What do we have for hypotheses about how people acquire false beliefs at scale?
Michael Vassar drew my attention to this problem- and coming from a Christian background it fascinates me how well "religion is a conspiracy" maps onto my lived experience.
Lots of beliefs held at scale we would think of as false: e.g., the earth being the centre of the universe. I think the reason is we rely on justification to shore up our beliefs and other people believing things is justification. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hcymnEAKtwvED7Y8o/what-are-we-actually-evaluating-when-we-say-a-belief-tracks
5Seth Herd
Motivated reasoning and Echo chambers.
Our decision-making mechanisms are guided by predictions of reward. Being right predicts reward, but so does giving answers your peers will like (we're wired for social reward, plus they'll give you food and shelter if they like you). So those two signals are mixed together when we make decisions about what evidence to look at, what lines of thought to follow, and ultimately what we believe. Thus, our reasoning is biased toward answers and beliefs that are in our (perceived) best interests.
Echo chambers are pretty obvious and have existed long before social media; the evidence/arguments one tends to hear is highly correlated with their social environment, and we self-select our social environments. We stay around those who agree with us and we agree with those around us.
Echo chambers are pretty obvious and have existed long before social media
Yeah, internet gives you a wide choice of echo chambers, so you are not limited to the ones you were born in or the ones you could find around you.
Even better, you can visit multiple echo chamber pseudonymously, which is something that would be very difficult to do in real life, as many echo chambers would punish that.