Author and former professional poker player Annie Duke on how conspiracy theories gain ground – TechCrunch

Earlier today, Facebook said it had removed hundreds of QAnon groups from its site, and that its restricting many more groups, along with hundreds of pages and more than 10,000 Instagram accounts.

As The New York Times observed in its report about the maneuvers, four-year-old QAnon, once a fringe phenomenon, has gone mainstream in recent months despite a wide range of patently outlandish conspiracy theories, including that the world is run by pedophiles trying to damage Donald Trump and that 5G cellular networks are spreading the coronavirus.

How is this happening exactly? Because we happened to be talking this week with the famed former professional poker player turned best-selling author Annie Duke an academic who now teaches about decision theory, including in her upcoming book How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices we asked for her thoughts about whether and why more people than ever have grown susceptible to conspiracy theories.

She had some interesting things to say that we thought worth sharing. Stay tuned for a longer piece from our conversation about her new book and how it can help both founders and investors.

Our brains dont like randomness. We as human beings are always trying to figure out this cause and effect thats just kind of random, yet our brains dont like; we try to connect dots and create causality where it doesnt exist.

Belief in conspiracy theories isnt correlated to intelligence. Its kind of a different thing thats going on with how comfortable are you with saying, Shit happens. Sometimes life is random and theres a lot of luck involved and what are you going to do? versus [people who] really want things to make sense and to [maintain] the illusion of control over outcomes.

If you say, These random things can happen like COVID and people are dying and youre now stuck in your home, its hard to think about that as luck expelling itself all over you because that has implications [regarding how much control] you have over your destiny. Were very deterministic in how we think . . . so were always connecting things together to make it feel like decisions and outcomes and things are much more deterministic than they are.

Were also natural pattern recognizers, even where patterns dont exist. Its so we can partly figure out that, When I went to this part of the plains, there were a lot of lions, [so for safetys sake I shouldnt go back], and so we can recognize faces. Its [hard] to understand that the world is not as you see it and that we impose things on the world all the time. [Editors note: here, Duke points to this visual illusion (below) of two side-by-side cubes that look to be in motion but are not.]

We shouldnt have so much confidence that we know the truth, but we really believe that the cubes are spinning. So [one solution is] dont have so much confidence that we know the truth, and know that youre imposing your reality on the world, as opposed to reality imposing itself on you.

Conspiracy theories are not new, in any case, theyve been going on a long time. The bigger issue now is how easily they are amplified.

One of the heuristics we have to determine whether something is true or not is processing fluency, meaning how easy is it for us to process a message. If we hear something over and over again, it increases its truthiness, in the words of Stephen Colbert. If you add a picture so I say giraffes are the only animal that cant jump, and I include a picture of a giraffe that increases this truthiness.

You can see where that interacts with social media. With theories plus repetition, its harder to figure out fact from fiction.

Again, well have more with Duke soon, including why youre almost certainly running your meetings the wrong way, and why we dig into losses without exploring enough why things go the right way when they do.

See the article here:

Author and former professional poker player Annie Duke on how conspiracy theories gain ground - TechCrunch