Tin foil hat: why people believe in conspiracy theories. Chicha from “Olga”: “Small height is my advantage Tin foil kale

Naked logic without expert opinion does not deserve any trust, the author of “Maximum Repost” Borislav Kozlovsky is convinced

Fake news and pseudoscientific facts on social networks have already become a part of everyday life and sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish them from real news. Surprisingly, the main consumers and distributors of information about events that did not happen are quite literate people whose hobbies are reading popular science books, listening to lectures on Coursera, and generally expanding their horizons of knowledge.Programmer and science journalist Borislav Kozlovsky studied this phenomenon and wrote a book about it, “Maximum Repost. How social networks make us believe fake news,” which is published by Alpina Publisher. Ideonomics is publishing an excerpt from this book on how people perceive conspiracy theories and why they believe them.

A persistent symbol of conspiracy theories is tin foil hats. They were invented by a biologist, Julian Huxley, the future first head of UNESCO, the author of the term “transhumanism” and the older brother of Aldous Huxley, the author of the dystopia “Brave New World.” In 1927, Julian published a science fiction novel in which the main character, a scientist, learned to illuminate someone else's brain with telepathic beams, and the only way to escape the scanning was to wrap his head in foil.

What is conspiracy theory associated with today? With a small number of freaks somewhere on the periphery of society, who fight the world government of reptilians, suspect the authorities of hiding the truth about UFOs and protect the brain from psychotronic radiation with those very caps.

Psychologist Rob Brotherton from Goldsmiths University of London, author of the book “Untrusting Minds” published in November 2015 in the US and UK, primarily argues with the stereotype of a handful of freaks.

Conspiracy theories are like religion in the Middle Ages: they are about the sincere and literal belief of hundreds of millions of people. The performances of David Icke, who came up with the idea of ​​a secret world government of reptilian archons, attract a full 90,000-seat Wembley Stadium - the same one where the football matches of the London Olympics were played. More than half of Americans suspect that President Kennedy could not have been killed by a lone psychopath (and the government is hiding the truth). Between 10 and 30% believe the 1969 moon landing was staged. It would be nice if we were talking about the most conservative and illiterate, but the “Committee to Study the Kennedy Assassination” (which took it as an axiom that the killer Lee Harvey Oswald was a puppet, and the official investigation was a cover operation) was founded by none other than Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, one of the fathers of modern mathematical logic and analytical philosophy. Nowadays, conspiracy theories are defended by people of the caliber of linguist professor Noam Chomsky and director Oliver Stone (three Oscars)—the RT channel especially likes to quote them as independent American intellectuals. Therefore, in order to study conspiracy theories as a phenomenon of mass consciousness, the definition “picture of the world of urban madmen” is no longer sufficient.

To begin with, what “conspiracies” are we talking about? Typically, a conspiracy theory deals not with some story about conspirators, but with a conspiracy-right-now, which aims to hide something from us. CIA agents killed Kennedy half a century ago, but the government still does not want to make this fact public. Doctors conspire to hide that vaccines cause autism. Virologists invented AIDS, but they still pretend that the virus exists. The airliner MH370, which disappeared over the ocean, is hidden in a NASA hangar, and secret scientists are conducting experiments on its passengers. Brotherton is confident that the common denominator for all these statements is not some kind of cross-cutting plot, but the same set of cognitive errors combined with a sincere desire to reason logically.

There are different needs of the brain that conspiracy theories help to cope with. Therefore, for a psychologist, conspiracy theory is not a set of specific judgments (“the twin towers were blown up by the CIA,” “the world is ruled by Freemasons”), but a state of mind that creates the need for them. For example, the fear of chaos: we are more comfortable attributing various disasters - from car accidents to a psychopath shooting at children at school - to the evil will of some powerful force (“the Freemasons want to remove witnesses”, “the CIA wants to turn citizens against owning personal weapons”), which acts according to a plan rather than a blind chance that can destroy us for no reason at all.

