What kind of person is drawn to conspiracy theories?

[trenton]

3 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

It just came off as completely artifical and inorganic, ungrounded, meaningless for the intended context. If you got a conspiracy theory, tell us about it, don't try to construct it after the fact based on some standard of being as milquetoast as possible. Because clearly it ended up being completely artificial and not even fitting the term "conspiracy theory". It's like you fear your father is going to beat you if he finds out you're a bad boy but you want to also sound like you're a bad boy and then you say "I could have probably been a bad boy sometimes". No, you're not a bad boy. Way too nice, way too constrained.

A conspiracy theory tends to be a specific narrative, not "something vague might have happened and it was covered up". Something very specific happened and it happened because of this specific reason and covered up for this specific reason. It has some power in the claims it makes, it actually makes a difference if they're true or not. An epistemically responsible approach to a conspiracy theory is to be consistent with the level and strength of evidence, and if you're for example a whistleblower with a lot of inside information, then you might have an epistemically responsible position thinking it is true. Same with how all the Epstein claims have tons of evidence now while before you had Alex Jones and essentially nobody else talking about it.

@Carl-Richard Okay, thanks for clearing that up. I actually have a ton of conspiracy theories and they are all very specific and calibrated to the evidence. There are plenty of conspiracy theories that explain criminal cases, institutional cover ups, and government corruption.

Firstly, conspiracy theories are very relevant to law enforcement for prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, and police investigations. This includes all kinds of frame up scenarios and set ups perpetrated by criminals with the intent to frame their victims while avoiding accountability by manipulating the evidence such that it misleads investigators. I have witnessed this personally multiple times. This includes cases of police corruption such as accepting bribes from drug traffickers, falsified evidence such as police officers planting drugs during traffic stops, the suppression of exculpatory evidence by the prosecution because they prioritize winning a case at the expense of truth, various cases in which people were set up and tricked into appearing to commit crimes by a third party of criminals who deceived them, gang activities in various contexts, institutional cover ups for financial fraud or child sexual abuse, my experience with an attempt to frame me for kidnapping, my experience with witnessing specific gang activities due to my father's involvement, various cases of insider trading among government officials, businesses engaging in calculated law breaking to ensure that they profit even after being sued, and so on. The conspiracy theory in cases like these are part of the investigative process rather than necessarily definitive conclusions.

For example, if you go to a school in which a teacher was reported by five or more students for inappropriate touching, but then the school rather than reporting him to the authorities instead moves him to another location, then this is a common cover up to protect the institution's reputation. It is a similar method to church scandals in which priests are moved rather than prosecuted. A reasonable inference an investigator would make is that multiple reports from several witnesses describing similar behavior is likely indicative of an institutional cover up.

My biggest concern about discrediting conspiracy theories is that when people are victims of frame ups, they are often not believed. The justice system handles these situations poorly and the investigations are often not done in a sufficient manner to secure the necessary exculpatory evidence. The lone victim of the frame up is often the only one with the knowledge of how the frame up works. The general population typically has a poor understanding of frame ups by organized criminals such as cases of identity theft, sex trafficking, or kidnapping among other examples. There are actually many possible frame up scenarios that challenge the current evidentiary standards including digital frame ups where the law is still very much behind technology. The gaps in the legal system and its evidentiary standards is what allows organized criminals to exploit the gaps to frame innocent people while avoiding consequences. Complete investigations are often expensive and time consuming, making truth seeking structurally difficult to seek in frame up scenarios as the defendant must become the prosecutor of organized criminals who manipulated the evidence to make him seem guilty.

By this standard, "conspiracy theorist" includes FBI agents investigating a criminal network that they suspect has committed serious offenses but haven't yet received confirmation beyond the circumstantial evidence which appears to implicate the bad actors. "Conspiracy theory" includes investigators making hypotheses as to what the organized criminals may have done to aid in discovery.

