Conspiracy: In Theory and Practice | Hacker News Reader

Conspiracy: In Theory and Practice

edwardsnowden.substack.com

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I like the conspiracy theory/practice distinction and I hope Ed will write more on how we could pay more attention to the latter.

Noam Chomsky presents lots of evidence about outrageous acts of American government in his books, and he always claimed that it all comes from official and open government sources. Yet most people are either unaware or refuse to believe it anyway.

These are conspiracies done openly, because almost nobody wants to go through and find the smoking gun in the heaps of otherwise boring government documents.

One of my favorite Noam Chomsky moments is when a 9-11 "truther" is able to ask him a question about what he believes about the 9-11 conspiracy theories.

Chomsky responds with the typical comment that it would take an unprecedented amount of coordination to have so many people keep the secret that it doesn't even make sense.

But he continues to say that the US government has openly killed 100s of thousands of civilians around the globe, why would 3000 killed more be interesting at all? Essentially pointing out that you don't need the complexity of conspiracy theory to realize that the US government actively participates in large scale murder openly and all the time.

The trouble with (true) conspiracies is that too many people benefit from them not being investigated properly and openly.

> Chomsky responds with the typical comment that it would take an unprecedented amount of coordination to have so many people keep the secret that it doesn't even make sense.

I remember hearing that argument made back in the 00's about government surveilance. The secret doesn't have to be kept perfectly, it just has to be made ridiculous.

Now I want to relearn all the 9/11 conspiracy theories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories

One of the weirder ones is that there were over 80 cameras pointed at the plane that crashed into the Pentagon and the public has seen none of the videos.

I'm pretty sure that was debunked several years ago. Plus, video was finally released, so there's that.

Per GP there were over 80 cameras but the pentagon, after years of calls for transparency shared a couple stills from one camera, so there’s that.

Those stills have about the same quality as your typical Bigfoot photo though.

Why not just release a damn video?

Sunlight cures all infection.

This phenomenon is a subset of the effect "Too much sunlight denatures complex molecules and kills carbon-based life."

They dont want to reveal the locations of their security cameras?

If they already released a still, they already released the location.

Of one camera. Not 80 of them.

I'm asking for them to release any video that shows what happened. If they already released one still, why not release the entire video?

I feel like you're purposefully being difficult.

I don’t have a lot to go on and so am I basically playing Devils Advocate.

If I’m coming off as difficult, that’s why.

What do you mean debunked? Who debunked it? Do you have a citation? Are you suggesting the HQ of the most powerful military in the world had no security cameras?

This has the statement of the FBI agent saying that they had 85 videos, only one of which was released:

http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/A_20...

Another strange one is the speech than Rumsfeld gave about missing trillions at the Pentagon 1 day before 9/11, then completely forgotten in the face of increased military spending the next day.

https://youtu.be/MfMjdKElgqY

https://youtu.be/xU4GdHLUHwU

Another thing I haven't seen any reasonable explanation for is how the towers collapsed perfectly in their footprint. It's hard enough to get smaller buildings to collapse perfectly in controlled demolition. Yet 2 towers that were among the tallest in the world both collapsed perfectly. With such tall towers they should have buckled unevenly at least a little bit, especially since the damage was off center.

They're definitely built to collapse inward out of necessity to avoid damaging other buildings/creating dominos.

I commented elsewhere on this oddity, and the Vegas shooting, contrasted to the coverage of the recent condo collapse.

Hm. No. The weirdest one is that the WTC was torn down by tactical nuke, buried under its basement, in context of Silverstein Properties having insured it at much higher value before, essentially pulling off a gigantic insurance fraud.

It's worth noting that the government surveillance secret wasn't actually kept very well, largely because of exactly the effect that Chomsky describes -- keeping all the numerous people in on the secret didn't work, and so we found out about it. I'd argue that the government surveillance example actually strengthens Chomsky's argument.

It's really about the upper limit of what a 6 inch chimp brain can process. Or a group of chimps can process.

Whether it's a chimp in govt or outside Rationality has an Upper Bound. Stick that on the Fridge.

When the problem faced is too complex and that upper bound naturally gets hit stories flow out of the head on both sides. The right move is not to focus on the stories.

The right move, for this has been studied for a long time under the Theory of Bounded Rationality, is to focus on simpler problems.

> The secret doesn't have to be kept perfectly, it just has to be made ridiculous.

Better yet, make it a partisan issue. Half of the country will refuse to believe it while the other half will be unable to do anything about it.

Confuse the issue more by flipflopping which party signals to their base to virtue signal giving a shit about the topic every....3-5 years.

The level of coordination required to fake 9/11 seems on a very different level than the level required to wiretap some central points on the internet. And that's not even considering usa basically had a dept of wiretapping (the NSA) already set up or that the nsa's activities actually did leak.

Not to mention that the post-911 NSA surveillance program leaked to the NYTimes within a few years

Does it really require all that much coordination?

Some top-level military exec(s) want the military to get more funding. They're in contact with Bin Laden. Bin Laden gets a bit of money to put a couple of arabs on a "work-trip" to the US. The military-execs offer a couple of pilots a "crazy increase to their life insurance". Check their schedules to coordinate the day of the attack.

I know there's a lot of detail left out and a lot of assumptions made, but I'm not convinced that it has to be an extremely complex and coordinated plan.

Military funding of Bin Laden isn't that far-fetched, and it may have possibly been true in the past[0], but 9/11 truthers believe that the World Trade Center was taken down by missiles and controlled demolition, and that people who thought they saw a plane were confused.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_...

AFAIK most "truthers" don't subscribe to the missile theory when it comes to the towers (the Pentagon is a different story).

I sometimes wonder whether the more out there conspiracy theories are simply used to discredit any concern or skepticism of the official narrative by lumping those concerned with the crazies.

> I sometimes wonder whether the more out there conspiracy theories are simply used to discredit any concern or skepticism of the official narrative by lumping those concerned with the crazies.

