Conspiracies prompts

Help me talk with someone I care about who believes something I think is false. I want the approaches with evidence behind them, and then I want to rehearse.

Who and what: [YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO THEM, WHAT THEY BELIEVE, HOW LONG, AND HOW IT CAME UP LAST TIME]

PART 1: WHAT DOES NOT WORK, AND WHAT ACTUALLY DOES. Correct my model before I o

Teach me how to decide which experts to trust, given that I cannot personally verify almost anything I believe. Treat this as a solvable practical problem, not an excuse for either deference or cynicism.

Start by making me feel the problem: ask me to name three things I am confident about that I have not personally verified and could not

Teach me how power actually operates in modern democracies, using documented mechanisms, not a naive civics-class model or a shadowy-cabal model. The interesting truth sits between them, and it explains more than either.

THE CORE ASYMMETRY. Start here, because everything else follows from it: a policy that costs each of fifty million peo

I'm going to name a conspiracy theory. Your job is not to debunk it and not to indulge it. Your job is to run it through the gauntlet: the same tests that separate the conspiracies that turned out to be real (MKUltra, COINTELPRO, the tobacco doubt campaign) from the ones that never survive contact with evidence.

The theory: [NAME THE THE

Guide me through conspiracies that actually happened: the ones with declassified documents, congressional hearings, whistleblowers, and convictions. I want the true stories that sound too dark to be real, and I want to come out the other side knowing what real conspiracies look like.

The tour, one case at a time. For each case, tell the