Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Seriously. Anybody stupid enough to believe this in the first place 
> clearly /wants/ to believe it.

Not all believers are stupid. Some of them are quite intelligent and
educated. It can simply be that they have been first lured into believing
it, they have become enamored with the feeling of being "in the loop", of
knowing something that the average person does not, and on top of that are
too stubborn to admit that they might be wrong about it (especially if
they have been holding the belief for a long time).

It's also a form of pseudo-intellectualism: They feel really smart and
intelligent when they think that they cannot be fooled by such a
conspiracy, and that they can spot everything that they are trying to
hide but missed.

The big irony in this is, of course, that they don't realize that they
are actually themselves being deluded and fooled by some clever conspiracy
theorists who have carefully and masterfully built an enormous amount of
material that makes it look like there's something going on, using all
the tricks in the book, plus talented presentation, expression skills and
charisma. They don't realize that they are actually being fed a carefully
cherry-picked selection of all available material, filtered through heavy
doses of plausible-sounding explanations, but which are ultimately just a
diversion.

It's like a magic trick: The magician makes you think you are seeing
something when in fact it's something else completely. You might think
that something just disappeared or appeared in front of your eyes, but
it's just deception. The magician skillfully fools you. He makes you look
somewhere else and abuses all the assumptions you make in order to make
the trick work.

In the case of conspiracy theories, sometimes the theorists deliberately
and maliciously do the fooling with full knowledge and intent, but probably
at least as often it's actually unintentional. They make their own
(mistaken) interpretation of something, they add it to their repertoire,
and then their audience believes the same interpretation. There might not
have been deceitful malice behind the interpretation, but the effect still
ends up being the same: Both the conspiracy theorists and his audience get
fooled.

What separates a true, experienced skeptic from a pseudo-intellectual is
that the former has trained himself to doubt hasty assumptions and alleged
explanations without further evidence and study. The true skeptic thinks
like "ok, that sounds interesting and even plausible, but am I just being
fooled by a cherry-picked red herring? Is there another explanation? Is
there perhaps something I don't know about the technology behind this
that's just deceiving me? Has someone else made a better analysis of this?"

Also, a true skeptic is always ready to admit having been wrong. If a
true skeptic was at some point deluded into believing a conspiracy theory,
but then they study the subject and find out that there's nothing to it,
they do not stubborningly hold to it because they fear admitting being
wrong (even to themselves).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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