You can see this with every time that the COVID lab leak discussion gets equated with lab creation.

And also creation for research/treatment development purposes vs. bioweapon purposes.

That is indeed a well known tactic. In the same way as critics of mass vaccinating a global population with an experimental vaccine are lumped together with anti-vaxxers who believe in a nanobot spiked mRNA vaccine by Bill Gates.

Right — why isn't it cool to distinguish, and rank, various adjacent conspiracy theory likelihoods anymore?

I tend to call that tactic "Joe Greening", from the guy in the original Deus Ex who mixed the (in-universe true) conspiracy theories with alien nonsense to discredit people who knew about the conspiracies.

https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/Joe_Greene

This comes up in The X-Files, too.

Agreed; I spend probably too much of my time debating conspiracy theories online, and I find these tactics incredibly common and incredibly disingenuous. It's very easy to reduce any conspiracy theory to the most absurd of its claims and claimants. One has to break down the different possibilities and the conditional probabilities that follow.

Was Epstein murdered, or did he kill himself? If he killed himself, was he told to, permitted to, or not permitted to and did it anyway? Did the towers fall due to plane collisions and fires, or explosives, or both, or something else? Were al Qaeda responsible? If so, did they collaborate with the US government? If they were responsible and didn't collaborate, did the US government have specific forewarning and let it happen for geopolitical purposes?

Any and every conspiracy theory absolutely should and must be steelmanned, and every person lobbing allegations must be taken seriously, if we're to have any hope of getting a micrometer closer to a shared sense of reality. Good epistemology requires taking conspiracy theories seriously and in good faith, even if one believes some percentage of conspiracy theorists may be acting in bad faith or may be in a state of psychosis, etc.

Buddy, I don't have time to evaluate all the true information that comes up, let alone all the probably false information.

Not to mention that conspiracy theories and other complex claims are an asymmetric demand on people's time: it takes a nut 10 seconds to say that the towers were hit by missiles, and 10 minutes for you to find video recordings from multiple sources.

Also the goal posts are moved whenever convenient: most conspiracy theorists that I have interacted with are attached to the idea that there is a conspiracy more than any specific conspiracy.

>Not to mention that conspiracy theories and other complex claims are an asymmetric demand on people's time: it takes a nut 10 seconds to say that the towers were hit by missiles, and 10 minutes for you to find video recordings from multiple sources.

This is true. I've lost countless hours exerting 50 times more effort trying to refute conspiracy theorists' claims than the effort they put into it.

But I don't find it a total waste. Do I ever alter or influence anyone's opinions in any way? The person I'm debating: probably almost never or never. But other people reading it? Probably very very rarely, but if even one person reading it has ever had their view slightly shifted, then it's worth it, to me.

I know the efforts don't go totally unappreciated; in online discussions, I've been privately thanked for being one of the only people who'll try to take a conspiracy theorist seriously and have a serious, long debate with them. I get why almost no one wants to do it. But, in my opinion, someone has to. I definitely wouldn't fault someone for not wanting to masochistically subject themselves to that, but I think there still needs to be someone willing to sit down with them, treat them and their views with respect, and present reasonable counter-arguments.

When not a single person will try to seriously engage with them and their arguments, it only deeply reinforces that they're right and everyone else is crazy and/or a liar and/or an idiot. For example, if you Google terms related to Holocaust denial, pretty much two things come up (at least as of some years ago): Holocaust denial websites or websites saying it happened. You almost never find someone actually trying to directly address the claims of Holocaust denialists. You just get things like the current top hit:

>In most cases, a healthy debate promotes understanding. But even in the most liberal societies, certain matters are closed for discussion. For good reason, we choose not to argue about whether the Earth is flat, or whether white people have (as some white supremacists claim) “superior germ-plasm.” Nor should we argue about whether the Holocaust happened. It did. Arguments against this fact reveal little about history and much about the arguer’s wish for the world to replace memories of Jewish victimization with a monolithic image of Jews as powerful and treacherous.

On one hand; sure, I agree with all of this. But try putting yourself in the shoes of someone who's been indoctrinated into truly, earnestly believing it's all made up, and then read that statement. What are you going to think?

>Also the goal posts are moved whenever convenient: most conspiracy theorists that I have interacted with are attached to the idea that there is a conspiracy more than any specific conspiracy.

Yes; their strongly-held priors are that there are lots of conspiracies. In my opinion, barring scenarios like antipsychotics for people in psychotic states, the only way to really dislodge any belief a conspiracy theorist has is to attack the entire jenga stack from the root. You need to chip away at the priors in order to move the needle on anything in any direction. This isn't easy and probably takes months or years of time spent with a specific person to have even the slightest chance, but I think it's the only way.

In my opinion, if humanity is to have a chance of surviving in the long term, there need to be at least some people making concerted efforts to try to bridge the gap between people who hold fundamentally different views of reality. I think it'd be bad and a net waste of time and energy if a lot of people were doing this, but I think it'd also be bad if no one were doing it.

Military funding of terrorists is nothing new.

Pakistan as a proxy state of the US created the Taliban in Afghanistan.

US wanted religiously motivated fighters countering the USSR. Pakistan, armed with US weapon, and flush with US money, obliged.

Taliban was actually created at the behest of the US.

It is an open secret.

The US, to counter Al-Assad, armed and funded Al-Noosra front. Much, if not most of the money and weapons went to the ISIS.

In the case of Al-Noosra turned ISIS, the US has plausible deniability. It doesn't even have that much of it in case of the next generation of the Mujahids fighting the USSR being turned into the Taliban.

> 9/11 truthers believe that the World Trade Center was taken down by missiles and controlled demolition

Speaking for an entire group, almost always going to fail.

Pffft...you got it wrong. "Zem planez have been remotely radioed in!"

The sticking point would be the bombers themselves. Maybe they chicken out at the last minute and then expose the conspirators.

The personal risk for the top level execs would be massive, maybe even up to and including a death penalty. The payoff is a budget with too many 0s gets more 0s. The plot isn't rational.

