How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories

I can vouch for it, it is very very effective, I discussed with a friend whom believed that a cabal of jews control the world and other one whom believed that the earth is flat

It should be noted that it is not easy to do, you need to have foundational knowledge of these topics and quick historical references to people/historical characters whom also made the "mistake" of believing what your interlocutor did, that way you can both set a reference for your interlocutor so he/she doesn't feel alone and as an outcast, and thread a narrative needle through history itself showing how people used to think that but now don't because of x, y, z evidence, think it like James Burkes idea of linking different topics through history, if anybody is interested I'd very much recommend listening to the Dan Carlin James Burke podcast episode and then checking James Burke books on it

But as OP said, I very, very much have enjoyed the conversations with "them" as I see them basically as adversarial journalists of sorts, asking some very tricky epistemological questions to which the foundations of modern science, history and modernity itself are built

And lastly a key, "There are no Good Great Men", everyone whom got to power in history is basically by definition Not A Good Person, and that is because just to get power at all one must play dirty most often than not. There are are just a very few select people whom we might look as being "Good"

A lot of the conspiracy theorists I encounter online are long-term married people in their late-50s/early-60s.

Or 20-somethings who, judging by their profiles, spend 2 ~ 4 nights a week in a bar.

It doesn't seem like social isolation quite explains it.

I think the term "conspiracy theory" is perhaps unhelpful, and it also seems that people are lumping together phenomena that aren't necessarily all that closely related. If there's a group of people with some strongly held belief, not supported by evidence, about the government doing something evil then perhaps we should call it a "shared paranoid delusion". It's hardly a "theory" if they already believe it and it hardly involves a "conspiracy" seeing as it's perfectly normal for the government to plan things in secret, even things that aren't "evil".

And as an addendum, you have to be kind.

We know our educational systems fail people, conspiracy thinking is what happens when critically thinking people lack the foundation to see the world around them and therefore start questioning the foundations of it, because again they are critical in thinking, after that first layer then you have socialization, ego, collective identities and other things that reinforce their loss aversion to changing their world view, but the core is critical thinking

Imagine this as if you were talking to a classical Babylonian, or to Plato itself and through foundational analogies such as the Anarchic Pirates of Plato you explain the world and logic

Recognize that there's some underlying payoff to believing this stuff.

> Psychologists like Jovan Byford from the Open University tell me that a good strategy is to try to get to the bottom of the person's legitimate concerns and to find out how they are feeling.

If you can find the payoff and substitute something else[1] the person will tend to return to "normal" on their own. It takes a lot of energy to fight the whole world.

([1] E.g. w/ the now-deprecated "Six-Step Reframe" https://gist.github.com/calroc/4719702 )

Use the "Meta-Model" from Neurolinguistic Programming.

> It is claimed that the Meta-model “yields a fuller representation of the client’s model of the world – the linguistic Deep Structure from which the client’s initial verbal expressions or Surface Structure, were derived” by offering challenges to its limits, the distortions, generalisations or deletions in the speaker’s language.

https://www.nlpworld.co.uk/nlp-training-meta-model/

Be careful, it's a power tool. You can easily alienate the person you're trying to reach.