I learned this as a practicing veterinarian. Also people don’t want to seem like they don’t know something, so they often won’t admit they don’t understand if you get a bit in the technical weeds.
The downside is that often people don’t stop you if they do have some knowledge. Cases in point, I once spent 1/2 hour explaining hip surgery to an orthopedic surgeon (and only about 3/4 way through the talk and showing him the xrays did he rearrange them to be the way he usually looks at human films [apparently we vets look at them in a different orientation]). and I spent some time explaining open wound care to a specialty wound care nurse, who only let on that she knew gauze from TP when she asked a very technically specific question about a product that she has access to that we generally don’t use in Vet med because of the expense…
On the flip side, there are the “chip on the shoulder” people who have a wee bit of technical knowledge, and try to act like they know everything…(and really don’t)
In my field, those are the types who ask me “why didn’t I do (that thing which is improper/ethical violation/useless…). They are the crowd I have to get a little stern with and explain, in writing I can’t/won’t for … reasons (mostly as protection from bosses who may only hear complaints from a client)
Not just space, time too (yes I know I’m being pedantic and you implied as much, but I think it deserves emphasizing). Sometimes I know in pretty good detail what approach I’d take to explain something to some particular person, but I also know it would take anywhere from hours to months of dedicated work to actually do so, involving changing assumptions they weren’t even aware they had in half a dozen different fields and then making a whole bunch of sequential inferences from them.
Most people seem to expect short inferential distances no matter the context, and you can’t bridge that gap unless you spend a lot of time with them, and they trust you enough to listen and care what you say. Otherwise the most I’ve ever managed to do is drop an interesting starting point in their laps and hope they eventually bridge it themselves.
@Scurra RE: jargon, what really made that hit home for me was a news article on a meteorology topic that mentioned gravity waves, and I got really confused because I thought they meat gravitational waves, like a physicist would.
Careful, my father used to ask me all sorts of questions about how could I know what was true and whether there was such a thing as truth. That road will drive a lot of impressional young minds to turn to metaphysics
As a long time veteran of the vaccine wars, no. It has nothing to do with me “not understanding the subject.” It has everything to do with conspiracy theory mindset. It’s not that there are not some who can be brought back, but way too many have put 5 coats of varnish on their belief system before I ever met them, and already believe I am “in on it.” Qanon type thinking, only much much longer history behind it.
Sure, which is why I manually typed that qualification. But the headline is “how to talk to a conspiracy theorist”, so I took it as implicit that we mean conversations where the other party is willing to talk.
You might maintain that could never happen, and if so it’d be a moot point. But based on light wingnuts I have met (more at the Graham Hancock level than the Qanon or Flat Earth level), some of them really are just trying to branch out intellectually, and it leads them down bad paths because they don’t have the background and/or social context that would steer you or I away from that kind of thing.
Like: more than one person has told me that there’s an engine that runs on pure water (which “they” don’t want us to have). I’m confident this is wrong. But even though they’re genuinely interested in the subject – there’s stuff they could learn here, and they might enjoy it if they did – I’m nowhere near fluent enough in thermodynamics to instantly frame what I know in relation to their unusual interest. All I could tell them is “experts say you’re wrong” (which they know), without being able to explain to them why they’re wrong. Knowing that, it would be obnoxious for me to try. And if they’re open to believing odd things, there’s probably plenty else to talk about.
Hmm… I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen The Edge but I think it is from Alive.
And now I think about it, you never see those two movies in the same room at the same time.
Hence the question I often feel like asking but rarely do but yeah, keep the heavy philosophy away from the young minds!
Most of my niblings have religious parents so I tend to steer away from anything that may undermine the parents until they become young adults. I’ve found evidence is relevant everywhere except where faith is concerned!
Evidence is however a useful topic for discussions with conspiracy theorists if their love for evidence outweighs their confirmation bias.
