How does more education prevent conspiracy theories? I’ve witnessed many highly educated friends (including some from outside the US) succumb to crazy conspiracy theories on Twitter.
This seems more like an emotional intelligence problem than anything else.
> How does more education prevent conspiracy theories? I’ve witnessed many highly educated friends (including some from outside the US) succumb to crazy conspiracy theories on Twitter.
Degrees are often conflated with education. People need to be able to think critically, something that is only partially practiced at a modern institutions. There's plenty of people who can tell you the facts of some field without being able to explain what a theory is, or how evidence works.
You are onto something very important. No one can be expert in every domain. So, one has to trust judgments of the people from other domains and institutions. However, if people with authority (not institutional authority) conflate science with policy positions, these 'authoritative' people and institutions lose their authority. That's how conspiracy theories emerge. Authoritative people and institutions have 'abused' their positions.
People in power, in the West, are disproportionately lawyers with humanities skills, or business types with no skills (lol). As our society increasingly fails, knowledge of math and science is increasingly important to convey truth. Politicians have long repeated repeated what experts tell them (when they are telling the truth), but now that they are repeating something they cannot well understand themselves, it just comes us stale / on faith alone.
Lawyers are paid to defend their clients. Every politician is a lawyer by trade. What do they do? Defend the sectional interests of their sponsors. That's what we see in the West: general interests are subordinated to the corporatist/sectional interests. This is the expected result, anyway; it is just a matter of how long does it take to reach the state of "sectional interests taking over general interests".
I'm sorry but this just reads as vague pessimism to me
> Lawyers are paid to defend their clients. Every politician is a lawyer by trade.
No, that would be true if "people paid to defend their clients are Lawyers". Lawyers offer a specific service to client, distinct from bodyguards and others who provide defense.
Politicians do want to get reelected, but there are many ways for that to be.
Nothing about politics is inherently sublimely, or sleazy things like ALEC inevitable. It rather the due to very specific problems in the US such as terrible voting systems.
I think you touched on a great point here. Thinking a lot about this lately and I'm convinced the authority figures don't just don't understand why people have stopped trusting them. Trump's election was a perfect symptom of the problem.
You need the right type of education. Being a highly trained engineer does not necessarily help, but you don't see a lot of historians falling for this type of stuff.
The existence of the term "Polocaust" would like to disagree with you.
A lot of this, I think, is driven by people badly wanting or not wanting things to be true. Religious history is another good spot where you can see highly-trained researchers buy into their community's biases, but in the last many years, we've gotten better as a society at acknowledging that religion is the sort of thing that can go sour like this. We haven't gotten good at acknowledging this about other forms of allegiance to a community. Most of the QAnon stuff is driven by patriotism gone sour, and with the benefit of hindsight, we've absolutely seen historians write to fit their worldviews, but we're not as good at seeing it in real time, when it matters.
One issue is the truth of late in West has been more statistics and less theory based.
Never mind that theory alone and statistics alone are both recipes for bias (either flat out fictional narratives (Freud) or p-hacking and over fit crap (bad science).
At least when we erred on the side of theory, it was more "catchy" and better fit our narrative brains. Theory-based truths also derive more from subject-matter-specific reasoning, whereas statistics based truths derive more from subject-matter-agnostic reasoning.
I'm guessing most people you interact with are highly educated, and therefore most people you see spouting conspiracy theories are also highly educated. If you sampled the whole population though, I'm pretty confident you'd find a lower percentage of conspiracy theorists among college grads than the general population.
Science gives us a very sharp razor blade to separate emotions from facts. Even in western societies only 5 - 10% of the population is trained about people like Karl Popper and their knowledge.
Not a silver bullet, but some focus on Informal Logic would at least help people to identify a claim, the premises for the claim, and typical fallacies.
While I agree with that sentiment (and as you say, "not a silver bullet"), I despair over something I see more and more lately: people who do have at least some understanding of logic, and make "logical" arguments... but they've chosen the outcome they want to believe in advance, and are just using logic to rationalize / justify their belief.
And yes, that's more or less exactly what logic is in a sense... except the people I'm talking about skip the part about checking the base premises they are building their argument on - because they so badly want to arrive at a specific conclusion.
Yes, "knowledge" is so broad that even if you have lots of learning you can choose subsets that support your predispositions. That's an understanding of human nature we've had for some time, giving rise to things like double blind randomized studies and the (too often ignored nowadays) need to reproduce results. But in less scientific environments (everyday life) we don't have easy workarounds for that aspect of human nature.
