An automated pipeline for the discovery of conspiracy theories
journals.plos.org
journals.plos.org
[Edit] Both of them make Dan Brown look really, really unimpressive. If "The Da Vinci Code" is a vaguely thought-through concept aimed at general readers, "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" is an explosion in a conspiracy theory factory.
To be clear (for the benefit of others), not specifically of Dan Brown. DB was only aged 11 when Illuminatus! was first published in 1975.
It's mostly because Browns work is just a cheap simulacrum of the original conspiracy theorists who came up with the story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Blood_and_the_Holy_Gr...
In the book there is the description of a fire in Paris on a specific date. The reader wrote to Eco, that he must have gotten the date wrong, as he was at that place that night and that there was no fire.
Eco uses this as an example, that some readers do not understand the signifiers of fictionality and that authors sometimes have to deal with readers taking their fictional work literally.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/01/study-folklore-struc...
Edited to add: I remembered a piece posted six months ago, referencing UCLA, along the same/similar lines and have just found it:
It goes like this: you find a surprising fact that, if true, will support the CT. You go to investigate it, which, of course, take some time. You realize that the fact has a normal explanation but, when you go back to conversation of the CT, that's not a relevant fact in the conversation anymore. There is a new fact, or more, supporting the CT. Start the process again. It's impossible to catch with the fact that it's, at the moment, supporting the CT.
I think, this is different from the old way conspiracy theories, where people just believed highly improbable things.
It also makes it more appealing to more people, because, if you take it all globally and don't look carefully, it really looks like there is a lot of evidence.
Back in the day, fact checking was incredibly difficult. If you were a domain expert, you might notice something was off, then go to the library to double check the information, and if the library happened to have what you needed you could try to convince your close friends and family of the truth. The other 99.99% of what you heard on the news or read in the paper was simply accepted as fact. Conspiracy theories were, at the time, either what the news said were conspiracy theories, or ideas so fringe that the news didn't even talk about them.
Nowadays, we are a few thumb movements away from fact checking literally any piece of human knowledge. There hasn't been a sudden proliferation of fake news, it's just more readily apparent. As it has become easier to spot the holes in shoddy reporting, faith in journalistic institutions has plummeted. More people are getting news from alternative sources whose quality is variable. For better or for worse, there are simply more versions of stories nowadays.
To try to retain viewers, traditional media outlets have tried to cultivate an image of themselves as the arbiters of truth which they once defacto were, and to do so have been quite liberal with labelling their competition as conspiracy theories. We haven't seen any uptick in the number of people wearing tinfoil hats to keep out the mind control rays or claiming any given senator is a lizard person. Instead, we live in a world where you're labelled a conspiracy theorist if you don't think there is a shadowy cabal of government agents spreading misinformation to manipulate us or depending on which of the past two presidential elections you think was illegitimate.
Even small deviations from the narrative of any particular bubble are heretical, but that narrative, and every other one, is composed from the incomplete knowledge of fallible people, so invariably as time goes on you will start to notice inconsistencies in the story. In years gone by, we would have simply chalked this up to someone being misinformed, people could admit they were wrong and papers could print retractions and we'd all forget about it. But now the combination of the record being so readily accessible and the increased role of our media consumption in our personal identity means we have forgone nuance and are strongly pressured to adhere to increasingly absurd stories. It's so much easier to label the other side as stupid and crazy than to try to demonstrate the veracity of our position and face the fact that we are not entirely correct either, but if we do not strive for truth ourselves, it becomes easy for them to see the faults in our logic and further convince themselves that we, in fact, are the crazy and stupid ones.
tl;dr there are many more non-mainstream narratives being labelled as conspiracy theories at the same time that the mainstream narrators who would normally dispel them are losing credibility.
https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...
The author has a pretty compelling explanation for the design of mass believed conspiracy theories, which I think is fairly close to what you posit in spirit, though not exactly.
"He developed an elite social circle and procured many women and children who were then sexually abused by Epstein and some of his contacts."
