What kind of person is drawn to conspiracy theories?

[Sucuk Ekmek]

They benefit from conspiracy, it's hard to work with coincident theories.

[zurew]

12 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

What was that specifically?

It was solved by the hypothesis that your subsconscious mind can pick up on very complex patterns.

In this specific case it was about introducing people(who needs to stare at you) in a pseduo random manner and it turned out that the subconscious can actually pick up on the fact that it wasnt actually random and just from that info they managed to guess better (even if they couldnt consciously recognize the fact that their subconscious actually picked up on the introducing rhythm).

After they adjusted and after they didnt give any feedback anymore  (after each round about whether they managed to guess the staring right or not), the chance went back down to 50%.

12 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

The Fine-tuning argument, in my limited knowledge of it (or rather almost purely intuitive understanding of it), never made much sense to me.

 

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Its very complicated , and it has to do mostly with bayesian reasoning , but some versions includes complex abductive reasoning.

The thing I currently dont like is the fact that most theists run the argument in an unfair way, where they just add a bunch of facts to God's psychology and after you add those facts, of course God will try to create the Universe like this and then they compared that to a shit version of naturalism where it is done by randomness.  But the same ad hoc move can be done by naturalists, where you just add random predispositional facts to the laws of nature or to the meta-laws that then can explain why the Universe is this way rather than some other way.

There are also issues with higher order fine-tuning, where if you bake in certain things about God's psychology, then you need to explain why God has that kind of psychology rather than any other psychology and who or what fine-tuned that? If you take that psychology as a brute fact where there isn't any explanation in principle, then my issue is that I dont see why couldn't we just do that move at the level of the Universe ,why do we need to go one level of abstraction higher to say that the given fine-tuning doesnt need any further explanation.

Once you strip away those added facts about God's psychology, the set of things that God could desire explodes and if it is the case that God can create any logically possible world (where he isn't constrained by nomological laws), then the probability of him creating this kind of Universe becomes practically equal to randomness.

--

There is a lot more that can be said about this, but I will need to get read up on this, because it seems to be the case that people who starts out thinking that the argument is trash, some of them flip their opinion once they get actually informed about the underlying problems and issues.

 

8 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

I mean you can say that in principle, but as a fact, you don't know the actual plan of God, and that plan can be studied, and you might find out that it unfolds only in a certain way that only fits with a few narrow hypotheses.

What I said there was just a pragmatic argument mostly, it doesnt show that what you said cant be true or that it is less probable, it just states once we make the move towards supernatualism, epistemically we get more fucked because it becomes much harder to make sense of things and to predict things.

 

Here I question what you gain by affirming supernaturalism:

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1) The harder sense making isn't just about not necessarily understanding God's plan, but it is also about adjusting your priors to other supernatural entities and stuff exiting and or the laws changing . If you just take God to be the Universe consciously intervening and interacting  with parts of itself, the issue surrounding this will go back to the point I layed down about the fine-tuning and about baking in predispositional facts about God's psychology rather than baking in those facts about the naturalist paradigm. Its unclear how NDE happening this way rather than any other way is more expected under supernaturalism than just under naturalism and if it is not more expected, then I dont see what would motivate the move towards supernaturalism.

2) Its unclear to me, what you gain by affirming supernaturalism, but depending on how you define it , its clear to me what you lose by affirming it. For instance, if you take supernaturalism to mean God being the Universe and it also having the ability to change the laws or to act despite those laws, then you introduced uncertainty (unless you know when and why God wants to adjust the laws or act despite those laws). But then I can just compare that with a type of naturalism where you can go with the laws changing because of some kind of higher order law or  I can just say that the laws never changed or will change , its just that we dont understand the laws well enough yet and thats why it seemed like they changed (this is epistemically better , because this dodges the introduced uncertainty). 

So even if we assume that God's psychology is perfectly knowable , even in that scenario (if you want to maintain your ability predict things) what you have is supernaturalism,  where you need to know the laws + God's psychology vs naturalism where you only need to know the laws . The question in this case is just what you gain by going with supernaturalism there?

Here I give further reasons to why reject it:

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The other reason why it epistemically fucks you up (independent from the fact whether you know God's psychology or not) is the fact, that once you take it that God has meta-cognition without it needing to go through a developmental process (like evolution or something similar) to develop that meta-cognition and you also take it that God is disembodied -  then with that move you also open up the door to other disembodied entities having meta-cognition from the start as well. Thats where you open up the door to all sorts of supernatural stuff like ghosts, demons, other invisible entities (that can possibly interact with you and with the world in a causal way). This is why I said in my previous post yesterday, that this makes it so that you need to entertain much more possible hypotheses for any given pnemona or event and it makes your ability to make sense of things much harder.

For instance, if and when your shoe goes missing - you dont just need to check whether your dog stole it or not , you need to also entertain the possibility that there are shoe-stealing invisible fairies.

