When anonymous prophecies fail

[Physics Guy]

There have been some news stories lately about the disappointment of QAnon followers when their prophesied "storm" didn't happen on 20 January 2021. I don't know much about QAnon but it seems like an interesting case study, at least if one is at a safe distance. There have been previous cases of groups of believers reacting to failed prophecies—spoiler: a lot of them explained the failure away and kept believing—but this case of QAnon is more recent. It's also potentially different because unlike the other cases I know it's not exactly religious.

At least maybe it's not. There does seem to be a fraction of QAnon believers for whom QAnon and evangelical Christianity are somehow closely entwined. And even for other QAnon folks there may well be a good case to be made that their belief in QAnon is best understood as a form of religion. Nonetheless it seems to me that if there's even a possible nuance involved about whether or not QAnon is religious then that might give this case some novelty. And on the other hand even if we decide that the failure of the QAnon storm is just another garden variety failure of a religious prophecy, well, that's still something to see in the 2021 edition.

And that's most of what I can say to kick off this thread. I don't know all that much about QAnon. I do have two for-what-it's-worth notions.

The first is just to wonder what role stupidity plays in QAnon, because man, you just have to wonder that, because there's just so much stupidity in it. I understand that smart people can still bamboozle themselves, given motivation, but with something this dumb it just seems as though intelligence past a certain modest level would be a serious handicap in the task of believing the nonsense. The requirements for emotional need to believe would rise steeply if you have a few clues. So I suspect that the majority of QAnon fans must be relatively dim, though there may well be a core of smart crazies.

Is that a realistic notion on my part, or is it naïve?

The second notion is that QAnon isn't just dumb: it's nasty. QAnon believers are specifically believing a lot of truly horrible things (ridiculous things that would be horrible if they were possible, that is) about a bunch of real people on anonymous hearsay evidence (if you can even call it that). Doing that seems to me to require a lack of charity that borders on psychopathy. You have to really want to revel in hate.

But okay, the QAnon theory is that a lot of children are suffering horribly because of these evil people. Pedophiles and psychopaths do in fact exist, and if you ever begin to think you might know one then you have to decide whether to go on presuming that this person is not such a monster or to try to act to save further victims. So there's a knife-edge either/or here that does resemble some religious decisions. I still feel that someone who was really empathic enough to want to save children would also be empathic enough to want to avoid such monstrous false accusations, and would therefore at least try to figure out whether the QAnon accusations were true before just assuming they are. To accept the accusations easily seems to me to require a certain level of depraved indifference on the part of the QAnon believer.

So I'm thinking there could be a certain trade-off between dumb and evil. Smarter people with inadequate consciences, and decent dumb people, would seem to me to be the main clientele for QAnon. But perhaps I'm overlooking some other factors?

[Fence Sitter]

Something Smith figured out early on is the appeal that being "in-the-know" has to a broad spectrum of people. Smith continually was looking to reveal hidden things to those "worthy" of such knowledge. Evidently the ridiculous nature of this secret information has little bearing on the willingness of adherents to accept it, just look at Scientologist. While perhaps not as outlandish as Zenu, Old Testament and the Galactic Confederacy, LDS temple ceremony is just bizarre. Who in their right mind goes through that and thinks, "wow this is the way an omnipotent creator of the universe would communicate his super duper secret information to his children?

So another factor to consider is the superiority feeling given to those who are willing to buy into such nonsense.
"Hey look, we're part of the in-crowd who really know the truth and the rest of the world is just sheeple."

In reality it is more like what Ralphie in Christmas story quickly recognized when he decoded the secret message with his Orphan Annie decoder ring, "its just a crummy commercial".

[Chap]

I am grateful to Physics Guy for starting this discussion, because it gives me an opportunity to refer to a remarkable study of which I only heard this morning.