This hypothesis - about the fear of chaos - was found to be tested in an elegant way experimentally. Some volunteers filled out questionnaires at computers in a sterile environment, while others were seated at cluttered office desks with piles of other people's things. The latter were much more willing to check the “I’d rather believe it than not” box under some statement like this: “the world is run by influential non-public people, and politicians simply carry out their orders.” The same connection was found between belief in conspiracy theories and uncertainty about the future: the lower your social security, the higher your trust in conspiracy theories.

Seven researchers from Italy and one from the USA decided to find out the limits of gullibility. They began to monitor the fate of outright parodies of conspiracy theories launched online by trolls. Do the white trails that trail planes in the sky contain the active ingredient in Viagra because the government wants to control our sexuality? Does lemon juice help you avoid hypnosis? This latest news was reposted by 45 thousand users. Scientists were interested in finding out who all these people were. 78% of commenters and 80% of those who liked it turned out to be regular consumers of other conspiracy stories. If you don’t believe that the Americans flew to the moon, and you think that the Boeing shot down over the Donbass was stuffed with corpses by Western intelligence agencies in advance, you may consider yourself a radical skeptic, but you’ll be much more willing to fall for any implausible nonsense about lemons and hypnosis, as long as it poses as hidden knowledge rejected by official science.

How paradoxical conspiracy theorists think was demonstrated in 2012 by psychologists from the University of Kent. Let's take two groups of people. Some are convinced that the British Princess Diana, who died in a car accident in 1997, actually faked her death and now lives under a false name somewhere in Argentina. Others are satisfied with the official version. Another conspiracy theory says that the death of Princess Diana was orchestrated by the royal family. Try to guess where this version has more supporters - in the first group or in the second? Oddly enough, those who believe that she is alive and that there was no accident are more willing to believe in the organized murder of the princess. The law of the excluded middle (“the princess is either alive or dead”) does not work for conspiracy theorists.

At the same time, conspiracy theorists claim that their main tool is naked logic, because expert knowledge from the outside (“imposed by interested parties”), of course, is not trustworthy. “Rather than being opposed to rationalism, conspiracy thinking actually fits surprisingly well with Enlightenment ideals,” write Chris Fleming and Emma Jane, conspiracy theory researchers at the University of Western Sydney and the University of New South Wales in Australia. “Doubt everything” is the famous principle of methodological doubt proclaimed by Descartes. Criticism of unconditional authorities is what allowed science to overcome thousands of years of misconceptions and develop to its current state: previously it was not customary to argue with the classics, and if Aristotle claimed that the mayfly insect has four legs, then you should have believed him and not your own eyes (the all insects have six legs).

Buyers of the book about rational thinking “Superbrain. Think like Sherlock Holmes” by Maria Konnikova, a columnist for the respectable New Yorker magazine, and fans of independent investigations about the CIA’s role in the Kennedy assassination and the bombing of the Twin Towers on September 11 are often the same people. “The dog that didn’t bark” from “The Notes on Sherlock Holmes” is a stock metaphor among conspiracy theorists: pay attention, they say, not to those details that are there, but to those that are not. It's never cloudy on the moon, but in the photo of Neil Armstrong, when he sticks the American flag into the lunar soil, there is not a single star in the sky - what is this, if not proof that the moon landing was filmed on a pavilion?

With this last example, it’s easy to understand why logic without expert opinion is a pretty useless thing. The knowledge that stars are too weak a source of light and leave at least some trace on photographic film in no less than a few seconds comes to every professional astronomer even during astrophotography practice at the university.

According to Brotherton, the most popular cognitive error is to overestimate the degree of one's understanding of even familiar things (in relation to which the concept of “expert” would seem to have no meaning at all). For example, a bicycle, which we have been taught all our lives “not to reinvent” - it is such a simple design. Psychologist Rebecca Lawson from the University of Liverpool gave her subjects a sketch of a bicycle - rear wheel, front wheel, seat, top bar, handlebars - and asked them to complete it. It was necessary to complete the missing details - schematically, without details.
Before drawing, everyone filled out a questionnaire. To the question “How would you rate your familiarity with bicycles (on a 7-point scale)?”, the majority of respondents gave themselves a rating of 4 to 5, reasonably assuming that they might not know some of the subtleties. But for 40% of those who completed the test, the drawn bicycle simply did not have a chance to ride. The subjects connected the front and rear wheels with a frame (and then the steering wheel could not be turned), placed pedals on the axle of one of the wheels, or connected the wheels with a chain. According to the results, the experiment participants admitted with surprise, “I didn’t know that I didn’t know that.”