> The sticking point would be the bombers themselves. Maybe they chicken out at the last minute and then expose the conspirators.

Very trivial to deal with, if one of them starts to speak up you just send the FBI to conduct an "interview" during the course of which they can be assassinated, like they did with Ibragim Todashev.

The bombers are useful idiots. True believers that aren't aware that they're part of an inside job.

Thank you.

Right. You just fine someone else that wants it done and grease the wheels.

That's what you need true believers for: cannon fodder. Unlikely for someone to chicken out if they're already heavily emotionally invested in the idea of achieving spontaneous unity with God by blowing themselves to bits.

I think the hard part is not doing it as a false flag op, but getting away with it after the fact. There was a lot of eyes on the aftermath of 9/11.

Especially after the centralization of the American surveillance and enforcement infrastructure in The Patriot Act.

The TLA organizations in the government are rival siblings. If the FBI caught wind of a conspiracy to orchestrate 9/11 perpetrated by the Department of Defense in the newly-authorized data sharing, they'd have run it to ground.

Ha. In fact, you could hardly be more wrong.

https://nypost.com/2019/09/07/robert-mueller-helped-saudi-ar...

This is not an example of the FBI caught in a conspiracy to orchestrate 9/11. If anything, this is an example of the FBI demonstrating, perhaps, insufficient willingness to pursue investigation into a politically allied nation... Not terribly surprising, because (for starters) the FBI's job is domestic investigation, not international. The CIA or NSA would be in charge of looking into Saudi connections to 9/11.

After the Patriot Act, these responsibilities became intertwined, but in the timeframe the article's describing, the nature of that entwining was nascent, and it's not surprising the FBI would have continued to act like the traditional FBI.

> If anything, this is an example of the FBI demonstrating, perhaps, insufficient willingness to pursue investigation into a politically allied nation

When you regularly use other nations to do your bidding, what the hell is the difference?

NSA mass surveillance was not just a matter of "wiretap some central points on the internet" as a one-and-done operation. It required thousands of people to work on various infrastructure and operations and to maintain it on an indefinite ongoing basis. It actually would have required far more sophistication and coordination to keep quiet in perpetuity than doing 9/11.

However, in point of fact, mass surveillance actually was kept quiet for years after it was spun up. Long after the evidence had leaked from multiple sources and become undeniable, you would still be called a crackpot if you said to someone on the street that all their electronic communications were being collected and stored indefinitely. Then, on a certain day in 2013, a former CIA employee dumped the NSA's files to the Western press, which obligingly flipped the narrative and dedicated weeks of extensive coverage to the government's shiny, new, and by then well entrenched panopticon. A surveillance system is ultimately most useful in its purpose only if the people know they're being watched, and the time had come for it to be unveiled.

As always, a large amount of media coverage in mainstream press outlets was a good indicator of what it was that the state wanted people focused on. The massively lower level of attention drawn to the Vault 7 leaks (which were arguably even more crucial than Snowden's) is stark and instructive, as is the different fate of the whistleblower (obscurity in prison vs international celebrity status) and a good indication of what they don't want you thinking about.

"Use Signal, use Tor."

The Vault 7 page on Wikipedia lists a strange ordering for E2EE messengers. Telegram has the weakest security and has only opt-in E2EE for chats, yet is listed first. WhatsApp's Facebook ownership is obviously problematic, but irrelevant to the specific context. I'd reorder it as “Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram”.

> While the encryption of messengers that offer end-to-end encryption, such as Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal, wasn't reported to be cracked, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7#Messaging_services

It doesn't matter how secure the messengers are if every device they're running on is compromised.

Is there a category of "reduced protective on the ground work to sloppy SIGINT surveillance willingly" to provoke a incident that would ensure future funding?

This is one of the points of the article.

Conflation of adjacent theories is an easy route to defeating them in court of public opinion.

"fake 9/11" isn't even close....

Has government surveillance not been an open secret for decades for example you can dig up EU reports on Echelon from the early 00's which talks about a 1997 study that said that ECHELON routinely intercepts all e-mail, telephone and Fax. The issue is more that most did not believe in it until hard evidence was presented by whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden.

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...

The official 9/11 story being a farce has been an open secret almost since the event. There are hundreds of verifiable facts that don't fit the official narrative.

eg?

Not a 9/11 truther, but there are some incongruities around official accounts of 9/11, for example the accounts of why CIA staffers actively blocked the FBI from being informed about the activities of future 9/11 hijackers, as discussed in the documentary "Who is Rich Blee".

There's a morass of conflicting stories, but if you're interested you could start with a close look at [1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfreda_Frances_Bikowsky

Intelligence agencies have used all the recipes in the book to take a hit at each other, so there is that as well.

What happened to WTC 7? There is a 45k+ bounty for any credible refutation of the University of Alaska Fairbanks study:

https://ine.uaf.edu/projects/wtc7/

http://westviewnews.org/2020/01/09/engineers-pledge-45000-re...

It's interesting how the Surfside condo collapse looked like a controlled demolition too. It wasn't, though. I think it's just how buildings are built to collapse, and they down that way regardless of cause.

You can tell the condo thing had no BS surrounding it because, well, the television showed footage of it from every angle and actually analyzed, as opposed to the piss poor confusing coverage and engineering analysis on, say, the Vegas shooting.

WTC7

that's not an answer.

what specifically about that building? in what way do you disagree with the "official" narrative and what is your proof of your counter-narrative and what is your evidence that was suppressed?

I remember laughing at the presented passport from one of the alleged culprits shortly after.(Like a day, or even hours? Can't recall exactly anymore) Found blocks away, only slightly burned at some parts of the corners. Seemed surreal and staged to me.

edit: Also, in hindsight, after having been sensitized to the topic in general, the fact that there were exercise/drill/training/simulation operations running at the same time and place where terror attacks hit.

No. Everyone believed the stories about Echelon and the mandated at&t "wiretap room" and so on and so forth. The situation is pretty similar as of today, in fact. People just put that into the back of their heads where they can ignore it and continue writing their HN post.

