[thmsths]

The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. A not yet explained phenomenon or even something as far fetched as "aliens" would have been a more comforting answer than "essentially we can all start losing our mind at once, and it takes very little to trigger it".

[kryogen1c]

I think that people, on the whole, vastly underestimate the degree to which humans are animals.

[Vegenoid]

I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly when we have so much history we are taught that demonstrates it. History makes it abundantly clear that it is a regular occurrence for large groups of people to collectively believe things for which there is little evidence, and furthermore, to take extreme actions based on such beliefs.

This applies to you too, reader. Many would read the above and fully agree with it, but fail to apply it to themselves and the groups they identify with. It is even more important to critically consider your own beliefs than the beliefs of others.

[Eisenstein]

> I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly when we have so much history we are taught that demonstrates it.

It is the tendency to think that people in the past were dumb, and we aren't. Like, there always has to be some explanation involved when we learn that people did something unintuitive in the past -- people learned how to make beer by accidentally leaving leftover bread in liquid and then drank it when they were starving. Maybe? Or maybe they figured out that things ferment and played with it until it worked, like we would have done it? Why does it always have to be an accident?

People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now.

[RajT88]

> People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now.

There's probably an aspect to people confusing "knowledge" with "brainpower". People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today.

We have the advantage of Millenia of stuff figured out and documented. So we know on average more about how the universe works than people in the distant past.

[abakker]

I’d say it: we know that some people currently know more, but, the average person mostly knows something about what is known, rather than knowing it directly.

[WalterBright]

> People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today.

I seriously doubt that. My experience in college was not to learn facts and formulae, but to learn how to learn. I.e. training the mind.

It's similar to athletes. The worst Olympic athlete today would blow away the best from a century ago. That's not because people are inherently stronger today, but because we know how to train much better.

[Eisenstein]

But again, that is access to knowledge. How good would your college education have been if there was no library or textbooks?

If you took the athletes today without their support team and sent them back in time two years before an Olympics event to compete on their own, I don't think it would be as big of a blowout as you suggest.

[Vegenoid]

I think that it depends on what you mean by “people”. My hypothesis is that the average person today is better at learning than in the past, for the reasons you stated, but that there have been people as good at learning as the best today for quite a while. It seems hard to refute this when considering some of the great minds of the past, and the incredible discoveries they were able to make with far less tools and collaborators with which to make them.

I also don’t think that brainpower/learning ability correspond as directly to training regimen as physical ability. We also don’t have as clear of an idea for what the “best” ways to increase learning ability are as for fitness. And of course our methods to quantify intelligence are much less objective than for fitness - partly because we separate fitness ability into different domains in a way that we tend not to for intelligence.

[nradov]

In swimming, high school girls today routinely go faster than the best male Olympic athletes from 1924. In most sports, technique and equipment has improved along with training.

[WalterBright]

Initial technological progress was agonizingly slow. Presuming that man then was just as smart as today, why would that be so?

I suspect it is because the thought of what might be possible just never entered their minds.

For example, Edison invented the idea of the invention development laboratory. Very, very recently. The Wright Bros were the first to come up with the idea of a research and development laboratory - just over a century ago.

[Eisenstein]

More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves. Agriculture, animal husbandry, arts, warfare, engineering were all very sophisticated, limited by the materials science available (firearms, for instance, need very strong metals not to explode).

The scientists that existed before the industrial age in the West were upper class, bored and educated men who did it for their own amusement.

It wasn't until the abandonment of the economic system which worked on the assumption that international economics was zero sum and capitalism (and imperialism) took hold that the incentive structure for creating novel technologies could exist.

This is all recollection based on various histories I have consumed and may not be entirely correct, but I'm pretty sure the idea is solid.

[WalterBright]

> More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves.

That is partially true. There is no incentive, for example, for slaves to make any improvements. I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves. That meant the few people in power were not enough to think of much new stuff.

You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator.

The evolution of guns is an interesting topic. So is the evolution of sailing ships. The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow!

You might want to investigate James Burke's "Connections" book and series. It's an entertaining overview of the history of invention.

[Cthulhu_]

Wasn't Da Vinci also a researcher running an innovation lab in the modern day definitions of the phrase, or is that the popular video game adaptation version of him?

