> From the situations I hear described, it's pretty clear the guy just likes to tease, and enjoys the "intellectual exercise"

This was the default assumption for plenty of people when they first hear about real flat earthers, but unfortunately it appears to quickly devolve into actual, very firm beliefs for many people.

This whole phenomenon of "LARPing" your way into a conspiracy (I'm going to start posting about the Jewish cabal controlling the world because it's "edgy," it triggers people online, and it's a fun intellectual exercise to see if I can gather as many pieces of evidence as possible) and then actually believing it seems to honestly explain how a lot of these conspiracy theories end up gaining so much momentum.

It's hard to get into peoples' heads, but in my experience, I've known people who were into conspiracy X, but did not want to admit that they believe in conspiracy X at first, so they told their friends that they were just joking, being edgy or learning more about it, etc.

After a while, they just grow tired of keeping up appearances, or maybe a famous person talks about conspiracy X, so they are no longer embarrassed by their belief, etc.

It's a common misconception that other people think alike oneself, and that everybody think rationally. As always, it depends.

> but unfortunately it appears to quickly devolve into actual, very firm beliefs for many people.

Is it possible to quantify "many people"? Like, what percentage of people that are ostensibly flat earthers are actually genuine flat earthers vs. trolls? I would guess trolls make up the majority of internet flat earthers.

Trying to ascribe the intent of an action rather than focusing on the action itself is part of the problem in this circumstance. It's impossible to know how many are sincere, or how many are trolls pretending to be sincere, or how many are sincere but are pretending to be trolls so as to plausibly deny their sincere beliefs, etc. At the end of the day, the intent doesn't matter. If one is in a public forum (especially an anonymous/pseudonymous public forum) then the only thing to judge is one's actions, not their intentions, and if their actions are deliberately stupid, then we must assume they are simply stupid, and not merely pretending to be stupid. This approach obviously has problems, but there's no other tractable solution. The internet (especially Poe's Law) has killed satire.

Flat earther trolls that I saw didn't look sincere or stupid, they looked ironic.

"Irony", or what passes for it these days, is too often a deliberate tactic to equivocate a sincere belief while retaining plausible deniability. Unless they deliberately call out their comments with something like an explicit sarcasm tag, we are forced to assume they are sincere.

In my culture irony equivocates amusement, not sincere belief.

This may simply be a function of your inability to believe that they could be sincere.

There are without question plenty of "real" flat earthers our there. People willing to spend actual money on experiments doomed to fail. People cutting ties with their families because they don't agree with them.

When we read people espousing flat earth views on YouTube or Reddit or wherever, out natural assumption is to think that they must be trolling, because nobody could be that stupid, but in fact there really is a subculture that does.

You want to say irony must be imagined and can't be seen?

You are being way too charitable. While there certainly are people that fall into the category you claim... there are many who are full blown Jewish space laser, government ice wall, lizard people shadow government, 5g microchip tracker crazies.

The entire "Jewish space laser" thing was never actually said. She mentioned names of people who are Jewish, but that terminology/connection was made by the media. Nothing she said illuminated this connection in any way.

Was her point grounded in reality? Hell no. But the exact point being made above is highlighted by your comment.

Her original post: https://politizoom.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Greene-las....

The phenomenon of the exaggerations of "Jewish space lasers" and "horse paste" is an interesting topic.

There's a perfectly reasonable point to be made in each case, but many of the people making it feel the need to overstate the case and make it even more absurd.

I think it's because mockery spreads faster on the internet than a simple debunking. And so the thing being debunked is turned into its most extreme form. Perhaps even a step or two beyond a valid interpretation of what's being asserted by the subject.

So with the Mockery Maximization Principle, you get a meme that can spread very quickly and discredit the target at the same time.

The problem with this technique is that it can backfire if people start repeating it as what was actually being asserted. For example, the horse paste meme has backfired when it came to Rogan and the CNN doctor. When this happens, now the debunkers are on the defensive and they don't have a great way out of it since they're no longer on the side of accuracy and truth.

> Mockery Maximization Principle

That's a great term.

Let's go Brandon!

> The problem with this technique is that it can backfire if people start repeating it as what was actually being asserted. For example, the horse paste meme has backfired when it came to Rogan and the CNN doctor. When this happens, now the debunkers are on the defensive and they don't have a great way out of it since they're no longer on the side of accuracy and truth.

This is the problem with tribal audiences. CNN can say to its audience (mainly older liberals) that ivermection is horse paste, and face no repercussions. Conformity is so valued by society as a whole, that no one is going to stand up for the truth on CNN itself. But then in those brief moments when the outside world comes in, their bluff is called.

