[thephyber]

I repeatedly see very intelligent and successful people outright reject the possibility that conspiranoids can be intelligent but misguided. I think conspiracy thinking ("conspiranoia") is orthogonal to educational attainment/quality. I think it's much more likely that we are all susceptible to conspiranoia thinking (we all have the same cognitive biases and we all use good-enough but imperfect heuristics to decide who/what to trust), but that some of us just haven't been introduced to one we are amenable to by a person of trust+authority. Given enough {theories, people we trust, exposure} we will all start falling for some or many of them.

Of course the dumbest of us will fall for more theories, including the more incredible theories, but to pretend like any one person is immune is to ignore the step 1 of a 12 step program.