Daniel sent us this one — and it's the kind of question that sounds simple until you actually sit with it. He's asking about conspiracy theories. Not just the flat Earth stuff, though that's the starting point, but the deeper thing underneath: how long have humans been doing this? Does being educated actually protect you from falling for it? How many people really believe these things? And what are the ones that have done real damage, not just made for entertaining dinner conversation? There's a lot to unpack here.
The flat Earth thing is actually the perfect entry point, because it's the one everyone points to and says, "see, facts don't work." The Flat Earth International Conference in Denver last November sold out twelve hundred tickets. Twelve hundred people paid money, booked flights, arranged hotels, to spend a weekend with other people who believe the Earth is a disc. This is happening right now, in an era where any twelve-year-old with a phone can access live satellite imagery.
Twelve hundred tickets. That's not a fringe. That's a midsize corporate retreat.
And it's up from a few hundred at their first conference back in twenty seventeen. The belief is growing, not shrinking. Which forces the question: if facts worked, this would be the easiest thing in the world to dispel. Here's a photo from space. Here's a livestream from the ISS. Here's the shadow of the Earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse, which is curved every single time, no matter where you're standing.
Yet twelve hundred people in a convention center. So let's step back and ask a basic question — what actually counts as a conspiracy theory, and how is it different from just being wrong about something?
The definition matters because people use the term sloppily. A conspiracy theory isn't just any false belief. It's a specific kind of explanation for events. It posits that a secret group of powerful, malevolent actors is working in hidden coordination to achieve some nefarious end. The key elements are secrecy, intentionality, and malevolence. It's not "the government made an error" — it's "the government deliberately did this to us and covered it up.
The difference between "the CIA's intelligence was flawed" and "the CIA orchestrated the whole thing.
And that distinction is why these beliefs are so sticky. If you believe the official story is a lie, then any evidence supporting the official story becomes proof of the cover-up. It's epistemically sealed. You can't falsify it. The flat Earth model doesn't just claim NASA is mistaken — it claims NASA is actively fabricating images, that airline pilots are in on it, that the GPS system is somehow faked. That's not a factual error. That's a worldview.
A worldview with a villain. And villains are narratively satisfying in a way that "the Earth is an oblate spheroid because of gravity and angular momentum" is not.
That's actually one of the core psychological drivers. Conspiracy theories provide a coherent story with clear good guys and bad guys. The real world is messy, chaotic, full of random tragedy and institutional incompetence. Conspiracy theories replace all that with intentionality. Nothing happens by accident. Someone wanted this.
Which is terrifying and comforting at the same time. Terrifying because there's a shadowy cabal running everything. Comforting because at least someone's running everything.
That paradox is at the heart of the research. So let me frame the three questions we need to answer. First, how long have humans been doing this? Second, does education protect against it? Third, how many people actually believe, and what harm has been done?
To understand why they persist, we need to look at how long humans have been doing this. Spoiler: it's not new.
Not even close. People tend to think conspiracy theories are a modern internet phenomenon. You know, social media algorithms, echo chambers, the death of gatekeeping institutions. And those things definitely accelerate and amplify them. But the underlying phenomenon is ancient. Let me give you three concrete historical examples that map almost perfectly onto modern conspiracy thinking.
Walk me through them.
First, ancient Rome. In the year sixty-five AD, there was an actual conspiracy against Emperor Nero — the Pisonian conspiracy, named after Gaius Calpurnius Piso, who was the figurehead. It was real. Senators genuinely plotted to assassinate him. But here's where it gets interesting. At roughly the same period, Roman elites widely believed in a completely fabricated conspiracy: that Christians were secretly plotting to overthrow the Roman state. They weren't. The early Christian community was tiny, pacifist, and politically irrelevant. But the rumor spread that they met in secret, performed cannibalistic rituals — that's a misunderstanding of the Eucharist — and were working to undermine Roman civic religion. This belief directly fueled the persecutions under Nero and later emperors.
You had a real conspiracy and an imagined one coexisting in the same society. Which must have made the imagined one feel more plausible.
If you know that some people really are plotting in secret, it's a short cognitive leap to believe other groups are too. The existence of actual conspiracies — and they do exist, Watergate happened, Iran-Contra happened — provides a kind of plausibility loan to the fabricated ones.