I don't know the answer. I don't know how you get people in general to plow through emotional reactions first and then give in to them only after a thoughtful process.
Education seems to help though, and lacking some other solution it seems a reasonable thing to focus on. Yet even that is now more of a political issue than it has ever been.
Critical thinking skills immunize you against the disbelief of provable facts and rational thought processes (assuming reasonable mental health state). Emotional intelligence is a component though, for sure.
You need both the skills and the desire to seek the truth versus accepting whatever information galvanizes your preexisting belief and value systems. High hill to climb.
Being smart and successful doesn’t mean you can think critically and challenge your belief and value systems. They are mutually exclusive. Kanye West is successful, you make what you will of the rest of his personality.
Quite the contrary, many successful people believe they and they alone are responsible for their success, despite their contribution being less than that of others.
The same could be said for a non insignificant amount of the population. It’s far more common than one might think, and it’s important to internalize to understand the environment one is operating in.
GP's statement was "You need... the desire to seek the truth" instead of reinforce what you already believe. In other words you, or let's say people, will choose, based on your desire, or let's say want, to believe one way or another.
Your statement was "People believe what they want."
I think you're conflating contrarian thinking with critical thinking. Believing in conspiracy theories does not imply a well-reasoned path to belief. Critical thought requires not only analyzing a position from contrary points of view, but also judging the objective likelihood of each point of view being true, and then picking the view that is most likely to be true. Stopping at picking a contrary point of view is more like subscribing to a religion than performing critical thought.
> Critical thought requires not only analyzing a position from contrary points of view
I don't disagree with you, I'm just stopping right here. Like you said, it's a requirement. So contrarians are more likely to have it.
It's just a technical truth. It doesn't mean they're more likely to be right or that they have a better grip on reality. They just have one of the prerequisites, so they're more likely to have the thing.
I think it's an example of the old addage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I agree with you that conspiracy theories require a degree of critical thinking. But it's necessarily flawed or incomplete thinking. If someone understands (explicitly or intuitively) Bayesian reasoning for instance, they're going to be less likely to believe conspiracy theories than someone who thinks 'less critically'.
I think the term "conspiracy theory" is most commonly used to refer to untrue conspiracy theories. That's how I meant it in that comment. Obviously yes, conspiracies do sometimes exist, and one could have theories about them.
Despite knowing the flaw of scientific institutions, I still trust scientists in general for ground truth facts, even when they get things wrong.
Hell, when I follow a known expert lecture and followed the citations for just the first lecture, I found minor errors or discrepancies.
I don't understand the major theories at the gut theories. I don't have degrees or the knowledge needed to understand them. I haven't followed the citations and look at the facts.
And the thing is: nobody in the world have time to follow the citations and see if it match up with what everybody else said, let along actually verify the raw facts and follow the thought process of the original scientists.
That being said. I am pretty sure that the modern world is based on a system of rational thought and technology built on the accumulated knowledge of generations of scientists.
I hope you are being sarcastic because I completely disagree with what you are saying. Critical thinking requires you to gather data, analyze it, and come out with a logical conclusion. In addition when faced with new facts you should be able to re-evaluate your conclusion and change.
People who believe in conspiracy theories rarely, if ever, change their minds. Everything is controlled by some small group that is pulling the strings.
Concrete example: The slightly more frequent instances of fireworks in neighborhoods across the country leading up to 4th of July being a “psy-op” by the police targeting neighborhoods of color.
This was believed by a Canadian friend who has a PhD, who is also addicted to Twitter.
Anyone who has the skills to find /pol/ and interact on that board has the digital skills needed to find true information. You don't just stumble upon that.
there is no evidence for this. Achen and Bartels in Democracy for Realists[1] go through a lot of research that shows that education does not aid in combating disinformation and may in fact make the situation worse.
One notable example is climate change. Among Republicans in the US belief in climate change actually declines with increasing education.[2]. Higher education or reasoning facilities don't stop misinformation because misinformation isn't the result of a literal lack of information, it's a rationalisation strategy of adopting fact to preconceived beliefs, and if anything highly educated or capable people are more likely to be able to justify their assumptions.
This even literally shows up in the QAnon slogan which is "question everything". Conspiracy theorists virtually never lack the ability to critically think, if anything they think too critically.
I think it's more that "question everything" mainly becomes "question everything that doesn't line up directly with my beliefs". And then you also get a feeling of superiority, of having secret knowledge/understanding, when the things that you are questioning are widely held to be true.
This seems more like an emotional intelligence problem than anything else.