We live in a world in which the "denominator" of information is skyrocketing. I'm referring to the idea that a person sees their knowledge as a fraction, the numerator being what they know and the denominator being the totality of what's out there. In the information era, the denominator of your knowledge increases geometrically while your numerator increases arithmetically, if you are someone who cares about learning. It can be disorienting how ignorant you are, if you're not prepared by a good solid Socratic education to understand that admitting ignorance is the root of all knowledge.
Try to understand the world as it is, and what do you encounter? Textbooks. The fucking Wall St Journal. A bunch of jargon and successful people you'll never meet talking about shit you couldn't hope to understand. Living lives you'll never have, by the way.
But dive into a conspiracy theory and within a half hour of scrolling, you're caught up on a school of thought that is both closer to you — its founders likely posting to the same forum you're reading — and smaller of epistemic footprint. Suddenly you're not studying long-running arguments people had without you; you are on the front lines, gathering information. What's the primary action of the conspiracy theorist? It's building the conspiracy: connecting dots, pulling threads, collecting evidence. You're suddenly a pioneer exploring an intellectual frontier, doing what Louis Pasteur or Linus Pauling or Archimedes did for real (meaning, provably useful) bodies of knowledge.
And the reason you're already on the frontier is that he area you need to master to get there is super, super small. A minimum of facts and knowledge of the world and ideology are all that's necessary for an undereducated consumer of information to go from deep anxiety at their own ignorance to suddenly, back in complete control of a body of knowledge.
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