"Jumpers," as described mostly just lacked a fear of consequences of being wrong and were presented with an incentive to guess. Not to be conspiratorial, but one can't help but notice a recent preoccupation in mainstream outlets with pathologizing conspiracy theorists, dissenters, and now, "jumpers."
Referencing Khaneman and Tversky's "system 1 and system 2" from their bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow without crediting it seems to be more about avoiding the scrutiny that would draw, and instead, appearing authoritative with statements about how ancient psychological researchers commonly distinguish between these types of thought. We should even be concerned someone who could be a "jumper," may also have schizophrenia, as our thinking may have applications to that.
Maybe it's interesting, or maybe on closer inspection and thoughtful consideration it resembles propaganda to ignore your instincts, trust the narrative, and provides blunt tools for being suspicious of others who don't. If only most people were smart and comfortable enough to jump to conclusions and then course correct as needed, we could avoid the consequences of groupthink by those who fear criticism above all.
I've always felt like the belief in a large group of "conspiracy theorists" is probably one of the biggest "conspiracy theories".
A friend of a relative is an apparent flat earther - my relative is always saying things like "oh you wouldn't believe what this guy thinks, he says the world is actually shaped like a UN map, what a goof". In this situation, which of the two is actually the more gullible? From the situations I hear described, it's pretty clear the guy just likes to tease, and enjoys the "intellectual exercise" - for some value of intellectual - of tearing down commonly held truths by providing alternatives, even if they are silly. I've seen the same thing with moon landing and 9/11. People like to use these as strawmen about look at all the nuts out there, we need to control what people can read, but this is just an excuse for shutting down opinions they don't like.
> From the situations I hear described, it's pretty clear the guy just likes to tease, and enjoys the "intellectual exercise"
This was the default assumption for plenty of people when they first hear about real flat earthers, but unfortunately it appears to quickly devolve into actual, very firm beliefs for many people.
This whole phenomenon of "LARPing" your way into a conspiracy (I'm going to start posting about the Jewish cabal controlling the world because it's "edgy," it triggers people online, and it's a fun intellectual exercise to see if I can gather as many pieces of evidence as possible) and then actually believing it seems to honestly explain how a lot of these conspiracy theories end up gaining so much momentum.
It's hard to get into peoples' heads, but in my experience, I've known people who were into conspiracy X, but did not want to admit that they believe in conspiracy X at first, so they told their friends that they were just joking, being edgy or learning more about it, etc.
After a while, they just grow tired of keeping up appearances, or maybe a famous person talks about conspiracy X, so they are no longer embarrassed by their belief, etc.
> but unfortunately it appears to quickly devolve into actual, very firm beliefs for many people.
Is it possible to quantify "many people"? Like, what percentage of people that are ostensibly flat earthers are actually genuine flat earthers vs. trolls? I would guess trolls make up the majority of internet flat earthers.
Trying to ascribe the intent of an action rather than focusing on the action itself is part of the problem in this circumstance. It's impossible to know how many are sincere, or how many are trolls pretending to be sincere, or how many are sincere but are pretending to be trolls so as to plausibly deny their sincere beliefs, etc. At the end of the day, the intent doesn't matter. If one is in a public forum (especially an anonymous/pseudonymous public forum) then the only thing to judge is one's actions, not their intentions, and if their actions are deliberately stupid, then we must assume they are simply stupid, and not merely pretending to be stupid. This approach obviously has problems, but there's no other tractable solution. The internet (especially Poe's Law) has killed satire.
"Irony", or what passes for it these days, is too often a deliberate tactic to equivocate a sincere belief while retaining plausible deniability. Unless they deliberately call out their comments with something like an explicit sarcasm tag, we are forced to assume they are sincere.
This may simply be a function of your inability to believe that they could be sincere.
There are without question plenty of "real" flat earthers our there. People willing to spend actual money on experiments doomed to fail. People cutting ties with their families because they don't agree with them.
When we read people espousing flat earth views on YouTube or Reddit or wherever, out natural assumption is to think that they must be trolling, because nobody could be that stupid, but in fact there really is a subculture that does.
You are being way too charitable. While there certainly are people that fall into the category you claim... there are many who are full blown Jewish space laser, government ice wall, lizard people shadow government, 5g microchip tracker crazies.
The entire "Jewish space laser" thing was never actually said. She mentioned names of people who are Jewish, but that terminology/connection was made by the media. Nothing she said illuminated this connection in any way.
