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By Manvir Singh
Millions of people have noticed the death of Mike Hughes. It happened on February 22, 2020, not far from Highway 247, near the town of Barstow in the Mojave Desert, California. A homemade rocket with Hughes strapped to it lifted off from a release pad attached to a truck. A vapor trail inflated the rocket as it drifted, then flew upward, with an indifferent parachute deploying ominously in its wake. In a video recorded by journalist Justin Chapman, Hughes disappears into the sky, a dark blob in an immense, indifferent blue. But then the rocket reappears and hurtles to the ground, crashing, after ten long seconds, into a cloud of dust 800 meters away.
Hughes, one of the best-known proponents of the flat-Earth theory, insists that our planet is not yet round, like a Frisbee-like disk. He had already built and flown two rockets, one in 2014 and one in 2018, and planned to build a “rockoon” — a mixture of rocket and balloon — that would take him over the upper atmosphere, where he could see the flatness of the Earth for himself. The 2020 liftoff, staged for the Science Channel’s “Homemade Astronauts” series, aimed to get it a mile high: not high enough to see the curvature of the Earth, but high enough to attract more investment and attention.
The flat-Earth theory may sound like one of those intentionally outlandish satires, similar to Birds Aren’t Real, but it has a cult theme for anti-science conspiracy theorists, increasingly involved in movements like QAnon and skepticism about COVID-19. “Off the Limit: Flat-Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything” (Algonquin), former Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill writes that the tragedy awakened her to the sincerity of flat-earthers’ beliefs. After researching the flat Earth scene and following Hughes, he had learned that, “on some subconscious level,” Hughes knew that the Earth was not flat. His death set the record straight: “I was wrong. The flat-Earth population is as serious as your life.
Weill isn’t the only one who worries about the effects of fake news. In January, the World Economic Forum published a report that said 1,490 foreign experts “misinform and disinform” are the most sensitive global threat in the next two years, ahead of war, migration and climate disasters. A stack of new books echoes his concerns. In “Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Prevent It” (Columbia), Paul Thagard, a philosopher at the University of Waterloo, writes that “misinformation threatens medicine, science, politics, social justice, and relations. Foreign issues, affecting problems. such as vaccine hesitancy, climate replacement denial, conspiracy theories, accusations of racial inferiority, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In “Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity” (Norton), Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at Cambridge, warns of “mental viruses” that spread through fake tweets and misleading headlines. pose “serious problems. ” threats to the integrity of elections and democracies around the world. Or, as MIT says. Political scientist Adam J. Berinsky puts it in “Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It” (Princeton): “a democracy where lies proliferate can only lead to dysfunction. ”
Most Americans seem to agree with the theorists of human credulity. After the 2020 presidential election, 60% of respondents believed that misinformation had a primary impact on the bottom line, and judging by a recent poll, they were even more likely to agree with human credulity theorists. We believe synthetic intelligence would exacerbate the challenge in this year’s election. Both the Trump and DeSantis campaigns have used deepfakes to smear their rivals. Although they have justified such inventions as transparent parodies, some experts anticipate a “tsunami of misinformation,” in the words of Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus at the University of Washington and the University of Washington’s first executive director of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “The ingredients are there and I’m absolutely terrified,” he told The Associated Press.
The fear of receiving incorrect information is based on assumptions about human suggestibility. “Misinformation, conspiracy theories and other harmful concepts stick to the brain and become deeply embedded in our consciousness,” van der Linden writes in “Foolproof. “”They infiltrate our thoughts and feelings, and even memories. “Thagard puts it more clearly: “People have a natural tendency to what they hear or read, which amounts to credulity. “
But do credulity theorists have a precise explanation for what’s going on?People like Mike Hughes aren’t gullible in the sense that they’re anything. After all, they seem to reject the clinical consensus. Supporters of other well-known conspiracies (the government is run by lizardmen; a cabal of high-profile pedophile Democrats operate out of a community pizzeria) are immune to the assurances of the mainstream media. Have we been misinformed about the power of disinformation?
In 2006, more than 500 skeptics gathered at an Embassy Suites hotel near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to talk about the conspiracy. They listened to presentations on mass hypnosis, the melting point of steel, and how to bring down the existing global order. They referred to themselves in many ways, adding “truth activists” and “9/11 skeptics,” though the call that would endure, and that observers would use for years afterward, was Truthers.
