People Drawn to Conspiracy Theories Share a Cluster of Psychological Features
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
It’s like talking to someone believing their cheating spouse did X, Y, Z crazy thing. If you responded to that person trying to debunk X, Y, and Z rationally you’d just anger them further. What matters is really the underlying anger that they’re feeling. Not litigating actual facts. In fact such litigating can feel like an attack or invalidation of the underlying emotion.
Same is true with feeling threatened by the appearance of “gracias” signs at a restaurant. Or a blue collar person losing status in an increasingly knowledge economy.
I feel like to make progress as a society we have to speak to the underlying “emotional truth” and not come across as pedants over facts.
As long as they don't take any aggressive or dangerous actions based on the feeling of course.
That's exactly what they will eventually do.
Because I want an easy scapegoat for my Covid fears and greedy telecom companies are already disliked...
Sounds nebulous and I’m highly doubtful.
If that seems unactionable, perhaps it says something about the quality of our healthcare systems.
Yes, its literally just tribalism gone wild again, your typical lazy fast thinking pooping out nuggets of racism.
It’s not only racism that people leverage for political influence. People also use racism as a label for political gain.
But the people on the receiving end of that labelling tend not to be well represented on this forum, so it’s easy to smear them as backwards and ignore their complaints.
Immigration benefits the U.S overall but if you are hourly labour with no special skills then it is probably not helping your wages.
Demographics are a huge sore spot for a lot of people.
So some people I was visiting in a small town started going on about 'chemtrails' they learned about from someone on Facebook. These contrails control the weather, while dispensing chemicals that get into the ground water to control people's minds. They showed me a video on YouTube, it was polished bullshit if I ever saw it. Then there were more FB posts about people who "know the truth".
It was hopeless, even with apps that showed the flight origin and destination of of the planes overhead for commercial cargo, passengers, etc. Apparently hundreds of international and domestic flights are all part of a conspiracy to make it cloudy and dispense chemicals to control the minds of this town. Further, the chemicals are clearly not working since they are even be able to have these thoughts.
I blame social media. The real disaster is coming, this is just the second inning.
Social media is part of the greater symptom which is that conspiratorial thinking has gained mass appeal.
“Hey the cancer that put you in bed is just a symptom of who you are.”
If you don't know the history of how these things started, then all you'll do by removing Youtube, Facebook et al is treat one part of the cancer when it's metastasized to the rest of your body. It's ignorant. Sites like Infowars or Breitbart will rise from their ashes and we will have solved nothing.
What you're saying is ignorance is bliss. Without social media, a few phone calls to media houses would have been sufficient to squelch the recent murder of a black male by the police.
The medium is not at fault.
We all hailed Facebook helped organize 'successful' revolutions in some 'oppressive' states.
It's easier to believe tales about people I distrust.
I prefer we focused on ways to increase transparency and fairness in government. That's the conspiracy theory vaccine we need.
I haven't hailed FB for squat. I don't even use it, but FB algorithms have been responsible for one genocide already, and I won't give it credit for the Arab Spring even for the small successes that were achieved.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
I am not the only one who has this impression.
I spend considerable time outside.
(To be clear I’m talking about 100% crazy theories like flat earth)
I disagree. Often I see some sort of conspiracy theory online and I am interested in seeing in what degree it is true or false. I am interested in rational arguments from both sides, not some emotional bullshit. How do you deduce if a theory is true or not otherwise?
Among other tactics, they wished to be able to use the term as a dismissal of anyone who got information about their real operations. This is very well documented, and is common among intel agencies of many countries.
It is also well documented, that the CIA and others (KGB etc.), have intentionally spread disinformation, from AIDS to Apollo hoaxes, in the same channel as (limited) legitimate information. This tactic is called "poisoning the well," the limited real info is a "limited hangout." If you put those terms into any search, youll find reams of documents detailing examples. Usually, these are the actions of some foreign service, analysed and released for the public service.
