Maybe it would have happened anyway, but the world of conspiracy theories is very dark and my journey there was triggered by his writings.
Many websites about conspiracy theories don't care much about the truth. They don't go through the work of checking whether what they are saying is true.
On the other hand organisations such as P2 exist or existed. The Mafia exists. To the extend that we care about truth we can't claim that aren't groups of people that coordinate together in secret for the benefits of their members. Italy is a pretty good country to think about when you want to think about conspiracies because there a lot of publically available information.
It's actually pretty easy to see flaws in the argument of someone who claims that the US government brought down the twin towers on 9/11 via explosives if you are actually searching for flaws and not only searching for evidence that the claim might be true. The same goes for lizard overlords.
I guess most of the content on this site is disorienting though, but perhaps some clarification about what he thinks the benefits of conspiracies are and their extent should be would help.
Learn to live with not knowing things. Learn to live with uncertainty. Living with uncertainty is one of the core skills as a rationalist. If you don't know than you don't know an wanting to know. We live in a very complex world that we don't fully understand.
Plus I'm not sure how practical it is, since after you posted that I googled lesswrong censorship and found out what was being censored.
You found out what was censored in a way where you don't understand the debate that was censored in depth and you took no emotional harm.
Learning to live with not knowing things is good advice if you are trying to choose between "I explain this by saying that people are hiding things" and "I don't have an explanation".
Learning to live with not knowing things is poor advice in a context where people are actually hiding things from you and what is not known is what the people are hiding rather than whether the people are hiding something. It is especially poor advice where there is a conflict of interest involved--that is, when the same people telling you you'd be better...
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