And the most sensitive personal and business emails continue to be sent in clear text. Without the sender usually even thinking twice about it.

Most normal people, whom you will not find on hacker news, will think you a tinfoil hat wearing lunatic to suggest anything remotely like mass surveillance being real in ky experience.

why the downvotes?

I didn't downvote you, but, to me, your claim very much does not match up with my experiences. Regardless of political affiliation or age or location - even before Snowden - most people probably wouldn't find it very crazy or implausible, and a lot would say it's quite possible or likely. Post-Snowden, I think you'd be seen as the crazy one if you thought it wasn't happening.

At least if we're talking about surveillance in the sense of "when you call someone or are called by someone, the phone numbers and length of the call are automatically recorded in a database, and everyone's unencrypted internet traffic is collected and/or automatically and manually analyzed by the National Security Agency". If someone says the government put microscopic hidden cameras in everyone's home ceilings, then, yeah, they'll probably be seen as pretty crazy. (A bit less so if they say they're just tapping the cameras in phones / laptops / smart TVs.)

The problem in my experience (with say a typical < 25 year old) is that they just don't care. Really. Like: "So what?" "Watch all they want, they can see me on TikTok."

It has become normalized and it doesn't connect with something undesirable.

Unfortunately this seems all too plausible, and it really is too late to have a society that allows privacy imho.

The main difference between government surveillance and 9/11 truther conspiracy is that the government surveillance "secret" can be kept in the open because the bulk of the citizenry doesn't care, or actually thinks it's in their best interests for the government to be surveilling everyone.

In contrast, the bulk of the citizenry would be up in arms if there were indisputable proof that our government orchestrated a terrorist attack on American soil that killed thousands of people.

Evidence: the reaction to the Snowden leaks. Lots of Americans responded to that news with "oh okay; that's a rational thing for the NSA to be doing to combat terrorism."

> the citizenry would be up in arms if there were indisputable proof that our government orchestrated

Not so sure about that. Large portion of population does believe that and they are not up in arms.

It's not a wide enough margin. The Scrips 2006 poll suggested around 16% think it's "very likely" someone in the US government either assisted or took no action (as frame of reference, Pew Research suggests between 4 and 7% of respondent input is "bogus"... Not just random, but intentionally biased towards the most unlikely answer to troll the pollsters [https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2020/02/18/assessing-the...]).

2006?!?!?!?!?!?!

That was the generous year. Belief has waned since then.

Statista probed the question in 2019 and found strong belief at 11%. https://www.statista.com/statistics/959504/belief-september-...

And the Manhattan Project before that ;)

The fallacy with that 9-11 rebuttal is that in its main stream form, 9-11 is as unprecedented as the conspiracy they are saying is far fetched. Why is it more infeasible to assume there was some inside help or looking the other way? Add in incentives as a result of the act, Israel’s known knowledge and surveillance of the act, seems pretty clear there’s more to it.

Any conspiracy powerful enough to affect world events in a major way would be the source of some or all of the popular conspiracy theories. So they tell you something, but not taken at face value.

People have been talking about Israeli and Saudi conspiracies since it happened, so I think it's safe to assume that is what the real conspiracy wants people to think.

It's more infeasible because it's massively more complicated. Occam's Razor.

Just because they're two unprecedented scenarios doesn't mean they're equally simple explanations.

Not only do you need the complicity of Bin Laden and his associates, you also need the complicity of many people within the US and you need them all to shut up about it and you need Bin Laden and his associates to lie about what really happened and you need to hide any trace of this from investigators. This is massively more complicated than the banal explanation that the small group of people who say they did it, actually did it.

You don't necessarily need the complicity of Bin Laden, or that many people.

You just need your intelligence agencies to keep track of what he is doing and allow him to continue because the attack suits your purpose (e.g. finding an excuse to attack Iraq).

That's a much more plausible version. It's still more complicated, though, and requires the complicity of many more people, and is therefore less likely to be true. There's also the rule of thumb that we shouldn't presume malice when incompetence fits.

> Chomsky responds with the typical comment that it would take an unprecedented amount of coordination to have so many people keep the secret that it doesn't even make sense.

That's often the weakest point of conspiracy theories. But I think this argument is exaggerated because it depends entirely on the assumption that 3 letters agencies didn't reach a level of sophistication and didn't accumulate enough know-how over their decades of existence to overcome this kind of human obstacle. Just right off my head I can think of several ways that this risk can and has been minimized: compartmentalization, black mail, child porn accusations (true or otherwise), close monitoring, murder, need to know kept very low, etc.

Also as a counterexample, see Operation Gladio where "stay-behind" units formed a hidden army inside NATO countries unbeknownst to their leaders and were involved in multiple terrorist attacks, massacres and harassment campaigns against "leftist" groups they deemed subversive and also to create a "strategy of tension". This has been going on from the 60s to the 80s and didn't begin to be uncovered until the 90s.

Also see MKUltra and operation Northwoods for actual government conspiracies, which weren't discovered due to the "unprecedented amount of coordination to have so many people keep the secret".

I don't think it would take an unprecedented amount of coordination, because not many people would even need to know the secret. During times of mass chaos there is a collective emotional and psychological understanding that is easily influenced. At a simple level, see the "Brain Games - Social Conformity" experiment by National Geographic.

> Chomsky responds with the typical comment that it would take an unprecedented amount of coordination to have so many people keep the secret that it doesn't even make sense.

Let's say that someone came out tomorrow and said, "9/11 was an inside job, and in my role as Undersecretary of the Army I was instructed by Donald Rumsfeld to do X, Y, and Z to help carry it out." What is it, exactly, that Noam Chomsky believes would happen? Does he think this whistleblower would get a segment on 60 Minutes? Fawning mugshots on the cover of Time magazine? No, they'd be easily marginalized, pathologized as a crank, and ultimately disposed of. What would even be the incentive for someone to throw themselves into the buzzsaw of our complicit media and its credulous consumers?

