Why do people believe the moon landing hoax or other conspiracy theories? | Hacker News Reader

Why do people believe the moon landing hoax or other conspiracy theories?

washingtonpost.com

21 pointsevo_925 comments

There isn't a single person here (including you, reader) who isn't absolutely and correctly a conspiracy theorist.

Try to explain with a straight face that Nixon did not conspire on Watergate (despite resigning over same), Snowden did not leak a mass surveillance conspiracy (despite thousands of pages of documents), Russia does not have any secret agents (despite all intelligence branches of the United States saying they do). Explain that Caesar was not assassinated by senators who formed a conspiracy against him and murdered him (to the chagrin of the common people, with whom he was very popular). And the emissions scandal (dieselgate) over which VW "spent $7.3B" in 2015 and CEO Martin Winterkorn resigned just didn't happen.

Congratulations: unless you can do the above, you're a conspiracy theorist. You believe people conspire.

It's really pretty much impossible not to be a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist in 2018. I mean go ahead and try, I'll read any replies.

I think the difference here is that those you are referencing are cases where enough evidence was provided that it was convincing after the fact.

So yes, conspiracies do exist; however, which of those did you suspect or predict beforehand? The theorist is often an early critic before there is enough evidence to be strongly convincing to the majority of people.

Evidence only exists if conspirators are sloppy.

Intelligence agencies are usually excellent in covering their tracks, so for example many conspiracies from WW II only become known after MI6 declassified their documents after 50 years grace period.

Who knows what historians will be able to prove about our times in 50 years time ?

Is this an argument for believing conspiracy theories on no evidence today? What's the point?

There's plenty of real stuff you can legitimately believe and be concerned about today, based on evidence. If you go around spreading unjustified theories, you're signaling your own superiority and awesomeness and insightfulness, at the cost of undermining our collective faith in institutions.

If you do this -- congratulations. You're a self-centered egoist. Well-done, and I hope you get lots of nice pats on the head for your unconventional thinking.

Curious about which MI6 plots remained secret for 50 years.

Saying "some past conspiracy theories were true, therefore $CURRENT_THEORY is true as well" is both a non sequitur fallacy (you still need evidence for any new allegations) and survivor bias (you're not talking about the tons of historical conspiracy theories that were dead wrong).

To expand on the non sequitur bit, here's an example I've used in the past: suppose I said, "The NSA has a constellation of mind-control satellites built with help from the lizard men!", and then responded to the deserved skepticism with "A lot of things that used to be tinfoil hat theories we now know to be true thanks to Snowden, so this is too!" Anyone can see that that's bogus reasoning, but that's what you're doing here. No matter what, every individual allegation needs to be backed up with its own evidence.

Conspiracy theorists are not people who believe people conspire. They're people who believe conspiracies without any evidence. Or worse, evidence against their preferred conspiracy only serves to re-enforce their beliefs. AKA, irrational people.

(Edited).

>Conspiracy theorists are not people who believe people conspire.

I thought that by definition they were.

In that case it is called Fake News.

https://projectunspeakable.com/conspiracy-theory-invention-o...

Titled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Commission Report,” the dispatch played a definitive role in making the “conspiracy theory” term a weapon to be wielded against almost any individual or group calling the government’s increasingly clandestine programs and activities into question.

All people are irrational about some things, which vary from person to person.

The connotation of "conspiracy theorist" as some paranoid lunatic is really convenient for people who could actually be engaging in unlawful acts. Sometimes I wonder if there is an effort to put forward clearly ridiculous conspiracies to discredit the legitimate conspiracies.

I really liked Joe Rogan's video on this topic, titled "Joe Rogan on Why he changed his stance on the Moon landing conspiracy". [1] The short, short version is that some training images got doctored and passed off as real space images, which gave people reason to doubt more substantial claims of having traveled to the moon. It was the first time a skeptics disbelief in our having visited the moon seemed like a rational stance to me.

[1] https://youtu.be/7mmlmxamw_k

I was just wondering the other day if anyone has ever tried to "fake" the moon landing with modern technology. Just see if you can pull it off. Hollywood can't do it as far as I can tell. Space movies aren't believable as real, even the best ones.

I think it would be an interesting mythbusters. I know they already did one on it, but that's not quite the same thing as what I'm saying.

