How some QAnon believers become disbelievers and call themselves the "perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect"

[CheeTo]

5 hours ago, legend said:

 

 

I think it's probably wrong to use "intelligence" as some singular metric. All evidence shows that there is not some singular dimension of intelligence; consequently, you cannot neatly divide people into the "intelligent" or "stupid" groups. 

 

Nevertheless, I do still maintain that people who go hard into things like Q are inherently deficient in some set of highly critical cognitive functions (even if they are competent in others) and because of that, I would not trust them just because they "escaped" one cult. I would be fully prepared for them to do it again with something else or have the flaw manifest in any number of other ways.

 

 

Also, while I did state this earlier, I want to be perfectly clear: I do think there is a distinction for children who are raised and brainwashed into some belief in particular and then leave that.

 

As someone that was raised in a very religious / cult like upbringing that is now an atheist, I struggle with your opinion that you can trust a brainwashed child that had their "come to god moment" but cannot do the same with an adult. The psychological impact of being raised a certain way, and constantly being around an echo chamber can last for a lifetime. In your inner circle, it is obvious that you should never go from a seemingly rational, intelligent person and suddenly leap to being a Q follower. From my unfortunate experience with people I love, it is a much slower incremental process. There are incredibly intelligent people that I don't believe have inherently deficient cognitive functions, but have found themselves wrapped up in a lifetime of "truths" that lead to the insanity's that seem absolutely stupid to us. I would allude it to an analogy closer to Stockholm's syndrome. It is not through some deficiency that you fall in love with your captor, and it is not always through some mental deficiency that you can find your self believing in something so bat shit crazy.

 

That said, some people are definitely just stupid. I just would not want to get to the point where we shame or distrust others because they believed something terrible and then came to their aha moment. It can happen in all degrees of previously poor thought beliefs. Sometimes in your 20's, sometimes in your 60's.

[stepee]

i think legend might not have imported data into himself for differences between himself and his social circle and people who live in different parts of the country with different social circles that have all been brought up around the brainwashing of conservative media prepping them for this moment. it’s like his social circle is full of people he can’t imagine falling for it, while the people who fell for it, their social circle is made up of 40% who believe that shit, that difference alone would significantly change ones chances of getting indoctrinated i would think. idk i’m high af 

[stepee]

it’s almost a kind of elitism in that it’s just thinking everyone gets to go off to college and meet the right people and expand their horizons, that isn’t the case for a lot of people. it’s almost saying that since you can’t understand people who are more susceptible  to falling into a cult that they are all beyond redemption.

[legend]

1 hour ago, CheeTo said:

 

As someone that was raised in a very religious / cult like upbringing that is now an atheist, I struggle with your opinion that you can trust a brainwashed child that had their "come to god moment" but cannot do the same with an adult. The psychological impact of being raised a certain way, and constantly being around an echo chamber can last for a lifetime. In your inner circle, it is obvious that you should never go from a seemingly rational, intelligent person and suddenly leap to being a Q follower. From my unfortunate experience with people I love, it is a much slower incremental process. There are incredibly intelligent people that I don't believe have inherently deficient cognitive functions, but have found themselves wrapped up in a lifetime of "truths" that lead to the insanity's that seem absolutely stupid to us. I would allude it to an analogy closer to Stockholm's syndrome. It is not through some deficiency that you fall in love with your captor, and it is not always through some mental deficiency that you can find your self believing in something so bat shit crazy.

 

That said, some people are definitely just stupid. I just would not want to get to the point where we shame or distrust others because they believed something terrible and then came to their aha moment. It can happen in all degrees of previously poor thought beliefs. Sometimes in your 20's, sometimes in your 60's.

 

 

The reason I don't necessarily hold the same opinion for children being able to escape and stay out is because there are developmental factors that cause children to readily accept what's presented to them. Humans are particularly primed for this compared even to other apes. For example, human infants tend to mimic exactly how you show them to do something, even if you do it badly. Whereas young chimps watch what you're trying to do and if you do it badly often improve on what you're doing.

 

I'm not sure the scientific community has settled on why humans are like that (it's hard to prove why behaviors may have evolved), but one of the working ideas is that readily accepting culture can be a way to quickly learn, and since humans in particular are able to continually learn new skills and teach each other, it was advantageous to be developmentally primed to accept what you're taught when you're young. At least that is what psychologists I knew and worked with during my postodc which isn't *that* long ago had conveyed to me.

