Currently...

"The following is (of course) just my opinion, and it might be wrong. (I kind of *hope* it's wrong, actually.)

I've seen a lot of people posting rebuttals to various conspiracy theories – or general appeals for people to vet sources more carefully, look out for various logical fallacies, employ the tools of reason when considering claims, etc.

And I totally get where you're coming from. I myself championed this kind of thing for years. I still wholeheartedly agree that it'd be a better world if people did these things.

And I wish you all the luck in the world in convincing people. But I've mostly concluded that such appeals are wasted effort. Maybe it does a bit of good around the margins – I *hope* it does – but I don't think it'll be enough.

You can't reason someone out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into. People don't believe these things because they haven't been exposed to the right facts, or because they haven't considered a particular logical argument.

Reason won't help, because people who are willing and able to believe such things don't care about reason in the first place. They subscribe to a worldview which – at best – only has time for reason when it suits their ends, and – at worst – is actively contemptuous of reason as a principle.

For those of us who *do* believe in reason, this can be hard to understand. But after two decades of butting my head against the brick wall of conspiracism and magical thinking, I assure you that it is true.

They will *claim* to value reason. They even believe it themselves. But they don't actually understand what reason *is* – and if they *did* understand, they would hate it. If you need evidence of this, just look at the way they react to people who *do* strive to follow the principles of reason – such as scientists, academics, and experts of all stripes.

This is a bitter pill to swallow – because if we can't extricate ourselves from our national clusterfuck via persuasive discourse, what options are left?

And that's a whole other conversation, which I haven't time to get into right now. So I'll leave things here.

I wish you luck. And I'm certainly not doing anything better, because I don't know what that would be. But if you think that we can win this if we just *reason* hard enough, then I'm afraid you're in for a disappointment."

-FB friend