Yes the GUCT

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

aka the chewbacca defense.
taks

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goodbye richard pryor :(...

I don't think it has anything to do with the person's level of intelligence. I think a person's intellect has very little to do with how they actually use that intellect. I do believe you are in the ballpark on the awareness issue. Awareness (the result of mastering the 2 obs - observation & objectivity), is the key to an individual understanding the world and their place in it. (It starts with awareness of the self and grows from there). Intellect w/o awareness is a very empty intellect. Good for solving abstract puzzles or other such stuff, but lousy for interpreting the incredibly complex web of activity that we know as daily living - which includes relationships, values, cultural norms, historical perspective, and so on and so forth.

I still have not finished Shermer's Why People Belive Weird Things; but I think he hits on this a lot. I eagerly anticipate his insights in the final chapter, Why Intelligent People Believe Wierd Things.

p.s. - I must pay homage to Daryl Zero, the world's greatest private eye, for the 2 Obs bit.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

what I was trying to do was objectively analyze the data at hand, and, let's face it, "they're stupid" is a pretty tempting explanation. you'll note I discarded it. (I was also trying to be funny, but that so seldom works as I'd hoped. oh, well.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

What you wrote applies pretty much to all conspiracy theories, but I think that with Apollo hoax another factor is involved. Namely, some people are incapable of admitting that a country (or a group within a country) which they just don't like is capable of great things.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

"Conspiracies are nothing more than a conspiracy to get people to conspire to do something." ~ Fooker, from GPF.

Other than that, I have nothing of worth to contribute to this convo.

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"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right." -- Thomas Paine

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor. -- Heinlein

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. -- Isaac Asimov