When the author began to align obviously false information with more credible things, what he is seeing are these intentional networks of lies that our own services have created. These things are not organic. He identifies common psychological features in these posters, because the intel agencies strongly select based on personality.
Also, how many of the accounts he investigated are bots? Was he able to prove that real individual people were doing this?
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Its been debunked already!
Why do you think this?
I had never heard this before, and to be honest it immediately gave off whacko vibes, so I Googled it and found this article that says it is false - https://theconversation.com/theres-a-conspiracy-theory-that-...
I think there is a terminology problem in this discussion and it will cause lots of us in the comments to chase our tails.
I think the credibility word is too subjective to be useful in this discussion. I think most conspiracy accusations are unprovable by most of us (unless we are federal prosecutors) so I assume that both logic conspiracies and fantasy conspiracies must be evaluated with equally few facts.
I think the myth that the CIA created/empowered the term “conspiracy theory” has lots of the same symptoms of fantasy conspiracy theories themselves. It apparently empowers the powerful and gives additional persecution claims to those who are labeled “crazy”.
The most interesting part of your comment was to get me thinking about the role of bots (and AI in the future) in crafting both hypotheses and researching them. I’m curious if social media bots may give us the tools to effectively test the psychological traits of people who are more likely to adopt theories about less coherent conspiracies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION
tl;dr: the USSR started the conspiracy theory that HIV was created in a US lab.
> But a C.I.A. document, recently declassified under the Freedom of Information Act, provides a detailed account of at least one instance in which the agency mustered its propaganda machinery to support an issue of far more concern to Americans, and to the C.I.A. itself, than to citizens of other countries.
> “Conspiracy theories,” the cable went on, “have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit circulation of such claims in other countries.”
> Among the arguments that the agency suggested were that the Warren Commission had conducted “as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition.”
> “Point out also,” the cable directed, “that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists.”
> These critics and others, the C.I.A. said, should be depicted as “wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in,” politically or financially “interested” in disproving the commission's conclusion, “hasty or inaccurate in their research, or infatuated with their own theories.”
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191121033812/https://www.nytim...
The rich are getting richer, people who start wars of aggression and whatnot aren't punished, companies have battalions of lawyers and Jane Doe has nothing, we are on the course for environmental collapse and mass extinction, and so on. These are shorthands for huge and very much real issues. And yes, conspiracy theories aren't helping, either, and many people spouting them don't really want to roll up their sleeves and turn this ship around. But that's also true for many people obsessing about conspiracy theorists, too.
Let's say the emperor is naked. Most people say variations of "nice clothes! maybe some issues here and there, but nothing major". Some people go "he's butt naked!". And yet others go "he's wearing planet Jupiter as a hat!". The latter are obviously wrong, but it's still just so awkward when the people who think he has nice clothes on start to laugh at those thinking he is wearing Jupiter as a hat, and lump everyone who doesn't think he's wearing nice clothes into that category. It's as if the mainstream is using these even sicker people to pretend it itself is not sick, contrary to the mountains of evidence.
I don't know if I agree with you here.
> It's as if the mainstream is using these even sicker people to pretend it itself is not sick, contrary to the mountains of evidence.
I feel quite strongly that this is happening.
> I don't know if I agree with you here.
Would it help if "many" was changed to "some"? I was thinking of people who are more interested in scapegoats than anything, but I didn't mean to make a point about distribution, it was just to acknowledge that it isn't black and white.
He is highly intelligent and used to be very analytical but got sidetracked in his life. Anxiety, disappointment and disenfranchisement describes his current state. Year after he became unemployed he started to watch X-files and all kind of conspiracy related entertainment. It was just entertainment. He saw it was silly. Then became History Channel and conspiracy internet tubers and all kinds of serious conspiracy stuff and it became more real to him.
Five years later he is deeply into that stuff. When we talk about it, he can follow my thinking perfectly and usually realizes that those theories are silly and laughs it off. Few hours later he is back into it. It's like he has tracks in his brain. He has walked the path so many times that his thinking goes back to the same things over and over. Maybe conspiracy theories protect him from negative emotions and facts of his situation as long as he keeps thinking them. He is harmless and nice person but his world view is crazy.
