What gets me most about these fools is they completely ignore how much such a huge fake job would cost. It would be so expensive that you could cut the budget in half and just...go to the moon.
But that isn't useful/actionable knowledge. WHY are they bad at getting ideas right? Is it innate to the average human biology? Is it something that has gotten worse as more people have gotten onto the internet where they are exposed to non-curated data more?
Whatever causes this we need to fight it.
It's incredibly seductive to be in on a secret. It makes you feel special and boosts your self esteem.
I think it is an natural personality trait gone haywire. Just as there are some people who are pure herd creatures, completely trusting of authority, there are others who are inherently skeptical as a genetic trait. Humanity benefits from a certain degree of skepticism but since it's a spectrum, some people possess it in excess. In antiquity such people may have been heretics who questioned the Church, and they led us to the Reformation and to scientific progress. In the more recent past, they believed in alien landings and the Bermuda Triangle. Nowadays they're anti-vaxxers or flat Earthers, viewing the government or scientific orthodoxy as windmills to tilt against.
Perhaps our current environment is to some extent conducive to runaway skepticism. Consider, obesity is rampant because human beings evolved in relative caloric scarcity, but in today's plentiful, carbohydrate rich diet, we find it hard to self-regulate our food intake. Perhaps conspiracy-theorism is rampant because humanity evolved in an environment where people were much less free to pursue their "alternative" urges, but the shackles have been loosened in the modern world. Freedom for better or worse also means freedom to hold fringe points of view.
We are dangerously good at making up stories to explain data. Talk to anyone about a spurious correlation[0] and they can provide you a just-so story that explains it as a real correlation in under a minute.
Provide anyone with two competing theories that each account for some but not all of the available data, then ask them to rank the two based on likelihood. You'll make people visibly upset. (Our ability to invent new theories to fit any circumstance might partly explain why, for a while, explorers forgot how to cure scurvy.[1])
And it's easier to "look smart" the first way. No one can immediately determine whether you're good at the second unless you make a long series of predictions evaluated over time while constantly gathering more data. Everyone can see if you've connected a few dots in a clever and unexpected way. Talking heads are regarded as experts for going on shows and making vague predictions based on a few recent events, but are never called back to scrutinize their predictive track record.[2]
Conspiracy theorists are generally just arguing something is plausible, and ignoring the messy step about what's more likely, with the implication you should just leap from plausible immediately to unwavering conviction.
Some of this is just, well, one of these things is hard and the other is easy. But I'm confident both can be learned to some extent, based on personal experience of getting a better sense for these over time.
So to the extent this is "fixable" at all,[3] maybe greater education about meta-cognition (esp. cognitive biases), the history of analytic philosophy, a humility about what one knows, and/or Bayesian reasoning earlier in education might help.
Sidenote, this itself is arguably just another just-so theory too. Maybe I'm wrong about it all. :)
[0] e.g., http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
[1] https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
[2] This is Phillip Tetlock's whole area of research.
[3] To be fair, maybe we've already "fixed" this pretty well, we tend to attribute far fewer things to witchcraft than a few hundred years ago, maybe normal everyday education and expansion of literacy is enough and there will always be a handful of outliers and trolls. See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
Others have also mentioned other salient factors (psychology, etc)
...and many of them make a living from the entertainment value of their conspiracy theories.
What compounds their out-sized impact is the attention the media pays to them. Every time they they are featured by some reporter, social media site, or local media channel, they receive a fresh new set of subscribers.
Rather than feeding these beasts, we need to learn to IGNORE idiocy.
>It would be so expensive that you could cut the budget in half and just...go to the moon.
Not even close.
It's surprising how - comparatively - easy is - and was - to go to the Moon. Do you realize that for today technologies it's a walk in the park? It was done half a century ago. But that's not enough - even then in many aspects it was quite doable. Remember, the Moon race started as a calculated idea to win - all crucial requirements were approximately achievable, erring on "more likely than not". For example, F-1 first stage engine had a rather modest characteristics, except the size (which already provided a plenty of problems). The whole architecture was decided in favor of a single bug launcher - because docking was considered "risky", even though one docking (after liftoff from the Moon) and even one-half more docking (after translunar injection, when Apollo CM detached, turned over and docked with LM) eventually remained. Problems were being solved with size, not with smarter decisions - because the latter required time and were riskier.
So... Rocket science isn't a rocket science. Yes, Moon landing is one of the greatest technological achievements up to now. But it was done then, and for that much.
If someone thought it was fake, they ought to be asking where the budget really went and whose pockets it lined.
Edit: changed to earlier upload of same video
All that design and construction still needed to be paid for.
Presumably faking the capsule return is cheap enough if you drop the capsule out the back of an aircraft.
Faking lunar return samples, returning signals from orbit for the various ground stations around the world, and a variety of other things also required a lot of deception, too.
Then, ofcourse, you have to hope that the Russians didn't put out a headline of "Americans fake lunar landing". Since they kept a close eye on things.
So, pretty much all the cost of going to the Moon and now add on the cost of faking it and maintaining that lie for 50 years.
But then what is the end goal of all this? Anti-US propaganda?
screenshot: http://v6y.net/1592547475.screenshot.png
7 @ g for 2.25s is a verifiable fact from one of the most prestigious standards making bodies on the planet. There are tutorials on reproducing that NIST measurement.
You seem to be not surprised it's flagged, and you bring up belief. Why?
Believer of what? Argument of what?