Was her point grounded in reality? Hell no. But the exact point being made above is highlighted by your comment.
The phenomenon of the exaggerations of "Jewish space lasers" and "horse paste" is an interesting topic.
There's a perfectly reasonable point to be made in each case, but many of the people making it feel the need to overstate the case and make it even more absurd.
I think it's because mockery spreads faster on the internet than a simple debunking. And so the thing being debunked is turned into its most extreme form. Perhaps even a step or two beyond a valid interpretation of what's being asserted by the subject.
So with the Mockery Maximization Principle, you get a meme that can spread very quickly and discredit the target at the same time.
The problem with this technique is that it can backfire if people start repeating it as what was actually being asserted. For example, the horse paste meme has backfired when it came to Rogan and the CNN doctor. When this happens, now the debunkers are on the defensive and they don't have a great way out of it since they're no longer on the side of accuracy and truth.
> The problem with this technique is that it can backfire if people start repeating it as what was actually being asserted. For example, the horse paste meme has backfired when it came to Rogan and the CNN doctor. When this happens, now the debunkers are on the defensive and they don't have a great way out of it since they're no longer on the side of accuracy and truth.
This is the problem with tribal audiences. CNN can say to its audience (mainly older liberals) that ivermection is horse paste, and face no repercussions. Conformity is so valued by society as a whole, that no one is going to stand up for the truth on CNN itself. But then in those brief moments when the outside world comes in, their bluff is called.
The right does it as well, and your mockery maximization principle (great name BTW) mandates that the meme is produced solely for their primary audience to sell clicks.
To me, “Jewish space lasers” is a slight hyperbole of the kind of rubbish we read from low-efforts trolls. I’ve obviously read about Marjorie Taylor-Green, but not being American I missed this gem.
That one could write that she did not quite say that, instead of the sane universe’s version that she did not say anything remotely like it truly is shocking. And horrifying.
It can be both. Typically one doesn't need to rationalize publically - by posting this thing to a large enough audience, this was past the point of rationalization - but was instead performative and seeking agreement/attention and acknowledgment.
And rather than stating the incorrect belief explicitly, she was using dog-whistle rhetoric techniques.
Again, you're rationalizing. You're making assumptions about her intent without any evidence to the contrary. This sort of thinking is the exact problem. You're finding your own conclusion, accepting it as fact, and then (in the case of the media) promoting that as what took place. That's a lie, no matter how you twist it.
The lie is pretending that people who post statements on a platform like Twitter and have a wide-spread audience or follower-base do not have any intent.
The lie is pretending that someones' written words are not actually enough evidence to show their intent.
The lie is pretending that statements exist completely isolated from any cultural or historical context. Marjorie Taylor Green has a well documented history of making very controversial statements.
The lie is ignoring the fact that time and time again conspiracy theorists keep bringing up the same scapegoats. Perhaps you are simply unaware that historically, attempting to link things with "Rothschild" is a very long-standing anti-semetic conspiracy and a known dog whistle.
> The lie is pretending that people who post statements on a platform like Twitter and have a wide-spread audience or follower-base do not have any intent.
Assumption.
> The lie is pretending that someones' written words are not actually enough evidence to show their intent.
Assumption.
> The lie is pretending that statements exist completely isolated from any cultural or historical context. Marjorie Taylor Green has a well documented history of making very controversial statements.
Assumption.
> The lie is ignoring the fact that time and time again conspiracy theorists keep bringing up the same scapegoats.
Generalization.
---
You're desperate to align reality with your opinion and offering nothing but characters attacks and assumptions as argumentation.
Yeah, I dunno. My mother-in-law picked up bona fide crazy beliefs when she started using Youtube about 4 years ago. She started with "Proof the world is going to end in 2018/19" videos that she would email me, then moved into some kind of weird anti-CCP guo wengui / steve bannon phase, and currently watches a daily update from "restored republic" which is basically a monotone voice explaining all sorts of crazy shit (energy and internet will soon be free, mass arrests are happening, president trump is taking control of the military, we're going to have a quantum banking system and everyone will get free money back that the vatican stole from the US through the federal reserve, ...)
This isn't a strawman intellectual exercise. If we're in the car and talking about charging it, she will excitedly bring up how electricity will be free soon and laugh when we suggest that's a load of bull. She chose to not get vaccinated because she believes the vaccine was engineered to make you more susceptible to the "next virus" that the CCP is planning to release.
