Availability heuristic; I haven't read many conspiracy theorists. He struck me as more careful and more cogent than the few others I'd read; like, he bothers to explicitly bracket certain ideas as having a good chance of being wrong, and he emphasizes giving up on a thread if it doesn't seem to be fruitful. He's generally pragmatic. He also has a healthy skepticism about the motives and natures of claimed demonic/alien entities, not in the sense of categorically doubting that they're supernatural/alien/"weird", but in the sense of not assuming that just because they say they want to help humanity and so on that that is strong evidence of actual benevolence: "I find it a fascinating frustration that many of those convinced of a massive government cover-up fall over themselves to accept the words of non-human entities." — this post on Fatima. Being pseudo-Catholic and schizotypal I naturally worry about demons—in fact that's part of why I'm pseudo-Catholic and not, say, pseudo-Tibetan-Buddhist. So Jeff Wells scores a lot of points with me for his caution on that front.
Do you have recommendations for other conspiracy theorists, or conspiracy theorist debunkers? 'Cuz honestly I think Jeff Wells makes a compelling, coherent case for High Weirdness, which is worth keeping in mind as a live hypothesis, though I don't think we'll have the collaborative argumentation tools necessary to rationally assess the hypothesis for at least another five years.
I visited Fatima in 2007 with my family. It was...spooky...and in a way that the Vatican was not (that is to say, not in the same way as any old, massive, historically-important thing is). On the other hand, my Portuguese isn't very good, so I may not have understood as much as I thought.
I'm worried that LW doesn't have enough good contrarians and skeptics, people who disagree with us or like to find fault in every idea they see, but do so in a way that is often right and can change our minds when they are. I fear that when contrarians/skeptics join us but aren't "good enough", we tend to drive them away instead of improving them.
For example, I know a couple of people who occasionally had interesting ideas that were contrary to the local LW consensus, but were (or appeared to be) too confident in their ideas, both good and bad. Both people ended up being repeatedly downvoted and left our community a few months after they arrived. This must have happened more often than I have noticed (partly evidenced by the large number of comments/posts now marked as written by [deleted], sometimes with whole threads written entirely by deleted accounts). I feel that this is a waste that we should try to prevent (or at least think about how we might). So here are some ideas: