The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon

[Withywindle]

4. Paradoxically, QAnon tends to attract semi-SMART people

Hear me out. There's an excellent article by a game designer who specializes in Alternate Reality Games (kind of like roleplaying games like D&D only not set in a fully fictional world).

https://www.thestreet.com/phildavis/news/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon


The reason it attracts smart people (for a certain value of smart) is that it's a puzzle. Q drops clues and encourages people to connect the dots. It encourages people to come up with their own clues. Because of the human tendency to pattern recognition and confirmation bias, if you obsess about a certain puzzle long enough, everything starts to seem like a clue.

Of course they're doing the very thing Sherlock Holmes warned against hardest: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

But they don't realize this because they think the Q drops ARE facts.

But as the author of this article suggests, they become so much more attached to the theory because they played a role in creating it.