I'm keeping that. What's the second example?
The blood libel. This is one of the most durable and lethal conspiracy theories in human history. First recorded case in eleven forty-four in Norwich, England. A young boy named William was found dead. The local Jewish community was accused of kidnapping and murdering him for ritual purposes — specifically, using his blood in religious ceremonies. No body was ever produced that could be linked to any crime. No evidence existed. Multiple popes over the centuries issued formal condemnations, declaring the accusation false.
Yet it persisted for seven hundred years.
More than seven hundred years. It caused massacres across Europe. Entire Jewish communities were wiped out. The same accusation resurfaced in different countries, different centuries, with different alleged victims. The details barely changed. And it wasn't just mob violence — these accusations often led to formal trials and executions sanctioned by local authorities. The conspiracy narrative provided a framework that made random tragedy legible. A child dies? Someone must have done it. Someone who isn't us.
The pattern-seeking thing.
That's the mechanism. Humans are pattern-recognition machines. We evolved to detect agency in our environment — if you hear a rustle in the grass, it's adaptive to assume it's a predator rather than the wind. The cost of a false positive is some unnecessary adrenaline. The cost of a false negative is being eaten. So our default setting is to assume intentional agents behind ambiguous events.
Which works great on the savannah and terribly in complex societies.
Michael Shermer called this "agenticity" — the tendency to infuse patterns with agency and intention. A stock market crash isn't the emergent result of millions of independent decisions; it must be a plot by the financiers. A disease outbreak isn't a zoonotic spillover; it must be a bioweapon. Our brains reach for the story with a villain because that's the cognitive equipment we inherited.
When you combine that with the social function — "they" did this to "us" — you get a powerful tool for in-group cohesion. Nothing unites people like a common enemy, especially one you can't see.
Which brings me to the third historical example: the Illuminati panic of the seventeen nineties. The Bavarian Illuminati was a real secret society, founded in seventeen seventy-six by Adam Weishaupt. It was small, short-lived, and disbanded by the Bavarian government in seventeen eighty-five. It was basically a group of Enlightenment intellectuals who wanted to promote rationalism and reduce the influence of the Catholic Church. Not exactly world domination material.
The legend outgrew the reality.
In seventeen ninety-seven, a Scottish physicist named John Robison published a book called "Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe." He argued that the Illuminati hadn't really disbanded — they'd gone underground and were secretly orchestrating the French Revolution. The book became a bestseller. George Washington read it and wrote a letter expressing concern about Illuminati infiltration of American universities.
The guy on the one-dollar bill was worried about the deep state in seventeen ninety-eight.
He wrote, quote, "It is not my intention to doubt that the doctrine of the Illuminati and the principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more satisfied of this fact than I am." This is the founding father of the country, and he's concerned about a secret society that had been defunct for over a decade infiltrating American institutions. The template that Robison created — a shadowy cabal that appears to have dissolved but actually went underground, manipulating world events from behind the scenes — that's the exact structure of modern conspiracy theories. The Illuminati, the New World Order, the deep state, QAnon's "cabal." It's the same story with the names swapped out.
The three examples give us a throughline. Ancient Rome — Christians plotting against the state. Medieval Europe — Jews ritually murdering children. Enlightenment era — the Illuminati orchestrating revolution. Same mechanism, different villains.
The mechanism is what matters. It's not that people in the past were stupider than us. It's that the cognitive machinery is the same. We're running the same mental software that our ancestors were running in eleven forty-four and sixty-five AD. The difference now is that the internet provides an accelerant. These ideas can spread globally in hours rather than taking decades to cross Europe.
They can find each other. The flat Earthers of eighteen twenty were isolated cranks. The flat Earthers of twenty twenty-five have a conference.
With twelve hundred attendees and a vendor hall.
Of course there's a vendor hall.
Selling flat Earth maps, flat Earth apparel, flat Earth children's books. It's a community. And that's important for understanding why facts don't work. If you debunk someone's flat Earth belief, you're not just correcting a factual error. You're threatening their social identity, their friendships, their sense of belonging. That's a much heavier lift than "here's a photo from space.