Going back further, the Islamic world had a lot of science going on which is often ignored or omitted by the western world when it comes to discussing the origins of science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islami...

[jyounker]

> Why does it always have to be an accident?

Because that's a surprisingly common way for things to be discovered.

Saccharine? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet.

Aspartame? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet.

I think this is true of basically every major artificial sweetener except invert sugar.

[rob74]

Same as the famous discovery of Penicillin in a petri dish contaminated with a mold that killed off the bacteria?

...but now I'm starting to wonder how many people working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and died, because they had accidentally discovered a toxin?

[Cthulhu_]

Dying is still a valuable scientific outcome, but few people become famous for it except maybe Marie Curie.

[Eisenstein]

Except it happened to be in a petri dish and it happened to be observed at the time by a scientist. Total accident!

[sdwr]

The funny thing is that, if anything, we are the dumb ones in this scenario.

They figured it out through reasoning and trial and error and raw experience, while for us it's apparently impossible to learn anything we don't already know the answer for.

[mithametacs]

I've undergone psychiatric care for things not related to psychosis. As for psychosis, I am mentally healthy.

As a child I was obsessed with math. I had a pseudo-religious obsession with Platonism, connected with my childhood fear of mortality. A bizarre belief system.

While trying to make new friends in a new city, I was shunned from a new group for unknown reasons. I was going through a breakup from an abuser. I was depressed and grasping for explanations, thinking I was being conspired against. A persecution complex.

Lack of information and strong emotion are enough.

[nathan_compton]

Arguably its because in many cases mass delusion is adaptive - it organizes and simplifies how groups of people behave. Religion is a cultural mass delusion (don't worry, I'm not talking about YOUR religion, just the other ones) with significant adaptive qualities, people argue.

Even more broadly, rationality and empiricism are extremely powerful tools for understanding the world, but they are also extremely difficult and costly to use, to say nothing of their known limitations at tackling complex systems. People have to and do believe stuff just to get through their day. I think this only becomes disturbing when its just one part of the culture which decides to believe some other complex of ideas than the mainstream one.

[kykeonaut]

thinking about lizard with lizard brain hard

[darepublic]

> I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly

... explained by(?)

> History makes it abundantly clear that it is a regular occurrence for large groups of people to collectively believe things for which there is little evidence, and furthermore, to take extreme actions based on such beliefs.

[dboreham]

The counter delusion is a built in emergent property of the system.

[carlosjobim]

We have just gone through the most massive event in this category in the lifetime of most people alive today, and the next such event is quite openly being planned for execution.

Each and every one of us knows very well by now how we reacted to mass psychological movements and how we will react to the next one, which is of course the next great war.

[Loughla]

What? What great war did we all live through and what's being openly planned? I feel like either you're being dramatic or I'm waaaayyyyy more out of touch than I thought I was.

Both are possible, so I need some clarification.

[carlosjobim]

We went through covid, just a couple of years ago. Each of us know how we reacted and how we behaved. The great war between Russia and NATO is being openly planned right now, by both sides. European and Russian media has reached a war frenzy that probably hasn't been seen since WWI.

[Cthulhu_]

I can't speak for Russia but you're kind-of correct about NATO planning for war, because Russia has been making moves to start one (or, they already did).

I have heard the spin that Russia made a move on Ukraine because if they became a NATO country there'd be more NATO at Russia's border, but... they still started it. They can't finish it because they vastly underestimated their own abilities though.

[aguaviva]

The great war between Russia and NATO is being openly planned right now, by both sides.

I don't see any basis for this view. There are indications that the two sides may be sleepwalking towards a great conflict. But neither side is specifically intending to start or escalate towards such a conflict.

[steve_adams_86]

It took me around 20 years to kind of key into that, but then it took almost another 20 for it to properly click.

I find it pretty hard to get on the same wavelength as most people about it. A lot of us feel distinctly human as opposed to, I don’t know, like a smooth ape that is neurotic enough to develop space travel.

I’m half joking. I’ve found the revelation made me love animals a lot more than I had. It brings a sense of unity to my life. Dogs really are family, birds are not nearly as different from us as they seem, and even creatures like fish or squid share remarkable traits with us. These fundamental aspects of being animals.

I really enjoy it. I think it’s a great thing to contemplate and embrace.