The core point of this paper is to question our intuitive idea that all one has to do to induce the collapse of a crazy and perverse belief structure such as QAnon or forms of religious belief such as those on which this board centres is to provide true information indicating that the said structure is nonsensical and false (so far as nonsense can rise the the level of being false or true, which it probably can't). Instead, the author points to the fact that in the same way that we think that ignorance must have a cost, it is also possible for the possession of true knowledge to have a cost - a cost that may be higher than the ignorant individual is willing to pay.

Citation
Williams, D. (2020). Motivated Ignorance, Rationality, and Democratic Politics. Synthese: an international journal for epistemology, methodology and philosophy of science https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02549-8

Abstract
When the costs of acquiring knowledge outweigh the benefits of possessing it, ignorance is rational. In this paper I clarify and explore a related but more neglected phenomenon: cases in which ignorance is motivated by the anticipated costs of possessing knowledge, not acquiring it. The paper has four aims. First, I describe the psychological and social factors underlying this phenomenon of motivated ignorance. Second, I describe those conditions in which it is instrumentally rational. Third, I draw on evidence from the social sciences to argue that this phenomenon of rational motivated ignorance plays an important but often unappreciated role in one of the most socially harmful forms of ignorance today: voter ignorance of societal risks such as climate change. Finally, I consider how to address the high social costs associated with rational motivated ignorance.

The text of the whole paper is HERE.

The conclusion reads:

5 Conclusion

In this paper I have sought to clarify a pervasive and important phenomenon: cases in which individuals remain ignorant not because of a lack of available information, and not because of the various costs associated with acquiring that information,but because of the costs associated with knowledge itself. I have sought to illuminate the circumstances in which this phenomenon is instrumentally rational, and I have argued that rational motivated ignorance plays a large but often underappreciated role in one of the most pernicious and socially consequential forms of ignorance today: ignorance among voters in contemporary democracies. As I have noted throughout, this paper leaves many important questions unanswered. Nevertheless, I hope that it has drawn attention to a set of issues that warrant more attention in philosophy and that it has taken some important steps in addressing them. To conclude, I want to flag two important implications of the paper.

First, and most obviously, the phenomenon of ignorance cannot be understood through a purely epistemological lens. We are not impartial seekers of knowledge, even if it often seems that way to us. We are social animals whose orientation to knowledge is fundamentally strategic. Knowledge is risky. It threatens our comforting illusions, undermines our wishful thinking, drives us towards undesirable actions and destabilises the social relationships that we depend upon for meaning and belonging. Insofar as motivated ignorance is a significant feature of human life, then, ignorance in general cannot be understood without focusing on a variety of highly practical considerations: the contingencies of our circumstances and motivations, and the structure of the social worlds that we inhabit. Of course, this is a central lesson of the work on ignorance by feminist philosophers and critical philosophers of race (Frye 1983; Mills 2007; Woomer 2019). I hope that the current paper reinforces it.

Second, and relatedly, the foregoing considerations suggest powerful lessons for how to address ignorance. An intuitive view is that the answer to socially pernicious forms of ignorance is to provide people with more information, perhaps combined with an appeal to their reason. This is unlikely to help when ignorance is motivated. Such ignorance is not caused by a lack of available information, and in many cases the problem is precisely that individuals are treating potential knowledge in a way that is rational. Instead, one has to address the root of the problem: the practical considerations that make knowledge costly for individuals. In cases in which ungrounded beliefs are signals of coalitional identity, for example, the task must consist of attempting to depoliticise such issues—to show that one can maintain one’s membership in a desirable coalition without renouncing a commitment to knowledge, perhaps by encouraging influential in‐group members to adopt a dissenting view (Nyhan 2013). Similarly, insofar as solution aversion is an important cause of denial in the political domain, it suggests that public information campaigns should work hard to decouple the recognition of problems from a specification of available solutions (see, e.g., Kahan et al. 2012). More generally, solving the problems associated with motivated ignorance requires a far more complex and demanding set of individual and collective strategies—strategies that can only be identified, let alone executed, with a proper understanding of the practical incentives that people have for burying their heads in the sand.

That makes a lot of sense to me!