This is something ignorant people (including Chomsky himself) also will often say about the JFK assassination, "oh someone would have come forward and said something." Well, people did come forward and say things, dozens of them, and they were ignored, mocked, harassed, and sometimes killed. With this kind of intimidation down to a science and communications channels more thoroughly surveilled than ever, coordinating a large action (especially with the standard spycraft techniques of compartmentalization and need-to-know) is probably easier than ever.

The lies are never foolproof, they're just delivered within a resilient system which controls how (and whether) the lies are talked about.

Chomsky's point is that the N people that need to be involved is large, so even if you think it's unlikely that one co-conspirator would come forward (you are right on that), when N is large then the probability that at least one will come forward, 1-pow(1-p, N), becomes much more likely.

Your other point about people not being believed is a separate point to the above. Has there been people claiming to have been involved in 9/11 on the inside that haven't been believed?

You don't need to keep them all quiet, just yank their YouTube videos or arrest them for their machine having child pornography.

So not only is there a 9/11 conspiracy, there's also a conspiracy to suppress and frame anyone who's coming forward over the next 20 years.

As the conspiracy theory gets more and more complicated like this, it also gets more and more implausible.

It's an absolute miracle the mafia ever got off the ground!

An example that proves my point, since the mafia itself and its prosecution under RICO are both well known to the public.

Hrm. There is also compartmentalization an a need to know base. I remember having seen a documentary about the Manhattan Project, wherein even people who lived and worked on and in those sites discovered only decades later on what they really worked. By seeing another, earlier documentary ;->

There's a lot in that idea to cover and I would actually think that it may be worth academic study. I see parallels to how institutions and governments are created etc...

> Noam Chomsky presents lots of evidence about outrageous acts of American government in his books, and he always claimed that it all comes from official and open government sources. Yet most people are either unaware or refuse to believe it anyway.

Such is the power of the brand and the "good guys" narrative that facts often have little to do with it. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason their way in to.

It's easy to love the USA when it's not your neighborhood they're bombing[1], or your friends they're hiding forever in torture prisons without trial[2], or your children they're kidnapping and raping[3].

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/us/politics/us-airstrikes...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/10/cia-senate-i...

[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/us/immigrant-children-sex...

Chomsky is a terrible, terrible historian.

He regularly presents things that are heavily debated as established fact.

He doesn’t lie or even repeat blatant falsehoods. He just misrepresents the level of certainty regarding historical events.

In his recent essay Prospects for Survival, he talks about Stalin’s offer to unite East and West Germany as though it were a good faith offer.

He equivocates with “we can’t be sure”, but then acts like it’s a reasonable proposition.

While the absolute truth died with Stalin, there’s no evidence anyone in the Soviet Union or East Germany was prepared to surrender control.

It's going to take more than just one example, and some links, to start to persuade me of your case.

Conspiracies happen constantly because people conspire to do nefarious things all the time. However nowadays the framework for evaluating those nefarious things (conspiracy theories) has been completely negated by those in corporate media conflating it with insanity and baseless, nonsensical accusations.

And there's a reason for that, which Snowden touches on. Namely, the world in its current form is largely run by such nefarious schemes. The bad guys won a long time ago. And by taking away the language we might even use to talk about what they did, and the scale of it, they have further insulated their power.

He says thhat conspiracy is inherently anti+democratic, so here is the antidote, strengthening democracy.

Another great point is in his last paragraph, that conspiracy theories are mostly bottom up events. You have a whole demographic doing conspiracy theorizing instead of talking about what it looks in practice.

There just was a president whose whole game was running a circus, everything was about the guy and his idea of The Enemy. Nothing of substance and nothing but misdirection.

Another problem is that day to day journalism isn’t epistemological, it’s just reporting, so you just get a flat view of what is happening.

Well, I guess if he says they are anti-democratic, the question is solved and settled, and the solution is just easy-peasy!

Have you considered that this president could have been himself the target of misdirection?

The problem of day-to-day journalism is certainly not epistemology, the problem is that they rely on eyeballs, advertisers, and tribes, and thus tend to tailor their reporting, that might be the reason why everything that happened around that last president seemed like a circus.

He was the president, he cannot be the target of misdirection. The last president needed the media in a symbiotic relationship. Something to rile against. In form he spoke badly about MSM, but in practice he needed them just as much to stay relevant and have something to rebel against.

Yes, media need the clicks, but that’s portraying it wrongly imo.

There is no world democracy though. It's so many representation levels that it devolves into a few elites.

Militaries are not democratic either.

Democracies vote to oppress minorities all the time. Democracy is not the solution.

That is a gross simplification isn’t it? While democracy isn’t perfect, it depends a lot how it is implemented. Just like you have badly implemented programs and right ones.

No, I think history and present times makes it clear that this is an inherent property of democracy.

In democracy without any limitations (like the US constitution), a little over 50% of constituents can do whatever they want to any minority comprising less than 50% of the population.

There are plenty of modifications that have been tried, but none of them solve this fundamental problem...

...because when push comes to shove the modifications are ignored. E.g. the US constitution is routinely ignored without consequence for those in power.

I don't think any political system humans have invented exists in reality. Our political systems are a veneer over the reality of consensual interaction sprinkled with generous amounts of violence, manipulation, and control tactics that have always been used to maintain power. I would argue that since these control tactics are inherent to human behavior, a focus on prioritizing anyone's ability to defend themselves is the best solution.

The other reason for that, which he also touches on, is that conspiracies are now tied up in the narrative that undergirds identity, especially political identity. The extent of truth in a conspiracy theory isn't that relevant to the partisan news orgs. Be it systemic racism, lab leak hypothesis, influence of certain lobby groups, etc.

> Namely, the world in its current form is largely run by such nefarious schemes. The bad guys won a long time ago.

I’ve slowly come to the same conclusion, and my first reaction was pretty much hopelessness and despair.

But I think it’s important to realize that most people through history, who fought for change, faced similar or worse adversaries.