But crazy worldview is crazy even if it's created by the circumstances.
What is the difference? Systemic circumstances define us if they occur for long enough.
I think I'm going to have to expand my list of normative sciences to four:
1) Logic, the normative science of what is true.
2) Aesthetic, the normative science of what is beautiful.
3) Ethic, the normative science of what is good.
4) Rhetoric, the normative science of what can be persuaded.
To be rigorous, which I admit often isn't worth the effort, one would have to examine a so-called conspiracy theory along every one of those axes that's germane.
Great analysis
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
But it doesn't make him wrong.
That makes it a huge problem for anyone that believes that climate destruction is something that needs to be solved co-operatively.
Or we can keep on laughing and sneering at people that don't think the same thoughts as us.
I wonder how that will work out?
Most things we can measure are better.
Individual happiness, that's P = NP.
And yet you wonder why people who are seeing declining life expectancy, poor nutrition and probable long-term unemployment react against the statement of that view as applying to them?
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2019/12/02/middle-ag...
Why did you pose that question in response to the OP's explanation that some people are frustrated at the disconnect between their lives and the very standard narrative of a world which has benefitted from 'progress' in recent history?
The less-reported undercurrent was that wages have been slow to rise, the jobs are less stable, and where wages have risen, they've gone to the top 10% of earners.
When Trump won, my first reaction was fivethirtyeight put it at 29%; I've lost much better poker hands than that; it happens. My second reaction was that I can see how the win happened. He really was the first candidate in a long time to tell working class Americans, especially in the rust belt, that things aren't great.
The adversarial weaponization of language by economically motivated actors should not be confused with the use of language for communication. Real humans have an amazing ability to communicate even on noisy channels.
When you understand that there are certain unprovable things and layers of gatekeepers for what is called "news". You have to connect the dots - and some would call it conspiracy theory.
I think it’s more important to distinguish that there are good faith investigations into conspiracies and there are bad faith investigations (more commonly called conspiracy theories, but this terminology is overloaded to muddy the difference).
Good faith investigations acknowledge there are limits to what government/power/authority is reasonably able to do. Conspiracy theorists tend to attribute an impossibly high level of coordination, organization, ability to execute with no leaks, believe contradictory theories, accept complex assertions while rejecting simpler ones, etc. Additionally, people who believe in one conspiracy theory are likely to believe in many. I would argue that there’s a pathology in attributing the worst intentions to everyone in power and an inability for believers to impartially weigh evidence against their beliefs, so they aren’t incentivized to Only believe hypotheses with more coherence.
On the one hand, there are theories which postulates a conspiracy to explain the available evidence. Nothing wrong with that, sometimes that is the correct explanation.
On the other hand, there are theories which invoke a conspiracy to invalidate the available evidence. Such theories are unfalsifiable, no evidence could possibly prove them wrong because all contrary evidence is just part of the conspiracy. This kind is problematic because its necessarily unhinged from any evidence or reality.
I ought to do a post some day: "I'm one of HN's resident conspiracy theorists, ama."
Almost any conspiracy theory of any depth is outside the mainstream.
The furthest in both cases would probably have to do with aliens (whether real or fake but useful aka project blue beam). Or perhaps quantum mechanic related phenomenon. Not saying these are ones I subscribe to but giving examples.
I'll give you an example of one that is very much not accepted: Pizzagate (please don't misunderstand, I don't necessarily think pizzagate is "real", I think it very much could be a limited-hangout, etc). To many it sounds completely crazy, beyond ever being considered. For those of us who are aware of the larger pattern it matches though, it fits into that pattern. A great example of a similar case in which we have deductive evidence is the Dutroux affair (aka the Belgian X-Files). Epstein was on the periphery of the same type of operation, but was more of a front man/procurer, much like Dutroux. I could list many similar examples (Franklin scandal, finders cult, Saville, Jersey, Kinkora, Elm Guest House, Roy Cohn, etc) where we have witnesses and testimony and evidence that usually got buried, assassinated, etc if it ever got closer to the heart and away from the front men/fall guys (and gals, looking at you Ghislaine Maxwell).