Conspiracy-minded people imagine a deep shroud of secrecy around the Epstein affair that doesn't really exist.
Considering how the media and public seem to usually enjoy getting their panties in a knot when the topic of child molestation arises, is this historic lack of interest combined with the current lack of interest not somewhat suggestive that something a little unusual might be going on here?
> a deep shroud of secrecy around the Epstein affair that doesn't really exist
Out of curiosity, how does one come to know such a thing? Do you have access to a data source that the rest of us don't?
Regarding my second comment, I was noting that you seem to have a sense of omniscience about you:
- "...a deep shroud of secrecy around the Epstein affair that doesn't really exist."
- "...the Epstein stuff was basically all a matter of public record."
Of course, if there was in fact a shroud of secrecy, or if some evidence on Epstein was not made available on the public record, you would have no way of knowing this. Yet, you speak as if you do know.
My armchair psychologist theory is that these sorts of incredibly common logical errors (several of which can be seen in this thread) are due to subconscious heuristics running on binary (True/False) logic rather than ternary (True/False/Unknown) logic. The human mind, both subconscious and conscious really seems to struggle with Null/Unknown. I have the impression that this phenomenon is increasing over time (perhaps due to increased internet usage, plus Trump), but I don't know how one might go about measuring such a thing.
Or, rather: was it splashed over social media? Because statistically, nobody's reading, these days..as disgusting as I feel having written that.
Slightly off topic, but I'm so happy wikipedia has finally stepped up an gotten rid of the stupid conspiracy theories that used to ruin their articles in the past because they turned a blind eye to the racist patriarchy of old white men that oppresses the working class and minorities.
"Epstein didn't kill himself" is about Epstein still being alive.
https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2019/08/epstein-foster-the-pe...
You need a seriously screwed-up culture in the detention facility for this to even be considered by guards, much less attempted. Why would anyone assume that only the two guards that were indicted are somehow the only bad apples there and that everyone else is great at their job?
It would be interesting to compare the guards at this facility with others on topics like complaints from detainees or disciplinary actions, to get a better idea of how unusual this behavior was. So far 100% of the COs involved have demonstrated to be highly incompetent and even dishonest.
I have no particular opinion about what exactly happened to cause his death (mainly because I don't pass judgment based on the little evidence I have) but it's easy to see why many would consider these actions proof of a conspiracy though.
They explicitly contrast Bridgegate and Pizzagate. Bridgegate was real and only involved New Jersey politics. Pizzagate of course is a grab bag of everything.
Of course we can make a Bridgegate conspiracy theory by simply pointing out the fact that Chris Christie’s name translates as “Christ Christ”, and he was opposed by Mark Sokolich. And what’s another word for “opposed” or “opposite”? That’s right “anti”, as in the antichrist.
Now you might be suspicious, but we know from analyzing transcendentalist literature that the pronunciation of names is a symbol. “Chris Christie”, in addition to meaning Christ, leaves your mouth with a smile, while “Mark Sokolich” leaves your mouth harsh and jagged, like evil.
Furthermore, governor of New Jersey ordered the closures of the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge. Which isn’t surprising because George Washington was famously a Freemason, a group that’s connected to Hermeticism, which has the famous saying, “As above, so below.” Close the upper deck, close the ground.
“Ground” is just another word for “Earth”, and so what is above the Earth? That’s right the heavens. And what lives in the Heaven? That’s right God. But not just any god, the false gods, those from the heavens, the ancient travelers from the stars.
So you see, by closing two-thirds of the toll booths dedicated to the town, the governor of New Jersey performed a magickal working to ensare and imprison an alien battle fleet, commanded by the the reptilian demon that had replaced the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey.
This is just facts. It’s just that the whole is considerably less than the parts.
So the approach I would take would be to isolate each claim in a conspiracy and assign some weighted value to each claim. Connecting aliens to Bridgegate would be obviously a tiny fraction of a percentage of likely to be true. But if someone were to make the claim that Bridgegate was connected to payouts from a lobbyist firm or that Chris Christie was associated with Jeffrey Epstein, I wouldn't necessarily dismiss that claim outright. It would remain an unverified but reasonably possible claim that would need further info or investigation.