In my experience most conspiracy theory claims fail at the “quality of evidence” level and I like to share these useful methodologies with adherents whenever I can:
What are the unstated assumptions behind the claim, and how do these assumptions affect our understanding?
How are the terms being defined, and might those definitions favour one position or another?
What is the quality of the evidence being offered and is the full range of evidence being acknowledged?
Does the evidence lead in a logical fashion to the claim being made?
from Robert Jensen’s book (one of this athiest’s favourite christians)
The fossil fuel industry isn’t “trying to destroy Earth”; the fossil fuel industry simply doesn’t care how much and what kind of damage they do to the environment, people or the planet in general. They just want to make lots of money.
No matter how unhinged any conspiracy theory is, if you can get someone to a point where their pet theory can at least be reduced to this (insane specifics aside) as its basis, you know there is at least one thing you can both agree on.
My only trouble is that I encounter on a near daily basis people for whom no amount of repetition will work. The idea has burrowed into their head more solidly than a tick with a radioactive burrowing machine and won’t let go no matter what. Despite it not passing even the most cursory logic test. For a great many people, the suggestion that they might be wrong is direct evidence that they are definitely right.
In our field it’s low level human nurses, who all of a sudden have deep and intimate knowledge of every aspect of medicine, especially for non-human species.
My favorites are Nurse: “so I should just give a non-steroidal anti inflammatory to help with the pain” Me: “well, that would probably help, but we still need to address the root cause.” Nurse: “so, I’m going to give an extra strength tylenol to my cat then”. me: “um, no, cat liver physiology is quite different from humans. That will quite literally kill your cat. We need to use a limited amount of one of the NSAIDs that’s safe for cats…”
It’s kind of like dealing with tRump. The ones who know tons tend to be modest, and want more information. The ones with very little information act like they are gods of medicine. I always smile and politely ask which local hospital they work for (making mental notes to avoid said hospital).
I’m late to the party, but how do I serve a truth sandwich to someone who isn’t just moving goalposts, but changing address?
Recently had another “conversation”. The person cleverly asked stupid questions instead of provoking me with statements. Started with my wireless headphones, switched to mobile phones, switched to insect decline, switched to 5G, switched to bird decline, switched to recently dying tit populations, switched to GMO, switched to EM radiation, switched to “silencing” of scientific research, switched to pharmaceutical companies, switched to train overhead contact lines…
It all fits well together, and defines a closed part of her worldview.
The technique of getting me to doubt my own knowledge tells me this isn’t the first conversation that person had. This kind of people are a dozen in a score, and sometimes I feel even a score in a dozen.
A truth sandwich can’t feed them all. Rather, they try to feed me my own sandwich. “Have you not wondered about”, “what do you think about”, “are you not worried about”, “have you heard about”, “do you know that website/book/person”, “why do you think this is happening”, “dont you think this could be have something to do with”… and that’s just for starters. Then come the “my personal experience” claims, which of course you cannot really doubt. Because their experiences are real.
All in all, a waste of my energy. I only have so much to spare.
Also, on a definitely not serious note: a BLT sandwich has bacon, lettuce and tomato in the middle. The truth sandwich has a layer of weird shit in the middle.
I think it’s usually the other way around. They sense that the world is threatening with a lot wrong with people either cynically profiting from making things worse or rationalizing parasitic behavior, and the irrational belief in conspiracy theories provides a false but comforting narrative. Which is why it’s extremely difficult and often unproductive to try to show them where the narrative breaks down, and why doing so tends to trigger reactionary defense mechanisms of denial.
One reason that I don’t bother engaging with conspiracy theories is that, for at least a portion of any given believer community, they all eventually end up tending toward the idea that “da Jooos are behind it”. Modern conspiracy theories are so structurally rooted in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”* that the villains from their ur-text continue to re-appear in them no matter what the subject.
[* itself a plagiarism of an earlier work, re-purposed for anti-Semitism and made more popular than its source as a result]
