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How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories

bbc.co.uk

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Re: How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories

#101

Post by DFHippie »

LeCow wrote: post #90
InitialLastName wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people are threatening the health and safety of other people (including uninvolved bystanders, not to mention people who disagree with them) based on their beliefs and opinions, does it not approach being your responsibility to do what you can to disavow them of those beliefs?

How does believing in something false threaten someones safety?

If it causes you to act in accordance with the false belief in ways that threaten someone's safety. For instance, you might shoot up Comet Pizza.

Re: How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories

#102

Post by disown »

That's easy. Tell them to stop watching CNN, Foxnews, BBC, MSNBC, etc.

> Are they quoting a fringe YouTube video (which may have been fact-checked and debunked), or people in the echo chamber of a conspiracy-minded Facebook group?

Yes. Youtube algorithm favors establishment media and these poor conspiracy minded souls are being bombarded by establishment conspiracy theories 24/7.

> Specialist disinformation reporter, BBC News

There you have it folks. BBC News specializes in disinformation reporting. :) That title is orwellian but then again, orwell based the ministry of truth after the bbc and his time working as a bbc propagandist in india during ww2.

The biggest conspiracy theorists are upset at the little conspiracy theorists. Nobody likes competition it seems.

Re: How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories

#103

Post by edgyquant »

jungletime wrote: post #18

Hard to read this with a straight face, after Snowden and Julian Assange. Snowden is still in exile, and Assange is tortured in Jail. This is the price for proving deep state "conspiracy theories".

Snowden immediately fled to US adversaries and Assange was knowingly working with Russian intelligence agencies.

Re: How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories

#104

Post by CyanBird »

kordlessagain wrote: post #77
netcan wrote: post #24

I've been in these conversations several times recently. My tips: Go in friendly. Make an effort to assume and embody good will and rationality. The premise of most conspiratorial thinking is very dichotomous. They see themselves as the open minded against dismissive, closed minded opposition. Don't play into this by being dismissive. Be generous instead and assume that they are truth seeking just like you. Don't be…

Do you have any data on the form their mind is creating to hold these theories "true"? The form could be factual data (lists of things) supporting or disproving their theory, creative imagery (internally seen things) obscuring what is normally viewed as reality, or perhaps sound or voices in the form of hallucinations (internally heard things). After armchair analyzing this for nearly 4 years, I'm pretty sure Trump i…

> Do you have any data on the form their mind is creating to hold these theories "true"

I can't address the rest of the comment, but I can address this

True and truth are what the collective believes it is true, you can see this from the Desert Storm invasion based on the "truth" that the Iraqi army was taking babies out of incubators, to the modern idea of Genders being exclusively binary when we have literal Roman emperors writing how much they love their teenage male lovers or South East Asian transexual and cross dressing.

Truth is what the group "deludes" itself to be, which will always be clashing with materialism and material reality

Re: How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories

#105

Post by mgkimsal »

fer wrote: post #93
TravHatesMe wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling into question fact checkers is a good thing, skeptics should be welcomed. But I suppose there is a subjective line between reasonable skepticism and near-schizophrenic skepticism.

Sure. On the other hand, my newsfeed's nuts complain about fact checkers flagging their "nanobot infused COVID-19 vaccines by Bill Gates that can be controlled by 5G towers on command by Soros" posts as censorship and shills of the NWO. Of course, fact checkers come with their own sets of biases, and any (educated) reader can identify those. But the fact that reporters from all around joined fact checking campaigns i…

The Bill Gates ones are just the weirdest. I watched someone try to dig in to this a bit with someone pushing the idea that Bill Gates was trying to control us with vaccines/5g.

"Why would he do that?"

"Oh, there's money! There's lot of money in controlling people with vaccines. I know if I had that kind of power, I'd want to make money like that". (paraphrasing, but only just).

I think people have a difficult time comprehending the level of wealth/power someone like Gates or Bezos already have. Having wealth north of $100B is something only a handful of people will ever experience. To think someone has worked their whole life to get that sort of money, then... someone, would decide to say "I want to control people with vaccines because I can make a lot of money that way!" is ... off-the-radar silly. For a time, Gates had a lot more potential control over the information itself, and likely could have enriched himself even more directly, without needing to resort to medical intervention.

People are scared. The world is changing around us faster than many are able to keep up. Focusing your fears on a few outsized larger than life names to try to make sense of things is... I guess understandable to a point, but... these 'theories' can't seem to stand up to much basic logic.

Re: How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories

#106

Post by nojokes »

bloak wrote: post #96

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 ha…

I am not sure that this is a helpful definition.

There are many opinions that could be described as "paranoid delusion" by its opponents but still have a high probability to be true.