Now if I spun this conspiracy to say that Chris Christie created a traffic jam so that child sex traffickers protected by the mayor of Fort Lee couldn’t easily escape, while the New Jersey state police conducted a raid on secret bunkers under the GWB. Would you believe that? Because if you do, I have a bike to sell you in the basement of the Alamo.
1. Christie has an interest in fighting child trafficking.
2. Christie used bridge closure to fight child trafficking.
3. Ft. Lee mayor defends child traffickers.
4. Ft. Lee mayor wanted to escape from a NJ police raid and bridge was the only path out.
5. Escaping via the bridge would have ensured Ft. Lee mayor's protection.
6. NJ state police were conducting a raid at GWB during bridge incident.
7. Bunkers at GWB involve child trafficking.
8. Ft. Lee mayor knew about child trafficking at GWB.
All claims can be viewed independently. Some claims have dependencies on earlier claims. If earlier claims turn out to be false (or extremely unlikely), any subsequent claims that have dependencies on those prior claims must be dismissed.
You apply some heuristic in your own mind like this all the time in the real world. You just probably never take a fully analytic and logical approach to it.
But that's roughly the system I use to evaluate the world. I don't dismiss things automatically but I won't buy into a claim without some evidence. But I will look at each claim independently because sometimes there is signal in the noise.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-...
Those dangerous idiots actually believe that a billionare pedophile spent decades inviting high-ranking politicians and influential decision makers to his private island for orgies with underage girls, and that when he was arrested he managed to hang himself while on suicide watch in a maximum security prison! They really are that deluded and dangerous. This needs to end, now.
The nutcases also believe that the governments are working with big tech to eliminate cash so that anybody who doesn't toe the line can be "permanently cancelled". Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? I hope in the future we can just have an algorithm that disables the bank account of anybody who spews such divisive nonsense online. There is no place for that kind of hate in a society that strives for any kind of progress.
Well, first you need to define "disinformation." It's a non-trivial, and probably a concept that's unable to be rigorously defined.
In case the sarcasm is not obvious... this will never happen. Determining what is true and what is false will be one of the greatest challenges humans face from here on out. The source of disinformation may be from fellow citizens (conspiracies, memes), or it may be from the government itself (propaganda) or from massive corporations (lobbies, bogus research with predetermined conclusions)
Nobody is getting phased out, the people who chose to not take the vaccine will just not be able to buy or sell.
Its been happening for a few years now. It is an unfortunate reality.
https://fortune.com/2017/08/18/visa-paypal-mastercard-hate-g...
We can't help correct misconceptions if we believe they're driven solely by stupidity.
But then on the other hand, I believe that the conversations and "thinking" on display in threads like this (and the many others that pop up from time to time) are beneficial to our cause, as it plausibly results in a kind of effort free recruiting. Of course we'll never be popular in intellectual forums like HN, but if one pays attention to comments on more "super-mainstream" (ie: non-HN, non-Reddit social media, like online newspaper comment sections or in YouTube comments from local TV stations), I sense distinct growth in average sentiments in our favour. To what degree this can be attributed to studies like this and the subsequent forum meme wars is obviously purely speculative, but I suspect "there's no such thing as bad publicity" is applicable here.
I don't think it's a good strategy for improving discourse, but some people probably find the creative element enjoyable.
To give you a sense of his motivations: He's a former debate captain, coach, judge. Pendants about grammar, punctuation, pronunciation. Still believes logic and facts are persuasive. Especially said louder, with more sarcasm and derision.
I'm trying to be less like that. Old habits are hard to change.
This study is interesting work to be sure, but the cause behind their hypothesis might be rooted in how journalism works, rather than whether it's truthful/factual or not.
Papers have a NJ politics "beat", with an editor and reporters who are experts in that single domain and are expected to produce work rooted in that specific domain.