[michael1999]

This is more broadly held than you might think. Just look at the outcry about Harambe.

My sense of kinship is weak with arthropods. Vertebrates are clearly kin. Birds and mammals are so clearly fellow beings, that I simply can't imagine caring about people if the concept of people must be narrowed to exclude them.

It goes the other way too. I find it easier to love my fellow human animals when I remember they are neurotic hairless apes wearing hats. Our intelligence is so new (in an evolutionary sense), we are just barely smart enough to pull this all off.

[steve_adams_86]

I totally agree. Coincidentally my son keeps some isopods as a sort of hobby in a terrarium, and yeah, I do find it hard to see them as quite the same.

Your latter point is a very important one. I think of intelligence as a very tenuous, fragile thing. We can barely utilize it the ways we intend to, and it isn't a guard-rail against all kinds of bad behaviour. It's almost useless to us in all kinds of common scenarios, or barely accessible. We get enraged, drunk, turned on, depressed, etc. and suddenly these faculties are barely function in the ways we need them to be.

So, it becomes much easier to forgive people for making mistakes. You begin to realize we're holding onto this potential by a thread most of the time, not wielding it like a trusted tool. The more you observe this, the more it's a wonder anything works at all.

[huijzer]

Although there is one part of my brain which tells me I and other people are rational beings, my own behavior tells me otherwise. Why else would I eat a candy when I rationally know I don’t need it?

For people interested, I can highly recommend Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal. It tells many interesting stories about social interactions between apes that look surprisingly human. By the way, did you know that apes pick their nose, just like humans?

[steve_adams_86]

Watching animals have familiar interactions and experiences is kind of amazing. I know we can’t know their experiences without empirical evidence, but as you mentioned, apes do a great job of providing some of that evidence. We are way more alike than I would have assumed before I was exposed to this stuff.

I believe this extends to all kinds of species besides apes (especially mammals, but others as well), and there’s certainly compelling evidence of sentience in places we wouldn’t have thought to find it, but there’s still plenty of research to be done before we can draw conclusions.

[kykeonaut]

because candy is to carbohydrates what meth is to adderall :)

[NavinF]

meth vs adderall is more about dosage. If for some reason you decided to consume massive amounts of adderall the same way crazy homeless people consume meth (1000mg instead of 30mg), you could get addicted to it. Pretty much nobody does this with adderall, but the theory is solid. See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/drug-users-use-a-lot-of-dru...

> Despite the repeated claims of METH being more addictive or preferred than AMPH, proven differences between METH and AMPH in addiction liability and in reward efficacy have evaded researchers. Animals self-administer METH and AMPH at comparable rates (Balster and Schuster 1973) and humans prefer similar doses (Martin et al. 1971). Also, neither humans nor animals discriminate between equal doses of METH and AMPH (Huang and Ho 1974; Kuhn et al. 1974; Lamb and Henningfield 1994). Furthermore, while METH is commonly believed to be a more potent central psychostimulant than AMPH, no direct comparison on the potency of the two drugs to stimulate central processes have been verified. In addition, no previous study has directly compared the acute effects of the two drugs on locomotor activity, an important central process that contributes tothe definition of psychostimulant. Moreover, there are no known neurobiological differences in action between METH and AMPH that would account for the putatively greater addictive, rewarding, or psychomotor properties of METH.

[SanDiegoSun]

> The psychostimulants d-amphetamine (AMPH) and methamphetamine (METH) release excess dopamine (DA) into the synaptic clefts of dopaminergic neurons. Abnormal DA release is thought to occur by reverse transport through the DA transporter (DAT), and it is believed to underlie the severe behavioral effects of these drugs. Here we compare structurally similar AMPH and METH on DAT function in a heterologous expression system and in an animal model. In the in vitro expression system, DAT-mediated whole-cell currents were greater for METH stimulation than for AMPH. At the same voltage and concentration, METH released five times more DA than AMPH and did so at physiological membrane potentials. At maximally effective concentrations, METH released twice as much [Ca2+]i from internal stores compared with AMPH. [Ca2+]i responses to both drugs were independent of membrane voltage but inhibited by DAT antagonists.

Do you intentionally cite way out of date scientific research? What is your background in pharmacology? The simple addition of the methyl group is known to effect absorption and potency.