If you take it that God isn't disembodied then the the point about meta-cognition still goes through (and then we still need to completely readjust our conception of what is needed for something to have meta-cognition and that has potential other issues) but aside from that;  I dont understand what it would mean for God to be embodied and then to create the Universe or to change the laws - because under the naturalistic conception of God the Universe is just God and the laws is how God unfolds, but in the supernatural conception of God  - he supervenes on those laws and I dont understand what it means to be those laws and to also supervene on those laws. 

 

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And yes, I agree with the thing you layed down about naturalism adjusting. Its unclear how we even define these terms in the firstplace and we are possibly challenging the edges and talking past each other. One thing is that there are always moves avalaible in order to maintain naturalism, but not at 0 cost. If I need to give a 1000 auxiliary hypothesis to explain the same set of facts (the set that supernaturalism could explain with one relatively simple hypothesis) then eventually it can become really intellectually dishonest and pressing to leave the fucking naturalist paradigm.

 

Sorry this was a lot, but if you want we can go through this by one piece at a time.

Edit: Added quotes so it can be closed and it wont take up half the page.

Edited 20 hours ago by zurew

[LastThursday]

I'm not sure I believe that a supernaturalist tendency makes you more prone to be a conspiracy theorist. I think anyone can be drawn to it, and even change their minds over time. 

I think most of it comes down a confluence of things, such as how naturally paranoid or anxious one is, or how much one believes what others tell them. Also, it comes from ignorance of how things actually work in real life; conspiracy theorists are uninformed in many different areas and so draw wrong conclusions.

There is often an esoteric or weird vibe to conspiracy theories, in the same vein as folk tales, and that does make them stick in the mind more. In other words it's survival of the fittest conspiracy theories, the ones that stick around are the most memorable, weird and wacky.

[Christoph Werner]

"What kind of person is drawn to conspiracy theories?"

Why is that a question that you find is important?

All kinds of people are drawn to conspiracy theories. A lot of fools off course. But even more fools dont take conspiracy theories seriously.

The wanting to put conspiracy theories and people who are drawn to it into a box just shows someone who is invested in certain beliefs and who easily needs to explain away alternative theories.

And Leo is certainly guilty of that.

Imagine you voluntarily play lab rat for a company that had to pay the biggest pharma fine in US history, a company that is well known for it's corruption. Just because you got triggered by fear and group pressure, the most obvious way of psychological manipulation. And then you even go to your blog to promote your sheepish behaviour... lmao

 

[Carl-Richard]

6 hours ago, LastThursday said:

I'm not sure I believe that a supernaturalist tendency makes you more prone to be a conspiracy theorist. I think anyone can be drawn to it, and even change their minds over time. 

Notice I laid out the cognitive style that underlies supernaturalism and conspiracy theorist thinking. In a culture like ours, overt supernaturalism (in terms of traditional religiosity) is naturally suppressed, so you would expect less people to be overtly supernatural but perhaps they start gravitating toward conspiracy theories to fill that need for narrative-based cognition. Traditional religion is of course considered a meta-narrative that explains everything, gives a history or a plan for everything in reality (teleology, escatology). You could see how that can be replaced by the belief in the Illuminati or repetilians or hidden global world order or something like that.

 

6 hours ago, LastThursday said:

I think most of it comes down a confluence of things, such as how naturally paranoid or anxious one is, or how much one believes what others tell them.

Paranoia and anxiety actually links to narrative-driven cognition (or are sort of the core ingredients of it, but with negative valence). Paranoia is driven by suspicion ("this thing could be indicative of this thing, that would be really bad"; assumption -> conclusion, a micro-narrative), and anxiety is driven by worry ("what if this thing happens in the future? That would be really bad"; similar assumption and conclusion).

Paranoia and anxiety is associated with mentalistic cognition (drawing inferences based on sometimes very little information), i.e. more psychotic-like cognition, while more concrete cognition requires more details or facts and often very obvious inferences, i.e. more autistic-like cognition. Mentalism is more holistic, narrative-driven, suspicious, again drawing loose inferences based on less information, while more concrete cognition is more analytic, fact-driven, stable, drawing very few inferences based on very obvious connections. 

So you're really touching on the same phenomena (of course in a bit of a peripheral way). And when the meta-narrative of conspiracy theories is control, domination, deception, then naturally the narratives become negatively valenced and thus suspicious, paranoid, anxious, worried.

 

6 hours ago, LastThursday said:

Also, it comes from ignorance of how things actually work in real life; conspiracy theorists are uninformed in many different areas and so draw wrong conclusions.

