will be people that actually believe these things. But it could be that the proportion of people who believe them is small while the proportion of people who don’t believe it but are now doubting is large.
I have never been entirely convinced that it’s implausible that there is a majority of the conspiracy theorists that are actually susceptible to a cognitive bias that is typical of people that have never encountered bayesianism :
When they face a new idea like “putting facemask will kill your children”, they integrate that facemasks are risky, but don’t compare it to the alternative : “do I think covid is risky?”. The consequence is that those people are now in doubt and will prefer the status quo (not using masks), not that they actually believe that trump is actively disseminating poison on facemasks. This can be reinforced by the bias that riskiness can be felt as correlated to how frequent you hear about how dangerous it is, ignoring the actual risk.
And your argument that I should not underestimate their creativity as I can see from how crazy their facebook propaganda is seems invalid to me. It seems quite possible that in 5-10 years we’ll see that those ads were mostly funded by [foreign governments/rich minority with X or Y interests] fueling political instability. This would explain that the propaganda we see is actually crazier than the current state of what most conspiracy theorists actually believe.
But I’m rather new here, so I’m guessing this has already been treated extensively. I would be very thankful for good essays on the proportion of hardcore-conspiracy-theorists vs people who know doubt and stay in status quo.
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.
I am not convinced. I feel there could be a huge variance in how people actually believe there conspiracies. And it look extremely hard to estimate it.
Of course I have no doubt that there are/will be people that actually believe these things. But it could be that the proportion of people who believe them is small while the proportion of people who don’t believe it but are now doubting is large.
I have never been entirely convinced that it’s implausible that there is a majority of the conspiracy theorists that are actually susceptible to a cognitive bias that is typical of people that have never encountered bayesianism :
When they face a new idea like “putting facemask will kill your children”, they integrate that facemasks are risky, but don’t compare it to the alternative : “do I think covid is risky?”. The consequence is that those people are now in doubt and will prefer the status quo (not using masks), not that they actually believe that trump is actively disseminating poison on facemasks. This can be reinforced by the bias that riskiness can be felt as correlated to how frequent you hear about how dangerous it is, ignoring the actual risk.
And your argument that I should not underestimate their creativity as I can see from how crazy their facebook propaganda is seems invalid to me. It seems quite possible that in 5-10 years we’ll see that those ads were mostly funded by [foreign governments/rich minority with X or Y interests] fueling political instability. This would explain that the propaganda we see is actually crazier than the current state of what most conspiracy theorists actually believe.
But I’m rather new here, so I’m guessing this has already been treated extensively. I would be very thankful for good essays on the proportion of hardcore-conspiracy-theorists vs people who know doubt and stay in status quo.
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.