Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

The topic of gun control in the United States is a rather difficult one to process because politics have gotten in the way of reasoned debate. Most Americans, all of them, favor expansion of laws that require background checks on all gun purchases , that includes Republicans, the party that is on the gun rights side of the debate. According to the same poll, 54% of Republicans even favor a ban on assault style weapons, again the party most in favor of gun rights. In the wake of the Las Vegas shooting, those on the pro-gun side repeated a simple mantra, "don't politicize the tragedy." There are two problems with this sentiment, the first is that it was not a "tragedy" it was a massacre. A "tragedy" isn't something that a person can control. It's a tragedy when a landslide kills a bunch of people, or someone dies suddenly from a disease. When one person commits an act of mass murder, it's a massacre, senseless violence, but not a tragedy. Sec...

For the last month I've been working on a presentation. Updates will be a little more frequent from now on. I've just finished writing my presentation for the CFI (Center for Inquiry) that I'm going to give on Friday on conspiracy theories. I close with advise on what a person can do to prevent themselves from turning into a conspiracy theorist: think logically, apply Occam's razor, and generalize the theory to the world at large. It's not a full proof system, but it's at least a start. I do not go into how to uproot the theories in other people, that's a much more difficult process considering the number of psychological guards that every person has against finding out something they believe is wrong. First, our brain regularly shuts out this kind of proof. Especially when we attach our beliefs to our individual sense of identity. With these kinds beliefs it's not merely something that we believe it is something that we are. The deeper a person is i...