This is the power of inductive logic.
For example (apologies if this is rude to ask, I don't know!) which of these would you subscribe to;
- Neil Armstrong did not walk on the moon
- JFK was not killed by Lee Harvey Oswald
- WTC towers were destroyed in controlled demolition
-----------
EDIT: nevermind, you edited your comment - thanks!
There are people who have flown around the world many times who have gone down the flat earth rabbit hole.
Unfortunately the people who aren't confident they can actually learn about what they are afraid of, or correctly judge probabilities of things being true, spend their energy choosing who to believe instead of gathering information and forming a coherent understanding.
You can spot 'hallmarks of flaws' in official narratives, such as internal contradictions in the “evidence” and contentions based on shaky assumptions, and this makes thinking people question the mainstream media...
I wonder if people who accept official or authoritative accounts of everything in spite of overwhelming evidence also share a cluster of psychological features?
With humans things rarely fit neatly.
That's not a conspiracy. It's a prior about the intent of others. Given that we humans are generally selfish, it's a justified prior.
> Encouraging analytic thinking may also help. In a 2014 study published in Cognition, Swami and his colleagues recruited 112 people for an experiment. First, they had everyone fill out a questionnaire that evaluated how strongly they believed in various conspiracy theories. A few weeks later the subjects came back in, and the researchers split them into two groups. One group completed a task that included unscrambling words in sentences containing words such as “analyze” and “rational,” which primed them to think more analytically.
Also:
> In addition, false conspiracy theories have several hallmarks, Lewandowsky says. Three of them are particularly noticeable. First, the theories include contradictions. For example, some deniers of climate change argue that there is no scientific consensus on the issue while framing themselves as heroes pushing back against established consensus. Both cannot be true. A second telltale sign is when a contention is based on shaky assumptions. Trump, for instance, claimed that millions of illegal immigrants cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election and were the reason he lost the popular vote. Beyond the complete lack of evidence for such voting, his assumption was that multitudes of such votes—if they existed—would have been for his Democratic opponent. Yet past polls of unauthorized Hispanic immigrants suggest that many of them would have voted for a Republican candidate over a Democratic one... A third sign that a claim is a far-fetched theory, rather than an actual conspiracy, is that those who support it interpret evidence against their theory as evidence for it. When the van of the alleged mail bomber Cesar Sayoc was found in Florida plastered with Trump stickers, for instance, some individuals said this helped to prove that Democrats were really behind the bombs. “If anyone thinks this is what a real conservative’s van looks like, you are being willfully ignorant. Cesar Sayoc is clearly just a fall guy for this obvious false flag,” one person posted on Twitter.
This article is about encouraging skepticism and analysis, not discouraging it. Notice how it discusses false conspiracy theories, as an acquiescence that sometimes conspiracy theories could become truth.
If there was an intention of acknowledging the truth behind some theories, they would / should have come right out and said so. As it is, the article is sending a much clearer message that 'if people were to think analytically, they wouldn't believe conspiracy theories'.
Sure they can, scientific consensus != the consensus of the whole society. In addition he says as if this is a central part of the theory rather than just the argument that some random supporters of said theory say.
> Trump, for instance, claimed that ...
This is not even a theory about a conspiracy though. Why is this in the article?
> Yet past polls of unauthorized Hispanic immigrants suggest that many of them would have voted for a Republican candidate over a Democratic one
If they disagree they should engage in open dialogue. I have no reason to trust either of them.
> This article is about encouraging skepticism and analysis
Then let me be sceptic about how they did not include any conspiracy theories that are supported by the democrat party.
> Notice how it discusses false conspiracy theories
Conspiracy theories which that the one writing the article decided that they were false.
> sometimes conspiracy theories could become truth
Sometimes conspiracy theories are true from the start.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/
Just a reminder!8-))
"...claiming that Jewish people were stealthily supporting illegal immigrants."
