The Link Between Wordle and Conspiracy Theories
What the popular game has to tell us about jumping to conclusions, ignoring more plausible possibilities, and seeing patterns that aren't there
This is another of a series of posts offering background on my satirical sci-fi novel, Ship of Fools, which launched last Friday. What do Wordle and a conspiratorial mindset have in common? Read on to find out! And if you enjoy it, I hope you’ll consider supporting my work with a like, a share, a comment, or even a subscription.
If you’re a Wordle player1, you probably know this feeling: You’re staring at a collection of letters, let’s say three yellows or a green and two yellows. A word pops into your head that fits the pattern. Aha! You’ve solved it! You’re so happy with yourself that you enter the word, only to find it’s off by one letter. Then you realize that four other words also fit the pattern. You’ve gone from dopamine hit to dopamine crash. And you might even lose the game.
Wiser (or just more serious) players will stop when that first word pops into their heads. How many possibilities are there? They’ll even use a turn to rule out as many letters as possible before guessing. This approach might take more guesses, but it can avoid losing the game altogether. (I didn’t use the rule-out strategy after my initial mistake in the game above. I’ll be happy to discuss that with any of you serious Wordle strategists in the comments.)
Often, the first word that pops into my head is an arcane or archaic one. I’m even more tempted to stick with such a word because it fits with my self-concept as a person who knows a lot of words. If that’s the winning word, then hey, how smart am I? I broke myself of this habit when I read that the creators of Wordle chose only common words as the winners, and the NYT has mostly kept to that since they bought the game. So in the example above, I thought of “fusty” but discarded it as too fusty to be the word of the day.
Now, imagine if I, having finished the above game, insisted that “fusty” must be the right answer. If you tell me the answer is “musty,” then you’re attacking my self-concept. Even if you’re the NYT puzzle editor — especially if you’re the NYT puzzle editor, or any such shill for the dominant paradigm — I still insist I’m right.
Obviously, this would be absurd.
What does my Wordle have to do with conspiracy theories?
The link between my Wordle habit (or bad habits) and conspiracists is that they present the same errors of thinking that I do in the above screenshot: failing to keep the mind open to other alternatives and to rigorously test the evidence for each. They’ve spotted a pattern, which gives them that dopamine hit of figuring something out. It also feels good to be in on this secret knowledge, which the rest of the sheeple are too dumb to understand (or too corrupt to admit). And the pattern often grows out of the conspiracist’s prior beliefs, prejudices, or worldview, which the pattern further confirms.
Confront the conspiracist with a more plausible explanation for the pattern, or additional facts that destroy the pattern, and it will be discarded out of hand. Accepting the evidence would challenge the conspiracist’s self-identity, but in a much more serious way than happens to me when I lose a game of Wordle.
Of course, with Wordle the answer is cut-and-dried. Unless the NYT starts publishing Wordles with different correct answers on the same day, everyone can agree on what the correct answer is. But most conspiracy theories are more open to interpretation and debate. Here are three patterns people have spotted and the interpretations or conspiracy theories that result, from the completely fanciful to the more contentious and maybe even plausible:
Devil’s Tower looks like a giant fossilized tree trunk? It must be true! (Or maybe it’s an igneous intrusion into sedimentary rock, now revealed by erosion.)2
There are a lot of Jews in entertainment and finance? Must be a vast cabal that controls the world! (But is there a vast cabal that explains all the Irish in the police force here in the US? Or are both explained by people simply flocking together? And what about all the Irish who aren’t cops and all the Jews who aren’t in entertainment or finance? Maybe there aren’t actually that many, but confirmation bias makes it seem like there are.)