[NavinF]

1. Why make claims about 5x dopamine and 2x Ca2+ instead of just scoring how people respond to the drug at various dosage?

2. None of that is relevant. I'm talking about people taking >30x the dose, not 5x lol. Do you have a background in pharmacology and not understand how that would make a difference?

[vehemenz]

Maybe I'm more optimistic. Is it our animal nature? Or is it that science is hard, and most people don't have enough formal education in the relevant subjects to know they're out of their depth, let alone to understand these things.

[binoct]

I don’t take issue with the point of your last sentence, but rather the framing that “animal” is somehow a negative thing. Humans are animals, there’s no separate animal nature. We are animals, full stop. The scientific method is a skill we have developed to be more objective about complicated phenomena. Depth of knowledge and education certainly help an individual reason more carefully about cause and effect in various domains, but scientists and other highly educated people share the same set of biological behaviors as everyone else.

[WalterBright]

What separates men from animals is men have honor.

[Cthulhu_]

I'd nuance that argument a bit; we know of the concept of honor and can distinguish between "honorable" and "dishonorable" behaviour, and / or the definition thereof depending on culture, whereas animals only have instinct. But then again, smarter animals do know right from wrong, or honor, if you will.

But this is a philosophical subject, which I'm not educated in.

[bregma]

Some men have honor. FTFY

[WalterBright]

Those without honor are intelligent animals, but not men.

Each of us makes that choice for ourselves.

[2lazy2pwdmgr]

There's a word for it: anthropocentrism. And another apt aphorism: arrogance.

[mikepurvis]

I think the vast majority of people are just astonishingly suggestible. That combined with a dash of main character syndrome and horrid sleep patterns and you’ve got millions driving home from work in the dark, ready to immediately assume that whatever is out their windshield is what they heard about on the radio that morning.

[stickfigure]

The majority of people (in the US, at least) spend half a day a week being taught to believe in magic. From birth. Usually on Sunday.

[hedora]

It’s down to 30% in the US; it was over 40% twenty years ago:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declin...

[stickfigure]

Wow, today I learned.

I'm gratified to see that the lizardman coefficient is consistent. In the chart, 2% of "None/Atheist/Agnostic" apparently attends religious services every week.

[strken]

My brother and I used to take our grandmother to church for Easter mass, and a friend of mine goes once a month with his wife's family, despite all three of us being atheists. I really don't think that 2% is guaranteed to be polling error, as Lizardman's Constant would suggest.

[jyounker]

I know of people who go to church for social reasons, but are complete non-believers.

[heresie-dabord]

It's a clear planetary majority. There is no consensus about the indoctrination day per se. Not participating is punishable in many regions.

"The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of syncretism), and traditional folk religions."

"The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of syncretism), and traditional folk religions."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion#Demographic_classific...

[jidar]

It's not terrifying. It's how people are, and it's destressing to me that so few people seem to be aware of it. No amount of explaining what confirmation bias is will convince people that drones in the sky aren't aliens.

The people who have looked behind the curtain and come to this realization about people and their behavior tend to be the ones who make the skeptic community, so we have that going for us at least.

[AtlasBarfed]

The fundamental issue with skeptical truth and science is that it is boring in terms of mass market marketing.

Combined with the inherent anti intellectual bias of most of America inherited from the nerd hatred of us high schools, reality has no chance against fantasy.

Look at how newspapers treat science. Findings are held up like a freak zoo of "look at what the weirdo science nerds are saying now" as they sensationalize and warp things in the desperate need for clickbait.

So combine pseudoreality rules of media with pseudoreality of finance and economics, and the pseudoreality of politics, and reality simple doesn't have a chance.

[oceanplexian]

Intellectuals have the same blind spots. During COVID (At least the ones I worked with) made fun of the disease when it started spreading and refused to take it seriously, then did a complete 180 when their social circles took it seriously. And then did insane stuff like wipe down their groceries with bleach and obsessively washed their hands long after the science was clear that it spreading through the air.

No amount of intelligence will protect you from confirmation bias, authority bias, social proof, and the numerous other vulnerabilities we all have built in. Actually intellectuals are more vulnerable, since intelligent people tend to have a cognitive bias where they over-estimate their expertise in unrelated fields to their own.

