[meowface]

Agreed; I spend probably too much of my time debating conspiracy theories online, and I find these tactics incredibly common and incredibly disingenuous. It's very easy to reduce any conspiracy theory to the most absurd of its claims and claimants. One has to break down the different possibilities and the conditional probabilities that follow.

Was Epstein murdered, or did he kill himself? If he killed himself, was he told to, permitted to, or not permitted to and did it anyway? Did the towers fall due to plane collisions and fires, or explosives, or both, or something else? Were al Qaeda responsible? If so, did they collaborate with the US government? If they were responsible and didn't collaborate, did the US government have specific forewarning and let it happen for geopolitical purposes?

Any and every conspiracy theory absolutely should and must be steelmanned, and every person lobbing allegations must be taken seriously, if we're to have any hope of getting a micrometer closer to a shared sense of reality. Good epistemology requires taking conspiracy theories seriously and in good faith, even if one believes some percentage of conspiracy theorists may be acting in bad faith or may be in a state of psychosis, etc.

[beckingz]

Buddy, I don't have time to evaluate all the true information that comes up, let alone all the probably false information.

Not to mention that conspiracy theories and other complex claims are an asymmetric demand on people's time: it takes a nut 10 seconds to say that the towers were hit by missiles, and 10 minutes for you to find video recordings from multiple sources.

Also the goal posts are moved whenever convenient: most conspiracy theorists that I have interacted with are attached to the idea that there is a conspiracy more than any specific conspiracy.

[meowface]

>Not to mention that conspiracy theories and other complex claims are an asymmetric demand on people's time: it takes a nut 10 seconds to say that the towers were hit by missiles, and 10 minutes for you to find video recordings from multiple sources.

This is true. I've lost countless hours exerting 50 times more effort trying to refute conspiracy theorists' claims than the effort they put into it.

But I don't find it a total waste. Do I ever alter or influence anyone's opinions in any way? The person I'm debating: probably almost never or never. But other people reading it? Probably very very rarely, but if even one person reading it has ever had their view slightly shifted, then it's worth it, to me.

I know the efforts don't go totally unappreciated; in online discussions, I've been privately thanked for being one of the only people who'll try to take a conspiracy theorist seriously and have a serious, long debate with them. I get why almost no one wants to do it. But, in my opinion, someone has to. I definitely wouldn't fault someone for not wanting to masochistically subject themselves to that, but I think there still needs to be someone willing to sit down with them, treat them and their views with respect, and present reasonable counter-arguments.

When not a single person will try to seriously engage with them and their arguments, it only deeply reinforces that they're right and everyone else is crazy and/or a liar and/or an idiot. For example, if you Google terms related to Holocaust denial, pretty much two things come up (at least as of some years ago): Holocaust denial websites or websites saying it happened. You almost never find someone actually trying to directly address the claims of Holocaust denialists. You just get things like the current top hit:

>In most cases, a healthy debate promotes understanding. But even in the most liberal societies, certain matters are closed for discussion. For good reason, we choose not to argue about whether the Earth is flat, or whether white people have (as some white supremacists claim) “superior germ-plasm.” Nor should we argue about whether the Holocaust happened. It did. Arguments against this fact reveal little about history and much about the arguer’s wish for the world to replace memories of Jewish victimization with a monolithic image of Jews as powerful and treacherous.

On one hand; sure, I agree with all of this. But try putting yourself in the shoes of someone who's been indoctrinated into truly, earnestly believing it's all made up, and then read that statement. What are you going to think?

>Also the goal posts are moved whenever convenient: most conspiracy theorists that I have interacted with are attached to the idea that there is a conspiracy more than any specific conspiracy.

Yes; their strongly-held priors are that there are lots of conspiracies. In my opinion, barring scenarios like antipsychotics for people in psychotic states, the only way to really dislodge any belief a conspiracy theorist has is to attack the entire jenga stack from the root. You need to chip away at the priors in order to move the needle on anything in any direction. This isn't easy and probably takes months or years of time spent with a specific person to have even the slightest chance, but I think it's the only way.

In my opinion, if humanity is to have a chance of surviving in the long term, there need to be at least some people making concerted efforts to try to bridge the gap between people who hold fundamentally different views of reality. I think it'd be bad and a net waste of time and energy if a lot of people were doing this, but I think it'd also be bad if no one were doing it.