Which can be driven (among other things) by a lack of fact-driven approach and drawing more loose inferences based on less information. Of course lower intelligence is also relevant, but that also feeds into facts-acquisition and inference-making (how fast do you do it, how much information can you handle at one time, how is your pattern-identifying skills, perhaps refinement and precision; IQ and working memory, pattern-recognition, intellectualism, all that).

 

6 hours ago, LastThursday said:

There is often an esoteric or weird vibe to conspiracy theories, in the same vein as folk tales, and that does make them stick in the mind more. In other words it's survival of the fittest conspiracy theories, the ones that stick around are the most memorable, weird and wacky.

Hmm, narratives? Narrative-cognition being more efficient and appealing to the mind? Hmm.

Edited 16 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

3 hours ago, Christoph Werner said:

"What kind of person is drawn to conspiracy theories?"

Why is that a question that you find is important?

I had an insight and I wrote about it.

 

3 hours ago, Christoph Werner said:

All kinds of people are drawn to conspiracy theories. A lot of fools off course. But even more fools dont take conspiracy theories seriously.

The wanting to put conspiracy theories and people who are drawn to it into a box just shows someone who is invested in certain beliefs and who easily needs to explain away alternative theories.

Notice I put both conspiracy theorist thinking and the opposite tendency roughly equally in their own boxes. But of course the former is more salient as a societal question (it brings up more feelings, because of the negative valence as @LastThursday brought up, but also because there is a societal or cultural bias or stigma against that kind of thinking, again because we're culturally embedded in an analytic and post- traditional-religious framework). That's probably mostly why I put it as a title.

[danniel]

Human primitive curiosity, mixed with a part of being right, seeing justifications in the given pieces of "facts", the joy of putting 2+2 together, which gives a sense of accomplishment. 

My thought on this is rather materialistic, in a sense. But I believe this because it is the same reason why reels/shorts/tiktoks are addictive, The algo, prioritizes "did you know..." format of content, and at the end an open ended finish, such as "only time will tell"

But someone wrote, people who want a boogeyman to blame on, is the esoteric strand of it. Something not happening/going right in an individual's life, and with enough pieces of information, they can deceive themselves into theorizing stuff, which brings it to the first point I said, justification and so on and so forth.

I say this because I have experienced it and have fell in trap in believing random stuff lol

[LastThursday]

@Carl-Richard a good unpacking of what I wrote there, thanks.

Isn't most cognition of a narrative style? I mean, the whole of science is narrative, but it doesn't appeal to all minds. It's definitely more to do with the content of the narrative, and the most memorable, lowest common denominator content wins out, which is where conspiracies sit. People are extremely prone to believing stories of all shades. Most of them are harmless because people "know" they're just stories, but the dangerous ones are the ones people don't recognise as stories, but as "reality". I think even very sensible even-minded people can slip from one state to the other.

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, LastThursday said:

@Carl-Richard a good unpacking of what I wrote there, thanks.

Isn't most cognition of a narrative style? I mean, the whole of science is narrative, but it doesn't appeal to all minds. It's definitely more to do with the content of the narrative, and the most memorable, lowest common denominator content wins out, which is where conspiracies sit. People are extremely prone to believing stories of all shades. Most of them are harmless because people "know" they're just stories, but the dangerous ones are the ones people don't recognise as stories, but as "reality". I think even very sensible even-minded people can slip from one state to the other.

You can have a narrative which is more dense in facts (data points) and one more dense in connections or inferences and conclusions. That's the salient difference I'm pointing to. When a conspiracy theorist is like "look at how weird the videos look of the moon landings -> it must be staged", the anti-conspiracy theorist is like "but what about this fact, and this fact, and this fact, and this fact; that surely doesn't yibe with your theory?".

[Leo Gura]

Conspiracy theorists are always falling for confirmation bias. They only cherrypick data that confirms their theory while ignoring falisfying data. This is because they never learned scientific method.

Most conspiracy theorists simply never completed university. They are uneducated to a dangerous level. They operate from pre-rational cognition. They don't understand what rationality is because no one ever taught them.

To a conspiracy theorist there is no such thing as coicidence or accident. Everything is part of a grand narrative. It is the thinking of a child.

Edited 6 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Raze]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Conspiracy theorists are always falling for confirmation bias. They only cherrypick data that confirms their theory while ignoring falisfying data. This is because they never learned scientific method.

Most conspiracy theorists simply never completed university. They are uneducated to a dangerous level. They operate from pre-rational cognition. They don't understand what rationality is because no one ever taught them.

To a conspiracy theorist there is no such thing as coicidence or accident. Everything is part of a grand narrative. It is the thinking of a child.

Then how do you explain the multiple conspiracy theories that were later proven true 

[Wilhelm44]

Why not just be open to evaluating everything on it's own merit. After all we now openly talking about the eating of placenta etc. Few years ago if someone brought up a topic like that on the forum, it probably would have been shut down immediately. 