[lazide]

COVID is easily spread via air, but like most diseases that are spread that way, is also easily spread via surface contamination. [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10531613/#:~:text=V....]

Speaking of blind spots.

[schmidtleonard]

It's all just memes?

Always has been.

[bregma]

All the way down.

[nilsbunger]

It’s been fascinating to watch this play out with the drone stories in NJ too. Despite all our amazing tech, we still can’t tell truth from fiction.

[raddan]

I assume this is why this was posted on HN. My first thought when I heard the drone stories was “you’re just noticing them now?” Anyone who has ever spent any time watching the skies knows that there is an amazing variety of things in the sky.

To be honest I am kind of surprised that the current hysteria revolves around something plausible (foreign drones) given that past hysteria has been about the totally implausible (alien UFOs… or angels… or whatever).

[Cthulhu_]

The implausible thing there is that if it really was an Iranian mother-drone ship etc, it'd be shot down ages ago. But it's a convenient story for parties that want to portray the US as incompetent, even if said parties have tentative alliances / shared interests with Iran.

[hobs]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518 there's a lot of conflicting stories, but mass hallucinations and insanity are not an abnormal thing in history (unfortunately)

[csours]

> The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion.

And this is why "conspiracy" theories exist. I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories, as I fee that is a more accurate name.

I am do not intend to pass judgement on this commentor or on people who believe in these theories; in fact, I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE likely to fall into one.

We are truly living in an age of narrative; it's not the first and it won't be the last.

Book recommendation: High Conflict by Amanda Ripley

[piotrkaminski]

> I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories

If you called them Low Information Excessive Satisfaction theories instead you'd end up with a much more satisfying acronym! :)

[schmidtleonard]

Ooh, I like that.

However, I think the original thinking behind the term "meme" is probably still the definitive discourse on the subject: in analogy to genes, ideas undergo natural selection for survival/reproduction and the attributes that promote this specific kind of fitness (ease of spread, satisfaction, advantage obtained by spreading) will be selected for in the course of social interaction. Qualities we might like to encourage (accuracy, completeness) will not be selected for except insofar as we can connect them back to the actual selection mechanism.

That said, "meme" really doesn't quite put as sharp of a point on the problem as "LIES."

[rvbissell]

I was about to recommend "Satisfaction High, Information Tenuous"

[csours]

I like it.

Another tweak: Low Information Extra Satisfying

[s2l]

Stories Pushing Imaginary Nonsence

[hindsightbias]

I was always down with Edgar Allan: “Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see”

But now I think he was vastly over-optimistic.

[mr_toad]

I’ve heard a different version “believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you read”, variously attributed to Mark Twain, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Douglas Adams.

I guess that proves their point, whoever they were.

[gwill]

I found it funny that your phrase: Low Information High Satisfaction > L.I.H.S. is a homonym with "lies".

Great phrase btw

[toast0]

> I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE likely to fall into one.

That's what they want you to think.

[BenjiWiebe]

This is like saying you're more likely to fall for scams if you think you're too smart to fall for them.

I don't think it works that way.

I wouldn't use the word smart to describe the people (that I know) that fall for scams/conspiracy theories.

Now, you could say that they incorrectly think they're to smart, but then that means how smart you consider yourself isn't relevant, i.e. a not-smart person and a smart person both consider themselves smart.

[0xEF]

It...does work that. Unfortunately.

Scams rely on two things:

1. Over-confidence. The often (but not always) target the elderly because the elderly have pride that comes with long living. When you think you've seen it all, you think you know it all.

2. Emotional irrationality. The scammer is expert at quickly putting a person in an emotionally agitated state, negating good rational thinking. This is easier to do when pride creates a blind spot to catch someone off guard.

People fall for scams not because they are stupid, but because they are humans which tend to be easy to manipulate by playing our cognitive biased and emotions against us. Scamming is both an art and an industry as a result.

[jyounker]

I think it works exactly that way. It's doubt that protects you. If you think you're too smart to fall for it, then you've now got a blind spot that can be exploited.

Assurance makes you a sucker.

[monadINtop]

Apart from the fact that conspiracies also do exist. Before serious reporting was done, people would've called you a crackpot for talking about half the things that the CIA got up to under Allen Dulles, such as with Operation Gladio, MKUltra, PBSuccess, Propaganda Due, etc., or mass surveillance under the NSA and GCHQ.

