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I really appreciate the first part of the post re: sports. I have a number of close friends who don't care about sports at all, and, although I bear them no animosity, I can't help but feel like they've missed this entire part of life that, if they engaged with it, would make every other part of their life better. My very best friends not only played and enjoy sports, they each have an attitude bordering on obsession with one or more professional or college teams. It means something. It means ... everything?
On conspiracy theories, I think people get tripped up in defining them. As @FirmWeird post indicates, sometimes what people call a "conspiracy theory" is really just the truth that one or more parties have attempted to conceal. If we don't get more specific, than a personal conspiracy can be as commonplace as telling your significant other a white lie about their appearance to preserve domestic bliss.
Therefore, my model of what makes something a conspiracy has more to do with the epistemic rubric people apply to any causal series of events. To be more direct about it, a "conspiracy theory" is a method of processing evidence wherein any counter-evidence is treated as, inversely, additional evidence that further proves the initial point.
"The Earth is flat"
"Here's a picture from space. It's a globe."
"OBVIOUSLY THAT'S A FAKED PHOTO THEY PRE-PRODUCED AS A PSYOP, WAKE UP, SHEEPLE"
In dealing with this epistemic rubric, there's simply no evidence, no matter how compelling, you can ever produce to change the other person's opinion. Note how this is actually distinct from confirmation bias in which confirming evidence is amplified 10x, and counter-evidence (sorry for that goofy phrase) is diminished 10x.
All the theories about the Luka trade, therefore, are NOT conspiracy theories until someone says something like "Lakers doc did Luka's physical and says he's fine" and the original conspirators respond with "Well, duh, the Lakers would never tell you the truth if he was injured."
A lot of the more enduring "conspiracy theories" (JFK comes to mind most easily) are fun because you can judge the available evidence pretty evenly and still find a lot of holes. Not believing in the Warren Commission report is nowhere near "lol tin foil hat alert!" I'd call it a kind of popular narrative agnosticism.
More recently, this is exactly how I felt about the lab leak theory. I couldn't give you a full, evidence laden dossier on why I felt unsure about the wet market hypothesis, or why I gave some credibility to the lab leak theory. I just kind of felt that way. What's more, nobody could offer me any sort of counter-evidence totally falsifying the lab leak theory. Instead, it was just an endless, yet vague, appeal to authority. "Jeepers! No serious SCIENTIST believes the lab leak theory. Get over it, man! A pangolin fucked a bat and now we can't hug grandma. That's just how life is sometimes!"
At the same time, you had John Stewart (of all people!), putting the regime on notice in real time. Wild.
In terms of conspiracy theory filter up / trick down, I think the key variable is mostly how an individual views information as a commodity. Meaning, when I encounter a new piece of information on anything, what's my initial reaction to it before I even process it. Is it "well, here's some data, I ought to consider it vis-a-vis my existing model." Is it "Someone obviously put this here for me to find. Let met try to discern this unknown person's motivations." Is it "I will begin with the assumption that, whatever this new piece of data is, it's wrong until proven right (or vice versa).
A smarter person than I might have some sort of snappy label for this (metabias? omni-priors?). The point remains the same; people are going to have attitudes about information even before they have enough information to justify having an attitude.
I just went from "don't care sports at all" to "care about soccer a great deal" last summer, and it really was just like a switch flip in brain moment. Like having children (obviously not like having children at all expect in this one sense), just can't explain it fully to those who don't have it.
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