> Yet in your case, you still fail to support your key claim:

>> I was describing how these types of stories can be discredited, by simply attaching a label to them...

> Obviously some people will never read past the label, whether it is "Qanon" or "socialism", but plenty of people do read past the label, and independently try to discover what is true.

You seem to be framing the conversation as if I have made the assertion that 100% of people fall for these techniques. I made no such claim.

> I don't think Dominion conspiracy is false because some low quality nbcnews article said it started on qanon - where it "started" does not really matter to me.

Now you are addressing the example I provided, rather than the general phenomenon I am describing.

> I think it's false because it's obviously politically motivated and doesn't make any fucking sense.

There is some Truth to the story, or there is No Truth to the story. Our respective personal opinions or understandings have no bearing on the actual state of reality.

> There would be noticable statistical differences between the results of Dominion and other voting machines.

Perhaps there would, perhaps there would not.

Perhaps this would be noticed, perhaps this would be not. Can you point me to anything that demonstrates that an extremely thorough statistical analysis has been performed?

> I reject the premise you seem to be trying to push, that only conspiracy theorists care about truth.

I am not pushing the premise that "only conspiracy theorists care about truth". You are framing and characterizing my comments as if I am stating that.

> I care about truth and am not a conspiracy theorist.

How much any one person perceives themself to "care" (a slippery concept) about something does not always match "the actuality" of the situation. This is kind of what sayings like "Watch What People Do, Not What They Say" are getting at. To make it even more complicated, the level of caring can often vary significantly with the smallest of modifications to certain variables in the model.

To be clear, I do not mean to accuse you specifically of any particular imperfection - if I have done so, then that was done in error. I have no way of knowing your true beliefs or intentions. I am speaking of a general phenomenon that can be observed - and furthermore, I am in no way asserting that it applies universally in all situations.

> Some conspiracy theories turning out to be broadly true (e.g. nsa metadata surveillance and mkultra) has no bearing on the truth of other conspiracy theories.

This is absolutely correct, and I have said nothing to indicate otherwise.

> Conspiracy theorists are a result of modern magic like airplanes and fiat currency being poorly explained in school and bad critical thinking skills.

This is an estimation. It is not possible to know with any kind of precision what the complex chain of causation is behind any individual conspiracy theorist, or conspiracy theorists in general.

> Most conspiracy theorists believe in multiple directly conflicting theories because it maximizes the chance of being correct at some point.

This is also an estimation. You do not have any way of knowing the actual, comprehensive beliefs of even one individual conspiracy theorist, let alone what "most" of them believe. Ironically, this neurological phenomenon (the mistaking of heuristic predictions about reality, for reality itself) is to a large degree the type of thinking that many conspiracy theory beliefs are based upon.

I happen to believe that both sides are very wrong on this general topic, and most other popular "culture-war" category disputes. I would like for the counter-productive and harmful "he said, she said" meme wars (of which this topic is but one) that are going on in the world between the various tribes to stop. I would like us to move more towards a public discourse based on calm, measured, truly evidence-based reasoning, and trinary logic (True/False/Unknown), rather than our current binary (True/False) approach (which forces people to guess).