The Scrutiny Gap | Avoiding the Allure of Conspiratorial Thinking

Castles in the Sky #39

Photo by Ousa Chea on Unsplash

I used to wait tables with a guy who was a big-time conspiracy theorist. One day, we were in the back of the kitchen doing side work, which is like the extra unpaid work you do for the privilege of collecting tips as a waiter. 

I don’t remember how it came up, but this guy–who was normally pretty quiet and mild-mannered–somehow launches into a heated dissertation on his conspiracy theories about the tragedy of the day. (Let’s call it the TofD for short. Not to be cavalier, but imagine any major American tragedy of the last twenty-five years.)

He was rattling off numbers, dates, and scientific facts, mapping out relationships, explaining geopolitics, describing the levels of government interactions, talking about air traffic control and call signs, diagramming chemical reactions, listing off the hierarchy of the criminal Justice system, and a bunch of other stuff. He probably talked for like forty minutes. 

I’ll be honest: I was impressed. There was a lot that I could not verify at the time that I later discovered was incorrect. But the stuff I knew and could instantly fact check, he knew down cold. This was a guy who did not seem very curious. And I wouldn’t call him lazy per se, but he wasn’t a very inquisitive. Before every shift, we would have a meeting to learn about the new, expensive special we were supposed to sell that night. I know for a fact there were at least a dozen nights where he didn’t know what one of the main ingredients for the special was, and still didn’t ask anybody.

You can imagine my shock at how seemingly rigorous he had been in his research. I was very skeptical of his conclusion though, that TofD was a conspiracy perpetrated by “them.” So I asked him the natural question that anyone would ask: 

“So who are they? Who did it?” 

By then it was just me and him polishing glassware in the back of the kitchen alone. He looked around and pulled out his phone, placed it landscape style where we could both watch it, and said, “watch this.” 

I proceeded to watch a twenty-minute video about—I kid you not—lizard people. What is a lizard person, you ask? Well, it’s an alien disguised as a human that has infiltrated the highest levels of our government, media, and financial system to slowly take over the world. To what end? I don’t know, I didn’t finish the video series. 

The video was very poor quality with shoddy reasoning and highly suspect evidence. After watching it, I realized that my friend had a more tenuous relationship to reality than I did in certain regards. However, I’d met a lot of people like him–people who were really fixated on just one thing. 

Over time, what has remained with me about that interaction more than anything else was what I now call the Scrutiny Gap: the enormous discrepancy between the level of rigor he showed trying to debunk TofD’s official explanation and the readiness with which he accepted the next alternative explanation that came along. 

The basic definition for the Scrutiny Gap is the difference in scrutiny that is applied to any incumbent, official narrative and any alternative, unofficial explanation. The Scrutiny Gap is kind of like when you start a new diet and have a hard day but you eat healthy all day, making the right choices and skipping cheat meals–similar to not succumbing to the propaganda of an “official narrative.” But then you get home, and right before bed, you eat a whole jar of peanut butter with a spoon–similar to building your worldview off of a poorly made YouTube video.

Being skeptical can be hard work, rigorously investigating official narratives for missing facts and leaps in logic, but to be intellectually honest it’s important to keep that same energy with any alternative explanation, and not fall victim to the scrutiny gap.