I don't really understand how she can possibly believe so much drivel, but she tunes in for her update every day, and this is the only "news" she cares about.
edit: just to be clear, the "free energy" thing isn't about government subsidizing electricity, it's about a device that nikola tesla invented that creates electricity from nothing but was suppressed for generations by the rich and powerful vested interests of the fossil fuel industry.
Something like this happened on Reddit, with the /r/the_donald subreddit. At first it was jokes at expense of the man, then it transformed into jokingly supporting his presidency. Then it became some quasi-intellectual support of his presidency. Then it became actual non-ironic serious support of his presidency through memes. And then when it actually happened, it became a sort of cult worship site that was eventually banned for supporting the more extreme viewpoints that have been attributed to his supporters.
I like the idea of intellectual exercise, and I enjoyed reading the sub when it was just fun and games. I stopped reading it when they started to seriously support his election. But people for sure lose themselves in the delusions, especially if some part of it connects to them. It's like some sort of cheat code into their minds. I have friends who fell to the QAnon situation. If you told them 5 years ago that our government officials were satanic ritualistic baby eaters, they'd laugh you out of the room and tell you to have another beer. It doesn't really work that way. No way in any serious debate could you ever convince them of this. But now, after they've fell down the rabbit hole some of them seriously unironically believe these things could actually be true.
It's like they saying goes: If you open up your mind too much, your brains will fall out.
I wonder to what degree anybody's mind changed in that subreddit, as opposed to the individuals being replaced with others of different beliefs. That's always a question when people attribute a collective with beliefs and other similar characteristics. The 'collective' is an ever-shifting amalgamation of different individuals.
That's an interesting narrative framing. I'm reading Berger[1] at the moment and of course the social reproduction of knowledge is a component of the work. Pg. 76-77(in the linked copy) parallel your description of this process though on a longer timescale. In social media spaces, the playfulness and joking nature of the progenitors, becomes habituated, and eventually institutionalized over time.
What's surprising is the speed at which this happens. In Berger's conceptualization is that this happens over the course of lifetimes, while in the social media space, this happens over the course of months.
My final point is that this is the reason why "jokes"[2] are insidious. They will attract people who earnestly believe they aren't just jokes which normalizes harassment.
Maybe it's LARPing or "intellectual exercise" for some, but for many if not most, it's their reality. I've personally tried to reason with some - it is truly and deeply a waste of time.
They literally cannot see beyond their own senses, e.g., want to see for themselves the curvature of the earth, yet they believe that it is the case that every one of the billions of photos of the earth from space or high altitude is faked, but won't believe that people can go to space.
The psychological research that seems to best explain it is that these people prefer to believe that the world is full of and controlled by an evil secret cabal than live in the reality of a world that is deeply random and uncertain.
Not disagreeing, but I think this idea of theorists believing there are hidden patterns as an impotent attempt to impose control on a random and uncertain world falls into its own categorical/binary/blackandwhite trap that also overlooks complexity.
Someone seeing periodicity or even symmetry, fractal self simlarity, or isomorphic structure in something noisy could just as easily be accused of apophenia until they produce proof. That there is structure in the noise matters to the theorist, but to the hegemon it's unimportant, if not subversive and dangerous.
I prefer to look at it as having to do with how people relate to power and truth and how they perecieve it.
Yes, I kind of gave the research short shrift summarizing it in half a sentence. IIRC, they found quite strong correlations between intolerance for uncertainty and conspiracy thinking.
I'm not sure it conflicts, and likely even correlates well with your view of how people relate to power and truth.
Whatever the root cause is relatively unimportant, until an aspiring authoritarian starts herding those who have trouble with objective reality - creates support for a regime that will constrain the rest of us.
The conspiracy subreddit gets discredited for the random stuff that gets posted on there, which ought to be expected since they do little moderation.
On several key points, the conspiracy subreddit has been correct. For example, in March 2020, they accurately predicted the course of covid, namely that vaccines would be developed, that there would be large-scale hesitancy, and that this would be used to justify the keeping of covid lockdowns / masking requirements / eviction moratoria far beyond the stated 15 days. Regardless of your belief in whether this was justified or not, this happened.
Similarly, the subreddit was correct about things later revealed by edward snowden.
Of course the next post will be about lizard people, but frankly, that doesn't mean we ought to discount the well thought out, presented, and reasonable 'conspiracies' that get trotted out there. Some of them actually happen.
It's just a bad place to trust, because they do no moderation. On the other hand, the places that do moderate are always behind on the things that end up being true.