[Joshe]

It depends on the conspiracy and what it offers.

Most ordinary people get sucked in by intellectual intrigue. Things like curiosity, playing detective/cracking a puzzle, shiny object. Also, pre-existing motivations like distrust in institutions. 

Things start to turn weird when they admit they believe the theory and then get pushback. That's the point when identity enters the chat and often becomes "I can see what others can't", "people are asleep/sheep" and when motivated reasoning becomes dominant.

And this arouses the rational person's identity defenses, who then feel compelled to flaunt their epistemic superiority, which humiliates the pre-rational and causes them to double down.

It's often both who are using epistemic superiority to stabilize identity. "I can see what others can't"

Rational people unwittingly play a large role in the epistemic breakdown.

Edited 3 hours ago by Joshe

[Uddi]

@Leo Gura For me I see the hidden agenda as more of a grand overall sense as it makes sense that elites want absolute control because the ego's dream is to become god without dying or dissolving to the absolute. I do have a veteran friend who has witnessed countless times that the US government has lied to the public intentionally. I trust certain conspiracies such as suppressed free energy technologies, frequency war much more than others as I can see why elites would want to do that. Free energy technologies will completely collapse billion dollar industries which is why it is hidden. And while 5G waves are non-ionizing, from what I know they can make it harder to relax however it is so hard to prove it because current modern science is terrible at truly predicting if something can create long term harm or not. What's your thoughts on this perspective?

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Uddi said:

@Leo Gura For me I see the hidden agenda as more of a grand overall sense as it makes sense that elites want absolute control because the ego's dream is to become god without dying or dissolving to the absolute. I do have a veteran friend who has witnessed countless times that the US government has lied to the public intentionally. I trust certain conspiracies such as suppressed free energy technologies, frequency war much more than others as I can see why elites would want to do that.

Imagine you're a normal person in your own life, working a job and barely keeping your head above water and a homeless person looks at you and says "the workers just want to keep us down, it makes sense as they would want more control". You would be like "I'm just trying to do my job, I ain't got the time or resources for this shit".

Do you think the elites have less responsibility, more time, more actual resources than you, to plot a plan of world domination that requires other people like them to be aligned with their interests and in on their plan and not preoccupied with their own interests? The higher up you get in the rungs of power, the more strings are attached to you, the more of your time is valued, the more of your time is needed, if not, you get outcompeted by those that have that time. You think Jeff Bezos has time for your shit? Just playing the anti-conspiracist devil's advocate.

If you look around, you see arguably much more division than cooperation, certainly across country lines, across company lines, across different competing agents. And you conclude that at the very top, at the very highest levels of organization, beyond all countries, beyond all companies, there is perfect and synchronous cooperation? This is the fact-driven position (criticizing the narrative by pointing to dissonant facts; real concrete things grounded in the real world). The narrative-driven position is "but the elites are creating all that division to benefit them, to keep us under control; it's all an epic plot, a play, a deception". These are connections that could make sense but are less grounded in concrete things. They are more general and more like possibilities than actual facts. What appeals more to you and why?

Edited 1 hour ago by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

8 hours ago, LastThursday said:

Isn't most cognition of a narrative style? I mean, the whole of science is narrative, 

You can also flip it around and ask "but doesn't a conspiracy theorist also find facts for their narrative?". And that's true, but the difference might be they might be more likely to start with the narrative and then find the facts (i.e. confirmation bias like Leo pointed out), rather than walking around and consuming facts after facts after facts until a narrative pops out.

An example that comes to mind of choosing the narrative first and then the facts would be Terrence McKenna's Timewave Zero. He essentially created a graph by deriving some mathematical equations from the I-Ching, and then he postulated that the graph represents fluctuations in novelty in world history. And then he looked at the peaks and trophs and tried to find a fact (an event in the real world) that corresponded to the graph at that moment in time.

Doing it that way makes it much easier to find facts that fit the time wave, rather than sorting through facts and then concluding what would be the time wave. That's one of the reasons why narrative cognition is more efficient. And narrative cognition is used in science all the time like you say. It's in fact virtually always a requirement, as you virtually always want to go from a theory (narrative) to a hypothesis to then confirming or disconfirming that hypothesis with data.

But of course science (or specifically quantiative science) addresses this problem partially with repeated measurement and control of confounding variables. But there is still problems with narrative-driven cognition even in quantitative science (problematic research practices like HARKing/post-hoc hypothesizing, multiple comparisons, p-hacking), which fuels the replication crisis in particularly the behavioral sciences.

After all, the scientist's livelihood and career depends on the narrative being correct, as that is what gets published and what gets the university money. So there is a massive incentive to skew the results in favor of the narrative being correct. And that may unfortunately never change unless we get infinite resources in society (perhaps UBI would help a little) or just less prestige-based journal systems.

Edited just now by Carl-Richard