Capricorn One came out in 1977 and had a decent “Mars” hoax

It's been a few years ago now, but as I recall Apollo 18 did a pretty good job here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_18_(film)

BTW, if I were one to believe that the moon missions were faked, then I might consider the fact that we haven't been back in almost 50 years to be the best evidence for that. As in, "The reason why we haven't gone back is because we never went there to begin with!"

Dave Jones / EEVblog made an interesting video comparing the LRO photos with Apollo 17 photos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYPmitSg268

Spoilers: they match, we really went to the moon :)

I generally assume it's because those people want to feel high and mighty. That they are smarter than everyone else.

> Conspiracy theories also supply a seductive ego boost. Believers often consider themselves part of a select in-group that — unlike the deluded masses — has figured out what's really going on.

> When such theories become entrenched in the public consciousness, however, they erode people's trust in authorities and the status quo.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how our institutions run on faith. One of my favorite quotes from Sapiens:

> Sapiens have been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.

The thing is, we kinda need these imagined realities. We need them to continue being collectively imagined in a positive light. I am from the Soviet Union. If you think you have it bad, imagine not being about to drive for an hour without getting pulled over and having to bribe a cop. Why do Russian cops need bribes, while American cops will bust you if you try to bribe them? The difference is entirely based on the cops' respective ideas about what they're doing. The American cops believe that laws are important, that their jobs are to keep people safe. When we punish people who stray from the ideal, we re-enforce the ideal. Corrupt cops and politicians must be punished, if our institutions are going to remain free of corruption. If we're cynical about transgressions, and say stuff like "of course that politician took a bribe, all politicians take bribes" then we actively re-enforce the negative model. This is exactly what, e.g. Trump does when he says "you think our country is so innocent?" He wants to normalize corruption because he himself is corrupt, and if it's normalized he can get away with it.

Thus, this kind of thinking is a vicious cycle. If everyone is cynical about institutions, the actors in those institutions will be enabled to behave more badly, which justifies further cynicism. And cynicism is easy -- as TFA says, it gives you an ego boost. You're hip, nobody is pulling the wool over your eyes, you know what's really going on. The benefits are internalized, while the costs are externalized.

I think conspiracy theory thinking is a harmful meme. It's a collective disease of society that undermines our social institutions -- you know, the ones we depend on to keep us safe and free from tyrants and corruption. I treat friends who spread conspiracy thinking the same way I treat friends who sneeze on shared food or have unprotected sex with an STD. If you believe nonsense, that's your prerogative, but if you're going to spread it by talking about it, I'm going to shut you down. If you agree with me, join me.

Tl;dr: friends don't let friends spread conspiracy theories.

Are you essentially suggesting that because everyone depends on certain institutions to be ethical, that's a reason not to challenge them?

And you write your friends off based on this, regardless of whether you can actually prove them wrong?

Thanks, great question.

It's one thing to challenge institutions to be better, and another to write them off as bad. For instance, I want NASA's missions to succeed, and I want them to be more bold and think bigger and be more effective advocates for their own funding. I do not believe that they're plotting to conceal the truth of the moon landing, or are building and launching mind control satellites. I want the police to hold officers accountable for deadly mistakes -- I do not think that all cops are racist assholes who cannot be trusted.

> prove them wrong?

You're actually a space lizard. Prove me wrong. You'll find it's harder than you think.

What you can do, though, is ignore people who accuse you of being a space lizard. Space lizardism is not a harmful meme. When my friends spread more harmful memes, like 'you can't trust the government so it's time to build a bomb shelter and stock up on ammo' -- I don't write them off. I engage. At the very least, they should know that I strongly disapprove even of this strain of thinking/discourse. I don't want to hear it, much as I don't want them to come over to my house and rub their cold sores on my cutlery.

Paywall :/

The secret to WaPo articles: google for the headline and follow the google link.

much appreciated

Yeah like those crazy conspiracy theorists who believe that if our government is capable of mass surveillance, they might actually do it.

Or those conspiracy theorists who think marijuana is improperly scheduled and there's been a decades-long campaign to lie to the public about its health effects.

Or those conspiracy theorists who think photographic evidence is sometimes widely misrepresented by the media.

Or those conspiracy theorists who think state actors sometimes astroturf social media.

Or the conspiracy theorists who thought we facilitated the the Iran-Contra weapons sales.

Or the conspiracy theorists who thought Iraq didn't have any WMDs.

Why on Earth would anyone distrust the government and Real News™?

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