Everything Is A Conspiracy Theory When You Don’t Bother To Educate Yourself

I talk a lot about confirmation bias here because it’s at the heart of many of the debates and discussions regarding disinformation. It’s something we can all fall prey to, at times. But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot more about what makes one more susceptible to confirmation bias, and I’m increasingly coming around to the idea that it has to do with a combination of intellectual curiosity and trust.

I had a bit of a Baader-Meinhof moment over the weekend, when I heard variations on the same phrase twice, in two completely unrelated contexts. The first was in an MSNBC article by former Twitter employee Eddie Perez talking about how little Elon Musk understands how elections work. He started out his piece with this phrase:

Here’s a timeless dictum that aptly applies to election administration: Everything looks suspicious when you don’t know how anything works.

There are some really good points in Perez’s article, including this tidbit:

Perhaps Musk’s most bizarre argument came when he argued U.S. elections are vulnerable due to a lack of paper ballots. “The last thing I would do is trust a computer program,” he told the audience. This was a very strange comment from a businessman who is pitching automated driverless robotaxis and robovans that depend on computer-driven artificial intelligence to protect human lives, as well as computer-driven rockets that hope to extend human civilization through the colonization of Mars.

I’m certainly sensitive to questions around electronic voting, as someone who spent many of the early years of this blog calling out sketchy electronic voting schemes. However, really over the last decade, there have been vast improvements in the security and process behind electronic voting, such that most such systems now include important safety valves and backstops, including voter-verified paper trails and risk-limiting audits. Not every state has those systems yet (even though they should!) but calling for such things is very, very different from saying that all electronic voting is untrustworthy.

But, by now it’s clear that if anyone lacks intellectual curiosity to understand reality, it’s Elon Musk. After all, he’s not only (falsely) trashing electronic voting, but he’s also been trashing mail-in ballots (which he calls “insane”), even as his own Super PAC is pushing people to vote early by mail. Oh, and also, Elon himself has regularly voted by mail.

But, back to that statement. The same day I read Eddie’s piece, I also saw the recent Hank Green video in which he talks about how he received his election ballot in Montana, and at first worried that something nefarious was underfoot. On his ballot, he noticed that in every category, the Democrat was listed last on the ballot, and he wondered if it was an attempt to sway votes (there is some science suggesting that people lower on a ballot get fewer votes).

However, Hank (unlike Elon) didn’t just run with his hunch. He investigated things and found that his worry was not valid. Montana “randomizes” the ballots by starting in alphabetical order by candidates, but then rotating the candidates down one on different ballots, so that each candidate appears on the bottom and the top of the list an equal amount of times.

In other words, election officials in Montana do something right, even if seeing just the one bit of info caused Hank to worry they might have done something wrong. Hank calls out a (more popular) variation on the quote that Eddie uses above, citing the saying:

“Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t understand how anything works.”

I like that formulation even better. But, as Hank points out, this saying is a bit too mean and inaccurate. A more accurate version would be:

“Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t trust anything.”

I’d add a caveat to that as well, though. You have to not trust anything and also not have the intellectual curiosity to find out what’s true. Hank is the kind of person who does have that intellectual curiosity. Even though he was initially concerned, before he spouted off, he did the research and found out that his concerns were unfounded.

Elon Musk, somewhat incredibly, seems to lack the basic intellectual curiosity to ever try to seek out why something is the way it is. He always assumes he can somehow “reason from first principles” as to why things are the way they are. This makes him ever more susceptible to the dumbest fucking conspiracy theories around. He’s constructed for himself a media environment mostly designed to reinforce those biases, rather than challenge them.

In the long run, I’d say folks are better off being more like Hank Green (intellectually curious, willing to seek out information and be proven wrong) and less like Elon Musk (intellectually uncurious, willing to believe utter nonsense so long as it reinforces your priors).