The Truthers argued that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were orchestrated through the White House to expand government strength and allow the military and security industries to profit from the war on terror. According to an explanation published through 911truth. org, an organization that helped sponsor the conference, George W. Bush and his allies muzzled and intimidated the whistlers, sent anthrax to the warring parties in the Senate, and knowingly poisoned the citizens of lower Manhattan. On this basis, Truthers concludes, “the administration makes the lives of American citizens can be sacrificed for the sake of secure interests. “
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In short, the Truthers argued that the government had taken excessive measures, adding the murder of thousands of its own citizens, to expose and cover up a conspiracy. And yet, the Truthers themselves announced the convention online and came together in a position where they can be monitored seamlessly. The names of the speakers were posted on the Internet, along with videos, photographs and short biographies. Organizers created a publicly available forum to discuss next steps, and some attendees spoke to a Times reporter, despite the obvious complicity of the mainstream media in the pavilion lifting. According to the logic of their own theories, the Truthers were preparing for assassination.
Their habit demonstrates a paradox of belief. Action pretends to cling to beliefs, and yet beliefs, even the most fervent ones, exist in their own cognitive cage, with little influence on habit. Take the “Pizzagate” story, for example, in which Hillary Clinton and her allies ran a pedophile ring from In the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, a staggering number of Americans (millions, by some estimates) endorsed this narrative, and in December of that year, a guy from North Carolina barged into the restaurant. Armed with an attack rifle. Both Van der Linden and Berinsky use the incident as evidence of the violent implications of disinformation. But they miss the point: what’s really striking is how abnormal this act was. The pizzeria has received threatening phone calls and even death threats, but the most common reaction from believers, besides liking posts, turns out to be leaving negative reviews on Yelp.
The fact that some deep-seated trusts seem far removed from other inferences is not unique to conspiracy theorists; This is the delight of the normal faithful. Catholics maintain that the sacrament is the structure of Christ, but no one expects bread to taste like raw meat or accuses parishioners of cannibalism. In “How God Becomes Real” (2020), Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrguyn recounts the frustrations of evangelical Christians with their own confidences. They had less of a clue about God when they weren’t in church. They confessed that they did not pray. ” I don’t forget a man who wept in front of a church because he didn’t have enough confidence that God would actualize the task he had missed,” Luhrguyn writes. The paradox of trust is one of the “clearest” messages of Christianity, he observes: “You may think you are in God, but in reality you are not. You don’t take God seriously enough. You don’t act like he’s there. This is straight from Mark 9:24: “Lord, I; Help my distrust!
The paradox of trust has been the subject of clinical research; Solving it promises new insights into the human psyche. Some of the most influential works have been the work of French philosopher and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber. Born into a Jewish family in France in 1942, during the Nazi occupation, Sperber was smuggled into Switzerland at the age of 3 months. His parents returned to France 3 years later and raised him as an atheist while instilling in him respect for all religiously minded people, adding to his Hasidic Jewish ancestors.
The exercise of locating rationality in what turns out to be irrational became an educational fear for Sperber in the 1970s. While with the Dorzes in southern Ethiopia, he discovered that they were making claims that they seemed to believe or not believe. For example, he was told that “the leopard is a Christian animal that observes the rapids of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. “However, the average Dorze man grazed his farm animals on fast days as much as on other days. “Not because I suspect some leopards are bad Christians,” Sperber writes, “but because I hold true the fact that leopards are fast and dangerous. “
Sperber concluded that there are two types of trusts. He called the first trust “factual. “De facto trusts—such as the trust that chairs exist and leopards are harmful—are consultants and tolerate little inconsistency; It cannot be said that leopards eat or do not eat livestock. He called this category of trusts “symbolic. ” These trusts might seem genuine, but they are far from action and expectations. These are symbolic trusts; We could say, for example, that God is omnipotent and intelligent and allows evil and suffering to exist.
In a masterful new book, “Religion as Fantasy” (Harvard), Neil Van Leeuwen, a philosopher at Georgia State University, returns to Sperber’s concepts with remarkable rigor. It analyzes ideals with the care of a taxonomist, classifying other types and identifying the homes that distinguish them. He proposes that humans constitute and use factual ideals other than symbolic ideals, which he calls “credibility. “Factual ideals are used to design the truth and behave optimally in it. Because of their role as a guide to actions, they have characteristics such as “involuntary” (cannot be adopted) and “obvious vulnerability” (react to evidence). Symbolic ideals, on the other hand, largely serve social and not epistemic purposes, so we can maintain them even in the face of contradictory evidence.
One of Van Leeuwen’s concepts is that other people distinguish between other categories of ideals in everyday speech. We say we “believe” in symbolic statements, but we “think” factual statements to be true. He has conducted creative experiments that demonstrate that it is possible to manipulate the way other people talk about their ideals by modifying the environment in which they express or hold themselves. Tell participants that a woman named Sheila erects an altar to Elvis Presley and plays songs on his birthday, and more occasionally they will say that she “believes” Elvis is alive. But tell them that Sheila went to examine penguins in Antarctica in 1977 and didn’t hear the news of his death, and they’ll tell you that she “believes” he’s still there. As the German sociologist Georg Simmel identified more than a century ago, devout ideals seem to involve explicit commitments: we believe in God as we believe in a father or one we enjoy, rather than as we believe chairs exist. Maybe the other people who peddle crazy conspiracies don’t believe them as much as they do.