History, medicine, climate science, and moon rocket science offer far more possibilities than bicycle mechanics for not knowing that you don't know something in particular. The best way to discover this is to tell the story as specifically as possible, but conspiracy theories are different in that they allow for as many unknowns as desired. Therefore, it is especially difficult to find errors in reasoning. This is how conspiracy theories gracefully satisfy our need to think logically without creating the discomfort and cognitive dissonance that is inevitable when solving real-world puzzles.

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August 20, 2018

Actor Timofey Zaitsev does not like it when his girlfriend Katya, who is 20 centimeters taller, wears heels

The continuation of “Olga” on TNT is getting huge ratings. The characters of the series instantly fell in love with the audience and became almost family. With one of them- Chichey, more precisely, we talked with 33-year-old Timofey ZAITSEV, who played the yard drunk and bosom friend Jurgen. It turned out that in real life he doesn’t burr, but is also terribly afraid of heights, and in his spare time he likes to play video games. .

- Timofey, you have a tattoo on your body with the image of Yuri Nikulin. Is he your idol?

Yuri Vladimirovich is one of my favorite comedians along with Kramarov, Brondukov, Leonov, Pugovkin. As a child, I dreamed of becoming a clown. As for tattoos, now I have nine of them - it’s a disease. In Olga there is a scene in a bathhouse. So the make-up artists suffered terribly while they were being covered up.

- How old were you when you made your first one??

At 18, when I felt freedom. I also pierced my eyebrow. These are the results of my independent trip to Moscow from my native Orenburg. My mother, Irina Viktorovna, is very democratic, although she is a teacher. At school, I always got used to it: I dyed my hair different colors and pierced my ear.

ZAITSEV (in a checkered shirt) with actors from “Olga”: Alina ALEXEEVA, Vasily KORTUKOV, Ksenia SURKOVA, Yana TROYANOVA and Maxim KOSTROMYKIN

- How did you get into the movie?

Lucky case. I played in KVN from 2001 to 2008. Our Orenburg team reached the Premier League. We were friends with the Ekaterinburg team, which played in the top. At one time the Eburgers had the now famous sound engineer Sasha Nezlobin. One day he called me and offered to star in the series “Kindness.” After that, together with Alexander and other talented people, I took part in writing the script for the film “Graduation”. He came up with the character Korchagin, whom he played himself.

- In “Olga”» passed the casting?

Yes. The creators of the series are also KVN artists, with some of whom, as it later turned out, I played on the same stage. By the way, the scriptwriters came up with my Chicha, looking at Korchagin from “Graduation,” who not only lisped, but also had a terrible lisp.

- Before you started acting, what did you do for a living?

I worked everywhere: as a technological compressor operator at a helium plant, as a cook in a restaurant, and as an administrator in a club... My mother left for Moscow before me. And I, remaining in our empty Orenburg three-ruble ruble, fell asleep every night with the thought that I would definitely become an artist. But because of my laziness, I didn’t do anything about it then.

- Why didn’t you go to the theater?

- I grew up without a father (my parents separated when I was not even a year old), and my mother was convinced that acting was not a serious profession. So after high school, I applied to two universities: technical and pedagogical. I chose the second one, following my best friend, and began to master the profession of a manager there.

Katya and Timofey feel good together

- You have a specific appearance, height 156 centimeters. Complex on this occasion?

I always perceived my height as an advantage, an opportunity to attract attention. And about the complexes... Yes, I definitely have one - Napoleonic. I want to be cooler and stronger than everyone else. But this does not interfere with life. I partly got rid of the internal clamps when I played KVN.

- I'm sure women's attention will never were not deprived…

That's right, everything is fine here. But I was not married. Now I have a girlfriend Katya. The three of us live in a rented apartment - me, her and the French bulldog Jules Verne, whom we call Rogue. My Katya is 176 centimeters tall. Therefore, when we go out for a walk, she doesn’t wear heels - that would be too much ( laughs).