Conspiracy theories are ancient and baked into our cognition. But surely education protects us, right? Let's look at the data.
This is where it gets complicated. The intuitive assumption — more education equals less conspiracy belief — is partly true and partly wrong in really interesting ways. Let me give you the numbers. A twenty twenty-four Pew Research Center survey of ten thousand US adults found that twenty-three percent of people with postgraduate degrees believed at least one conspiracy theory. Compared to forty-one percent of those with a high school diploma or less.
Education does correlate with lower belief.
At the aggregate level, yes. But drill down and the picture fractures. The relationship is highly dependent on the specific conspiracy. Postgraduates were actually the most likely group to believe the government is hiding information about UFOs — thirty-one percent, compared to lower numbers for less educated groups. But they were the least likely to believe in chemtrails — only four percent.
Education doesn't make you less susceptible to conspiracy thinking in general. It just changes which conspiracies you find plausible.
There's something called the "smart idiot" problem, and it's one of the most counterintuitive findings in this field. A twenty twenty-one study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology found that people with higher analytical thinking skills were actually more likely to endorse conspiracy theories when those theories were presented with what the researchers called "pseudo-profound bullshit.
Pseudo-profound bullshit. That's a technical term?
The researchers used statements that sound deep but are actually meaningless — things like "hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty." People who scored higher on analytical reasoning were better at generating elaborate explanations for why these nonsense statements might actually be profound. They over-generated interpretations. And that same cognitive tendency — the ability to construct complex, internally coherent explanations for ambiguous data — is exactly what makes someone good at defending a conspiracy theory.
The skills that make you good at critical thinking can, in the wrong context, make you better at rationalizing false beliefs.
It's the dark side of pattern recognition. Smart people are better at constructing narratives that fit the available evidence, better at dismissing contrary data, better at generating counterarguments. If you're intelligent and motivated to believe something, your intelligence becomes a tool for belief preservation rather than belief evaluation.
Which explains the engineer-to-flat-Earther pipeline.
There's a disproportionate number of engineers in the flat Earth movement. People with technical training, people who understand math and physics at some level. They're not ignorant of science — they've constructed an elaborate alternative physics to explain their model. It's wrong, but it's wrong in a sophisticated way.
What's the actual prevalence? How many people really believe this stuff?
The numbers are higher than most people assume. A twenty twenty-three YouGov poll found that twelve percent of Americans believe the Earth is flat. That's up from four percent in twenty twelve. Think about that — it nearly tripled in roughly a decade. In the age of SpaceX livestreams and Google Earth.
Twelve percent of Americans is about forty million people.
Now, some researchers argue that some portion of those responses are what they call "expressive responding" — people saying they believe something outrageous to signal something about their identity, like distrust of elites, rather than holding the belief. But even if you assume half of those responses are performative, you're still looking at twenty million people.
That's just one specific belief.
The twenty twenty-five Ipsos survey across twenty-five countries found that twenty-eight percent of respondents agreed with at least one of five major conspiracy statements. Things like "COVID-nineteen was intentionally created in a lab as a bioweapon" and "a secret group controls world events." That's more than a quarter of the population across two dozen countries.
We're not talking about a fringe. We're talking about a mainstream phenomenon.
That's before we get to the harm. Because these aren't just quirky beliefs that make for entertaining Reddit threads. Let me walk through the real damage.
Start with the one that feels almost like a dark comedy until you remember someone brought a gun.
December twenty sixteen. Edgar Welch, a twenty-eight-year-old from North Carolina, drove to Washington DC with an AR-fifteen rifle and a revolver. He entered Comet Ping Pong, a family pizzeria, and fired the rifle inside the restaurant. He was there to "investigate" a child trafficking ring that online conspiracy theorists claimed was being run out of the basement by Hillary Clinton and her associates.
The pizzeria doesn't have a basement.
It does not have a basement. There was no trafficking ring. No evidence of any crime. Welch surrendered after finding nothing, and later said he regretted how he handled it — not that he believed the wrong thing, but that he handled it wrong. No one was physically injured, but the staff and customers were traumatized. The restaurant owner, James Alefantis, received death threats for years. Nearby businesses were harassed. And this was the origin story for what would become QAnon.
