So.. a lot of this is "negative polarisation" combined with "exactly wrong". People see something bad happening, or come to distrust a piece of mainstream belief/reporting when it gets caught in a contradiction or turns out on subsequent evidence to be wrong. That is the healthy side of skepticism.

The problem comes in this causing people to do one or both of:

- immediately flip to believing the direct opposite, without evidence that's true either (most things are not excluded-middle)

- immediately imprint on the first non-mainstream source they find and start treating it as gospel

> but if there's a "bad" way to be a free-thinker then you could say it usually has a pretty limited blast radius for society in general and it isn't a contagious kind of madness either

It absolutely can be contagious. Sometimes that's for the good, sometimes bad, quite often the mixed result of getting to the right place only after a fraught disruptive time. Martin Luther, originator of the listicle, was correct in a lot of the theses but also started the domino chain for some of the most lethal wars in Europe. VI Lenin was right about the problems and wrong about the solutions. And so on.

>wild conspiracy theories.

Do you know the difference between a conspiracy "nut", and a rational person?

For a "conspiracy nut", understanding that there is sufficient incentive (also implies a lack of deterrent) for X to do Y is proof enough that X is doing Y.

For a "mainstream" person, that is not enough. They require real, solid proof to consider that X is doing Y.

Note that this is about deciding their own behavior, and not about handing capital punishment for X.

I ll let you decide who is smarter...

The system isn’t static. Anti-authority is not countered by authority, or the same kind of authority. It’s countered by co-opting anti-authority.