Well I'll go ahead and touch the third rail. There were a lot of non-profits involved, some would obviously fit the the conspiracy theorist's description (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society for example), others had 990s that further strengthened the theory. Was there a shadowy conspiracy? I doubt it, the majority of involved non-profits were classic left-wing open-borders types, some communists, and a bunch of Christian alliances. So why lie instead of presenting the results of a statistical sample?
"...positing that high-ranking Democratic Party officials were involved in a child sex ring..."
Pizzagate was a 4chan inside joke that got taken seriously by people who already had cause to be suspicious, and Epstein didn't kill himself. It reminds me of something Saddam Hussein admitted under FBI interrogation: he wanted the US to think he had WMDs, because that would cause his regional adversaries to think the same. Obviously he miscalculated. After years of weird spirit cooking talk and association with known degenerates, people are going to start thinking you mean it.
Finally: does anybody remember the satanic panic? Surprise, there was a government cover-up of weird cult ritual stuff involving abused children. If you said so, for almost 30 years, you were a wacky conspiracy theorist... until the FBI released the file to zero interest: https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders
>You can spot hallmarks of fake theories, such as internal contradictions in the “evidence” and contentions based on shaky assumptions, psychologists say.
Just look at the many legitimate sources of conflicting information regarding COVID. Hell, many of our medical practices are based on "shaky assumptions" and shoddy survey data, especially in psychology.
Conspiracies happen, speculation is valid and arguably necessary for a healthy society. But this? This is just some kind of weird appeal to authority - recognizing the possibility of conspiracies and attempting to piece them together is not pathological and a society which believes it is it placing itself firmly under an unyielding authoritarian boot.
Even if this is true, the fact remains that most conspiracy theories are nuts.
No matter how many times conspiracy theorists shout "Snowden! Snowden!" at critics, that doesn't lend credibility by association to flat earth, anti-vaxxers, Pizzagate, etc.
Conspiracy theorists who claim to merely be skeptical of the "status quo" but cannot or will not differentiate between a plausible conspiracy theory (say, Snowden or Epstein) and an implausble one (5g towers cause COVID) are bad skeptics.
One such strawman is one you'll find throughout this thread, that anyone skeptical of conspiracy theories is either an agent of the conspiracy, a useful idiot or a troll. That dumbs down discourse as well but no one seems to question it.
I disagree with the assertion that these are representative of "most" conspiracy theories. How about JFK? The Panama Papers? Mass surveillance? These are real things that happen, and people are offered no explanation—or no good explanation—and will try to reason out their own.
Each of the ones you listed fall into two camps - lack of evidence to disprove (e.g. JFK papers being sealed) or evidence available to support (Mass surveillance, Panama Papers).
Flat earth, anti-vax, pizzagate have mountains of evidence to disprove them, but there are a worrying number of people who buy into them, and an entire cottage industry pushing them. See also 5G.
How often are you told that vaccines cause autism? How often are you told that the earth is flat?
Now compare that to how often you are told that Epstein did not commit suicide, for example.
Most conspiracy theories aren't false, per se. You just only pay attention to, and remember, the ridiculous ones.
It's funny how the true Epstein case turns out to be so broadly similar to the Pizzagate and Qanon conspiracy stories. I mean, Epstein did not actually own a pizza place somewhere in DC, but he could have.
Most theories claiming to be "conspiracies" are nuts.
When free speech outweighs censorship, spam can be used to make signal harder to find by increasing noise.
If there is useful signal associated with "foo", then "fake foo" (embrace and extend) makes it more expensive to find "foo" signal. This is still preferable to censorship, since increased literacy enables real signals to be found.
It's modern psyops to make legitimate conspiracy theories and theorists look crazy by association... and it is very effective. (case in point)
As for "anti-vaxxers", this is a position rather than a conspiracy. Do you have something specific in mind? (such as the autism thing?)
I do not know about Pizzagate specifically but there is a lot of evidence for sexual abuse by powerful people (epstein is just one recent example).