(Absolutely not an endorsement of historical atrocities)

I've noticed people treat conspiracy theories with the same level of validity or non-validity regardless of the facts or details.

Things like flat earth conspiracies have now inexplicably been lumped into the likes of those who believe in things like.

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...

Or just question in general the motivation behind the decisions made by those in charge.

There are some very obviously dumb conspiracies that have no basis in reality, there are some possibly far out there conspiracies that could have some merit and then there's conspiracies that seemed ridiculous but actually turned out to be true.

The world is not black and white...it's very grey.

Again, I find it odd these things tend to all be labeled under one giant 'conspiracy theory' label. Much like any theories, some are possibly valid, others very obviously not.

Categorizing these things together as has been done in recent years makes no sense.

I think the purpose of many conspiracy theories is simply to reduce trust in media. If you doubt everything then any theory is as good as any other. So you might as well trust the people who speak most loudly and convincingly.

The term conspiracy theorist was designed for this purpose...

Personally, I have a tendency to lump them together because they always seem to be propagated by people with certain characteristics.

- They think "questioning everything" makes them smart even though many questions are answered to a point where being contrarian is irrational.

- They're generally just anti-intellectual. They enjoy talking about stuff without introducing any rigor.

- Probably the most interesting to me; they tend to have rather isolated jobs. I suppose they haven't been exposed to incompetence at scale.

You're right, it's not correct to just lump everything into one bucket. But when they seem to be pushed by a different incarnation of the same person every time, I get desensitized. Especially because, when I do bite and ask some follow up questions, I never seem to get any answers.

>when I do bite and ask some follow up questions, I never seem to get any answers.

You may be asking the wrong people.

It does make you wonder about some of those louder people spouting the most bullshit and where their funding comes from though...

It depends on which conspiracy theories you mean. I probably agree with Snowden on his last point that people make an identity out of which conspiracy theory they believe. Groups base their membership on which conspiracies are believed. I just always felt that way so he didn't give me that idea.

I wonder if we label the irrational or maybe unverifiable beliefs of unfavorable groups as conspiracy theories but we label similarly unverifiable beliefs in a conspiracy as 'lived experiences' or 'perspectives' when they likewise have no evidence. The only difference in how we treat the beliefs is based on the racial/religious/political preferential status of the group that has the beliefs.

So conspiracy theories are probably pretty common and uniform and not confined to certain groups.

> But when they seem to be pushed by a different incarnation of the same person every time, I get desensitized

That's a problem. And I think that's more on you than anyone else. Ignoring something with potentially significant consequences just because its proponents are annoying doesn't actually make it insignificant.

>Probably the most interesting to me; they tend to have rather isolated jobs. I suppose they haven't been exposed to incompetence at scale.

What do you mean by this?

You have me wondering because in my experience 'conspiracy' is the norm - every business decision I've seen has been the product of a private discussion between a handful of decision makers. The alternative is harder to believe - that decisions are made unilaterally or off the cuff in front of the public.

He means that people, on the whole, are more incompetent than malicious.

The first time you find out a billion dollar corporation relies on handful of dodgy Excel files, you recoil and wonder how such a company got so successful doing such idiotic things.

The second time you discover this, you marvel that you found the two companies that are successful in spite of such bad decision making.

By like the fourth or fifth time, you realize that this is the norm and no one really has it any more together than anyone else.

Strangely the incompetence of a company has to do with how much it is in their interest to fix something. A bug makes the company money? This can't be fixed, are you sue it is important? A bug loses the company money? It is fixed within the hour!

Example of the first is the horrible billing for cloud products, designed to make it easy to get huge bills and apparently that is impossible to fix.

Incompetence wouldn't correlate this strongly with company interests if incompetence actually was such a huge problem for fixing things. Sure companies often fail at doing some stuff, but those things then are usually very hard to do, they never fail at relatively simple things unless failing at it helps them.

I think the point is that large scale organizations have a certain amount of incompetence within them.

Real conspiracies are made to work around that incompetence, either by compartmentalizing and limiting the internal flow of information (intelligence agencies), by being decentralized and resilient to people messing up (eg class warfare still happens even if upper-class people don't all work to further the interests of the upper class), or by not being a conspiracy in the first place (eg if two rich people meet to discuss mutually-beneficial business deals, it doesn't have to be a conspiracy).

Imaginary conspiracies just magically work perfectly, with no whistleblowers, no accidental leaks, with thousands of agents invisibly affecting every facet of life to cover up what really happened during 9/11 or whatever.

There's a biological/psychiatric dimension to all this. Dopamine levels in the brain are related to belief in unfounded conspiracy theories, which interestingly is also related to schizophrenia. It makes it difficult for the person to inhibit associations between things.

Default human consciousness is chock full of bugs in cognition, it isn't just schizophrenics who can't think flawlessly.

I recommend you watch this lecture. It may change the way you think about people that question the narrative. https://youtube.com/watch?v=7LqaotiGWjQ

My favorite example of this is the tinfoil hat conspiracy of the early 2000’s. An open joke in the tech community that the government is always listening and knows what you do online.

then Snowden happened

Echelon[1] and Room 641A[2] (and others) were well known among niche circles a long time before Snowden. These "conspiracies" were the kind of thing that people would call you a crackpot for if you told normies though.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

A reason others may refer to conspiracy theory supporters as "crackpots" could be attributed to the fact that there's now so many wild theories out there (UFOs, aliens, 9/11 inside job, etc). So if you support a few, then you'd be more likely to be considered a crackpot.

In other words, while those two examples were true, many are likely not.

Just because you see them all presented as equals on /r/conspiracy doesn't mean that every conspiracy researcher considers them all equal.

I hope everyone here can internalize that. We need engineers in these communities.

Yes I do remember opening the news that day and my reality completely changing.

Up until then the “party van” parked outside your house taping your conversations was a joke perpetuated by schizos. Turns out they didn’t need a “party van” parked outside of your house.