[mentalgymnast]

That makes a lot of sense to me!

Would this apply to secularists also? If so, this makes a lot of sense to me too. Do secularists see religionists as being rational? That is, looking at all the evidence? Because there are not a few religionists who think secularists are not rational in the sense that they refuse to accept certain evidence, even if it can’t be proved through the natural senses. Is one group of higher intelligence than the other?

I would concede that one group is more prone to epistemological error than the other.

At the end of the day there are tribal affiliations based upon accepted evidence and pre-existing assumptions. And more likely than not they see the ‘other’ as being deficient in being able to discern and grasp the ‘truth’.

Regards,
MG

[Moksha]

I was a bit surprised by this LDS-QAnon post on the LDS Newsroom's Facebook page regarding President Nelson and the Apostles getting their COVID-19 vaccine:

Amanda Smith
This is not Gods design!! We are not to poison ourselves with RNA, Neurotoxins, heavy metals, ABORTED BABIES!! The church can't claim to be against aboetion and then urge us to inject aborted babies into our bodies!!!!

Makes you wonder whether DezNat should confine itself to the perimeter limits of FAIRMormon.

[Chap]

I was a bit surprised by this LDS-QAnon post on the LDS Newsroom's Facebook page regarding President Nelson and the Apostles getting their COVID-19 vaccine:

Amanda Smith
This is not Gods design!! We are not to poison ourselves with RNA, Neurotoxins, heavy metals, ABORTED BABIES!! The church can't claim to be against aboetion and then urge us to inject aborted babies into our bodies!!!!

Makes you wonder whether DezNat should confine itself to the perimeter limits of FAIRMormon.

Yup. Straight factual ignorance here. COVID-19 vaccines do not contain material from aborted babies. So no-one is "injecting aborted babies into [their] bodies" when they are vaccinated against COVID-19.

[Philo Sofee]

My gawd does no one even think at all anywhere anymore?! This is astonishing. Aborted Babies?!? I am SOOOOOOOOOO glad Dr. Anthony Fauci now has the freedom he was supposed to have to let us see what is real in relation to the vaccine, the plague, etc. However, that said, since his name does come to the number 666, he will be considered the anti-Christ, and thus we are closer to when Jeezus can come and save us.

You mean you didn't know his name = 666?! I am more than sure someone out there has done the proper and verifiable calculations in order to arrive at such a conclusive and valid answer! I mean, it just HAS to exist somewhere, and so I am perfectly safe in saying it is the truth. Perhaps it came from the Congo... perhaps it really came out of Greenland, which is why Trump wanted to buy the place because of the vast scholarly network sprawling all over the world with its world headquarters in Greenland. Who cares where it came from? THE POINT is, there is SOMEONE out there who just has to have thought it and so verily has calculated that Dr. Fauci's name does in very deed, fact, and mathematical rigour come out to 666. It HAS to be out there, and so, with impeccable logic, it thus just is. Praise the Lord! Praise JEEZUS! Now then, who is gonna let Russell Nelson in on this so he can begin prophesying valid information instead of his silly diatribal schmuck? He needs to be in on this!

[Gadianton]

The first is just to wonder what role stupidity plays in QAnon, because man, you just have to wonder that, because there's just so much stupidity in it. I understand that smart people can still bamboozle themselves, given motivation, but with something this dumb it just seems as though intelligence past a certain modest level would be a serious handicap in the task of believing the nonsense. The requirements for emotional need to believe would rise steeply if you have a few clues. So I suspect that the majority of QAnon fans must be relatively dim, though there may well be a core of smart crazies.

Is that a realistic notion on my part, or is it naïve?

QAnon has become this broad phenomena, and I think if there is one factor shared more than others, it's low education. There could be some higher intellects there, but few have college backgrounds. High intelligence; low education describes people I've known who got sucked into Scientology. The hooks for higher intelligence would be exposure via the hacker communities (4chan 8chan) that also produced Anonymous. And then extreme right-wingers who are already conspiracy theorists who encounter it that way. I am acquainted with a QAnon guy through a friend who is a brilliant engineer. Bi-polar runs through the family and he has all kinds of delusions or fantasies about government hiding alien technology that he was part of when he was younger.

