> I've seemed to notice a pretty big uptick in 'uncle so and so went off the deep end so we had to cut off communication' type stories.

I wonder how long that sort of cutting off has been happening in the past. I know there are members of my extended family I don’t associate with due to their crazy beliefs, but I haven’t talked about it.

My personal opinion is that the pandemic offered a unique opportunity for hidden 'crazy beliefs' to expose themselves.

If Uncle Bob in 2017 believed that the federal reserve was run by a cabal hoarding 90% of our tax money to enrich themselves, nobody would really care unless he feels the need to bring it up in every conversation to the detriment of normal human interaction.

If Uncle Bob in 2020 believes that, he probably also believes that the cabal is using masks to control the population, which causes an immediate conflict when he insists on going unmasked everywhere, including visits to elderly grandma. And then in 2021 that belief probably gets extended to vaccines.

In other words, the pandemic offered a unique opportunity for conspiracy theories to conflict with day-to-day life in a way that wasn't true before the pandemic.

This is an interesting one because the pandemic policy response divide is right on the line where it created an unlikely coaltion of superstitious villagers, with 2+ stddev intelligence people in the habit of checking their priors and rejecting perceived obvious untruths. To extend the metaphor, perhaps it's a coalition of people beyond a stddev in both directions, who together form a huge cohort, if not even potentially a small majority. They share the same sentiments and instincts about concreteness and untruth, but have radically different tools to express it.

What broke pandemic policy is it was run by people who believe sincerely that they need to deceive people for their own good. It's the maternalism of noble lies. While there is a lot of uncertainty in policy circles about science and truth, there is very little uncertainty about power, and when you have that, truth is what you say it is.

The policy response is absolutely using the crisis as leverage to ensconce measures that would not have been legally or politically possible without it. The only meaningful question (I think) is whether the people behind the policies and supporting them are protagonists or antagonists. Almost nobody is asking, "wait, are we the baddies?" The reason "the banality of evil," is such a controversial idea is it places more intellectual and moral responsibility on each of us than the long tail of people are willing or able to accept, and so it's easier to attack the person with the idea than clear the bar it implies.

That's not conspiratorial, that's critical, and I'm sympathetic to people accused of conspiracy thinking because we've let the culture conflate those - to whose benefit is left as an exercise to the reader. ;)

Discussing pandemic policy here is off-topic, but going back to my previous post:

> This increase in attention feeds news stories about conspiracy adherents (and anybody that can be lumped in with them, even if it's not warranted).

Emphasis on the last bit: whether your contrarian position is "+2 sigma" (as you state) or -2 sigma, you will definitely be lumped in with the other group by some targeted news program.

> to whose benefit is left as an exercise

To everyone's detriment really. Every accuser is also accused. Mainstream news these days is as much a target of conspiracies as they are accusers of conspiracy theorists. So too are leftists, rightists, contrarians, and of course actual conspiracy theorists. Everyone is accusing everyone else of something, to a net negative on society.

Every leftist is accused of marxism, every conservative accused of white supremacy, and so on. It's a miserable state of affairs with no nuance or productive discussion. Even the platforms (Facebook et al) that promulgate the inflammation of public discourse are themselves increasingly under fire by both sides of the aisle for various reasons to the point that both breaking up tech companies or heavily regulating their platforms are regularly discussed and promoted by lawmakers (ie Facebook and family face existential threats because they are so accused of poisoning the well, which well they have done to be fair but that's really just the nature of social media).

So we're not talking past each other, your example of conspiracy uncles was attitudes toward masks, which is pandemic policy, so it is precisely on topic as an example.

Conspiracy theories are rooted in (if not defined as) the logic of uncharitable interpretations, and I'm saying the source of that is whether the subject of the theory is viewed as a protagonist or antagonist. Conflating the dumb and the smart in that stddev/sigma view is an artifact of that uncharitable thinking as well, where the average person has been trained to think the common are stupid and the exceptional are insane.

Optimistically, we can dislodge that, and I'd emphasize this uncharitable cognitive bias as the source of the divide.

> he probably also believes

The entire problem. You're not speaking to this person to figure out what they actually believe, you're forming a belief based on your own assumption.

This is a hypothetical person, so no, I am not speaking to the hypothetical person.

My point is that IF uncle bob's belief system segued into beliefs about masks and vax, then it becomes more visible and causes conflict with family members who didn't give a shit about the previous belief system; not that all conspiracies will necessarily turn into beliefs about masks and vax.

It seems to me that there's been an uptick in cutting off family members because it sends a social signal to those you're speaking with that you're the kind of person that only cavorts with rational people. Given how individualistic america is today, cutting off your family for 'rationality's sake is seen as a good thing, whereas to most cultures, this is seen as utterly horrific.

Well that and the preponderance of cutting off hypothetical family members.

>It seems to me that there's been an uptick in cutting off family members because it sends a social signal to those you're speaking with that you're the kind of person that only cavorts with rational people.

It seems to me there has been an uptick in people wrongly assuming someone else's attempts to fix a problem are all down to social signalling.

haha touche.