Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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