I write stuff here when I feel like it.
Conspiracy theorists occupy a strange place in our culture, because that class is composed of both skeptics (who distrust mainstream narratives and construct the theories) and the credulous (who believe their theories). However, I’ve made an observation that links their mindsets together and hopefully somewhat explains their common mentality.
I’m definitely not the first person to comment about this, nor am I the most qualified to explain this phenomenon, but it’s had a major impact on my life in the last year or so, and I want to share my thoughts and experiences.
This past Tuesday, the 16th, most of the north part of my town lost power, some for longer than others. My power outage lasted about 3 hours. However, instead of sitting around bored during this extended outage, I decided to do something productive.
I recently encountered a scenario in a class I’m taking where there was a big argument about what should be done with unfair questions on an exam. The discussion appeared to be entirely centered on intuition and emotions, so I decided to settle the matter with mathematics. I think this information could be useful to teachers in a similar predicament.