 

The consequence of that is it may be substantially harder to break out of what you were conditioned into even if you are otherwise cognitively sound and wouldn't have entered into it as an adult.

 

In contrast, if you're already fully developed and adopt such blatantly insane and morally gross ideology, then I would not have any confidence that this isn't an inherent cognitive flaw.

 

 

Also, to be clear, I'm not saying if you were merely brought up and indoctrinated into cult-like beliefs and behaviors that you're fine. I'm saying if you were *and you deliberately left that in your adulthood* I'm more likely to believe that you'll be fine from there on out compared to someone who got themselves involved with Q and then supposedly "escaped."

[SimpleG]

9 minutes ago, legend said:

In contrast, if you're already fully developed and adopt such blatantly insane and morally gross ideology, then I would not have any confidence that this isn't an inherent cognitive flaw.

Yup

If one day your strongest political ideologies are Pro Life and 2A and the next you believe your government is hunting down pedo's that are draining the blood of children while running some super cabal and the only thing that can stop it all is the President who has an IQ somewhere between a flapjack and golden retriever but without the charm of the latter , there is a good chance you have a mental deficit. 

 

 

[CheeTo]

1 hour ago, legend said:

 

 

The reason I don't necessarily hold the same opinion for children being able to escape and stay out is because there are developmental factors that cause children to readily accept what's presented to them. Humans are particularly primed for this compared even to other apes. For example, human infants tend to mimic exactly how you show them to do something, even if you do it badly. Whereas young chimps watch what you're trying to do and if you do it badly often improve on what you're doing.

 

I'm not sure the scientific community has settled on why humans are like that (it's hard to prove why behaviors may have evolved), but one of the working ideas is that readily accepting culture can be a way to quickly learn, and since humans in particular are able to continually learn new skills and teach each other, it was advantageous to be developmentally primed to accept what you're taught when you're young. At least that is what psychologists I knew and worked with during my postodc which isn't *that* long ago had conveyed to me.

 

The consequence of that is it may be substantially harder to break out of what you were conditioned into even if you are otherwise cognitively sound and wouldn't have entered into it as an adult.

 

In contrast, if you're already fully developed and adopt such blatantly insane and morally gross ideology, then I would not have any confidence that this isn't an inherent cognitive flaw.

 

 

Also, to be clear, I'm not saying if you were merely brought up and indoctrinated into cult-like beliefs and behaviors that you're fine. I'm saying if you were *and you deliberately left that in your adulthood* I'm more likely to believe that you'll be fine from there on out compared to someone who got themselves involved with Q and then supposedly "escaped."

I think we are coming at this from different angles. I agree that the behavioral susceptibility of a child is much greater than an adult and that humans by nature follow the tribalistic patterns they were born into. What I'm primarily getting at is that a large portion of Q followers have grown up in their social norms where you start with step one and incrementally and gradually reach what we are seeing today. It isn't always, and probably not often a rational, fully developed adult that suddenly reached this ideology as you mentioned. It led to this over a lifetime. The reason why I think that distinction is important is because adults can break out of their lifetime of beliefs. Eg. A parent that always looked down on gay people and found out their son / daughter was gay. There are many examples of terrible beliefs that can and have been shaken from fully developed adults. We should also treat this the same way as opposed to ostracizing them. We can be abhorrent to the idiots, but welcoming to the possibly few that realize their mistakes.

[Iculus]

capitalism is the worst cult that ever culted. eat shit forever in order to, maybe, have it warm once per week.  

[BloodyHell]

12 hours ago, SimpleG said:

Yup

If one day your strongest political ideologies are Pro Life and 2A and the next you believe your government is hunting down pedo's that are draining the blood of children while running some super cabal and the only thing that can stop it all is the President who has an IQ somewhere between a flapjack and golden retriever but without the charm of the latter , there is a good chance you have a mental deficit. 

 

 

Nahh, this is just false. Very intelligent people are still susceptible to this stuff. It happens every day, all over the world. Its just rarely been this public. Its no different than any other cult that is filled with intelligent people (and also dumb ones).

