Reading a Reddit AMA with a former Q believer and he had a really insightful thing to say: “Conspiracy theory thinking hooks the brain because it feels like critical thinking.”

That seems very true from what I’ve observed. The thread is here if you’re interested: https://t.co/3NsmL0pjHB
I also thought it was interesting what shook him out of it: a post from Q containing obviously false information about the field he worked in, computers. He realized the technobabble made no sense, so what else was wrong?
As for what got him in in the first place? He grew up a fundamentalist Christian and so was primed with stories about how only they knew THE TRUTH about things like evolution, the end times, etc, and the rest of the culture was just full of powerful lies. Perfect breeding ground
If you want to see a really good in-depth exploration of how someone falls down an internet rabbit hole into extremism (not Q, but related to it in that it’s about white supremacy and far right politics), I’d recommend the podcast Rabbit Hole, from Kevin Roose at the NYT
He found a guy who’d gone from an Obama voting vaguely liberal college student to a far right devotee and “race realist” (faux-scientific racism), then back out, all through YouTube. The guy opened his entire YT history to Roose, and they tracked the descent
Now, I don’t recommend these things just for the sake of “having compassion.” I have lots of compassion, maybe too much sometimes, but you can’t just offer sympathy and a cup of tea to people and have these virulent conspiracy theories disappear
I like to learn about this stuff so I can recognize warning signs of someone going down these paths, learn effective counter-messaging, and preferably figure out how to prevent it from happening in the first place
And as someone who’d like to have a kid, and knows that kid will be white, and someone who knows and loves other white kids and is involved in raising them: I do not want to raise a kid who is vulnerable to believing racist claptrap
And while sometimes I feel like “keep them off the internet forever” is the only true solution, I also know it’s not going to happen. So what must happen is a kind of bulletproof education in critical thinking. Which requires studying its failures

More from For later read

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Planet Money on HP's myriad ripoffs; Strength in numbers; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/esjoT3u5Gr

#Pluralistic

1/


On Feb 22, I'm delivering a keynote address for the NISO Plus conference, "The day of the comet: what trustbusting means for digital manipulation."

https://t.co/Z84xicXhGg

2/


Planet Money on HP's myriad ripoffs: Ink-stained wretches of the world, unite!

https://t.co/k5ASdVUrC2

3/


Strength in numbers: The crisis in accounting.

https://t.co/DjfAfHWpNN

4/


#15yrsago Bad Samaritan family won’t return found expensive camera https://t.co/Rn9E5R1gtV

#10yrsago What does Libyan revolution mean for https://t.co/Jz28qHVhrV? https://t.co/dN1e4MxU4r

5/
I’ve asked Byers to clarify, but as I read this tweet, it seems that Bret Stephens included an unredacted use of the n-word in his column this week to make a point, and the column got spiked—maybe as a result?


Four times. The column used the n-word (in the context of a quote) four times. https://t.co/14vPhQZktB


For context: In 2019, a Times reporter was reprimanded for several incidents of racial insensitivity on a trip with high school students, including one in which he used the n-word in a discussion of racial slurs.

That incident became public late last month, and late last week, after 150 Times employees complained about how it had been handled, the reporter in question resigned.

In the course of all that, the Times' executive editor said that the paper does not "tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” This was the quote that Bret Stephens was pushing back against in his column. (Which, again, was deep-sixed by the paper.)

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