Quote Originally Posted by Adrian II View Post
My question: why isn't t this switch operative in other settings, such as people being told of hugely complex conspiracies? Surely they should be able to switch to a different, 'higher' perception of agency instead of falling for the nonsense.
You mean to say, they should realise that the conspiracy theory is a tale told by an agent with aims to make you believe ...?

More seriously though the difference between the assumption of someone affixing a cloth and a conspiracy theory is very small. You cannot rule out either, whereas you can use both to explain the present. This is like belief (of any colour or stripe or supernatural being) in that it is very much a “higher understanding” of the world through which the world can be explained.

It is a pattern, or if you will intuition: the world makes sense, somehow. Similar to how intuition says that rand() + rand() is equally random as rand(). Yet, on closer inspection it turns out that rand() + rand() is random, but not nearly as truly random as rand() is, because rand() + rand() is not uniformly distributed.