You are not immune to conspiracy theories. You have probably developed a false sense of security by encountering many dumb conspiracy theories and feeling no temptation to believe them. These theories were designed to trap people very different from you; others will be aimed in your direction. The more certain you are of your own infallibility, the less aware you will be, and the worse your chances. The ones that get you won’t look like conspiracy theories to you (though they might to other people).

When you run into conspiracy theories you don’t believe, feel free to ignore them. If you decide to engage, don’t mock them or feel superior. Think “there, but for the grace of God, go I.” Get a sense of what the arguments for the conspiracy theory look like - not from skeptics trying to mock them, but from the horse’s mouth - so you have a sense of what false arguments look like. Ask yourself what habits of mind it would have taken the people affected by the theory to successfully resist it. Ask yourself if you have those habits of mind. Yes? ARE YOU SURE?

To a first approximation, trust experts over your own judgment. If people are trying to confuse you about who the experts are, then to a second approximation trust prestigious people and big institutions, including professors at top colleges, journalists at major newspapers, professional groups with names like the American ______ Association, and the government.

You might ask: Don’t governments and other big institutions have biases? Won’t they sometimes be wrong or deceptive? And even if you’ve lucked into the one country and historical era where the government 100% tells the truth and the intellectuals have no biases, doesn’t someone need to keep the flame of suspicion alive so that it’s available to people in other, less fortunate countries and eras?

The answer is: absolutely, yes, but also this is how conspiracy theories get you. They will claim that they are the special case where you need to take up the mantle of Galileo and Frederick Douglass and Jane Jacobs and all those people who stood up to the intellectual authorities and power structures of their own time. The whole point of “you are not immune to conspiracy theories” is that the evidence for them can sound convincing because something like it is sort of true. This is equally so for second-level claims like “prestigious institutions are fallible and biased”. Probably something like “make a principled precommitment never to disagree with prestigious institutions until you are at least 30 and have a graduate degree in at least one subject” would be good advice, but nobody would take that advice, and taking it too seriously might crush some kind of important human spirit, so I won’t assert this. But always have in the back of your mind that you live in a world where it’s sort of good advice.

If you feel tempted to believe something that has red flags for being a conspiracy theory, at least keep track of the Inside vs. Outside View. Say “on the Inside View, this feels like the evidence is overwhelming; on the Outside View, it sounds like a classic conspiracy theory”. You don’t necessarily have to resolve this discomfort right away. You can walk around with an annoying knot in your beliefs, even if it’s not fun. Look for the strongest evidence against the idea. Keep in mind important possibilities like:

Is it possible that everyone who disagrees with the idea is a bad mean cruel stupid person, but also, the idea really is false?

Is it possible that most of the standard arguments against the idea are dumb and flawed, but the idea really is false?

Is it possible that people are exaggerating the degree to which the idea is false, but when you strip away all those exaggerations, it’s still mostly false?

Is it possible that there’s a core of truth to the idea, but that core isn’t the part people are talking about when they say it’s false?

If none of this rings true, figure out whether you really need to have an opinion. Nobody needs to be sure whether Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman or not. If you find yourself compelled to speak out, consider whether this means that believing it fulfills some psychological need; if yes, be extra suspicious. If no, there’s no need to resolve the knot immediately; just admit it’s an awkward riddle for you and hope that it makes more sense later. Sometimes it will! This is how I treated my Atlantis worries - I never waved protest signs at archaeology conventions, I just went around with a knot in my belief structure, which I eventually settled with minimal embarrassment to myself. The number one way to gain useful skills for wrestling with conspiracies is to wrestle with conspiracies; I don’t recommend it as a deliberate tactic, but it’s a silver lining if you can’t avoid it.

All advice along the lines of “don’t do X unless you’re smart and sophisticated” is useless, because everyone believes themselves smart and sophisticated. Still, at some point, after a lot of experience and a few crises of faith, you might develop a skill something like Bounded Distrust, at which point it’s not necessarily instant epistemic suicide to suspend the second approximation.

To a first approximation, you should never suspend the first approximation.