{"id":4988,"date":"2021-03-30T01:43:12","date_gmt":"2021-03-30T01:43:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/30\/ross-douthat-a-better-way-to-think-about-conspiracies\/"},"modified":"2021-03-30T01:43:12","modified_gmt":"2021-03-30T01:43:12","slug":"ross-douthat-a-better-way-to-think-about-conspiracies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/30\/ross-douthat-a-better-way-to-think-about-conspiracies\/","title":{"rendered":"Ross Douthat | A Better Way to Think About Conspiracies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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[Education about conspiracy theories] won\u2019t be effective if it tells a too simplistic story, where all consensus claims are true and all conspiracy theories empty. In reality, a consensus can be wrong, and a conspiracy theory can sometimes point toward an overlooked or hidden truth \u2014 and the approach that Caulfield proposes, to say nothing of the idea of a centralized Office of Reality, seem likely to founder on these rocks. If you tell people not to listen to some prominent crank because that person doesn\u2019t represent the establishment view or the consensus position, you\u2019re setting yourself up to be written off as a dupe or deceiver whenever the consensus position fails or falls apart.

I could multiply examples of how this falling apart happens \u2014 I am old enough to remember, for instance, when only cranks doubted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction \u2014 but the last year has given us a thuddingly obvious case study: In January and February of 2020, using a follow-the-consensus method of online reading could have given you a wildly misleading picture of the disease\u2019s risks, how it was transmitted, whether to wear masks and more.

Is there an alternative to leaning so heavily on the organs of consensus? I think there might be. It would start by taking conspiracy thinking a little more seriously \u2014 recognizing not only that it\u2019s ineradicable, but also that it\u2019s a reasonable response to both elite failures and the fact that conspiracies and cover-ups often do exist.

If you assume that people will always believe in conspiracies, and that sometimes they should, you can try to give them a tool kit for discriminating among different fringe ideas, so that when they venture into outside-the-consensus territory, they become more reasonable and discerning in the ideas they follow and bring back.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/03\/02\/opinion\/misinformation-conspiracy-theories.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Education about conspiracy theories] won\u2019t be effective if it tells a too simplistic story, where all consensus claims are true and all conspiracy theories empty. In reality, a consensus can be wrong, and a conspiracy theory can sometimes point toward an overlooked or hidden truth \u2014 and the approach that Caulfield proposes, to say nothing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-1is","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4988\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}