The average conspiracy theory is half-true

Example; if someone decides to research 911, and instead of seeking out published papers and original sources, they go on yt and start watching videos about it, they will in short order hear a number of false things; holograms, lasers, nuclear weapons, missles, etc. Stuff that the average person would instinctively know is false.

The goal is not to convince the person that any of those examples is true. It's to associate them with other information and to game confirmation bias.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/nasathermalimages/public/video/prete... (win users might need videolan.org)

The problem with conspiracy theories is that they take generic possibilities, which often have been true at at least one point or another, and apply it to a specific situation with no evidence.

So, for example, it gives a point for “spread of diseases is deliberate, concealed effort, by some government”, and uses 2 historically known instances (I’m not sure how “concealed” these efforts are, but for the sake of argument let’s assume they’re valid), to give an entire point for the theory itself. However, the problem is there is no conspiracy theorist going around saying the thing in general, and if they are, they are met with a resounding “yes, that has definitely happened”. The problem is that conspiracy theorists were saying that this was true of Aids, or vaccines, and there is no evidence to believe either these (or the variety of other similar conspiracy theories) were true.

Yet, the scoring system here gives that theory a full point.

The problem with many conspiracy theories are that they take known conspiracies, and imply that because there was a conspiracy, that means everything similar is a conspiracy. And this scoring system rewards that fully.