#you are susceptible to latching onto misinformation too

[kingofthewilderwest]

Please, please remember that just because you like the sound of it doesn't mean it can't be misinformation.

[whumpster-fire]

This, and also, I'm not convinced that scientific literacy is the solution. Some of the "9/11 was staged, jet fuel can't melt steel beams" type conspiracy theories have IIRC been pushed by people who have backgrounds in science and engineering: usually in different fields, but still, they should have a basic level understanding of how science works, and should have a substantially higher baseline of scientific literacy than the general public, but they still get entrenched in these beliefs. Better scientific education might make people less susceptible to falling for pseudoscience on average but it won't prevent people from Dunning-Kruger-ing their way into some terrible ideas.

It's true that just shoving evidence in hardcore pseudoscience cranks' faces isn't going to change their minds, and that you need to empathize with why they want to believe something, but describing them as "bright, naturally inquisitive people who are just misinformed and could be good scientists if they were more scientifically literate" is overly charitable IMHO. The fundamental mindset of starting with a conclusion and working backwards by cherrypicking / creatively interpreting evidence to justify it needs to be changed, and that's really difficult because the real belief they're trying to support is often not that the pseudoscientific theory itself is true, it's either a deeper ideological agenda or their own self-perception (or both).

In the self-perception category, someone who's convinced that their new (disproven by evidence 70 years ago) theory disproves the big bang, or that they've discovered the secret to Perpetual Motion, might be addicted to the ego boost of believing they're a misunderstood genius "I'm smarter than everyone else and can see the truth that all these 'smart' scientists can't / I'm too smart to believe the official story like all those other sheeple," they might be unable to take the ego hit of admitting they're wrong about something so they latch onto an idea and entrench themselves deeper and deeper into it. Someone with this attitude knowing more science might just make them latch onto some other fringe theory that requires more specialized knowledge to debunk.

On the other hand, a 9/11 truther? Yeah, the reason they want to believe that an airliner crash couldn't have brought down those buildings isn't because they're deeply invested in their ideas about how structural engineering works, it's because believing 9/11 was an inside job fuels a core belief like "America Bad. 9/11 was a false flag to create a pretext to invade Middle Eastern countries for their oil / create a surveillance state / kill brown people / feed the Military-Industrial Complex" or "Israel / The Jews did this to drag America into a Middle Eastern war for their own benefit" or some shit like that.

Young Earth Creationists? Well obviously that particular pseudoscientific theory is religiously motivated, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the people pushing it tend to also want "Biblically based law." They want a theocracy, and any part of the religious text they want society / the state to follow their fundamentalist interpretation of being proven to not be 100% factual threatens the legitimacy of that. If the Bible is wrong on how the Earth was created, then it could also be wrong about women's rights, or abortion, or homosexuality. (ignoring that the Bible may or may not even say those things)

"The Pyramids Must Have Been Built By Aliens" guy? There's a good chance the real root of that belief is that "primitive people" were too stupid to accomplish something like that, which is usually racist. I mean, I have seen "Aliens did Stonehenge" theories too so they're not exclusively directed at African and Native American people, but I haven't seen any "The gothic cathedrals couldn't have been built without help from aliens, medieval Europeans didn't even understand sanitation" ones, I'm just saying.

(Which isn't to say that kind of theory is the exclusive domain of white supremacists. I think I've seen some "the existence of pyramids in Central America proves Africans must have sailed across the Atlantic because there's no way indigenous Americans could have independently figured out how to carve large stones and stack them on top of each other without help" arguments a while back)

(not going into Hollow Earth, QAnon, New World Order, Antivaxxers, etc because the above poster already brought up the bigotry at the core of them)

On the other hand, pseudoscience like the Antivax trend or pseudoscientific home remedies can spread extra fast when people are scared and the institutions that are supposed to have answers do shit that loses them the public trust. The antivax movement being as big as it is isn't solely due to ableism in the general public: it's been aided by the fuckery Trump pulled with the CDC during the initial outbreak of COVID which people saw as proof the medical establishment were being used as political pawns / didn't actually know what they were doing, as well as decades of patient-hostile or public-hostile practices by the US medical system. "The doctors don't want to help you, they want to keep you sick because it makes them more money" and similar theories are easier to believe not because of a failure of scientific communication, but because the healthcare / health insurance industry in this country is broken.

Similarly, like... the US Government very blatantly did use 9/11 as a pretext to create a surveillance state, and started a completely pointless and devastating war over fraudulent evidence of WMDs, and that lent credibility to 9/11 Truthers that they wouldn't have had if the Iraq War or the Patriot Act didn't happen. Again, for something like that the failure isn't on the side of science: no amount of widespread literacy about how difficult it would be to secretly plant enough explosives to implode a skyscraper or how massive fires can affect a structure and the immense dynamic loads of 20 floors of building falling 10 feet onto the floor below can address the fundamental problem that the public has good reasons to not trust the government to murder its own citizens en masse. Even if every single person was convinced that yes, plane impacts could and did cause that damage, you'd just get theories that the hijackers were actually Government agents and the recovered documents linking it to Al Qaeda were fake instead.

Tl;dr yeah there's well-meaning people who fall for astrology, homeopathy, MBTI etc because of being uninformed, but a lot of conspiracy theorists and cranks don't believe dumb stuff because they're uninformed, they believe dumb stuff because they're assholes.

It is true that otherwise well-meaning people are sucked in by pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, and empathy is the key to dealing with that, but scientists can't fix the problem because the root cause is often institutions behaving so unethically that people stop trusting any scientists or educators agreeing with the "official story."

I really like what this physicist, Lamar Glover, has to say in Behind the Curve. 