For example many politics from Eastern Europe tried to warn their Western colleagues (before 2008) that Russia is not up for good relations with EU. This was labeled as Russophobia i.e. paranoid delusion.

Trying to understand global politics is a very difficult task and there are probably many false beliefs even on highest level.

It is also up to interpretation.

Re: How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories

#107

Post by CyanBird »

desilentio wrote: post #95
CyanBird wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

I don't want to be rude, but your use of `whom' is wrong; `whom' is only used for the object.

Thanks I didn't know, I am one of these self taught English people

Re: How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories

#108

Post by redlock »

LeCow wrote: post #90
InitialLastName wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people are threatening the health and safety of other people (including uninvolved bystanders, not to mention people who disagree with them) based on their beliefs and opinions, does it not approach being your responsibility to do what you can to disavow them of those beliefs?

How does believing in something false threaten someones safety?

By refusing to follow the rules set by the medical authorities. Refusing to wear mask, not isolating when infected, etc...

A more extreme example of false beliefs causing great harm is the Holocaust that was caused by Nazis believing the Jews are part of a conspiracy to undermine Germany and were the cause of Germany's defeat in WW1.

False beliefs can cause a lot of harm to a lot of people in both personal level (not vaccinating your kids) and to the larger societal level.

Re: How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories

#109

Post by everybodyknows »

newsbinator wrote: post #7

This doesn't seem to offer insight. It's: 1. Talk to them, for hours if you can. 2. Figure out where they're getting their information and see if it's already been debunked. 3. Don't be a jerk. That's not very much 'how', unfortunately.

It doesn't even succeed in showing readers how not to be a jerk: "Present facts and evidence neutrally, the experts say."

A god may have facts, but we mortals have only evidence, and theories that explain the evidence more or less well. Is this not the central principle of science?

But following scientific explanations requires certain skills, such as mathematics. And the mass media, including even Scientific American, do not print equations. So popular journalists treat scientists as, in effect, alternative gods, whose opinions may be weighted according to prestige, or by how well they flatter reader's prejudices, but cannot be otherwise tested or analyzed.

Conspiracy theorists merely take more or less this same dysfunction to its extreme: a circle of Youtube pseudo-scientists, perfect conformity to reader's prejudices, and perhaps no numbers at all.

Re: How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories

#110

Post by mindslight »

tombert wrote: post #31
blhack wrote: post #19

>Are they quoting a fringe YouTube video (which may have been fact-checked and debunked) We have got to get away from this idea that you can "debunk" something with some authoritative source of truth. That is just not how reality works, and the idea that you can "fact check" and "debunk" your way to a healthy, functioning system of rhetoric is absurd. NO argument has EVER been won by somebody pointing to a third part…

There's an old quote that I'm probably butchering, and I don't know who said it, but it goes along the lines of "you can't use logic to get someone out of something they didn't use logic to get themselves into." I used to be someone who would perpetually argue with friends and family members who believed in all this conspiracy crap, usually devolving to me sending links to Snopes and Politifact and whatnot, but I lat…

> since they could always just dismiss me as "in on it" whenever I said something they didn't like.

I get this same effect when talking about vanilla non-conspiratorial things, agree with their concerns, and I've been asked what I think. Since I don't tow their party line by focusing my attention on the same bad people, I'm "othered" and written off. This is more pronounced when talking to people on the red team than people on the blue team, but happens with both.

A simple example is "GPS satellites tracking your phone". Trying to explain to people that the GPS satellites only transmit, but that it's applications on your phone spilling your location, so there are steps you can personally take to avoid that - it just doesn't work. It's like my model of the situation doesn't fit into their model, and rather than doing the work to understand what I'm saying, they'd rather continue with their comforting simplistic answer that generally combines defeatism with condemnation.

> I'm not sure what the best strategy for fighting this kind of weird mass idiotic groupthink is

If anyone has any ideas please share them. For basically any social movement, when I see it gets some traction I'll think finally people are starting to care. But then as things progress, the movement takes on a life of its own and heads in the wrong direction without fail. It's like instead of staying focused on the problem, opportunists looking for power supply a "solution" that steers the crowd into an easy non-answer to benefit themselves. And it doesn't take many of them, because once the red herring becomes the groupthink dogma, pointing out its problems gets you othered.

I think the catastrophe we're now experiencing is from the wave of "normies" discovering conspiracy theories. Early Internet denizens went through this phase a long time ago, and had to contextualize wild theories within mainstream thought. Even if we found them very compelling, we couldn't just rant to everyone we met. But now that everyone and their aunt is on faceboot, not only can you repeat all the nonsense you've heard without being socially ostracized, you will actually gain popularity from it!

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