Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

For any interested, I wrote an entire essay and some arguments in favor of conspiracy theory on Schneier's blog here:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_psycholog...

I argue that conspiracy, or key elements of it, is a natural part of human behavior. You can see it in all kinds of legitimate things. You can also see it in many criminal activities. A subset of it would be what we traditionally call a criminal conspiracy good enough to leave only breadcrumbs. The conspiracy theories... one's using good investigation rather than cherry-picking... have to find and tie together these breadcrumbs to derive the hidden activity.

Academics almost exclusively tend to analyze why people must be wrong-headed if they investigate conspiracies, err, criminal activity. Instead, they should look at those that were proven right and wrong to identify data points for criteria or heuristics to help investigators get it right more often. What constitutes good evidence of a probable conspiracy vs what is just bias of researcher? A valid question and form of research.

However, it's nonsense and defies common sense to have their assumption that conspiracies don't happen and investigating one is equivalent to mental illness unless you have a confession in hand from perps.

I agree that there are probably some conspiracies, even statistically its bound to happen. People always have something to hide. Whats ridiculous though are the infowars type of sites that literally state everything is a conspiracy and that every action a government or cooperate official makes is to enslave people and make more profits.

Oh yeah, those are ridiculous. The academic research was even valuable on how people fall into that trap. The double standards for media evidence was one of best points that I remember.

So, Im not blanket supporting conspiracy claims so much as saying we need fo recognize the need for some and focus on how to evaluate them effectively.

These sites utterly fail to understand the difference between an active conspiracy and merely coincident interests for certain things to happen.

For example, if an industry is predicated on certain things happening or not happening (e.g. military contractors being biased towards war) or denying certain facts (e.g. oil companies playing down global warming) it may seem like a widespread conspiracy but it's actually a bunch of independent actors with the same motivations or bias.

There's also the fact that a large conspiracy needs a large motivating factor. A group of criminals conspiring to steal something has a very clear reward. The government spraying massive amounts of chemicals from airplanes to do...stuff...is hardly a compelling reason.

"These sites utterly fail to understand the difference between an active conspiracy and merely coincident interests for certain things to happen."

That's a good point. This happens a lot with oligopolies, too. Yet, there has been evidence that some of them collude in secret often through intermediaries to expedite this process. You usually see this with lobbyists but sometimes outright scandals like RAM price-fixing. So, coincident interests doesn't auto-eliminate possibility of a conspiratorial explanation but certainly should be the default belief for scheming, self-interested behavior.

"The government spraying massive amounts of chemicals from airplanes to do...stuff...is hardly a compelling reason."

I smirked at the wording. The amount of mythology around chemtrails mostly makes it a good example. Yet, you're off the mark on this one just as they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray

So, you can replace "stuff" with testing of bio-weapon systems and studies of disease impact on unwitting subjects with legal immunity. Not sure if any of the chemtrail claims or evidence overlapped with that as I didn't research it much. Yet, it's a fact that the U.S. military secretly (for a while) flew planes over U.S. cities that doused them with both chemicals and biological agents to support our biological and chemical weapons capabilities. There were many groups involved in that. They even blocked further investigation of all the incidents and those effected. So, we know what's revealed is a fraction of what went on but I'm not going to speculate size of that fraction. I just know there's more.

This brings me to another facet of the problem: supporting irrational stuff with rational stuff. The fact that certain conspiracies and lies happened before seem to increase the likelihood people will believe a similar claim. "Of course they're doing chemtrails on us: remember Sea-Spray!? Why wouldn't they still be doing it?" That doesn't logically follow but does in many people's minds. Hell, it often does in reality so much we have the meme that "History Repeats." I think allowing recurring and similar rogue behavior in industry and governments plants many seeds for other, false beliefs to show up. Another reason to put an end to any schemes we identify. Affects signal-to-noise ratio of our ability to detect sneakier schemes.

Good news is the biggest bullshiters in conspiracy claims are usually really full of shit. Obviously. They practically out themselves. Helpful to researchers like myself as we just filter them away.

I like to apply this to pretty much everything that involves a lot of people making a product. Such as tripple a games, movies, toys, whatever. If too many people is involved and the outcome is bad it's easy for the consumer to blame the group/business/developers as a single entity thinking it made it bad on purpose somehow. Or it often seems to be implied that way because I guess we need to be able to blame someone for it.

I know a person who made $800,000 a year without having to work much and had another $500,000 an interest income. For whatever reason, this person sold some amphetamine prescription pills to another rich guy (in the open) and scammed his own company for $80 in the same day. He made some crazy investment and was fired, destroying his life.

I know another person who sold a company for $110 million, and tried to scam a major investment bank. There's about 10 con-artists in this group of people, all of them have a variety of wealth, some extreme wealth but of questionable origin.

These people were amateurs and in extremely privileged positions with huge politicians involved with them. Now the politicians weren't involved but I could see a situation developing where something conspiratorial could happen.

But I have never experience this with the government or military. People forget the intelligence agencies have certain mandates, rules, laws, regulations etc. Sure some wild stuff has happened, along with illegal and immoral in the past.

And the general march towards a technocratic supranational surveillance state is concerning, but to me that is the inertia of ignorant power hungry people.

As for conspiracies like 9/11, it seemed to be partially a failed sting operation. And I think the coverup of what CIA and DIA were involved with, leads to the conspiracy theories.

And all the weird elements of 9/11 or other stories, or love, life, the Universe etc., to me seem like echos of distractions, set to feed delusions and one's ego, like there is a firewall of sorts protecting the dangerous from reaching some level of enlightenment or understanding.

When in reality, all this is a computer simulation. And the absurdism to it is screaming out that this isn't real . In my opinion, and Elon seems to believe that- https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=fP...

Elon Musk: "Well maybe we are in a simulation right now. [smiles, nods] [pause] Yeah [laughs] seriously. [laughs] Uh sometimes it feels like that." (23:14)

Elon of Mars (Wernher von Braun's The Mars Project) - http://imgur.com/a/yhvDH

I will add, I don't believe in Free Well or the self, and I think Sam Harris is right on these ideas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com