More on crank magnetism

Andrew Gelman follows up on some thoughts we had over here with some of his own:

Holding a strong belief in a fringe theory is a form of commitment. This could be public commitment or it could just be something you hold to yourself, but in any case I’m thinking of the decisive step from “all things are possible” or “let’s have an open mind on this one” to “I believe this theory” and “the powers that be are suppressing it.” Once you’ve passed this threshold, it lowers the barriers for future such commitments. There’s lots of psychology research on this sort of thing, no? Once you’ve broken a rule or gone past an inhibition, it’s a lot easier to keep doing the taboo behavior.

Sometimes you can start crazy, other times the craziness creeps up on you. Kinda like how they told us in junior high that marijuana is a gateway drug. The fringe-dwellers whom I’ve known have started with offbeat takes that are interesting and on the border of plausibility and then stepped further and further into the wilderness.

In reaction to Campos’s post, Palko writes:

I get the sense that conspiracy theorists have a sense of community that runs deeper than their specific beliefs and part of that is a kind of mutual nonaggression pact: I’ll believe (or at least tolerate) your theory if you’ll do the same.

The desire for community and the need to reciprocate are strong. It’s not a good idea to leave them out of your calculations.

Good point!

This reminds me of the piranha principle. Theories such as nudge, power pose, fat arms, himmicanes, etc., are in competition with each other in that not all these can be true at the same time, but the people who push these theories have a sort of informal alliance. Similarly with conspiracists, who can disagree on the details but agree that they resent the gatekeepers.

Gelman makes the broader point that people who are prone to indulging in bad science (science which is both wrong and contradicts the current standard view; of course occasionally good science contradicts the current standard view, which is what makes science and life complicated) all have a social/political incentive to stick together:

I think more about the bad-science thing, though, the idea that people who are making outlandish claims of huge effects based on noisy data all feel they are on the same side. They can’t agree on what makes us irrational—is it whether we sign at the top or the bottom of a form, or the presence of elderly-associated words, or our facial expression, or how we are sitting, or the outcomes of college football games, or shark attacks, or the time of the month, or whatever—but they can agree on the general principle. They can agree that we’re all “predictably irrational,” even while having incompatible notions about what these predictors might be.

In a vaguely related way, I think a similar thing explains some support for Trump, especially among high SES types. Yes they want their tax breaks, but they also don’t want to admit, especially to themselves, that they’ve been scammed by some fake Jamaican with bad hair and a time share pitch.

Thus there’s an entire media ecosystem dedicated to, in the words of the non-fraudulent Goffman, cooling the mark out.