I think the problem with discrediting "conspiratorial thinking" generally is that it doesn't seem to account for cases of reasonable inference based on documented patterns and corroborating evidence. If I am going to say there is an epistemic problem with conspiracy theories, then the actual criticism should be that they are often made without sufficient evidence which would make the claims more grounded. By this logic, the problem isn't simply conspiratorial thinking because there are different epistemic standards that can be used when making conspiracy theories and engaging in conspiratorial thinking. We should probably say that wild speculation without evidence is the problem rather than just conspiracy theorists making conspiracy theories, otherwise we end up with a bunch of people saying, "sometimes conspiracy theories are true, therefore there is validity to making conspiracy theories in certain contexts."

There are however types of conspiracies and frame ups that the general population typically has no understanding of, leaving the victims of criminal conspiracies and frame ups vulnerable to being accused of making "wild stories" when in reality they are telling the truth. Many stories of legitimate conspiracies are often dismissed due to seeming crazy, which in of itself is an epistemic failure. This seems to be the real reason why I find this subject triggering and I felt the need to post in this thread.

[zurew]

On 2026. 04. 09. at 11:55 PM, trenton said:

Many stories of legitimate conspiracies are often dismissed due to seeming crazy, which in of itself is an epistemic failure.

They can be an epistemic failure, but this is why the talk should rather be about how to make sense of events better and how to distinguish real conspiracy theories from false ones.

I wont do this, but my personal approach would be something like:

1) Lets take systematically all the conspiracy theories that actually turned out to be true and deeply analyze them structurally and try to extract common patterns from them.

2) After that, lets go back in time, and try to think about what better epistemic approach(es) could have been used to recognize that the given conspiracy theory is plausibly true and or worth deeper investigation (given all the avalaible info and tools and all the alternative hypotheses back then)

3) After that check how many false positives ( by false positive here I just mean - generating a conclusion that there is a conspiracy when there isn't one) would your updated epistemic approach generate about other known historical events that we already have a more plausible/better answer and or theory for.

 

So develop an approach by which you can recognize and differentiate (hopefully in a reliable  way) true conspiracies from false ones and integrate that approach within a higher order weighing system -  where you compare, study and entertain a bunch of other alternative theories for any given event in question (by alternative theory here , I just mean theories that are not conspiracy theories).

On 2026. 04. 09. at 11:55 PM, trenton said:

This seems to be the real reason why I find this subject triggering and I felt the need to post in this thread.

I understand your frustration (if you try to target people who are so naive and biased   that they never ever entertain any conspiracy theory no matter how much evidence is presented),  but on the other hand, you need to understand and acknowledge that dismissing most conspiracy theorists as a heruistic can be reasonable and understandable  given some of the reasons you already layed down -  limited resources, time, information and having negative priors about most conspiracy theorists (where most of their claims turn out to be false or unsubstantiated and most of them are generally uneducated about the subject they try to talk about) .

This is not to say that there isn't any room for epistemic improvement (when it comes to how to approach conspiracy theories and people who bring up conspiracy theories) , but this is to say that you shouldnt have an unreasonable standard for people and for institutions. Because, just like we cant expect every single criminal case to be perfectly solved (given all of our limitations), we also cant expect people and institutions to recognize every single legit conspiracy theory when there is one.

But I think its fine for you to push people to update their priors about conspiracy theories and about conspiracy theorists so that they dont just categorically reject all conspiracy theories. 

Edited April 11 by zurew

[trenton]

@zurew Thank you for your input.

The way I approach it, I don't even look at ridiculous conspiracy theorists that talk about things like lizard people or things of that nature. I think attacking the category "conspiracy theory" logically doesn't make sense. Conspiratorial thinking is justified in some smaller contexts aside from a global scheme with extreme organization. I think it would be fair to say that we should not make drastic claims which outpace the evidence. This is the core argument that applies to most false conspiracy theories that make up elaborate stories.

There is probably better language we can use to describe what is being criticized if "conspiracy theory" is technically the wrong category to be attacking. Instead we should probably attack the category of "elaborate delusional conspiratorial thinking with no basis in reality and without sufficient evidence." Aside from this category, maybe "conspiracy theory" as a category is fine within narrow or smaller contexts with strong evidence such as a church hiding a sex scandal.

[Shermaningeorgia]

People who claim to be aware.

Edgelords who want to be right

People who distrust power.