Elevating doubt is the point

[Nevilledog]

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Philip Bump
@pbump
If someone said their response to rumors about Bigfoot was to assume every sighting was true until debunked and to hire members of the Bigfoot Is Real Coalition to look for evidence of the creature, would you consider this to be an informative approach?

Analysis | Elevating doubt is the point
The proper way to handle wild, unfounded allegations is not to treat them as serious.
washingtonpost.com
8:09 PM · May 27, 2021

You are by now certainly familiar with the QAnon extremist ideology. It holds, in its more extreme iterations, that there is a secret group of prominent celebrities and Democratic politicians who engage in child abuse and cannibalism as part of their adherence to Satanism. It is, in short, as obviously extreme a conspiracy theory as can be imagined and one for which there is no evidence that doesn’t involve investigatory techniques such as picking every third letter off the back of a Cheerios box or interpreting a senator’s greeting of “hello” as being his attempt to say the word “hell.”

Despite how extreme and obviously ludicrous the above formulation is, millions of Americans say they believe it. New polling from the Public Religion Research Institute and Interfaith Youth Core finds that 15 percent of Americans claim to believe specifically that a Satan-worshipping pedophile ring controls the world, with more than a fifth of Republicans somehow expressing that opinion. Perhaps those numbers are overstated, but that’s still a lot of people willing to publicly express confidence in one of the more demented ideas that’s ever emerged.

So how do we combat the spread of this idea, one that’s already led to multiple acts of violence? Well, one way is to do our best to avoid treating it as in any way serious or legitimate or, ideally, to avoid giving it any oxygen at all. That is tricky for news organizations, for obvious reasons.

Perhaps the worst way to combat what QAnon adherents say is to treat it as something falsifiable. That is, we wouldn’t want to simply assume it’s true or has obviously true components that we then work to validate or discredit. There’s no reason to believe it’s true, and even just launching an investigation suggesting that it might be lends it credence.

*snip*

[TreasonousBastard]

1. You don't. There's an annoying parallel to religion in politics...

We've had several Great Awakenings in our history, and an obsession with the paranormal. Houdini spent much of his lfe exposing spiritualism, to no avail.

Lots of reaearch into why we believe the unbelievable, and it seems to lead to us believing what we want to believe