The other QAnon guy I know is from my daily walks. He's intelligent, but he's strung higher than an E string on a violin. I guarantee he has no college and has never written even a basic research paper; and he most certainly has PSTD or something. A large body of QAnons have gotten in through online influencers or friends, and are faceless low educated people who wish to feel connected to something that's trending, the same way some pretty lame pop songs trend on youtube and get billions of hits.

But okay, the QAnon theory is that a lot of children are suffering horribly because of these evil people.

There's a lot of articles online about how QAnon is seriously causing problems with child services organizations and actually getting in the way of helping kids. But I found one very revealing article, and if I can recall more about it to find it again I will post it, but it had a unique twist on this. This article pointed out that there is something like real government conspiracy involved in child services, because back in the 90s, the religious right went off the deep end with hysteria over Satanic ritualistic abuse. This even crossed paths with Mormonism. That whole Satanism craze I'd say is pretty close to the QAnon stuff. Anyway, the government got pressured by the public to take Satanic abuse seriously and so now that becomes evidence for QAnon that the government has been fighting child abuse cults for decades.

Don't forget to read my post on the other forum discussing the very first Q post.

[Dr Exiled]

The first is just to wonder what role stupidity plays in QAnon, because man, you just have to wonder that, because there's just so much stupidity in it. I understand that smart people can still bamboozle themselves, given motivation, but with something this dumb it just seems as though intelligence past a certain modest level would be a serious handicap in the task of believing the nonsense. The requirements for emotional need to believe would rise steeply if you have a few clues. So I suspect that the majority of QAnon fans must be relatively dim, though there may well be a core of smart crazies.

Is that a realistic notion on my part, or is it naïve?

QAnon has become this broad phenomena, and I think if there is one factor shared more than others, it's low education. There could be some higher intellects there, but few have college backgrounds. High intelligence; low education describes people I've known who got sucked into Scientology. The hooks for higher intelligence would be exposure via the hacker communities (4chan 8chan) that also produced Anonymous. And then extreme right-wingers who are already conspiracy theorists who encounter it that way. I am acquainted with a QAnon guy through a friend who is a brilliant engineer. Bi-polar runs through the family and he has all kinds of delusions or fantasies about government hiding alien technology that he was part of when he was younger.

The other QAnon guy I know is from my daily walks. He's intelligent, but he's strung higher than an E string on a violin. I guarantee he has no college and has never written even a basic research paper; and he most certainly has PSTD or something. A large body of QAnons have gotten in through online influencers or friends, and are faceless low educated people who wish to feel connected to something that's trending, the same way some pretty lame pop songs trend on youtube and get billions of hits.

But okay, the QAnon theory is that a lot of children are suffering horribly because of these evil people.

There's a lot of articles online about how QAnon is seriously causing problems with child services organizations and actually getting in the way of helping kids. But I found one very revealing article, and if I can recall more about it to find it again I will post it, but it had a unique twist on this. This article pointed out that there is something like real government conspiracy involved in child services, because back in the 90s, the religious right went off the deep end with hysteria over Satanic ritualistic abuse. This even crossed paths with Mormonism. That whole Satanism craze I'd say is pretty close to the QAnon stuff. Anyway, the government got pressured by the public to take Satanic abuse seriously and so now that becomes evidence for QAnon that the government has been fighting child abuse cults for decades.

Don't forget to read my post on the other forum discussing the very first Q post.

Ever thought that the Q phenomenon might be a hoax designed to make republicans look foolish? It certainly has if it wasn't intentional. However, the nonsense of prophesying that something was continually about to happen seems like someone was riffing on what so many crazy supposed "prophets" and "prophetesses" have done over the years.

[Moksha]

Trump State Department QAnon: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet- ... index.html