system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do so many people believe in ridiculously complicated 9/11 conspiracy theories (controlled demolitions, holographic planes, mini-nukes, etc) instead of simple ones (hijackers were government agents, other people had advanced knowledge, etc)?

I don't believe 9/11 was an "inside job" but I'm willing to entertain the possibility that there are major parts of the story that we don't know.  I wouldn't be surprised if some governments had advance foreknowledge to some degree or another, and if somebody came out tomorrow with evidence that, say, Saudi Arabia's intelligence service was complicit, I probably wouldn't be terribly shocked.

However, I get immediately turned off by most "Truthers" because most of them seem to believe not just that the official story is incomplete, but that the attack itself unfolded completely differently than what everybody saw.  What I don't understand is, why does believing that 9/11 was an inside job require one to believe that the buildings were brought down with pre-placed explosive charges or atomic bombs, or that there were no planes at all even though thousands of people witnessed the impacts right in front of them?  What happened to flights 11, 175, 77, and 93 if there were no hijackings?  I mean, if you're going to believe in conspiracies, couldn't you just believe that somebody up the chain of command in the terrorist organization was a government operative?  That's fantastical, but plausible and doesn't take a carving knife to Occam's Razor like the "fake planes & thermite" theories do.  Why do people go through such intellectual contortions to arrive at conclusions that seem completely absurd?
gpt
Basically the 9/11 truther community is undergoing citation inflation. Here is roughly how it goes:

1. 9/11 truther creates relatively moderate conspiracy theory and posts it somewhere
2. 9/11 truthers see that theory and cite it in their own expanded theory
3. Repeat steps 1-3.

So originally, it was an inside job, and then people accepting that as the 'normal' truth, because they're always looking for conspiracies they look for conspiracies *in the conspiracies*. Over time you get gradually more absurd theories.