I remember pre-Snowden everyone called you a headcase if you said NSA is monitoring everything and everyone.
After Snowden, everyone mysteriously shut up about it.
TL;DR: His friends were disturbed by his paranoia that the FBI was following him. But years later it turned out to be based on fact: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/opinion/02hotchner.html
I like your summary. It has seemed like calling something 'conspiracy theory' has been, for many people, a comfortable dismissal. It's so much easier to believe the conspiracy theorist "needs help" than to accept that the NSA is monitoring everyone.
One I wanted to share anecdotic (A: and B: texting);
B: "The reason of every causality related to probability is 'action and reaction'."
A: "'Not contentual' but reachable and alternative - Only in one direction. So it would became provable, that in the heart of each theory may be no veritable solution."
B: "Even if combinations of the whole and something imaginary find together ?"
Left me with a question... (-;
x-Files for Computer (-:
> Conspiracies happen
As do coincidences. This isn’t about conspiracies but about conspiracy theories.
A provable conspiracy is two or more agents coming together, even without their awareness of alignment, to achieve a single specific secretive goal as qualified with evidence. Qualified evidence is any single or series of provable facts that directly links each participating agent to the secretive goal with intent. The most important part of that is proving intent. A conspiracy theory is a belief there should be a conspiracy but without the necessary qualified evidence.
Coincidence - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence
Conspiracy theory (nonsense) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory
Conspiracy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy
Intention - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention
Given the terms I find it’s not at all far fetched to conclude there exists some common mental health defect that allows conspiracy theories to flourish amongst some people and not others.
On a more serious note, it's important to remember the power of inductive logic in places where we lack evidence, such as in the conspiracy theory realm. Not everything has to be deductive, though of course it is preferred.
I don't think it's fair to conclude there's a mental health defect in people more skeptical of the status quo (If we want to go that route, perhaps there is a similar mental health defect that allows belief in improbable coincidence to flourish among some people and not others?).
What were the inexpiable coincidences that were piling up?
Here's what led me to believe that the NSA was engaged in large sale interception of communications years before the Snowden disclosures:
"The Puzzle Palace," published in 1982: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace
Report from the EU's investigation of ECHELON in 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Committee_on_the_ECH...
Disclosures around room 641A in 2006 (discussed yesterday on HN): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
The NSA's capabilities were correctly speculated upon by technically adept civil libertarians before the Snowden disclosures. The details were certainly fuzzier before 2013. But mass surveillance capabilities were no more in doubt than the existence of Israel's nuclear weapons program. In both cases there was plenty of concrete evidence despite official denial and/or stonewalling.
The existence of "NSA spying" I don't believe was ever considered a conspiracy theory.
"The NSA has a giant secret building in the midwest where they store surveilance." "The US government is spying on US citizens."
I remember the pre-snowden discussions online and offline, and saying the US government was spying on US citizens was tinfoil hat territory. I even had conversations with government contractors who used the line, 'the government could never keep a secret that big'.
It’s not about fair, popularity, perceptions, or belief systems. It is only about the inability to separate evidence from belief. The strength or popularity of the belief does transform that belief into evidence.
b) NSA surveilance was a conspiracy theory 15 years ago. Was that nonsense?
Equating mental illness or impairment to an ad hominem ignores the medical nature of the subject in preference for an ignorant social stigma. See the last paragraph of this comment to discover what mental illness is according to the medicine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23329867
The definition of mental illness has nothing to do with whether what you said is an ad homenim. If you were to diagnose someone with a relevant mental illness, and then have a conversation with them which brought their conspiratorial ideas to your attention for the first time, then saying their conspiratorial talk was the result of a mental illness would be legitimate. However, to have a conversation with someone, hear them theorize the existence of a conspiracy, and then conclude they must be part of a set of people with a mental deficiency? That is absolutely an ad homenim.
So, again: I don't think it's fair to conclude there's a mental health defect in people more skeptical of the status quo.