The right does it as well, and your mockery maximization principle (great name BTW) mandates that the meme is produced solely for their primary audience to sell clicks.

To me, “Jewish space lasers” is a slight hyperbole of the kind of rubbish we read from low-efforts trolls. I’ve obviously read about Marjorie Taylor-Green, but not being American I missed this gem.

That one could write that she did not quite say that, instead of the sane universe’s version that she did not say anything remotely like it truly is shocking. And horrifying.

"but that terminology/connection was made by the media"

She put enough of her thoughts and 'research' into her post that it was a 'dog whistle' for like-minded-thinkers.

You do not always have to explicitly say something, to actually say something...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)

No. This is a rationalization for a belief that is incorrect.

It can be both. Typically one doesn't need to rationalize publically - by posting this thing to a large enough audience, this was past the point of rationalization - but was instead performative and seeking agreement/attention and acknowledgment.

And rather than stating the incorrect belief explicitly, she was using dog-whistle rhetoric techniques.

Again, you're rationalizing. You're making assumptions about her intent without any evidence to the contrary. This sort of thinking is the exact problem. You're finding your own conclusion, accepting it as fact, and then (in the case of the media) promoting that as what took place. That's a lie, no matter how you twist it.

The lie is pretending that people who post statements on a platform like Twitter and have a wide-spread audience or follower-base do not have any intent.

The lie is pretending that someones' written words are not actually enough evidence to show their intent.

The lie is pretending that statements exist completely isolated from any cultural or historical context. Marjorie Taylor Green has a well documented history of making very controversial statements.

The lie is ignoring the fact that time and time again conspiracy theorists keep bringing up the same scapegoats. Perhaps you are simply unaware that historically, attempting to link things with "Rothschild" is a very long-standing anti-semetic conspiracy and a known dog whistle.

> The lie is pretending that people who post statements on a platform like Twitter and have a wide-spread audience or follower-base do not have any intent.

Assumption.

> The lie is pretending that someones' written words are not actually enough evidence to show their intent.

Assumption.

> The lie is pretending that statements exist completely isolated from any cultural or historical context. Marjorie Taylor Green has a well documented history of making very controversial statements.

Assumption.

> The lie is ignoring the fact that time and time again conspiracy theorists keep bringing up the same scapegoats.

Generalization.

---

You're desperate to align reality with your opinion and offering nothing but characters attacks and assumptions as argumentation.

Ditto. Wether someone is "insincere" or not matters less when one can judge their words and actions.

Looks like we got one of the conspiracy theorist conspiracy theorists. /s

Yeah, I dunno. My mother-in-law picked up bona fide crazy beliefs when she started using Youtube about 4 years ago. She started with "Proof the world is going to end in 2018/19" videos that she would email me, then moved into some kind of weird anti-CCP guo wengui / steve bannon phase, and currently watches a daily update from "restored republic" which is basically a monotone voice explaining all sorts of crazy shit (energy and internet will soon be free, mass arrests are happening, president trump is taking control of the military, we're going to have a quantum banking system and everyone will get free money back that the vatican stole from the US through the federal reserve, ...)

This isn't a strawman intellectual exercise. If we're in the car and talking about charging it, she will excitedly bring up how electricity will be free soon and laugh when we suggest that's a load of bull. She chose to not get vaccinated because she believes the vaccine was engineered to make you more susceptible to the "next virus" that the CCP is planning to release.

I don't really understand how she can possibly believe so much drivel, but she tunes in for her update every day, and this is the only "news" she cares about.

edit: just to be clear, the "free energy" thing isn't about government subsidizing electricity, it's about a device that nikola tesla invented that creates electricity from nothing but was suppressed for generations by the rich and powerful vested interests of the fossil fuel industry.

Something like this happened on Reddit, with the /r/the_donald subreddit. At first it was jokes at expense of the man, then it transformed into jokingly supporting his presidency. Then it became some quasi-intellectual support of his presidency. Then it became actual non-ironic serious support of his presidency through memes. And then when it actually happened, it became a sort of cult worship site that was eventually banned for supporting the more extreme viewpoints that have been attributed to his supporters.

I like the idea of intellectual exercise, and I enjoyed reading the sub when it was just fun and games. I stopped reading it when they started to seriously support his election. But people for sure lose themselves in the delusions, especially if some part of it connects to them. It's like some sort of cheat code into their minds. I have friends who fell to the QAnon situation. If you told them 5 years ago that our government officials were satanic ritualistic baby eaters, they'd laugh you out of the room and tell you to have another beer. It doesn't really work that way. No way in any serious debate could you ever convince them of this. But now, after they've fell down the rabbit hole some of them seriously unironically believe these things could actually be true.