I wrote "People like to use these as strawmen about look at all the nuts out there, we need to control what people can read"
The grammar was very poor. I meant the "look at all the nuts out there, we need to control what people can read" as the false conclusion that might be drawn by someone who believes conspiracy theories are rampant.
I think the people falling for conspiracy theories are thoroughly demoralized. They are so far in the rabbit hole that they cannot even acknowledge reality any longer. That won't be fixed by stopping people to read things. I think it will only add to the underlying mistrust and make it worse.
You need to find out why that happened and fix that.
"Reality" is so huge and so opaque, it often feels like there aren't any answers only more questions. We're hairless apes on a rock hurtling through endless space, reality is terrifying.
I imagine a lot of these people just want/need something to cling to , because even the conspiracy theory sometimes seems more real then reality.
I don't understand why "conspiracy theorists" are so discredited. Conspiracy is a crime and people are charged with it often if not every day. It's essentially a coordinated effort by any group to do something others disapprove of. Pretty much any human organization with is capable of it.
It doesn't take long to find evidence of truly outlandish conspiracies perpetrated by the US government itself. Dosing citizens with drugs in an attempt to control their minds. Exposing citizens to radiation on purpose without their knowledge or consent in order to study the effects, measurably causing increased rates of cancer in that population. Anyone can find stuff like this just randomly browsing wikipedia. Yet somehow we're supposed to disbelieve when "theorists" speak?
I've also concluded there's people out there who want to discredit these "theorists" in any way possible. Abusing science and medicine to do it? Why not? They must be mentally ill, right? All those insane ideas must be evidence that something is literally wrong with their cognition. Their brains must be scrambled or something. Schizophrenia? Throw in words like paranoia and suddenly people will agree that maybe we should involuntarily institutionalize these people. Put them on medication to calm them down. Yeah.
Paranoia is not a symptom when they really are after you. I don't understand how anyone can accuse people of paranoia in the 21st century when we know there are a hundreds of government agencies out there spying on literally everyone on the planet at all times. We know they conspire to do all sorts of completely unacceptable actions. We know they always deny the truth afterwards for as long as they can get away with.
Some people have silly beliefs like flat earth. That's just wrong and it's safe to ignore them. The problem is when people raising perfectly legitimate concerns about COVID-19 vaccines are dismissed as anti-vaxxers. The truth is their risk-benefit profiles are not fully known at this time, scientists are still studying their effects. It's absolutely possible that some vaccine has higher risks than benefits. Yet people saying anything that isn't glowing support for vaccination get moderated on social media for spreading disinformation.
> It doesn't take long to find evidence of truly outlandish conspiracies perpetrated by the US government itself. Dosing citizens with drugs in an attempt to control their minds. Exposing citizens to radiation on purpose without their knowledge or consent in order to study the effects, measurably causing increased rates of cancer in that population. Anyone can find stuff like this just randomly browsing wikipedia. Yet somehow we're supposed to disbelieve when "theorists" speak?
I have become more skeptical of bashing of "conspiracy theorists", and rapid mislabeling from numerous experiments gone awry, due to great examples of crazy things in government like Operation Midnight Climax [1]
>The problem is when people raising perfectly legitimate concerns about COVID-19 vaccines are dismissed as anti-vaxxers. The truth is their risk-benefit profiles are not fully known at this time, scientists are still studying their effects. It's absolutely possible that some vaccine has higher risks than benefits. Yet people saying anything that isn't glowing support for vaccination get moderated on social media for spreading disinformation.
I think this had to do with Science-as-a-process vs "Scientism". When you treat science as a methodology it works great, because I truly believe science is regularly self-correcting, even if the correction period is in centuries. But, when science becomes mixed with narrative truth, painted through a partisan lense, or a dogma, then we devolve into something out of Frankenstein. Or, perhaps, better, The Fly.
Because most of it is absence of critical thinking and facts. There are many real conspiracies, but they become real when backed by facts for the allegations.
Yeah. I'm not saying we shouldn't exercise some healthy skepticism when dealing with new ideas. However, there seems to be such a widespread stereotype plaguing these people saying they shouldn't even be given the time of day. They even create conspiracionist characters in movies. Dude is always treated as some funny nutjob even when they're right.
The US is a country with documented examples of doctors injecting microorganisms into unsuspecting patients. There's a truly astounding list of unethical scientific experiments performed there on wikipedia.