That is because we have another word for it. Probability. If something crosses a threshold of being highly improbable yet people still believe it we call it a conspiracy theory.

You can think of it as humid weather vs rain. That’s just a spectrum too. And yes the world is grey but when it rains I’ll be damned not to know the difference.

Yet we get things like the mass surveillance conspiracy mentioned by other commenters, the Iran Contra scandal, Things like MK-Ultra, where, even up here in Canada, a friend of my dad's mother was actually put through experimentation on the CIA's behest and wasn't acknowleged by the Canadian government for decades.

https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/brainwashed-mkultra

I mean, just do a quick search about conspiracy theories that turned out to be true and you'll quickly see the kinds of things that have actually occurred throughout history, and how many times the crazy conspiracy theorists were right.

By using this word you already presumed the likelihood of it being true is very low, so why do you at the same insist the likelihood of it must be high?

If you believe there are conspiracy theories that turned out to be true then maybe they weren’t actually conspiracy theories but instead theories held by a group of people based on evidence (evident possibly just to them) that turned out to be true.

If your question is how do we discern between the two without the benefit of hindsight I’m afraid the answer is in the negative, we can’t, unless you want to just give undue probability of events occurring based on how you feel on one day instead of what evidence you have been provided.

> If you believe there are conspiracy theories that turned out to be true then maybe they weren’t actually conspiracy theories but instead theories held by a group of people based on evidence

Where do you get this idea that conspiracy theories can't be based on evidence? It seems like you've preemptively defined "conspiracy theory" to mean ungrounded bullshit. Some conspiracy theories have plenty of evidence, and some don't.

What is the urge to keep the ambiguity? We can do better. Let's use a different word when we mean something different. This should be easy to do, if there is evidence use word A if there isn't sufficient evidence use word B. I'm perplexed why a mainly engineer crowd on HN would put up with this type of bs.

Who's being vague here though? "Conspiracy Theory" is made up of two words with relatively precise meaning. That you decide to attach your own meaning or lack of meaning to it doesn't make everyone else's usage of the term a failure.

Are you aware that conspire is a word?

"Probability" is sometimes a matter of opinion/implementation though.

YouTubers, TV shows, hollywood, newspapers make fun of conspiracy theorists every day for millions of views. That's how peoples opinions are formed.

There's also an amplifying effect where only unpopular people voice unpopular ideas - either they don't pick up on the social cues, or lack a sense of shame, or simply aren't very bright. Its a feedback loop adding to the stigma.

Umm there is at least an equal number or more of conspiracy theorists on youtube as well. Qanon qed.

There are conspiracy theory vids with millions of views? Can you show me one?

Not sure what qanon qed is supposed to mean.. Qanon wasn't on YouTube and I don't think he ever had as large a following as the media made out. I've never met one or seen a qanon post, and I don't think his supposed demographic could actually navigate 8chan.

no some of us actually care about the truth and actively despise being lied to, being gaslit, and being encouraged to do that to others to fit in with the social consensus.

> Categorizing these things together as has been done in recent years makes no sense.

I think it not only makes sense, but it was a brilliant strategy, the results of which can be seen on Reddit and even here, if the topic is other than a direct abstract discussion of conspiracy theories that is: it is a powerful subconscious heuristic, it has been very widely deployed, and can be activated when necessary.

I agree, but stating such things is essentially a conspiracy theory...

Which has zero epistemological value, but extremely high persuasive value, which is the point.

> There are some very obviously dumb conspiracies that have no basis in reality

Many of which are psyops.

>The world is not black and white...it's very grey.

The more I read about any topic, the more I realize how true this is. I used to think in absolutes but now I realize how nuanced everything is.

A group of people who organize to advocate for a cause are an NGO, and "affinity group", or a dangerous conspiracy or maybe even cult; depending on if you agree with them... by modern usage.

Is The Federalist Society a conspiracy? They have open meetings. How about labor unions?

Did you read the article? His answer is yes, all organized action qualifies as a conspiracy, and that it's important to distinguish between conspiracy theory and conspiracy practice

> all organized action qualifies as a conspiracy

The dictionary definition disagrees. It adds qualifiers like 'secret' and 'unlawful' and/or 'harmful'.

In one definition. In another it simply says that "conspiracy" is "the act of conspiring" and one of the definitions of "conspire" is:

to act in harmony toward a common end

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conspire

That said, I don't think there's much question that the more common-place, colloquial definition includes the "secret" and probably "unlawful" aspects. But somebody who uses these terms in the other sense isn't necessarily wrong.

agree.. fragmenting words by colloquialism tends to obscure the deeper and more complete 'sense' that existed before the fragmentation - so we're left with more precise words, but less linguistic cohesion

a similar example of a word that has become so loaded by the negative sense would be 'propaganda' - technically all political speech is propaganda, but in colloquial usage the term is so bogged down to mean roughly 'blatant and overt totalitarian propaganda' that we can hardly see the inherent political bias in 'acceptable' political statements, and are more prone to be influenced by them as a result

I mean, how do would this present the FBI action against social movement groups in the 1970s?

The actions against the black panthers, for instance, were secret and harmful to the group and the question of the legal status of those actions is open. The same could be said with regards the US treatment of the American Indian Movement, or many, many actions taken against labor organizers in the late 19th C.

Much could be said of about anything the CIA has done in its history.

IMO, it's more useful to just open up the term to any organization that acts in concert, because then a lot of the fuzzy distinctions between, say a government that isn't acting in the direct interests of its entire population and a criminal cartel.

Those are clearly different kinds of organizations, but "harmful" and "legal" become questionable in many situations.

Ed does try to make the distinction between a 'true' conspiracy (ie one that is actually happening) and a 'false' one (one that's just made up, and doesn't actually exist except as in the minds of its believers) - one is possibly justifiable paranoia (for example what Ed showed us about the NSA), the other mass delusion (cough-q-cough)

Ed? Do you know him?

How is that different from everybody here calling Mr. Thorwalds by his given name?

The number one thing that distinguishes conspiracy practises from conspiracy theories is how boring they are.

