Thread by @dappergander

By now everyone familiar with QAnon has probably seen this argument made by a dozen different Anons. But why, you might ask, don't they actually just *have* answers? Why is the answer always "go read 3000 posts and 7000 decodes yourself"?

The simple explanation is that since QAnon is a conspiracy theory, it's a theory built out of other theories. To believe one, you have to believe some (or all) of the others. Q fights the Deep State, which is Illuminati and Freemasons, and demons exist, etc etc etc

So basically it's nearly impossible to explain without either a) taking forever, or b) just leaving gaping holes and/or having to fess up that there are parts that make no sense.

It's like trying to explain a dream that made perfect sense when you first woke up, but in describing the dream to someone you pause a lot and say stuff like "in the dream, snakes were birds, so when the bird bit me I had to go to the hospital." Outside the dream it's nonsense.

The more complicated answer is complicated. But the tl;dr is that humans suffer from all sorts of fallacies and biases based on "personal experience." Sunk-cost fallacy, observational bias, confirmation bias, Dunning-Kruger.

In short, a human being is far more likely to convince themselves of something insane than to ever *be* convinced of something insane. You see this in horror movies and even modern big-name films all the time.

Jaws was scarier before you saw the shark than after: your brain did the heavy lifting and you scared yourself. Of *course* the newest film in whatever franchise sucks: your headcanon would have *obviously* been better.

The point is, if an Anon can trick you into becoming curious (ie, a receptive state), you are more likely to convince yourself of the conspiracy. If the Anon tried to explain it to you it would sound like lunacy.

This is precisely why they rely on memes, especially ones like this. On the face of it, it makes no sense, so you become curious. And you if start Googling-- I mean Duck-Duck-Go'ing, don't use Google-- it, you will find hundreds of pages of text.

So now you're looking at a thousand search results for "is Nancy Pelosi a reptilian" and they're all different, there's blogs and forums and even things that look like actual news items and memes and everything else.

Two things have now happened: you've been exposed to the idea that lots of other people believe this (argumentum ad populum fallacy), and more importantly, if you are still curious, you will now SELF-SELECT the source that most appeals to how *your* brain works.

You might not ever visit 8chan or crazymanblog dot com, but what about naturalnews? Why, they have the word 'news' right in their name! And it's written like an article!

Congratulations, you just played yourself.

Like, *literally* played against yourself, and lost. That nutcase on the streetcorner would never be able to get you to listen to him for thirty seconds, and yet here you are, choosing to read an "article" on the same subject because you and your brain tricked one another.

That's how it's done. And that's why they claim to be "researchers," because most of them started out this way. And that's why none of them want to explain it to you, but encourage you to find out the truth for yourself. No one can trick you as well as YOU.