Van Leeuwen’s book complements a 2020 volume by Hugo Mercier, “Not Born Yesterday. “Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the École Normale Supérieure who studied with Sperber, argues that considerations of human credulity overlook our ability to derive factual ideals. Our understanding of the truth matters, he points out. If you get it wrong, the consequences can be disastrous. The most sensible thing to do is that other people have a self-centered interest in manipulating each other. As a result, humans have developed a toolbox of mental adaptations for comparing data, what he calls “open surveillance mechanisms. “While a credulity theorist like Thagard insists that humans have a tendency to anything, Mercier shows that we are cautious when we adopt factual ideals and instinctively assess the quality of data, adding tracking the reliability of sources.
Van Leeuwen and Mercier agree that many ideals are no more productive if they are interpreted as factual ideals, although they give other reasons for this. For Van Leeuwen, the organization’s identity is a primary factor. Beliefs serve as badges: the more bizarre and unfounded religions are, he points out, shape belonging on the basis of unverifiable, even unintelligible ideals: that there is only one God; that there is reincarnation; that this or that user was a prophet; that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are separate but one. Mercier, in his work, focused more on justification. He says that we have intuitions (that vaccination is bad, for example, or that certain politicians cannot be trusted). And then it collects stories that protect our positions. However, both authors treat symbolic ideals as socially strategic expressions.
After Mike Hughes’ death, a small debate erupted about the nature of his beliefs. His publicist, Darren Shuster, said Hughes never believed in a flat Earth. “It was an exposure stunt,” he told Vice News. “We used that Atención to get sponsorships and he continued to paint over and over again. Space. com unearthed an old interview that corroborates Shuster’s statements. “This flat Earth has nothing to do with steam-powered rocket launches,” Hughes told the site in 2019. It never has been, it never will be. »
Maybe it made sense that it was just a gimmick. Hughes performed death-defying stunts for years before joining the Flat Earthers. He was born in Oklahoma City in 1956, to an auto mechanic father who enjoyed race cars. By the age of twelve, Hughes was running alone. And soon after, he competed in professional motorcycle competitions. In 1996, he was assigned a job as a limo driver, but his dream of becoming the next Evel Knievel persisted; In 2002, he drove a Lincoln Town Car down a ramp and flew one hundred and three feet, which entered him into the Guinness World Records.
When Hughes actually unveiled a rocket for the first time, in 2014, he had never talked about the shape of the planet. In 2015, when he co-led a crusade on Kickstarter to fund the rocket’s next flight, the stated motivation was fame, not science: “The crazy Mike Hughes was so keen to get noticed that one day he made the decision to build a steam rocket and set the world record. They gave him two endorsements and $310. Soon after, he joins the Flat Earth Network and links his crusade to theirs. The network supported his new fundraising initiative, attracting more than $8,000. From there, his fame grew, earning him appearances in a documentary (2019’s “Rocketman”) and on this Science Channel. series. The lineup with the Flat Earthers has obviously paid off.
However, not all of them did. Waldo Stakes, Hughes’ owner and rocket-building friend, wrote on Facebook that “Mike was a genuine Earthling,” pointing to the “dozens of books on the subject” he owned, and said Hughes had lost money organizing a convention for the community. Another friend of Hughes’ told Kelly Weill that the Flat Earth theory “started out as a marketing approach,” but then “generated awareness and engagement. “To him.
The debate over Hughes trusts is based on the assumption that a trust is sincere, strategic, genuine, or false. This is a false dichotomy. In fact, the social purposes of symbolic trusts (purposes such as signaling the identity of the organization) seem to be more productive when the trusts seem serious. A Mormon who says Joseph Smith is a prophet but secretly thinks he is an ordinary person does not seem like a true Mormon to us. In fact, evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers argued in “Deceit and Self-Deception” (2011) that we lie to ourselves in order to convince others. Our minds harbor two representations of reality: one that turns out to be true and that we publicly defend. , and the other that we use to interact well with the world.
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The concept of self-deception may seem far-fetched; Mercier expressed skepticism about the theory. But it reconciles what appear to be contradictory conclusions. On the one hand, some studies suggest that other people’s ideals about misinformation are genuine. In “Political Rumors,” for example, Berinsky describes experiments he conducted suggesting that other people actually say that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that the U. S. government allowed the Sept. 11 attacks. “In general, other people speak their minds,” he says.