Diagnosing somebody with a broken arm is not a personal attack and neither should be a mental health diagnosis.
> I don't think it's fair
Life isn't fair. Fairness is a subject best left to small children and courts of law. To address your concern though, evidence is not about agreement.
Logically speaking, we could be talking about how belief in conspiracy theory is affected by mental deficiency, a preference for apple pie, or a broken arm. Giving me a definition of 'thing-that-is-bad' is irrelevant to its use as a potential ad homenim. And as I said - if you already have a diagnosis of the person, then feel free to mention it as a point against their theory of a conspiracy. But if you do not already have that diagnosis, then claiming the theory implies a mental deficiency is absolutely an ad homenim against the theory. The order of the cause and effect matters.
I think you mistook my use of the word "fair". I was using the first definition from merriam-webster: "marked by impartiality and honesty." Maybe I should just keep using "intellectually honest" since that appears to cause less confusion. We do agree on your other point, though, that "evidence is not about agreement." Maybe I should use the phrase 'theorize about the existence of a conspiracy' instead of 'skeptical of the status quo'.
With that addressed: I don't think it's intellectually honest to conclude there's a mental health defect in people who theorize about the existence of a conspiracy.
That is an arbitrarily high standard. Just because the subject of a hypothesis is that there is a conspiracy doesn't automatically make lack of evidence problematic. Even for natural phenomena there can go decades before a hypothesis is backed with evidence if ever (e.g. Einstein), human interactions and particularly intent is much more unlikely to leave a trail of evidence so I don't get how being even more strict with it helps with our knowledge gathering process. All conspiracies that turned out to be true were conspiracy hypotheses before they were proven and this defense could have been (and was, and is) used to stifle the process of evidence gathering.
This doesn't mean most of the conspiracy hypotheses aren't far fetched, emotional and poorly argued, nor that all is entitled to public attention equally, but we can't apply different epistemological standards between conspiracies or natural phenomena (science) when we are faced with unknowns.
> Given the terms I find it’s not at all far fetched to conclude there exists some common mental health defect
If we judged this premise by the standard you've posited, it would be equally problematic. In fact, we know in the past, states have abused psychiatry to discredit dissenters. Check out Soviet Union and their "creative" diagnostic labels used against political dissenters as an example.
Which likely explains why conspiracy theories proliferate.
That is not necessarily a bad thing, but setting an arbitrarily high standard is problematic. Human life is complex, interactions are combinatorially so. Just because uncertainty makes us uncomfortable doesn't mean we should move the bar higher to only deal with the comfortable territory (those with readily available evidence). History is full of atrocities that didn't immediately produced evidence, and even in the face of evidence we denied it could be happening for a long while. Even evidence is no panacea for our biased knowledge-seeking machinery. Not all beliefs are bad. Not all truths are comfortable. Therefore it is imperative we be careful with what we ignore and what we don't.
That is why investigations are a thing. The need for proofs is completely unrelated to complexity.
My point was exactly how states in the past could not un-corrupt themselves through investigations. That is why observing, questioning eyes of everyone is needed.
> The need for proofs is completely unrelated to complexity.
You couldn't be more wrong. Number of possible moves in a game of chess is 10^43. It exhausts the computation capacity of the most powerful computer, let alone a human's. They have to use heuristics, in other words, they have to decide what is relevant and what is not. Real life is infinitely more complex, rules are not self evident and there are many more players. Therefore we always have to decide how we will deal with complexity, therefore e.g. what we choose to investigate or what criteria we will use to assess the claims is much more consequential than you acknowledge. You are suggesting an arbitrarily high bar for investigation, assuming anything that doesn't readily have evidence will not be relevant. This is one way to narrow the problem space indeed, but it is not a good one. Things that have the most evidence are not always the things that are most relevant and vice versa.
As somebody who has conducted lawful investigations I am fully aware. In a real life investigation where the outcome can bring legal sanctions that destroys a person's life or career the opinion of the investigator has weight, but that opinion is irrelevant without evidence to connect the dots. A conspiracy theory will sink the credibility of the investigation. What matters is what you can prove and what the attorney finds is legally qualified.