Or worse, the "single domain" in some instances might be appearing because it was a story fed to the paper by a three-letter agency.
Citizen journalists (or whatever less charitable term you want to use) don't really have that. They can focus on whatever they want, and it's much easier to build a narrative that spans multiple domains.
I suspect that this is increasingly less true every year as local reporting is actively dying.
> I suspect that this is increasingly less true every year as local reporting is actively dying.
This isn't a new concern, of course[0], but in 2021 local reporting has probably already mostly died as much as it is going to. There just isn't that much money left to take away.
[0] https://www.poynter.org/newsletters/2017/the-west-wing-total...
I spent an inordinate amount of time on /pol/ around the 2016 election and when Wikileaks made the emails available I was among those hitting the random button to see what we could find. The authors of the paper did a great job in understanding a key feature; (vacuous) conspiraciy theories involve a lot of jumping to conclusions, and are all over the place (multi-domain). At the time there was so much momentum to find dirt on Hillary, that every silly comment seen through chan culture lenses became a zero-point energy engine, and suddenly we were swimming in mspaint.exe infographics pulled out of thin air.
I was never a believer though, but I did enjoy the shitstorm, and human trafficking is a real thing. I was disappointed that people was so fed up with the matter that Epstein's suicide was not a bigger deal with the general public.
2016 election timeline: https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6fyugv/link_you...
2016 summary of Wikileaks events: https://old.reddit.com/r/WhereIsAssange/comments/6nebdk/can_...
CT's are just folktales and explanations for things people don't understand or control. A conspiracy theory only becomes dangerous or harmful when it threatens to upset an established order, which makes it oddly self fulfilling, since its real purpose is to facilitate organizing people around counter-establishment narratives. When you look at this paper as a new way to use technology to automatically detect counter-establishment narratives, it seems like pretty standard playbook for a secret elite coordinating to secure and expand their powers, which is hilarious, to me anyway.
However, the conclusion includes criteria for detecting actual conspiracies as separate from theories, "We hypothesize that three features—a single domain of interaction, a robustness to deletions of nodes and relationships, and a proliferation of peripheral actants and relationships—are key characteristics of an actual conspiracy and may be helpful in distinguishing actual conspiracies from conspiracy theories. "
I think they buried the lede on that one, as a heuristic for evaluating CT's and accusations of them could be super valuable.
Who nudges the conspiracy theories to stick?
The best writing about this IMHO is from Renee Diresta. She has papers, articles, talks, testified before congress, and founded the Internet Observatory project.
Diresta co-wrote a very comprehensive report on the activities of the Russian "Internet Research Agency": http://www.reneediresta.com/ira-report-4e8d0ff684.pdf It explains in gory detail how this "stuff" works when there are state actors involved.
For reference: IMO, Alex Jones knew from day one that pizzagate was just bullshit made up on the internet, and kept distance accordingly. But there was so much intersection with his audience that he treaded carefully and did an obscure video on the side where he said he was just playing it cool to avoid persecution. Of course, if anything real came out of that, he would have claimed he was in on it from the start.
This isn't to say that there are no conspiracies, and people aren't justified in looking for explanations, but this mechanism of deceit is what makes it a controversial/goofball topic.
> how conspiracy theories ... and their factual counterpart conspiracies... We show how the Pizzagate framework relies on the conspiracy theorists’ interpretation of “hidden knowledge” to link otherwise unlinked domains of human interaction, and hypothesize that this multi-domain focus is an important feature of conspiracy theories. We contrast this to the single domain focus of an actual conspiracy. By highlighting the structural differences between the two narrative frameworks, our approach could be used by private and public analysts to help distinguish between conspiracy theories and conspiracies.
I'm not sure how to interpret this new classification of true conspiracies as just "conspiracies" and false ones as "conspiracy theories" that they seem to be pushing in this paper. Many things others called conspiracy theory were eventually proven to be true, at least in some degree, and those things are often still called conspiracy theories because they have uncomfortable truths that people would rather not acknowledge as factual. This seems like an abuse of terminology in some way to me.