[legend]

11 hours ago, CheeTo said:

I think we are coming at this from different angles. I agree that the behavioral susceptibility of a child is much greater than an adult and that humans by nature follow the tribalistic patterns they were born into. What I'm primarily getting at is that a large portion of Q followers have grown up in their social norms where you start with step one and incrementally and gradually reach what we are seeing today. It isn't always, and probably not often a rational, fully developed adult that suddenly reached this ideology as you mentioned. It led to this over a lifetime. The reason why I think that distinction is important is because adults can break out of their lifetime of beliefs. Eg. A parent that always looked down on gay people and found out their son / daughter was gay. There are many examples of terrible beliefs that can and have been shaken from fully developed adults. We should also treat this the same way as opposed to ostracizing them. We can be abhorrent to the idiots, but welcoming to the possibly few that realize their mistakes.

 

I'm willing to be nuanced about the particular journey someone takes. I tend to avoid making absolute blanket statements. But as a default, I simply would not trust these people to be out; I think there is something fundamentally wrong with a lot of them to go to such extreme levels of insanity and they better have a damn compelling story if they'd ever want me put any trust in them in the future.

[legend]

33 minutes ago, BloodyHell said:

Nahh, this is just false. Very intelligent people are still susceptible to this stuff. It happens every day, all over the world. Its just rarely been this public. Its no different than any other cult that is filled with intelligent people (and also dumb ones).

 

As I said earlier in the thread, I think it's a mistake to partition people into "intelligent" and "stupid" because intelligence is multi-faceted. The core issue is whether there is something fundamentally wrong with them, not whether they're "smart" in any capacity.

 

And the reason that is the core issue is because that's what matters when deciding what to do with people. If they're prone to this kind of thing, then you must be defensive to them, whether they happen to be rocket engineer otherwise or not.

 

And actually, I didn't mean it when I chose rocket engineer, but it made me think that Elon Musk is a great example of someone who is smart in some ways, but may be fundamentally cognitively fucked in others. Hard to say with him how much that is just a result of being rich with a an unreasonable number of fanboys, but I would absolutely entertain the idea that he is just broken in some important ways.

[SimpleG]

1 hour ago, BloodyHell said:

Nahh, this is just false. Very intelligent people are still susceptible to this stuff. It happens every day, all over the world. Its just rarely been this public. Its no different than any other cult that is filled with intelligent people (and also dumb ones).

Mental deficit is an issue with cognitive function not just intelligence but it also covers a wide spectrum of meanings so I apologize if i wasn't clear. We have become desensitized to this as joke. You are a functional person so when someone tells you that Tom Hanks was a child molester that been assasinated and replaced by a clone your brain knows that to not be true or to be skeptical a Q follower doesnt have that. They lack a skill in reasoning to look past it, its a real issue that needs to be addressed.

 

10 years ago if a friend/co worker/parent/family member said they were getting secret messages about 

Tom Hanks the Super Pedo, Hill dawg doing blood drainings in pizzeria basement, JKF jr coming back to manage the Government  and super secret Jew Lasers those folks would likely be committed and right fully so.

[SimpleG]

1 hour ago, legend said:

And actually, I didn't mean it when I chose rocket engineer, but it made me think that Elon Musk is a great example of someone who is smart in some ways, but may be fundamentally cognitively fucked in others. Hard to say with him how much that is just a result of being rich with a an unreasonable number of fanboys, but I would absolutely entertain the idea that he is just broken in some important ways.

It because he seems so narcissistic, he super fucking smart but not smart enough to know when he wrong like in Thai cave incident.

[Guest]

@legend‘s posts read to me like somebody who has never dealt with mental illness up close and personal.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

1 hour ago, sblfilms said:

@legend‘s posts read to me like somebody who has never dealt with mental illness up close and personal.

 

He's been posting with us for well over a decade.  I'd say that he's more than qualified in that area!

[legend]

1 hour ago, sblfilms said:

@legend‘s posts read to me like somebody who has never dealt with mental illness up close and personal.

 

 

Yeah unfortunately that's not true at all. And no I don't think any of the people I've been close to who suffered from clinical depression or other issues would have gotten involved with Q. It's pretty insulting, in fact, to put generic people with mental illness in the same boat as the cult of Q. 

[Uaarkson]

Can we acknowledge that there is a segment of the population that is cut off from reality by design? I can't assign responsibility for this to anyone but the right-wing mediasphere as a whole.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Speaking for myself, if someone I knew fell down this rabbit hole, I'm pretty sure that my reaction would be merely to shrug move on with my life without that individual in it. 

 

I  wouldn't waste one more nanosecond thinking about them.  They would simply cease to exist for me.

[SaysWho?]

Full story of the woman in my second post:

 

 

[Keyser_Soze]

@SaysWho? I've been waiting a while to say this but

 

you are the perfect example of the stunning kruger effect