Photo from the personal archive of Timofey ZAYTSEV

The term tin foil hat has firmly entered into everyday life not only among residents of the United States, but also in our country. A lot of people have come across references to this high-tech device. If you are not a tin foil hat fan, because... If you are not sure about its beneficial properties or, on the contrary, are interested in learning how to make it, then it’s time to read the article.

You've probably watched the movie "Signs", perhaps you've just heard about it. This film reveals and confirms some of the beneficial properties of a tin foil hat. Let's figure out why it is recommended to wear it constantly.

First of all, as we learn from the above-mentioned film, the cap saves us from the influence of aliens. This fact has also been confirmed more than once in the cartoon South Park. So, remember, a tin foil hat helps protect against the influence of aliens.

The second no less important property of a tin foil hat is the ability to protect the person wearing it from mind reading. It is difficult to overestimate the usefulness of such a device in a society of telepaths. By the way, there is also the opposite effect - by wearing a hat you can protect yourself from reading the thoughts of other people, and it can also save you from the voices in your head. The protective properties of a tin foil hat are shown very well in the Futurama featurette.

The third reason for wearing a tin foil hat first appeared in the United States - it was protection from federal agencies, in particular the NSA, using electromagnetic weapons and influencing people. At best, this is technological mind reading, but through the same technology, people are zombified, as well as various manipulations of consciousness. This is often mentioned in the cartoon "King of the Hill". In addition, EMR can cause harm to health, including psychological health. Unfortunately, there is evidence of the testing and use of similar installations by law enforcement agencies in Russia. One of the confirmations of the use of such technologies in our country is the book “Trace of the Zombies” by Oleg Divov

Finally, another not unimportant property, although far from the last, of tin foil hats is the ability to concentrate the positive vibrations of the cosmos. Wearing a hat helps not only to reduce anxiety, but also to experience a feeling of complete security and peace, helps to open the third eye and protects against leakage of vital energy.

If you are interested in the method of making a hat from foil, I have attached instructions for making a simple, but nevertheless extremely effective design:

How useful do you think a tin foil hat like this is? Perhaps you have your own developments for its manufacture or unique designs? Have you ever regretted not having foil on hand?

A tin foil hat can shield the mind from outside intrusion. So, at least, quite a large number of people seriously think so. Conspiracy theories, world government, tin foil hat - a completely logical chain. Today we will try to trace where this strange invention came from and whether it is as useless as it seems at first glance.

Generally speaking, people's commitment to shielding their minds from invasion by aliens or intelligence agencies is the first signal of progressive paranoid schizophrenia. Patients believe that foil is capable of reflecting control signals (in particular, Russians tend to vigorously defend themselves against the Pentagon).

Science and life

In fact, the legs of the myth about the protective cap grow out of completely scientific facts. Foil can actually significantly reduce the intensity of exposure to high-frequency radiation on the human brain. Protection made from this material will work like a Faraday cage, shielding external radio radiation. A thin, half-millimeter layer is capable of blocking long, medium and ultra-short waves - no cap will help against the ultra-long wave range.

Life and science

In reality, all these scientific calculations are not very applicable. The fact is that for successful blocking, the foil hat needs to be grounded. In fact, a person trying to protect himself in this way will not need a hat, but an actual foil container with a half-meter pin at the base that will go into the ground.

Israeli ingenuity

But the tin foil hat also has its practical uses. Israeli surgeons use a cap to shield infrared radiation - this is how their heads are cooled during operations on premature babies. They cannot yet regulate their own body temperature, so operations are carried out in rooms with additional heaters. The foil hat copes brilliantly with the task of removing excess heat!

She works!

American psychologists from Geoffrey Woodman's group also made a real tin foil hat - only it really works. Woodman noted that weak electromagnetic fields can stimulate the prefrontal zone of the cerebral cortex, which helps improve learning. At the moment, tests of the so-called “foil cap” (in fact, it is more of a rim of electrodes) are still underway.