another thing it means is that

a) people can have extreme beliefs and behave absolutely identically to ordinary people

b) people can behave in extreme ways without actually having extreme beliefs https://twitter.com/henryfarrell/status/1335644397820633091

a girl i knew in high school was a 9/11 truther. she thought, or at least wanted me to think she thought, that the government conspired to murder 3,000 people. she did nothing.

she was just a normal teenager in los angeles, and this belief made zero practical difference to her observable behavior.

otoh there are people who participate in violent actions who have a variety of complex motivations, some of which have little to do with the object-level event. like participating in a riot because you want free stuff or your're bored

the riot *occurs* because of some baseline anger about, say, the government doing X. this does not mean that all or even most of the participants *believe* that the riot is ideologically justified because of X.

the quoted excerpt notes that people can feign crazy beliefs to appear more reliable to others, which is another example of people behaving in an extreme manner without actually having extreme beliefs

i think people will be genuinely surprised about how many of their friends, relatives, and co-workers have odd or nutty beliefs. a lot of the energy has to go towards the behaviors https://twitter.com/IRHotTakes/status/1335729035947745280

laziness and inertia are the human baseline. it takes work to get people to participate in activities, especially when activities have some risk

disrupting efforts to get people to engage in antisocial behaviors, regardless of their underlying beliefs, is probably more feasible than trying to stamp out nutty beliefs