It's like they saying goes: If you open up your mind too much, your brains will fall out.

I wonder to what degree anybody's mind changed in that subreddit, as opposed to the individuals being replaced with others of different beliefs. That's always a question when people attribute a collective with beliefs and other similar characteristics. The 'collective' is an ever-shifting amalgamation of different individuals.

That's an interesting narrative framing. I'm reading Berger[1] at the moment and of course the social reproduction of knowledge is a component of the work. Pg. 76-77(in the linked copy) parallel your description of this process though on a longer timescale. In social media spaces, the playfulness and joking nature of the progenitors, becomes habituated, and eventually institutionalized over time.

What's surprising is the speed at which this happens. In Berger's conceptualization is that this happens over the course of lifetimes, while in the social media space, this happens over the course of months.

My final point is that this is the reason why "jokes"[2] are insidious. They will attract people who earnestly believe they aren't just jokes which normalizes harassment.

[1] The Social Construction of Reality. Berger, Peter http://perflensburg.se/Berger%20social-construction-of-reali...

[2] A specific kind of harassment designed to habituate abuse while also taking advantage of plausible deniability by ostensibly also being a "joke".

I think that was a great example of; 'normalization of deviance' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

Maybe it's LARPing or "intellectual exercise" for some, but for many if not most, it's their reality. I've personally tried to reason with some - it is truly and deeply a waste of time.

They literally cannot see beyond their own senses, e.g., want to see for themselves the curvature of the earth, yet they believe that it is the case that every one of the billions of photos of the earth from space or high altitude is faked, but won't believe that people can go to space.

The psychological research that seems to best explain it is that these people prefer to believe that the world is full of and controlled by an evil secret cabal than live in the reality of a world that is deeply random and uncertain.

Not disagreeing, but I think this idea of theorists believing there are hidden patterns as an impotent attempt to impose control on a random and uncertain world falls into its own categorical/binary/blackandwhite trap that also overlooks complexity.

Someone seeing periodicity or even symmetry, fractal self simlarity, or isomorphic structure in something noisy could just as easily be accused of apophenia until they produce proof. That there is structure in the noise matters to the theorist, but to the hegemon it's unimportant, if not subversive and dangerous.

I prefer to look at it as having to do with how people relate to power and truth and how they perecieve it.

Yes, I kind of gave the research short shrift summarizing it in half a sentence. IIRC, they found quite strong correlations between intolerance for uncertainty and conspiracy thinking.

I'm not sure it conflicts, and likely even correlates well with your view of how people relate to power and truth.

Whatever the root cause is relatively unimportant, until an aspiring authoritarian starts herding those who have trouble with objective reality - creates support for a regime that will constrain the rest of us.

Read the conspiracy subreddit and get back with us.

The conspiracy subreddit gets discredited for the random stuff that gets posted on there, which ought to be expected since they do little moderation.

On several key points, the conspiracy subreddit has been correct. For example, in March 2020, they accurately predicted the course of covid, namely that vaccines would be developed, that there would be large-scale hesitancy, and that this would be used to justify the keeping of covid lockdowns / masking requirements / eviction moratoria far beyond the stated 15 days. Regardless of your belief in whether this was justified or not, this happened.

Similarly, the subreddit was correct about things later revealed by edward snowden.

Of course the next post will be about lizard people, but frankly, that doesn't mean we ought to discount the well thought out, presented, and reasonable 'conspiracies' that get trotted out there. Some of them actually happen.

It's just a bad place to trust, because they do no moderation. On the other hand, the places that do moderate are always behind on the things that end up being true.

Go outside and get back to us.

> we need to control what people can read

Why do we need that? I find this type of control suffocating and it is just a patch for deeper seated problems, mistrust of authority for example.

I wrote "People like to use these as strawmen about look at all the nuts out there, we need to control what people can read"

The grammar was very poor. I meant the "look at all the nuts out there, we need to control what people can read" as the false conclusion that might be drawn by someone who believes conspiracy theories are rampant.

Fair enough

I think the people falling for conspiracy theories are thoroughly demoralized. They are so far in the rabbit hole that they cannot even acknowledge reality any longer. That won't be fixed by stopping people to read things. I think it will only add to the underlying mistrust and make it worse.

You need to find out why that happened and fix that.

"Reality" is so huge and so opaque, it often feels like there aren't any answers only more questions. We're hairless apes on a rock hurtling through endless space, reality is terrifying.

I imagine a lot of these people just want/need something to cling to , because even the conspiracy theory sometimes seems more real then reality.