The CIA's most famous ship headed for the scrapyard
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This sounds exactly like James Cameron's astroid mining. I wonder if we'll find out in 50 years that the CIA was recovering a Russian spaceship.
not Russian, i mean like not of Earth origin...
Imagine, after all of the press releases and discussion around manganese nodule harvesting, saying Howard Hughes wasn't interested in mining manganese nodules at all, but sunken Russian ships. You'd be labeled as crazy. First off, people would be asking where the heck you got the idea that something along the lines of manganese nodules could actually be a cover story for the CIA. Then, you'd be slammed for saying things counter to the mainstream narrative. Finally, if you were somehow gaining a lot of traction (but how could you! who even cares about recovering sunken Russian ships) you might get a visit asking for your silence.
If you were, in this case, claiming it was because the CI was looking for Russian ships - what evidence do you have? Given enough conspiracy theories, at least one will be right. But that one right one shouldn't be accorded any point if there was no reason to believe it over other ideas.
And CIA experiments with LSD. Virtually nobody took those stories seriously at the time.
Or maybe more succintly: we need more Edward Snowden and less Alex Jones.
Crowded forums, especially those with points systems like Reddit and HN, have become contests and the people that win those contests are usually the ones that can argue a position with the most veracity. Nobody is impressed by anyone that says, "hmm, well, that might be true too, maybe"; that person is perceived as naive or weak or ignorant or wishy-washy.
This isn't limited to internet culture either. Any politician that dares to change their mind on an issue is "waffling", it's a sign of a weak leader, not an introspective one.
And this is really, really hurting the way that debate happens, at least in the US. You generally can't have a civil, thoughtful, enlightening discussion about gun control, abortions, religion, climate change, race and gender issues, or any of a number of other hot-button political topics. People instead pick a position and cling to it with all their might, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When one argument for their position stops working, rather than reconsider their position they just migrate to a new argument for the same position. (This is happening right now for instance with anti-vaccers, who have moved from "it's not safe" to "it impinges on my religious freedom".)
...
Y'know, I think the world has gotten too connected too quickly. I don't mean that this interconnectedness is altogether bad; it is amazing to me that we live in a time now where two people in politically opposed countries can get together with a minimal amount of effort over vast distances and talk to eachother. That's fantastic.
But I think it has also become overwhelming for a lot of people. We haven't had enough time to adapt. The relentless news cycle, the constant distractions from Twitter and social media feeds, the nonstop barrage of email and texting, the vast social timewasting (and often hostile) networks like Reddit, the unimaginable amount of information being pumped into a blogosphere that's expanding at rates resembling the earliest moments of the Big Bang ... I think most people are just completely overwhelmed by it, and coupled with this culture that reveres certainty and conviction over measured consideration, people have retreated to finding comfortable positions on every issue they care about and then clinging to them with all their might.
It would be nice if there was a way to turn the dial back just a notch or two, to have some kind of network where we could easily limit ourselves to connections with a much smaller number of people, the same people on a regular basis, where it can become comfortable again to say something like "I don't know" in a context where you don't feel like you're in a gladiatorial arena and will get downvoted by the spectators for it.
This is one of the key skills that I got from my training in science. That and literature research. And designing experiments. Getting emotionally attached to some hypothesis is very dangerous. But on the other hand, sometimes the hypothesis is OK, and it's the experimental design and technique that are hosed.
But on the other hand, maybe the category "conspiracy theory" isn't so useful? I'm reminded here of Kuhn.
I do agree that untestable hypotheses are bullshit. But most "conspiracy theories" aren't untestable, as nontrivial as the requisite tests might be.
Maybe not. The defining aspect of silly theories isn't just that they involve conspiracies.
However many silly theories do wind up involving conspiracies, because assuming the existence of a conspiracy is the easiest way to explain away any differences between your theory and observable reality.
Think that President Obama comes from Mars? Well why is there a birth certificate that says he was born in Hawaii? Easy: someone faked it. Why didn't the records office notice it was faked? They were in on it. Why hasn't one of the President's medical examinations shown up his Martian physiology? The doctor is also in on the conspiracy. Why didn't anyone notice his spaceship landing? They did, the government covered it up. And so forth. There's practically no fact you can't explain away by asserting a giant conspiracy between all the people who tell us this fact.
Ridiculous conspiracy theories can usually be distinguished from vaguely sensible ones by looking at whether the asserted conspiracy would actually be a sensible way for the purported actors to achieve their goals. Ridiculous people claim that George W Bush plotted 9/11 as a way to achieve... something, but always some goal that could have been achieved in a much easier and less risky way.
On the other hand, the idea that the CIA would build a giant ship to raise a Russian submarine while pretending it's for some other purpose? That's actually a sensible way for them to achieve an actual goal.
"Sure, we tried to steal your sunken sub. But look, we played nice."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_submarine_Kursk_%28K-1...)
It was just 100m depth - a normal dive for professional divers - and i just remember how it was surprising that nothing was done during the next couple days. I mean such paralysis is typical for Russian bureaucratic machine, be it civilian or military (remember Rust?), yet these bangs were obviously easily heard by the listening anti-submarine posts of the Russian Navy ships idling right on top of it and nobody did nothing while waiting for the orders from "the top" and working around the clock trying to cover their a&&es.
This sort of mutual respect and tradition between enemy aircrews is not uncommon.
"And so as we return their mortal remains to the deep, we do so in a way that we hope would have had meaning to them and clothed with a representative portion of the ship on which they served and perished."
I almost blew my gasket when I realized the ship in question was the same one I was sitting on at the time.
A+ read.
Now I'm going to feel the need to go back and re-read the rest of the Laundry books and see if I can find any similar tie-ins.
And the only reason I know the term Glomar is because of that fantastic Radio Lab episode.
The missiles were nuclear-tipped, though.
More reading: http://military.wikia.com/wiki/Soviet_submarine_K-129_(1960)
For reference, the composition of Manganese Nodules: http://crustal.usgs.gov/geochemical_reference_standards/mang...
So remember not too long ago when James Cameron made a big deal about exploring the Mariana Trench? Makes you wonder what else was down there that we won't find out about for another 40 years.
edit: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/06/080602-titan... says Ballard was involved in checking the nuclear reactors of Scorpion and Thresher to make sure they were safe, but that was years after their wrecks were found, and not nuclear warheads.