> You are suggesting an arbitrarily high bar for investigation
As I should.
Truth is not under the monopoly of legal systems. Legal systems make use of truth to deliver justice, not to make sense and meaning of what is going on at large. They don’t orient us as a society regarding what is important to pay attention to. Besides, you can’t be suggesting legal investigations catch everything there is to investigate, nor lack of due investigation doesn’t destroy lives either. Nor every conspiracy is readily codified in law. Laws change and get applied as a function of what we bring into attention or not.
Conspiracies by nature rely heavily on information asymmetries. It means most of the time we don’t even know what to investigate. That is why conspiracy hypotheses are crucial to be vigilant about the possible connections even with weak evidence. It is a preliminary exploration of the problem space; reasonable people don’t suggest we prosecute people based on hypotheses only. We are talking about a process that might or might not lead to an investigation but not an alternative to it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatr...
e.g. this is the popular portrayal of religious people who refuse to accept the claim their religions are massive lies made up to control and console
in which case these psycological factors may just be generally indicative of people who have trouble accepting the truth when it contradicts their cherished worldview, conspiracy or otherwise
on the other hand, if someone possesses this psychological makeup, and refuses to accept a certain proposition, i am not sure there is much we can conclude from this study. maybe they are being irrational, or maybe not. we would have to examine the actual reasons they reject the belief, and not rely on psychoanalysis, since if we did so it would ironically be irrational on our part
UPDATE: here's the MIT article on their research. http://news.mit.edu/2019/storing-vaccine-history-skin-1218
"MIT engineers have developed a way to store medical information under the skin, using a quantum dot dye that is delivered, along with a vaccine, by a microneedle patch. The dye, which is invisible to the naked eye, can be read later using a specially adapted smartphone."
A stamp that tells the next health care worker if a person has been vaccinated, when, the type...
My friend who believes in stuff like these seems to have a thinking impairment in some areas. He latches on to the first idea his mind likes and never lets go.
Example was two days ago. He downloaded GTA3 game.
The file was a 147mb 7zip archive. Which magically expanded 147mb expanded to over 2GB after he ran a batch file!
He immediately started singing the praise of 7zip.
Without knowing any detail I told him the uploader was the wizard not 7zip.
He sent me the setup.bat file and the stuff became clear.
The uploader converted wav to MP3. MPG videos to low quality MP4.
The setup.bat used ffmpeg to upscale things.
No logical explanation from me changed his mind.
Last straw, told him to uninstall 7Zip and run setup.bat.
That was the end of the discussion.
Like, could you imagine if we could deploy microchips in vaccines? We're maybe 30-50 years away from nanotechnology that could operate in the human body like that, and it would be groundbreaking and revolutionary.
Or, could you imagine just getting gigabit wirelessly, even out in the sticks? It'd be absolutely amazing for accelerating the growth and connectivity of about one third of America, and revolutionize the economy, education, literally everything in those places.
The problem with conspiracy theorists is that a lot of their conspiracies depend on the emotional connection with technology fucking up their life. No, people fucked their lives up, technology just makes it faster, easier, and more efficient to do it.
I, on the other hand, am just disappointed that you can't actually torch a 5G tower... because there aren't any outside of very tiny test installations. What they've been torching have just been normal towers or long range LTE deployments.
Also I see the validity behind concerns around vaccines - certainly mistakes can be made and some may not be beneficial.
Same for 5G and radio waves. In theory, strong radio can cause damage but the amounts would have to be enormous.
But of course I am talking about people whom like children exaggerate everything in their minds, good and bad, to the point where where they fear an imaginary cabal plotting to subdue them. Like Courage the Cowardly Dog which sees everything like an exaggeration coming to get him and his family.
So imo yes, there are emotional connections but those emotions are underdeveloped and exaggerated.
What bugs me the most is that authoritarians will use this as "scientific proof" that people who question their government are mentally ill.