Why?
As for me, I gave up a long time ago trying to convince the tin-foil hat wearers of the world. If I come upon a conspiracy theorist away from work, I laugh at them and walk away. If they decide to follow me to try to convince me, I ridicule them. I’m sorry that I’m not more polite, but when I used to be more polite to them… I just couldn’t get rid of them. Now, I can.
I treat evangelists the same way.
That’s pretty similar to the way I handle these encounters. I haven’t had a really good one in a while; the only one that sticks in my memory is the time I sat next to an elderly black man on the bus and he wanted to tell me all about his belief that the government was secretly sending the extra-heavy buses and trucks through the poor black neighborhoods because it would cause the asphalt to break up faster and the powder would cause lung cancer and the bumpy roads would cause back pain, or something. It was a remarkably well-developed narrative, especially noteworthy for how it completely overlooked the more straightforward explanation that poor black neighborhoods usually come up short on allocations for road maintenance money. Anyway, for the first half of the ride, I feigned interest, and asked a bunch of subtle leading questions, trying to get him to recognize and be frustrated by his own contradictions; but after a while it became clear that he was happy to spout off paradoxical assertions without any rational appreciation of how little sense he was making, so I just started jerking his chain. He got pissed, yelled at me, and mercifully shut up.
Oh, wait, I do remember another one. There’s a guy here at work who said “I can tell you’re one of the smart ones” and went on with “have you heard about how the construction of the gas chambers at Auschwitz don’t match the official explanation of their purpose” and “Jews control the media” and suchlike. With that guy, I went hard on the attack: “What you’re saying flat out untrue, it is absolute nonsense, it’s contradicted by volumes and volumes of unimpeachable data, and anyone who actually believes those things is an ignorant moron.” He was taken aback, and he hasn’t raised the subjects again. It was risky, because I was sort of inviting all-out war, but apparently my forcefulness blew him away.
Would they would all respond like that.
I am well acquainted with a conspiracy theorist, my former boss who is an architect. As far as I know, he is the only architect in the world who publicly supports 9/11 CTs. More recently, he started believing in free energy CTs that contend large energy corporations suppress technology that would allow automobiles and buildings to be powered for lifetime (for free) using the ambient energy around them. He thinks over-unity devices and perpetual motion machines can accomplish this. :rolleyes:
I’m not sure what his stance is on the Moon landing or JFK’s assassination.
My employment there began in 2000 when I was a junior in high school. I worked for him part time after school and on weekends and full time in the summers 2000 and 2001. I left home in the fall 2001 to pursue my college education studying materials engineering. I continued to work for the architect during breaks from school and during parts of the summers 2002 and 2003. Since then, I’ve only worked on a few projects away from his office. My only full-time employment in the meantime was working as an engineering research assistant.
To me, my boss had always been an eccentric person to say the least. He lives on a somewhat isolated hill side in a wacky house that he designed for himself. Plus, for a professional businessman, he severely lacks people skills.
Then, the 9/11 conspiracy theory emails started coming in late 2004. I ignored him for a while but dedided to confront him after he started giving public speeches on the topic. My first step in confrontation was writing a somewhat detailed email pointing out the obvious flaws (obvious to me at least) in his arguments. Just one example, He seriously could not understand why the steel columns in the WTC towers could have failed at temperatures below the steel alloy’s melting point. Even at room temperature, a specimen of any material can yield if a enough force is applied. Later on, I argued with him over less non-technical points after some internet research including the SDMB. This isn’t the appropriate thread to discuss all the details (I’m not motivated to do so anyway), so I’ll leave it at that.
To this day, he is completely unphased. :mad: What a dumbass
Here’s my conspiracy theorist story:
A more entertaining conspiracy theory story: When my daughter, whiterabbit, was in high school, she got stuck with a history teacher who spent the entire semester spouting off various CTs to the class. They were utterly ludricrous, but I was appalled enough to go to the principal, who assured me that they really wanted to get rid of the guy but he was a power in the union and they’d had no success to date.
But the entertaining moment came at the end of the final exam, when whiterabbit finally had enough of his idiocy. He was spouting off to another student in the class, and she said, “I don’t believe that!” He was taken aback, and so she followed up with, “I don’t believe your CT X or your CT Y [can’t remember what they were any more, but none of them was particularly original]. In fact, I think you’re a complete nut case!” At which point she marched out of the room, feeling very good about what she’d just done. As did I, needless to say.
We spent the next two weeks wondering whether her attack on him would have an effect on her grade. It did: He turned out not only to be a nut, but a craven one to boot. He gave her an A. 
I think I’ve finally realized why I should start wearing a watch.
Is a conspiracy theorist all that different from any other type of extremist? Hardcore liberal, hardcore conservative, hardcore theist or hardcore atheist? Hardcore belief systems by nature hold the viewpoints of their group as unvarnished truth and dissenting viewpoints as lies.
Let me put all my cards on the table here. I tend to lend more credence to liberal viewpoints than conservative simply because they more closely align with my world-view. I think the majority of people tend to seek out information that supports what they want to believe rather than let the available evidence inform their world-view. I am guilty of this, but I’m continually trying to get better – SDMB is a great help to that end.
This is further acerbated by the glut of misinformation published by passionate writers with an axe to grind, if not [insert your preferred hated misinformers here: (the liberal media / Fox News)]. So what do we really know for sure? We all have to rely on other people for much of what we purport to know.
Ultimately, I place the most stock in things that can be empirically proven by multiple independent sources. But — as tinfoilhat as this sounds — I have to take it on faith that they’re independent.
One thing I do know for certain — because it’s happened to me on more than one occasion — is that losing one’s world-view can be a terrifying experience. These boards are littered with examples of people (myself included) who desperately do not want to be wrong. To be shown that some of the most important things you believe, things you may have based your life upon may just be a sham is to be shown that the corresponding amount of your life spent towards that belief has been a waste. It can be a crushing experience for anyone.
Now apply that standard to people who are so far off the deep end that they subscribe to ideas that typically (a) require enormous leaps of faith and logic to believe, and (b) suggest that the greatest powers on this mortal coil are also the most corrupted.
I would expect that to argue with conspiracy theorists will be pointless and be perceived as an attack by them. If someone I cared about held alarmingly extreme views, I would focus on how dissenting viewpoints help one understand any issue better and share a copy of The Blind Men and an Elephant to illustrate my meaning.