When it comes to embracing new information, there are three types of people… the majority fall into the category where they acknowledge that the new information may be important, but they don’t understand the subject (medicine, politics, finance, physics, etc.) well enough to make a judgement, so they rely on the opinions of experts.
Then there’s the sort of person who will effectively say, OK convince me. They will use various resources like Wikipedia and fact-checking websites like www.snopes.com, www.factcheck.org, www.urbanlegends.about.com, www.fullfact.org, www.hoaxbuster.ciac.org, www.politifact.com, to satisfy themselves of the accuracy of the new information before they take it on-board.
Sadly, there is a third group who hears an explanation that fits their preconceptions, then through gullibility, ignorance, poor education or a combination of all three, they accept it without question and are often happy to start spreading their opinions. These people live in a belief system, akin to religion. They value opinion over fact, and sadly, they are easy targets for the conspiracy theorists.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that they are a danger to the planet right now, because a) this group is growing in size, and b) they are undermining efforts to fix the big problems that face the world right now.
Smallpox for example, was eradicated several decades ago simply because people listened to the experts; the result was enough of the population were immunised, that the disease died out. Sadly, as we saw with Coronavirus, there is a strong movement of disinformation and conspiracy, claiming variously that:
- It’s a scam by ‘big-pharma’ to boost their profits
- It’s a left-wing hoax
- It’s no worse than flu
- The virus was bio-engineered
- Spikes are due to increased testing
- Hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment
- Masks don’t work
- It’s caused by 5G networks
- It’s a hoax by Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates to empower wealthy elites
It’s a drip-drip process whereby confidence in expert advice eventually becomes undermined.
There was an anti-vaxxer article doing the round on social media a few weeks ago, essentially saying that “Covid mainly infects vaccinated people”. As with most of these articles, this one was intended to look plausible to the lay person, and referenced articles in The Lancet and the British Medical Journal to give it credibility, and it includes impressive looking graphics and statistics, but completely misquotes the articles referenced, because they know that most people can’t be bothered to check.
As an example, the article says: “Peter Doshi, editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), already denounced in an editorial that the touted (and lucrative, by the way) efficacy of 95% was falsified”. If you follow the references and actually read the BMJ article referred to, you’ll find it says nothing of the sort. It’s actually just a call to the vaccine manufactures for more transparency with trial data. Nowhere does he suggest that they ’falsified’ anything.
Anti-vaxxers are fond of using statistical ‘smoke and mirrors’ like… “If alcohol is a factor in 20% of fatal road accidents, then since 80% of fatal accidents don’t involve alcohol, you are 4 time more likely to have fatal accident if you’re sober!”. Hopefully you spotted the fallacy in that argument!
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes the psychology of these people quite well… the less they know about a subject, the more confident, opinionated and vocal they are. Furthermore, there is a significant sub-class of this group that doesn’t want to know more about the subject. They become so committed to their cosy theory that they are blind and deaf to anything that might force them to re-evaluate their views.
As already mentioned, the numbers of conspiracy believers is growing, but also new conspiracy theories are emerging all the time. As well as the Covid conspiracists and their brethren, the anti-vaxxers, there are many people who believe in a flat Earth; there are people who believe that the world is controlled by the Illuminati; there are ‘Chem-trailers’ who believe that a shadowy world government is dosing the planet with chemicals and biological agents to control the populace; that the Moon landings were staged; that there was a crashed UFO with alien bodies that the US military covered-up, and even that the 2004 tsunami was the result of a ‘Tsunami Bomb’.
Disturbingly, there is suspicion and some evidence that a lot of support for these theories comes from Russia… possibly attempting to destabilise the west by undermining confidence in authority and mainstream science. Russian influenced or not, there is no doubt that the conspiracists and their web sites are well organised and well funded, and the science and other content is at least superficially plausible.
The only way to resist the temptations of conspiracies is to maintain healthy scepticism. As Carl Sagan once said “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Conspiracy theories would quickly die off if everyone checked with Wikipedia and the sort of fact-checking websites mentioned earlier, before they repeat some little snippet they’d just heard on social media.
