Gee, Ya Think?

[theweaselking]

Paper #1: NASA faked the moon landing–Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science (pdf), a detailed study showing that kookery is cross-contaminatory: denial of global warming correlates strongly with antivaxxery, moon landing denial, racism, belief in reptoids, 9/11 twooferism, libertarianism, Birferism, Randroid free-market quackery, Niven-fandom, AIDS-denial, FOX News viewership, goldbuggery, etc.

This produced a predictable reaction: millions of words from idiots online, screaming that this was a giant false-flag operation by Big Climate and that it was all a huge conspiracy organised by the secret Jewish Communist Reptoids On The Moon cabal.

That predictable reaction was carefully measured, producing:
Paper #2: Recursive Fury: Conspiracist Ideation in the Blogosphere in Response to Research on Conspiracist Ideation (pdf), a study comparing their predicted reactions from wingnuts to the actual reactions of wingnuts.

University of Western Australia: mining bad thinking for comedy gold.

Comments

[marlowe1.livejournal.com]

I know a guy who implicitly believes that GMOs are evil, but thinks that global warming was made up.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Another data point in the "belief in one conspiracy tends to indicate belief in many conspiracies" column.

My favourite was the study that showed that among people who believed most strongly that Diana, Princess Of Wales was assassinated? They were also very likely to believe she had faked her death and was in hiding.

Which is to say: If you believed she was murdered by a conspiracy, you were way more likely to also believe she wasn't murdered at all.

[kafziel.livejournal.com]

Well, that's hardly incompatible. A vast conspiracy attempted to assassinate her, and in the confusion she used the opportunity to fake her death.

[cleodhna.livejournal.com]

Or just p&/p.

Seriously, I wouldn't put it past them.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

Oh, perfect .gif.

[aeduna.livejournal.com]

Niven fandom?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Be vewwy quiet. We're hunting wabbits.

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

And apparently they've made enough noise to have the journal remove the second one but far too late.

[kjn]

The University of Western Australia decided to pick it up and give it a permanent home:

Recursive Fury

The original author's notes on the background of the paper and these events.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Wow, the comment war at the second link is... quite something.

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

You missed Bieberism. The world will fall before the amassed greatness that is Bieber.