So I don't fault americans for assuming there's some kind of conspiracy behind vaccines and I would most certainly not be surprised if they turned out to be right. I don't fault them for not trusting doctors, especially psychiatrists. I've read some truly horrifying stories.
Yeah, I agree with you with the fact that there have been conspiracies. They do exist. And I agree with you on the 'obvious' looney tunes ones but what I don't agree with you on is your emotional fear of vaccines. There is not conspiracy there.
I'm not afraid of vaccines. I took two shots of coronavac. I'm not being "emotional" either. Pointing out the fact that these things are still being studied is information. It's possible that these things have risks we don't know about. It's possible that some vaccines only have favorable risk/benefit in certain populations such as the elderly. All doctors I know are reporting cases correlated with COVID-19 vaccination.
People should be able to make informed decisions with regards to these vaccines, not get manipulated into taking them because governments are desperate to contain the situation.
You can say that about anything. It's better to point out real concerns. There always are, than unknown unknowns that doesn't really tell anybody anything real.
The vaccines have side effects, though are regarded as a very safe method. It's very targeted, as broad corona vaccines are not deemed to be good. Medical experts know this much better.
> Not to be conspiratorial, but one can't help but notice a recent preoccupation in mainstream outlets with pathologizing conspiracy theorists, dissenters, and now, "jumpers."
No conspiracies needed. QAnon type conspiracies are more visible than ever (as they get blown up on social media) and personally I've seemed to notice a pretty big uptick in 'uncle so and so went off the deep end so we had to cut off communication' type stories.
This increase in attention feeds news stories about conspiracy adherents (and anybody that can be lumped in with them, even if it's not warranted).
> maybe on closer inspection and thoughtful consideration it resembles propaganda to ignore your instincts, trust the narrative, and provides blunt tools for being suspicious of others who don't
This is almost all "news" nowadays. Antifa is running the left, QAnon is running the right, somebody is out to get you and ruin the American way of life and we're going to tell you who the bad people are if you just tune in for our next segment.
> I've seemed to notice a pretty big uptick in 'uncle so and so went off the deep end so we had to cut off communication' type stories.
I wonder how long that sort of cutting off has been happening in the past. I know there are members of my extended family I don’t associate with due to their crazy beliefs, but I haven’t talked about it.
My personal opinion is that the pandemic offered a unique opportunity for hidden 'crazy beliefs' to expose themselves.
If Uncle Bob in 2017 believed that the federal reserve was run by a cabal hoarding 90% of our tax money to enrich themselves, nobody would really care unless he feels the need to bring it up in every conversation to the detriment of normal human interaction.
If Uncle Bob in 2020 believes that, he probably also believes that the cabal is using masks to control the population, which causes an immediate conflict when he insists on going unmasked everywhere, including visits to elderly grandma. And then in 2021 that belief probably gets extended to vaccines.
In other words, the pandemic offered a unique opportunity for conspiracy theories to conflict with day-to-day life in a way that wasn't true before the pandemic.
This is an interesting one because the pandemic policy response divide is right on the line where it created an unlikely coaltion of superstitious villagers, with 2+ stddev intelligence people in the habit of checking their priors and rejecting perceived obvious untruths. To extend the metaphor, perhaps it's a coalition of people beyond a stddev in both directions, who together form a huge cohort, if not even potentially a small majority. They share the same sentiments and instincts about concreteness and untruth, but have radically different tools to express it.
What broke pandemic policy is it was run by people who believe sincerely that they need to deceive people for their own good. It's the maternalism of noble lies. While there is a lot of uncertainty in policy circles about science and truth, there is very little uncertainty about power, and when you have that, truth is what you say it is.
The policy response is absolutely using the crisis as leverage to ensconce measures that would not have been legally or politically possible without it. The only meaningful question (I think) is whether the people behind the policies and supporting them are protagonists or antagonists. Almost nobody is asking, "wait, are we the baddies?" The reason "the banality of evil," is such a controversial idea is it places more intellectual and moral responsibility on each of us than the long tail of people are willing or able to accept, and so it's easier to attack the person with the idea than clear the bar it implies.
That's not conspiratorial, that's critical, and I'm sympathetic to people accused of conspiracy thinking because we've let the culture conflate those - to whose benefit is left as an exercise to the reader. ;)
Discussing pandemic policy here is off-topic, but going back to my previous post:
> This increase in attention feeds news stories about conspiracy adherents (and anybody that can be lumped in with them, even if it's not warranted).
