Ridiculous Things People Actually Believe

A sharp, funny, and thoroughly researched tour of the beliefs that should have died in the Dark Ages but somehow have Wi-Fi now. From flat earthers who use GPS to drive to conferences where they explain why GPS is a lie, to parents giving their children industrial bleach because someone on Facebook said it cures autism, to people who think the British Royal Family are shape-shifting lizard aliens. Richard Lowe documents 18 categories of spectacular human intellectual failure and exactly why otherwise intelligent people fall for every one of them.

This is not a compassionate exploration of why misinformation happens. There are plenty of those, and they are very polite, and they have not fixed anything. This is a direct examination of specific beliefs, why they are wrong, and how people manage to hold them while surrounded by evidence of their wrongness.

Forty-five years in technology taught Lowe one thing above everything else: there is a hard difference between things that work and things people want to work. Watching grown adults spend real money on psychic hotlines and crystal healing and manifestation coaches does not just baffle him. It makes him angry. Some of these beliefs are harmless entertainment. Some of them kill children.

The book covers the full spectrum. Flat earthers and hollow earth believers who have rejected basic geography. Seven flavors of medical misinformation, from homeopathy to urine therapy to MMS advocates who convinced themselves that pool chemicals cure cancer. Celebrity death hoaxers who have decided that Elvis, Tupac, Paul McCartney, and Michael Jackson all faked their deaths rather than simply died. Secret societies, reptilian overlords, moon landing denial, time travel, financial fantasy, historical revisionism, weather warfare, QAnon, manifestation culture, social justice overreach, and the alpha male mythology that convinced a generation of men that female attraction works like a stock market.

The final chapters step back from the specific beliefs and look at the machinery underneath - the logical fallacies, the cognitive biases, and the social media dynamics that turn individual delusion into organized movements with merchandise, conferences, and YouTube celebrities.

By the end, you will have a complete picture of how ordinary human brains get weaponized against their owners. And you will never look at a contrail the same way again.