I'm like "OVERWROUGHT MUCH??" to my 6yo

All public figures have to do to con you is brazenly lie and pass terrible policies while setting up their enemies as conspirators. You’ll constantly be looking past obvious truths in search of shadows.

This seems like something worth pointing out to students: thinking of information this way is not a good way to live in the 21st century. It comes from a fear of getting duped while totally setting you up to be a dupe.

If you’re far enough into this bias, heinous things done in the open aren’t worth looking at. It’s like the point of gaining information is to feel smart or smug about discovering the “real” hidden truth, so if there’s no puzzle to solve, why bother?

Maybe info literacy researchers have talked about this and I missed it, or Hofstader did and I forgot, but it seems to point to a “conspiracy bias” – attentional bias in favor of stuff that’s supposedly coordinated in the shadows, hidden but well organized, evil.

but the second something looks like a conspiracy people start paying attention. The new thing it shows, to me, is that there’s a huge swath of the public that’s not just into conspiracy theories, but who *will only pay attention to things that look like conspiracies.*

“blank sheet of paper” doing a lot of sinister work here.

The premise that any city or any citizen should accept immigration raids after watching the daily bad-faith operations of this administration is absurd on its face.

After finding out most of the Venezuelan men they sent to El Salvador had no criminal record and they knew it. After watching them appoint know-nothings, incompetents and addicts to the highest positions of power.