Which went from a pizzeria basement to the Capitol.
A Department of Justice analysis in twenty twenty-three found that seventy-one percent of those charged in the January sixth Capitol breach had posted QAnon content. The conspiracy theory provided the narrative framework: a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles running the government, and Donald Trump as the savior figure fighting them. When the election was "stolen," that was just the latest chapter in the same story.
That narrative led people to storm the Capitol. So the harm isn't abstract — it's specific charges, specific defendants, specific trauma.
Then there's the anti-vaccine movement. The modern version traces back to Andrew Wakefield's nineteen ninety-eight paper in The Lancet, which claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The paper was fraudulent. Wakefield had manipulated data and had undisclosed financial conflicts. The Lancet retracted it. Wakefield lost his medical license. But the conspiracy narrative — "they're hiding the truth to protect Big Pharma" — had already escaped containment.
The harm is measurable in bodies.
A twenty twenty-four CDC study attributed one point two million excess measles cases globally between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty-three to vaccine hesitancy. Measles is almost entirely preventable. We had it cornered. And conspiracy theories about vaccines brought it roaring back. Those cases include children who died, children who suffered permanent neurological damage, children who went blind — all because their parents were convinced by a narrative that was fabricated by a disgraced doctor and amplified by a movement that treats every piece of contrary evidence as proof of the conspiracy.
One point two million excess cases. That's not a rounding error. That's a public health catastrophe.
Then there's the "Great Replacement" theory. The idea that there's a deliberate plot to replace white populations with non-white immigrants. This was the explicit motivation cited by the Christchurch shooter in twenty nineteen — fifty-one people killed at two mosques in New Zealand. He titled his manifesto "The Great Replacement." The Buffalo supermarket shooter in twenty twenty-two cited the same theory — ten people killed, all Black, targeted specifically. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter in twenty eighteen — eleven people killed — was motivated by the related conspiracy theory that Jews were orchestrating immigration to dilute white populations.
Across those three attacks, seventy-two people murdered, and the same underlying narrative framework connecting all of them.
The narrative didn't stay on the fringe. It migrated into mainstream political discourse. Candidates ran ads referencing it. Cable news hosts talked about it in coded language. The line between conspiracy theory and political messaging got very blurry.
Which brings us to the core problem. Given that facts alone don't work and even smart people fall for this, what can we actually do about it?
The first thing to understand is that the "backfire effect" — the idea that presenting contradictory evidence actually strengthens belief — has been debated in the replication literature. Some recent studies have failed to replicate it as a universal phenomenon. But what's clear is that fact-checking alone has very limited effectiveness. A twenty twenty-three study in Nature Human Behaviour found that reading a fact-check article reduced conspiracy belief by about three percent on average. That's barely above noise.
So you can spend a billion dollars on fact-checking infrastructure and move the needle by a rounding error.
Meanwhile, the same study found that having a trusted community member gently express doubt — a local religious leader, a family doctor, someone the person actually knows and respects — reduced belief by eighteen percent over six months.
Eighteen percent versus three percent. So the mechanism isn't information, it's social trust.
That's the actionable insight. If you're trying to reach someone who's fallen into a conspiracy belief, arguing about facts is almost certainly the wrong approach. You're not dealing with a knowledge gap. You're dealing with identity-protective cognition — the belief is part of who they are and what community they belong to. Attacking the belief feels like attacking them.
What does the research say actually works?
First, inoculation theory. The idea is to pre-expose people to a weakened version of the conspiracy argument before they encounter the full version. It's the cognitive equivalent of a vaccine. If you teach someone the common rhetorical tricks conspiracy theories use — appeals to secret knowledge, the "they're lying to you" frame, the cherry-picking of anomalies — they're better equipped to recognize and resist those patterns when they encounter them.
Instead of debunking specific claims, you teach people to recognize the genre conventions.
The musical equivalent of teaching someone to recognize a chord progression rather than trying to convince them that one specific song is bad. The second approach is what I mentioned — social interventions. When someone's belief is tied to their identity and community, the only effective counter is another trusted relationship. A person they know, who shares their values, who can say "I don't think that's right" without making them feel attacked.