[cwillu]

It's the same reflex: the desire to apply a simple theory with apparent explanatory power.

[monadINtop]

Yeah I do agree with that.

[nradov]

I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories. (And I'm not even particularly smart.)

[Cthulhu_]

Not being particularly smart probably gives you a better defense against conspiracy theories; a lot of them rely on pseudoscience and faith in said science, which require some intelligence to comprehend.

Like, I'm too stupid to understand the flat earth science.

[AceJohnny2]

I dunno, "collective delusion" sounds worse than a simpler "we weren't paying attention to the Thing, then media/memes sprung up and made us pay attention and we freaked out".

This happens all the time in our current media landscape. "Yeah health insurance denies claims sometimes, that's normal" to "wait actually health insurance denies claims routinely to increase its profits!?"

There are tons of things that we decide to ignore to go on with our lives. It's exhausting to freak out about all the things that deserve to be freaked out about.

[psc]

> There are tons of things that we decide to ignore to go on with our lives

Absolutely, we all need to filter the overwhelming amount of information we're faced with. The part that seems terrifying is that occasionally our filters can line up in such a way as to pick up what's just pure noise and escalate it into an enormous positive feedback loop.

And of course there's a whole discussion about how those filters are shaped (by the media we consume, authorities we decide to trust, direct experience) and how that's changed over time.

[mrandish]

We already have a more neutral term than "collective delusion"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attentional_bias

[metabagel]

What's the term for when people's attention and outrage is directed by an unreliable third party (let's say a partisan news channel) towards certain issues/threats, and away from other equally (or more) significant issues/threats?

I'm not talking about editorial bias. I'm talking about deliberately manipulating audience attention in order to control the perception of reality. Another way of putting it is to create a framework for rejecting or distracting from 'disagreeable' ideas.

For example, a partisan news organization might highlight the purported cultural and economic threat posed by immigration. Since people have a limited budget for their attention, having their attention and outrage focused on immigration might distract from other issues such as rising inequality.

[toast0]

Curation? Programming? Editorial discretion?

[AceJohnny2]

Propaganda? Two Minutes Hate?

[taneq]

Moral panic?

[2lazy2pwdmgr]

Human beings are the most dangerous, potentially-violent, and destructive animal this planet has ever known... and far more dangerous in larger groups. None of us is as dumb as all of us.

[m463]

> The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion.

Hey, let's not go making something out of nothing.

[lxgr]

It's always been like that, but now you and many more people have this information available to you and can take it into consideration – arguably you're better off than before :)

[bagels]

Maybe not all of us, but enough + the media indulging it.

[lazide]

Why do you think introverts are the way they are?

[Neil44]

Drones over NJ, anyone? Communism scares in the 60s, Witch trials, etc

[mplanchard]

Welcome to the human race, we’re the scariest thing around

[krunck]

Witch!!!

[dessimus]

Build a bridge out of her!

[InsideOutSanta]

This happens all the time. See: drone sightings right now. Previously: Havana syndrome.

[oldgradstudent]

Havana syndrome can have a far less charitable explanation.

There is no objective test for Havana syndrome, but being diagnosed with it grants significant financial and non-financial benefits.

[gopher_space]

The veterinary world has a specific term for a condition they can’t diagnose, and I appreciate the intellectual honesty behind that.

[itronitron]

do you know the specific term, or does your intellectual honesty prevent you from saying that you do?

[gopher_space]

Ain't Doin Right.

[pdntspa]

"Idiopathic"?

[zitsarethecure]

Another good one is the "Mad Gasser Of Mattoon" incident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Gasser_of_Mattoon

[BLKNSLVR]

But the "Illinois Enema Bandit" was real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_H._Kenyon

(coincidentally, the "Mad Gasser" was also in Illinois).

I only know about this because of Frank Zappa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=352dVmsn7y4

[whatevertrevor]

And also the Monkey Man of Delhi (though that urban legend wasn't confined to Delhi):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey-man_of_Delhi

[idontwantthis]

Best example: A whole town thinking Bigfoot AND aliens were invading at the same time https://medium.com/@weirdones/the-pa-ufo-bigfoot-invasion-of...

[ghurtado]

Also: killer clowns every few years. That one is a cultural icon by now.