+ this part from Spiros Michalakis:

[faithfulnews]

'Plandemic' news, et al: Why do so many religious believers quickly embrace conspiracies?

The other day, I was talking with a friend in another state over the phone about the coronavirus crisis.

Suddenly, our conversation veered in a whole other direction. The virus, she said, was the work of a cabal of billionaires and world leaders. She recommended the work of Dr. Rashid Buttar, an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist. My friend said that she didn’t believe anything the media said anymore.

This friend is an educated woman who attends a nondenominational charismatic church. She has worked in the health care industry for many years. She was also touting “Plandemic,” the movie that alleges that the pandemic is a nefarious creation by hidden overlords in government, media and finance. Facebook, Vimeo, Twitter and YouTube have been working overtime to get it off their feeds.

Which seems very odd. Is “Plandemic” that dangerous? I can think of a lot of more objectionable stuff on those platforms, ie pornography, than a conspiracy film. I watched the movie and don’t buy the claim that it’s “harmful” to have it publicly posted.

I posted a connection to “Plandemic” atop this post, only to see it get zinged by YouTube. I’ve tried several times to post a replacement video and it’s been taken down within the hour. So here (at the top of this post) is a video about the video. Whether it will be working when this post goes public is anyone’s guess.

Meanwhile — this Atlanta-Journal Constitution story gives some helpful background on the movie. I started looking up “Plandemic,” wondering if my friend was the only conservative Christian to latch onto this. I found a piece by Marshall Allen, a ProPublica health writer (and Fuller Theological Seminary grad) who was also finding religion connections.

My brother is a pastor in Colorado and had someone he respects urge him to watch “Plandemic,” a 26-minute video that promises to reveal the “hidden agenda” behind the COVID-19 pandemic. I called him and he shared his concern: People seem to be taking the conspiracy theories presented in “Plandemic” seriously. He wondered if I could write something up that he could pass along to them, to help people distinguish between sound reporting and conspiracy thinking or propaganda.

Sensational videos, memes, rants and more about COVID-19 are likely to keep coming. With society polarized and deep distrust of the media, the government and other institutions, such content is a way for bad actors to sow discord, mostly via social media. We saw it with Russia in the 2016 election and we should expect it to continue.

If there’s one group that tends not to trust the media, it’s folks on the conservative religious end of things. They sense they are aliens in our culture and what better represents the dominant culture than the news media?

But what surprised me is how easily “Plandemic” sank its hooks into some of my friends. My brother also felt alarmed that his own church members and leaders in other churches might be tempted to buy into it…

There’s never just one side to a story. I mentioned this point in 2018 when I wrote about my faith and the biblical basis for investigative reporting. One of my favorite Proverbs says, “The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.” So a fair presentation should at least acknowledge opposing points of view.

I don’t think that Allen’s mention of his pastor/brother and then his own faith is a coincidence. It’s a subtle signal to any folks –- of certain religious persuasions –- who might be reading it that says '“Hey folks: I’m in your tribe and I’m not out to mislead you.”

So far, secular reporting about COVID-19 conspiracy theories haven’t pointed toward the religious community. But every warning I see on my Facebook feed about a conspiracy tends to come from someone in the conservative Christian universe.

I’m not alone. A writer for Patheos posted a similar observation on Friday.

This last week, I’ve had so many fellow evangelicals sharing bogus videos and links promising to reveal the “truth about COVID-19.” As social media platforms removed false information (because it put people at risk), it only seemed to feed into the conspiratorial fire of the posters…

The sheer number of Christians sharing conspiracy theories desperately needs to be addressed. The gospel already requires people to suspend a certain amount of disbelief to embrace something that — at first hearing — sounds incredibly fanciful. It doesn’t do us any favors if the messengers are known for spreading half-truths and nonsense.

Churches need to teach their members about discernment, now more than ever. I believe that evangelical Christians are particularly susceptible to believing dangerous conspiracy theories, and they need to learn how to become more discerning.

Back on April 15, Christianity Today warned readers that Christians are disproportionately fooled by coronavirus theories. In an opinion piece directed toward evangelicals, Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, wrote:

Unless you believe President Trump, Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the media, and the scientific community are all in league together (a real leap of faith), you are just embarrassing yourself when you spread Coronavirus conspiracies. These vast conspiracies would mean that President Trump, himself, knew this was a bioweapon, is part of the plan to end religious liberty, plans to use a potential vaccine as some mark of the beast, and somehow 5G is part of it all. (Yes, that’s all out there, one web search away— and in far too many Christian social media feeds.) …

If you still insist on spreading such misinformation, would you please consider taking Christian off your bio so the rest of us don’t have to share in the embarrassment?

This is not just the Christians, by the way.

The Guardian reported a month ago that Hindus are beating up Muslims in India because of “corona jihad;” a belief in a hidden Muslim conspiracy to spread the virus to Hindus. It didn’t help that an Islamic missionary meeting in south Delhi in mid-March is credited with spreading the virus around the country.

On April 24, theconversation.com posted a piece about how Covid-19 has greatly ramped up demonization of British Muslims on social media via conspiracy theories. And then there are the anti-Semitic theories. Haaretz reported on May 3 about far-right theories on a Jewish-Chinese cabal that spread COVID-19.

This is just a snippet of what’s out there.

The gospel is public information, not hidden, not secret. This is one of many reasons that Christians don’t trust or follow conspiracy theories but the rather the risen Lord of history. https://t.co/zgZAYxV2vb

— kennethtanner (@kennethtanner) April 18, 2020

I know that reporters have a lot on their plate these days reporting about the coronavirus crisis.

Nevertheless, please start tracking those who are spreading conspiracy theories, why they feel so moved to do so and why so many of them have religious connections of one sort of another. It’s part of this global story.

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