Before I delve to deeply into this, I will first say, however; As an open conspiracy theorist, (doing my best to "take back" the phrase), who tries to stick to the facts as much as possible, I have long thought about how a scientific approach could be used to prove the likelyhood of what others call conspiracy theories, and the longer I have thought on the matter the more I have great hope that some researchers or other would stumble upon this likely-career hurting approach to said theories. While I disagree with the papers characterization of certain theories as true and certain ones as false, both due to the black and white label and the lack of context primarily surrounding the accusations of the narrative framework of the true to be one that is in more flux and single domain vs the one of the untrue being constantly in less flux and multi-domain, I think this approach could be modified and put to better use beyond the limitations of this paper itself, primarily because the root of their study is the same as a serious conspiracy theory researcher: "actants (people, places, things), relationships between actants, and a sequencing of these relationships".
It is only in the application of this approach to center on stories and social media that a series of methodological mistakes emerge to weaken the paper. I could go into some of the details if wanted about these weaknesses, but in general on HN I try to keep the discussion more meta on the topic of conspiracy theories in order to not devolve the conversation too much. One example I will give however, is their overreliance on certain sources of data (twitter, reddit) that were considered at best secondary to the more deep and open conversations (the chans, irc, etc) being had on certain topics (pizzagate for example) juxtaposed against the reliance on UCLA aggregates of NJ newspapers on the topic of Bridgegate. I know, I was participating in all of the above when the last post which "broke the last straw" on reddit caused the sub to be banned. [1] Again, I don't say this to start a discussion on pizzagate as it is likely to devolve quickly, but rather to show I'm not making up my accusations of methodological weakness based on nothing. This sort of snowball methodological weakness then undermines their conclusion, which quickly goes off the rails into so many tropes and cliches not backed by their data and research it quite surprises me to see the the authors take a semi-defensible approach and allow it to be deteriorated by such a series of erroneous "conclusions". Go read the conclusion section for yourself if you think I am exaggerating.
edit: in particular I would like to call out their overreliance on calling conspiracy theory discussion some variation of "imaginative interpretations of “hidden knowledge”". In reality, and this is something I frequently like to stress to my more logical/scientific friends who are skeptical of certain conspiracy theories, what many conspiracy theories rely on, often without being aware of it (to their detriment) is a series of inductive logical conclusions, as opposed to a series of deductive logical conclusions. Rightly so I say, because in the domain of conspiracy theory you often lack the hard evidence to back claims, and therefor must often rely on inductive logic instead (and the lack of deductive evidence does not alway indicate untruthfulness as is often assumed). This is one of the keys that helped me get past many issues, because when it comes to conspiracy theories true or not, the real crux is the probabalistic likelyhood of truth which can be modified as more data points emerge, not some black and white true and untrue label.
I think part of the problem here is that most of what we call conspiracy theories that are true aren't actually conspiracies per-se, except in the loose sense of "a conspiracy of silence", and don't particularly intersect with things like secret societies. I mean, sure, there are efforts made to conceal things from the public, and yes, there is a certain amount of coordination among powerful actors where their vested interest align, what else would you expect to happen in the real world? For every amoral person to act as a solitary megalomaniacal villain?
But none of that particularly implies that this sort of thing is planned ahead or centrally organized in any particular way or there wouldn't be any need for in-person meetings like the Bilderberg Group (which didn't even meet in 2020). It certainly doesn't imply that such conspiracies deliberately interlock with each other except as you would expect simply from survivorship bias.
I mean, organized crime is a conspiracy. A large corporation evading responsibility for a chemical spill is a conspiracy. Cartels doing price fixing is a conspiracy. The US military flexing in support of private interests is a conspiracy. Lobbyists getting exceptions and loopholes enacted into law is a conspiracy. Politicians accepting bribes is a conspiracy.
So conspiracies as such aren't unknown. Such things come to light all the time in part because maintaining secrecy is so damn hard and there are many interests aligned in exposing them. We should encourage that where and when we can.