@RickiTarr News media diet.

If you get all your news from one source only, you're gonna end up believing some crazy shit, regardless of where you started from.

The problem is that we've allowed our information environment to degrade into the equivalent of a food desert. There's a lot of fast food joints serving up junk, and all the big outlets are now optimized to make maximum profit rather than deliver the most well-sourced news.

The internet killed newspapers, and this is the result.

@RickiTarr

I'd say when the cost of living within a conspiracy narrative is tolerable, it becomes acceptable. The easiest way to reduce that cost, and the burden of having to explain things, is to team up with like-minded people.

In this setup, you do not believe weird stuff because you are dumb, but mostly because it gives cohesion to your community. Also, it allows you to wrestle down any doubts that you might be wrong, since many others seem to believe what you believe, and they can't be all wrong, can they?

@RickiTarr 50 years of death by a thousand financial paper cuts can make people angry, hopeless and very willing to attack whoever is pointed at.

Ask yourself what 'big' things the gov't has done for the 'people' in the last 30-40 years. Beyond the ACA and extremely recently the IRA, I'm not really coming up with much.

Minimum wage being worth literally less than it was in 1960s is a pretty stark example of who the gov't is *actually* working for.

@RickiTarr The origins of this go a long way back. Carl Sagan was writing about this 30+ years ago.

"The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

- Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, The Demon-Haunted World, 1995

@RickiTarr I think in the case of people I know, it's mainly just confirmation bias that got out of control.

They started out with a stance that questioned the status quo in some way -- like a health nut suspicious of the medical establishment's disregard for homeopathic remedies -- and were conditioned to looking for information that fit that viewpoint. Then they didn't notice so much as it got more extreme. And suddenly they're not just looking for viable natural options, they oppose science.

@RickiTarr

Rationalization and denial are powerful defense mechanisms, especially when people are told that their existence is in peril

@RickiTarr Everybody's day-to-day is different and when convenient choices that don't add to the stress of each struggle present, it can be so easy to choose the convenient route, whether that's not checking info, or going along with family, friends, coworkers, etc...

That's logistics and doesn't deal with belief systems. .When the logistic structure is shaky, it can make the convenient choices even easier to make, dependent on the threat posed to the structure. /1

@RickiTarr I think it started in the 90s with the Telecommunications act signed by Bill Clinton. The act removed the caps on how many radio and tv stations one could buy resulting in massive consolidation of media.

That gave a lot of power of what people saw, heard and read in the hands of wealthy few. And we can see how you can influence how a person thinks, sees the world and even votes by presenting the same dis/misinformation time and time again.

@RickiTarr A therapist once told me that sometimes you "want" to believe something but you know you "shouldn't" and a conspiracy theory gives you an excuse to believe it.

That dissonance of wanting/shouldn't is often masking a deeper understanding of your own responsibility that you are trying to avoid.

Of course they all say stuff like that to get you to go more 🙂

@RickiTarr

People seem to live in completely different information environments and operate from totally different universes of fact.

@RickiTarr
Oh you wanted the reverse answer. I’m not a psychologist there are some here.
From what I 🤔

Umm, some of it has to do with in and out groups, social groups, social standards, community leaders who are elected for a popular reason like a basketball coach, but knows nothing about resource management or project management.Then those same community thought leaders in religion positions of power, use that power to influence their in group, fuel them with polarizations. Engagement model

@RickiTarr I've bought into Cipolla's laws relating to stupidity which are not related to intellectual capability, but observations of their behavior:

"Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or group of people when he or she does not benefit and may even suffer losses."

But I realize this is not in common parlance and the "stupid" label will usually evoke the wrong response.

However this definition gives clues...

@RickiTarr IMO if you want a "simplest possible" explanation, social circle is the one to go with.

Humans, by and large, are shockingly accepting of whatever our in-group believes and asserts. And, inconveniently, psychopaths and sociopaths aren't naturally like that, while the rest of us either learn how to be skeptical of authority as we grow up, or we don't.

Beyond that is where it starts to be about particulars. Culture, media exposure, education, individual psychology, lifestyle, etc.

@RickiTarr I think the vastly more interesting group are those in the middle who just believe whatever their local in-group believes, and don't really think about either misinformation or conspiracy, Or they entertain one or both *a little bit,* like "well, there has to be a little truth in there somewhere."

People seem to be, for the most part, hardwired for this kind of ambivalence, which I just fully do not understand at all, but suspect that whatever parts of us survive will probably want to study it to see where it all went wrong.

@RickiTarr Pretty much every version of knowledge I have ever seen is "Your version of the truth that may, or may not, reflect reality as you experience it alongside some people you care about tweaking it every once in a while during scant moments of vulnerability."

So I see people who repeat conspiracies and go "Well, it's working for them..." And kinda evaluate how messy it'll be when it stops working for them and whether there will be any benefit for me to disabuse them and act accordingly.

@RickiTarr From personal experience in my own family (four data points, very big margin for error!), people who have not once felt sufficient agency to claim responsibility for doing wrong are particularly vulnerable, both to exculpating disinfo and to God-forgives-you grifter pitches from the pulpit.

If your life has been only about cowering and avoidance of conflict with some boss or other, the prospect of completely escaping guilt over what else you've done along the way is very attractive.

@RickiTarr

I can only speak personally, I came out of the womb very strong minded. On top of that, I grew up with a parent who made it abundantly clear that claimed authority doesn't necessarily warrant credulity.

Then, in Jr High social studies, I got a short, but extremely formative schooling in "influence". Basically, "Advertising Techniques 101." The Tl;dr (that I unpacked in subsequent years): "In whose interest is it that you believe this?" >