There are a lot of objects flying around (or maybe just a few) that we can’t identify? Must be extraterrestrials! (Or could the apparent strange movement of these objects be an artifact of how the sightings were recorded? And why didn’t we think the UFOs were ETs before ETs became popular elements of fiction? Before that, people thought they were faeries — also known for kidnapping people!)3
We should all strive to be good detectives
As
reminds us, and as reminded me on my post last week, we must always keep in mind that conspiracies do happen, and they’re happening right now. So what’s the distinction between a conspiracist and a person who is investigating an actual conspiracy? A willingness to be guided by evidence, wherever it leads.The habits of keeping an open mind, of not letting one possible pattern crowd out all the others, and of gathering and then accepting the evidence are the key distinctions between the good detective and the bad detective (at least in mystery novels and crime shows, and I’d imagine also in real life). The bad detective quickly settles on a theory of the case based on the first evidence available. This can lead either to no conviction or a wrongful conviction. The good detective keeps an open mind, considers all possible suspects, and waits for all the evidence to come in before developing a theory. This is far more likely to result in a just and airtight case.
Here’s the thing though: while they’re doing their work, it’s hard to tell the difference between the bad detective and the good, or between a conspiracist and a person who’s actually on to something. This is because fitting disparate data points into a coherent picture is so basic and vital a human activity, from simple survival to telling a story to solving a case. It’s not only what detectives do, it’s what lawyers do in courtrooms, what novelists do when weaving a “plot,” and what readers do when following it.
And it’s what QAnon adherents thought they were doing when they were putting together Q’s “bread crumbs.” Superficially, the mode of thinking doesn’t look that different from what a detective does.
And then, if you’re Sarah Kendzior and you’re accurately predicting how predatory the Trump administration will be, how similar to the Putin or Erdogan regimes, then editors and reviewers will call you a conspiracy theorist. Or, if you’re Seth Abramson, who has written more than any other journalist on the actual conspiracy that led to January 6th, but which started long before most media will admit, even to this day, your work can start to look like that of a conspiracy theorist: the excessively long pieces, the long, involved sentences (like this one!), the necessary background before the main argument can be introduced, the many dots that need connecting, and then in the comments, the theorist’s many followers providing their own dots or breadcrumbs that elaborate on the picture. There’s a certain breathlessness, which explains the commas instead of semi-colons in the previous sentence.
But both Kendzior and Abramson provide elaborate evidence for their work. Kendzior points out that her books wouldn’t get past the publishers’ lawyers if they weren’t thoroughly fact-checked. This is a far higher bar of evidence than anything you’ll find on the old QAnon sites or the current flat-earth or moon-landing hoax sites.
The bottom line: let the evidence be your guide. For whatever belief, always question your own evidence and that of others. If the evidence leads to something that looks like a conspiracy, then maybe it actually is one. But be wary. If you find yourself becoming obsessed with the theory, trying to prove it rather than disprove it, accepting only evidence that supports it and discarding evidence that doesn’t, then you’ve gone down the rabbit hole.
Did you enjoy this post? Please give it some love! Or even buy me a coffee. And make sure to come back on Friday, when Ship of Fools continues with Chapter 2, “The Collector.”
If you’re not a Wordle player and you’re wondering what that grid of letters means, it shows that I took six turns to pick the word of the day, musty. Gray backgrounds mean the letter doesn’t appear in the word of the day, yellow means the letter does appear in the word but in the wrong place, and green means the letter is in the right place.
It’s important to remember and honor original stories about the formation of a place like Devil’s Tower, but these are far different than the imaginings of a random YouTuber. (The hegemonists at YouTube must really be doing their jobs, because I couldn’t easily find one serious video claiming this landmark to be a tree. I had to resort to a SciManDan video instead, but you get the point.)
For decades, the US government hid what it knew about these UFOs — an actual conspiracy, though perhaps a benign one, which makes it, technically speaking, not a conspiracy. But the revelation of those secrets and the resulting reports certainly haven’t helped to tamp down the certainty that these must be ETs. And since we now know that there are many, many habitable worlds in just our own galaxy, if we close our minds to the possibility of visits by extraterrestrials, then we’re as guilty of confirmation bias as the conspiracists. For instance, see the treatment of astrophysicist Avi Loeb by the scientific establishment — of which he’s a high-ranking member!
This is such a clear and comprehensive explanation of something that can often become tricky and confusing to talk about. Love that you started with Wordle lol. Brings it down to a level we can all relate to.