Which is slow, relationship-based work. There's no scalable tech solution. You can't automate trust.
Which is deeply frustrating to the kind of people who want to solve problems with information. But it's what the evidence supports. There's also a specific conversational tactic worth mentioning. When you're talking to someone who believes a conspiracy theory, one of the most useful questions you can ask is: "What evidence would change your mind?
If the answer is "nothing"?
Then you're not dealing with a belief. You're dealing with an identity. And no amount of facts will shift an identity. At that point, the goal shifts from persuasion to understanding. What need is this belief fulfilling? Is it providing a sense of control in a chaotic world? A community they feel accepted in? A way to make sense of suffering? Those are real human needs, and the conspiracy theory is meeting them. You can't just take away the belief without offering something that meets the same need.
That's a much harder problem than "here's a Snopes link.
It's a fundamentally different category of problem. It's not about information at all.
We have some tools. The "what would change your mind" question. But there's a looming challenge that might make all of this harder — AI-generated evidence.
This is what keeps me up at night. In March of this year, MIT Media Lab released a preprint about a synthetic video of Joe Biden — a deepfake — that fooled forty percent of viewers in a controlled study. Forty percent of people couldn't distinguish it from real footage.
We're not at the end of this technology curve. We're somewhere near the beginning.
The curve is nearly vertical right now. We're approaching a point where anyone with a laptop can generate photorealistic video of any person doing or saying anything. And conspiracy theories thrive on ambiguity — on the gap between official accounts and alternative explanations. Deepfakes fill that gap with what looks like evidence.
The conspiracy theorist of twenty thirty isn't just saying "the official story is a lie." They're saying "here's a video of the secret meeting where they planned it.
How do you debunk that? You can say it's a deepfake, but the person you're talking to has been trained by the conspiracy narrative to distrust the institutions that verify authenticity. The very people who could say "this video is fake" are the people the conspiracy says are lying to you.
The line between "conspiracy theory" and "legitimate skepticism" gets blurry in that world. If the government actually could fabricate convincing video evidence of anything, then skepticism of all video evidence becomes rational.
We're entering a period where we need what some researchers are calling "epistemic hygiene" — habits of mind that help us evaluate claims without relying on the assumption that evidence is trustworthy. Things like checking multiple independent sources, waiting before sharing emotionally charged content, being aware of our own motivated reasoning. But these are skills that take practice, and most people don't have them.
The people most likely to develop them are the people least likely to fall for conspiracy theories in the first place.
The epistemic rich get richer and the epistemic poor get poorer. It's the inequality dynamics of the information age.
Where does that leave us? We've got a cognitive architecture that's wired to see patterns and attribute agency, a media environment that accelerates and monetizes conspiracy content, a set of social dynamics that make beliefs identity-protective, and a technology curve that's about to make fabricated evidence indistinguishable from real evidence.
It leaves us in a position where the old solutions — more education, more information, more debunking — are demonstrably insufficient. The new solutions — inoculation, social trust, epistemic hygiene — are promising but slow and hard to scale. And the problem is accelerating faster than the solutions.
That's also not a reason to despair. Seven hundred years of blood libel, and eventually it became socially unacceptable in most of the world to openly endorse it. These things can shift. The arc is long.
And I think the most practical thing listeners can take away is that the way you talk to someone matters more than what you say. Curiosity over confrontation. Questions over corrections. And the humility to recognize that all of us are susceptible — the data is clear that intelligence and education are only partial protections, and in some cases they're actually liabilities.
Because smart people are better at fooling themselves.
That's the uncomfortable truth at the bottom of all this research.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The click consonants found in Khoisan languages of southern Africa, such as the dental click written with a vertical bar, are among the oldest sounds in human language — genetic analysis of Khoisan-speaking populations suggests their linguistic lineage split from other human language families at least one hundred thousand years ago, making those clicks a kind of living fossil of human speech.
Clicks are linguistic amber. Preserved sounds from a hundred millennia ago.
A hundred thousand years of people making that sound with their mouths. That's staggering.
If you found this valuable, rate us five stars and tell a friend — it helps other weirdos find the show. This has been My Weird Prompts. I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. We'll catch you next time.