On the other hand, some studies suggest that many false ideals are little more than words. Put money on the table and other people will suddenly see the light. In an influential paper published in 2015, a team led by political scientist John Bullock found stark differences in how Democrats and Republicans viewed politicized issues, such as the death toll in the Iraq war. By paying respondents to be accurate, which included rewarding “don’t know” answers over incorrect ones, the differences were reduced by 80 percent. A series of experiments published in 2023 by van der Linden and three colleagues replicated the established finding that conservatives view false headlines as true more than liberals, but found that the difference is cut in half when other people are paid for its accuracy. Some studies have reported smaller or more inconsistent effects, but the central point remains. There may be other people who believe in fake news like they believe in leopards and chairs, but behind many authentic claims is the understanding that they are not exactly objective.
Van der Linden, Berinsky, and Thagard propose tactics to fight manufacturing. But because they treat erroneous data as a challenge to human credulity, the remedies they propose tend to concentrate on minor issues, while ignoring the larger social forces driving the phenomenon. Think of van der Linden. He devotes about a third of “Foolproof” to his group’s studies of “prebunking” or mental inoculation. The concept is to provide other people with false information before they notice it in the real world, and then reveal the truth. Falsehood: A type of epistemic vaccination. Such a presupposition may point to outright falsehoods or it may be “broad-spectrum,” such as when other people are familiar with a variety of disdata techniques, from emotional appeals to conspiratorial language.
The previous adaptation has garnered mainstream attention. If you’ve ever read a headline about a vaccine with fake news, it was probably the work of van der Linden. His team has collaborated with Google, WhatsApp, the Department of Homeland Security, and the UK Prime Minister. Office; Similar interventions appeared on Twitter (now X). In “Foolproof,” van der Linden discusses the evidence that pre-blocking makes other people better at identifying fake titles. However, nothing is discussed about the effects on their actual behavior. Does this make anyone more willing to settle for election results?We wondered.
The lack of evidence is all the more challenging as there are few studies showing that incorrect information affects habit through changing beliefs. Berinsky acknowledges this in “Political Rumors” when he writes that “few scholars have established a direct causal link” between rumors and reality. Does disinformation influence, for example, voting decisions?Van der Linden admits: “Contrary to most of the comments you can find in the popular media, scientists have been incredibly skeptical. “
It is therefore conceivable that we have been misinformed about how to combat misinformation. What about social situations that make us vulnerable? Van der Linden tells us that other people are occasionally more drawn to conspiracy theories when they feel “insecure and powerless” and see themselves as “marginalized victims. ” Berinsky cites studies suggesting that conspiracy rumors flourish among others who suffer from “a lack of interpersonal acceptance as truth” and a “sense of alienation. ” In her own research, she discovered that an important factor in accepting false rumors is agreeing with statements like “Politicians don’t care much about what they say, as long as they get elected. ” A recent study discovered a strong correlation between the prevalence of conspiratorial ideals and degrees of government corruption; In those ideals, Americans fall somewhere between Danes and Swedes and citizens of middle-income countries like Mexico and Turkey, reflecting a frayed sense of institutional integrity. More than Russian robots or click-hungry algorithms, a crisis of acceptance and legitimacy turns out to be the source of the proliferation of paranoid lies.
Discoveries like these force us to reconsider what incorrect information represents. As Yale legal scholar Dan Kahan points out, “Disinformation is not something that happens to the general public, but something that its members are complicit in producing. “That’s why considered researchers, adds philosopher Daniel Williams and experimental psychologist Sacha Altay, inspire us to think of misinformation more as a symptom than a disease. If we do not solve the disruptions of polarization and institutional trust, they say, we will make little progress in the face of an inexhaustible source. of seductive fabrications.
From this perspective, lashing out at social media for manipulating our zombie minds is like cursing the wind for destroying a space we let fall into disrepair. It distracts us from our collective failures, situations that degrade, we accept as true and leave a giant component of citizens feeling powerless. By pointing out that the challenge is made up of “irresponsible senders and gullible recipients,” in Thagard’s words, credulity theorists threaten to ignore the social pathologies that disenchant other people and cause them to coalesce around strange new beliefs.
Mike Hughes was among the disenchanted. Sure, he used the flat-Earth theory with a celebrity, but his anti-institutionalist tone spoke to him as well. In 2018, while seeking investment and attention for his upcoming rocket ride, he published an e-book called “Mad Mike Hughes: The Tell All Tale. “The e-book is replete with implausible and unsubstantiated claims (that George H. W. Bush was a pedophile, for example), but they are interspersed with well-founded frustrations. He saw a government ruled by a greedy few, a government that was spreading the word to start a war in Iraq, and that seemed less involved in spreading freedom than in funneling taxpayer money into the wallets of defense contractors. “Think about those numbers for a moment,” he wrote of the “We have other homeless people in this country. We may just pay off everyone’s mortgages. And we can eliminate sales tax. In fact, they would all be free.
Hughes is not an idiot. He just felt lied to all the time. As he wrote near the end of his book, “I need my coffee and I don’t need whipped cream, you know what I mean?I just need that raw truth. “
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