Scott has (naturally) written about this phenomenon, of how he reacts to situations where there’s strong arguments for the position, and only invective against:
“When I was a teenager I believed in a conspiracy theory. It was the one Graham Hancock wrote about in Fingerprints Of The Gods, sort of a modern update on the Atlantis story. It went something like this:
“Did you know that dozens of civilizations around the world have oddly similar legends about a lost continent that sunk under the waves? The Greeks called it Atlantis; the Aztecs, Atzlan; the Indonesians, Atala.
“Various ancient structures and artifacts appear to be older than generally believed. Geologists say that the erosion patterns on the Sphinx prove it must be at least 10,000 years old; some well-known ruins in South America have depictions of animals that have been extinct for at least 10,000 years.
“There are vast underwater ruins, pyramids and stuff. We know where they are! You can just learn to scuba dive and go see them! Historians just ignore them, or say they’re probably natural, but if you look at them, they’re obviously not natural.
“Teenage me was impressed by these arguments. But he also had some good instincts and wanted to check to see what skeptics had to say in response. Here are what the skeptics had to say:
“Haha, can you believe some people still think there was an Atlantis! Imagine how stupid you would have to be to fall for that scam!
“There is literally ZERO evidence for Atlantis. The ONLY reason you could ever believe it is because you’re a racist who thinks brown people couldn’t have built civilizations on their own.
“No mainstream historians believe in any of that. Do you think you’re smarter than all the world’s historians?
“Meanwhile, I learned to scuba dive and checked out a site where Hancock said there were underwater pyramids. They were definitely there!”
And then there is a picture of himself in scuba gear, taken by his scuba instructor, and he is floating underwater next to what appears to be an obviously man-made stepped pyramid underwater - exactly like the conspiracy theorist said, and more importantly, exactly like the anti-conspiracy-theorists mocked you for being so stupid as to expect to see.
Reflect on why that might be convincing for a moment: the conspiracy-theorist camp said “go to coordinates XYZ and you will find an underwater pyramid”, the anti-conspiracy-theorist camp said “you’re stupid”, and when you go to coordinates XYZ you find an underwater pyramid.
That dynamic is evinced very clearly by this email (“not provably not-correct” and “the public response has been abysmal”). I feel like that is a better explanation than “if he can’t prove them wrong he has to believe them, he’s weird like that”.
This reads like a parody, and beautifully sums him up.
Historians: we looked into the Atlantis stuff, and it's not true, see decades of boring science.
Racists: but we'd like it to be true, because it's a bit racist.
Someone on tumbler: only silly racists believe that Atlantis BS
SSC: I don't believe in Atlantis (or support Trump, etc.) but I think the racists who believe in it only do so because liberals are so mean to them, so really it's all their fault.
I’m glad to hear I managed to provide a better summary of the thinking in that email than the previously-offered “he can’t prove them wrong himself so he has to believe them”, that was my goal with that comment.
I think I can sort of see how “I don’t believe in X, but the Xists who believe in it only do so because the anti-Xists are so mean to the Xists, so really it’s all the anti-Xists’ fault” sounds like a parody.
On the other hand, though, I think if you take “only do so because” and replace it with “do so in large part because” it would be basically a correct description and one that SSC might even endorse himself.
> The Atlantis myth, in its many forms, has long been associated with racism. Many writers on the subject—including Hancock back in the 1990s—spoke of the “white” skin of the Atlanteans, who were a kind of master race tutoring benighted brown people in the divine art of piling rocks. The Nazis made use of lost civilization fantasies to support their hunt for a vanished Aryan homeland. Andrew Jackson even used a lost prehistoric civilization claim to justify the Indian Removal Act, which ended in the Trail of Tears. But in recent years, Hancock replaced his white Atlanteans with Indigenous ones and has been a vocal proponent of Native rights. That’s not to say Hancock doesn’t have some nasty classist and colonialist ideas. “Think about it: Could those farmers, who archaeologists tell us never built anything bigger than a shack, really have achieved all this?” he asks at a Maltese temple. Elsewhere, he complains hunter-gatherers lacked “ambition”—the “takers” of the Atlantean world.
“When I was a teenager I believed in a conspiracy theory. It was the one Graham Hancock wrote about in Fingerprints Of The Gods, sort of a modern update on the Atlantis story. It went something like this:
“Did you know that dozens of civilizations around the world have oddly similar legends about a lost continent that sunk under the waves? The Greeks called it Atlantis; the Aztecs, Atzlan; the Indonesians, Atala.
“Various ancient structures and artifacts appear to be older than generally believed. Geologists say that the erosion patterns on the Sphinx prove it must be at least 10,000 years old; some well-known ruins in South America have depictions of animals that have been extinct for at least 10,000 years.
“There are vast underwater ruins, pyramids and stuff. We know where they are! You can just learn to scuba dive and go see them! Historians just ignore them, or say they’re probably natural, but if you look at them, they’re obviously not natural.
“Teenage me was impressed by these arguments. But he also had some good instincts and wanted to check to see what skeptics had to say in response. Here are what the skeptics had to say:
“Haha, can you believe some people still think there was an Atlantis! Imagine how stupid you would have to be to fall for that scam!
“There is literally ZERO evidence for Atlantis. The ONLY reason you could ever believe it is because you’re a racist who thinks brown people couldn’t have built civilizations on their own.
“No mainstream historians believe in any of that. Do you think you’re smarter than all the world’s historians?
“Meanwhile, I learned to scuba dive and checked out a site where Hancock said there were underwater pyramids. They were definitely there!”
And then there is a picture of himself in scuba gear, taken by his scuba instructor, and he is floating underwater next to what appears to be an obviously man-made stepped pyramid underwater - exactly like the conspiracy theorist said, and more importantly, exactly like the anti-conspiracy-theorists mocked you for being so stupid as to expect to see.
Reflect on why that might be convincing for a moment: the conspiracy-theorist camp said “go to coordinates XYZ and you will find an underwater pyramid”, the anti-conspiracy-theorist camp said “you’re stupid”, and when you go to coordinates XYZ you find an underwater pyramid.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fi...
That dynamic is evinced very clearly by this email (“not provably not-correct” and “the public response has been abysmal”). I feel like that is a better explanation than “if he can’t prove them wrong he has to believe them, he’s weird like that”.