Emphasis on the last bit: whether your contrarian position is "+2 sigma" (as you state) or -2 sigma, you will definitely be lumped in with the other group by some targeted news program.
> to whose benefit is left as an exercise
To everyone's detriment really. Every accuser is also accused. Mainstream news these days is as much a target of conspiracies as they are accusers of conspiracy theorists. So too are leftists, rightists, contrarians, and of course actual conspiracy theorists. Everyone is accusing everyone else of something, to a net negative on society.
Every leftist is accused of marxism, every conservative accused of white supremacy, and so on. It's a miserable state of affairs with no nuance or productive discussion. Even the platforms (Facebook et al) that promulgate the inflammation of public discourse are themselves increasingly under fire by both sides of the aisle for various reasons to the point that both breaking up tech companies or heavily regulating their platforms are regularly discussed and promoted by lawmakers (ie Facebook and family face existential threats because they are so accused of poisoning the well, which well they have done to be fair but that's really just the nature of social media).
So we're not talking past each other, your example of conspiracy uncles was attitudes toward masks, which is pandemic policy, so it is precisely on topic as an example.
Conspiracy theories are rooted in (if not defined as) the logic of uncharitable interpretations, and I'm saying the source of that is whether the subject of the theory is viewed as a protagonist or antagonist. Conflating the dumb and the smart in that stddev/sigma view is an artifact of that uncharitable thinking as well, where the average person has been trained to think the common are stupid and the exceptional are insane.
Optimistically, we can dislodge that, and I'd emphasize this uncharitable cognitive bias as the source of the divide.
This is a hypothetical person, so no, I am not speaking to the hypothetical person.
My point is that IF uncle bob's belief system segued into beliefs about masks and vax, then it becomes more visible and causes conflict with family members who didn't give a shit about the previous belief system; not that all conspiracies will necessarily turn into beliefs about masks and vax.
It seems to me that there's been an uptick in cutting off family members because it sends a social signal to those you're speaking with that you're the kind of person that only cavorts with rational people. Given how individualistic america is today, cutting off your family for 'rationality's sake is seen as a good thing, whereas to most cultures, this is seen as utterly horrific.
Well that and the preponderance of cutting off hypothetical family members.
>It seems to me that there's been an uptick in cutting off family members because it sends a social signal to those you're speaking with that you're the kind of person that only cavorts with rational people.
It seems to me there has been an uptick in people wrongly assuming someone else's attempts to fix a problem are all down to social signalling.
This is interesting. It used to be that some of the people we're discussing, let's use flat-earthers as an example, were just really, really committed to their idea. It was their whole identity and persona, and they would just never be able to accept anything different. This seems to me to be the opposite of what you describe. It's like they were terrified of being wrong, so they embraced not admitting it no matter what. They would never accept that they had been wrong. (With a few exceptions - I've engaged with A LOT of flat-earthers and some of them do give me the impression they just like playing devil's advocate, etc.)
Lately though, QAnon seems to have embraced this idea. They've made statements that will be very quickly falsifiable, and will actually say "Who cares if it's not true - we just support patriotism / freedom, etc. and what part of that do you disagree with?" They'll make statements that will be very quickly falsifiable (for instance, I saw a post claiming Nancy Pelosi had been arrested for high crimes, and Trump was now making his move - but a few days later obviously that wasn't true). That's what I call a lack of fear of consequences of being wrong. But to me it seems a new phenomenon.
I'm a right winger. I don't know any Q people. It seems to me that mostly left wingers know Q people and know all the details. My leftist father in law will explain in detail to me everything Q said, and I just nod along going like... why would you even bother reading this stuff?
I know several in person. I'm probably right of center and definitely live in a predominantly right area. They put it on their IG stories and they bring it up in person. Without cutting them off socially, not really sure how I can avoid hearing it from time to time.
Referencing Khaneman and Tversky's "system 1 and system 2" from their bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow without crediting it seems to be more about avoiding the scrutiny that would draw, and instead, appearing authoritative with statements about how ancient psychological researchers commonly distinguish between these types of thought. We should even be concerned someone who could be a "jumper," may also have schizophrenia, as our thinking may have applications to that.
Maybe it's interesting, or maybe on closer inspection and thoughtful consideration it resembles propaganda to ignore your instincts, trust the narrative, and provides blunt tools for being suspicious of others who don't. If only most people were smart and comfortable enough to jump to conclusions and then course correct as needed, we could avoid the consequences of groupthink by those who fear criticism above all.