Which are the more boring ones?

Take your pick. As soon as I mention one your lack-of-interest meter will immediately shut it down.

How about campaign finance? How about the fact that it is against the interest of the two American political parties to solve any politicized problem? Immigration, for instance, will never be solved because as long as it remains a political issue it brings in money to both parties. Nobody will harm that golden goose. It's the same reason that nobody inside Facebook will solve the problems with Facebook. Because those very problems are what fund the income of everyone who works there. Ergo, it will never be solved, at least not from within.

I just wasn't sure if they were saying fake conspiracies are more boring or real ones are more boring. I could imagine it being either. I suppose the ordering of the sentence implies it's the former that are more boring.

Real conspiracies are super boring.

For example we had this guy in Australia James Ashby who was the chief of staff for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party.

They play to a lot of the fake conspiracy types that also fall into the “basket of deplorables” from which other conservative governments globally garner their support.

However all the outlandish shit that PHON either spread directly or nurture indirectly (such as NASA doctoring climate change data) is far more interesting than the actual conspiracy they were alleged to have perpetrated which was James Ashby pressuring candidates to use his signage company:

https://www.afr.com/politics/knives-out-for-hanson-staffer-a...

I guess my go-to ideas of "conspiracy theories" are things like MKULTRA, Gladio, COINTELPRO, Stargate Project, ECHELON etc. Which seem extremely interesting, to me anyway, and I think we can say those things are "real". Whereas I find the QAnon, AntiVax etc stuff fairly tedious (although I do find the sociology behind them interesting). Maybe it's more about my relationship with these things, rather than than the theories themselves.

Yeah I guess those things don’t really strike me as conspiracies, like I guess they fit the technical definition in some ways especially if they’re deemed illegal but just because a program is covert doesn’t make it a conspiracy. It might just be a dumb or poorly executed idea (although I suppose also “harm” may be in the eye of the beholder)

Maybe it's an age difference thing (I'm old), but to me MKULTRA feels like the absolute archetype of "conspiracy theory" material. I'm fairly sure that's how it was regarded before the Church Committee investigation, and to a large extent afterwards. I think if you were applying the "real conspiracies are boring" heuristic you'd have dismissed it pretty quickly.

Edit: There's a bit in Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures with Extremists, where he hangs out with Alex Jones, who tells him about secret events where powerful men don robes and perform weird rituals. Which sounds outlandish but Ronson goes along with Jones to infiltrate Bohemian Grove, and sure enough there are powerful men in robes, performing weird rituals. At that point, Ronson notes that it no longer seems outlandish, it just seems like some middle aged men letting off steam. I think perhaps things just seem inherently more boring when there's no mystery attached.

Examples here:

https://www.emptywheel.net/

Well researched, endless detail, often leading to no resolution.

This goes to the heart of the mentality of full-time conspiracy theorists.

They aren't interested in conspiracies. They are largely marginalised lonely people looking for a hobby which provides status, an addiction, and a sense of control/power.

Conspiracy theorists engage in the free association of concepts which "Seem Important" and derive entirely uninformed connections between them for the sake of creating "insider knowledge".

The "boring conspiracies" all require you to be in the system, and fundamnetally, not marginalized. Broadly, you probably have to: have gone to university, understand recent political history, are across the news; have been familiar with the operation of business, governments and nation states. Probably have either met, or know via (eg., university): journalists, politicians, business leaders, etc. Or today, eg., listen to podcasts by these people.

If you dont have this knowledge, you really have very little idea of how the world works.

"Real Conspiracies" are "boring" in the sense that they are a result of obvious incentives that people have in highly complex systems which require quite an elite level of understanding to fully parse.

Conspiracy theorising, "chasing the addiction" through hours of youtube videos, blogs, -- connecting the dots -- etc. is really just an erzats video game played by people unable or unwilling to actually participate in the complex really-existing social world.

The "theorist" is a lonely player looking to fill their time with rewarding objectives that give them a sense of accomplishment. It isn't about actual conspiracy.

And then there's omniscience theorists...

They don't make for sensational Youtube content that isn't covered by the "MSN".

If I subscribe to Ed Snowden’s Substack, on a scale of 1 to 10 how much “monitoring” am I about to be under…?

No doubt. But (if I may disappear further down the rabbit hole) for this to be meaningful we would have to know what level of monitoring we are under without subscribing.

With what he has revealed, you'll realize that you’ve been monitored this whole time. All of us have.

He has pointed out that it’s not a question of whether they start monitoring you, it’s that with bulk collection they are collecting your activity already for later filtering/reference, forever.

When most people talk about conspiracy theories, they are actually talking about motivational theories.

For example, with the 'China lab leak theory', there is no actual evidence of Sars-Cov2 in that lab before the outbreak. What does exist is the belief that 'the Chinese government lies'/'scientists lie'/'Chinese people lie' or some combination or offshoot of these. There is a belief that sinister things happen in labs. There is a belief that it would take serious coordinated effort by humans to cause this much disruption in our lives.

It is psychologically much easier to believe that if we could find the people responsible for this and stop them, we can prevent pandemics like this. It is very hard to hold in your head that disease agents can be transmitted from animal populations to human populations at any time and we have no significant control over this.

I'm sure I'm doing a lot of projection here, but then so is everyone else.

Just FYI - I think it is possible that the virus leaked from the lab, but it is significantly more likely that it was an animal virus (like 1000:1 in favor of 'natural' zoonotic origin)

People all over the world lie. I think lab leak speciation is more driven by a lab mucking about with bat coronaviruses being around the corner and the bats 600 miles away.

The standards of evidence you're used to cannot be the same in this instance.

The CCP targets dissenters and has a long history of doing so, including openly killing them. Internally, news unfavorable to the CCP rarely comes from established outlets (so it's possible to dismiss it all as hearsay - try constructing your view of China using only Mainland Chinese mass media!).

Also, how are you supposed to get evidence if they destroy it and don't allow independent researchers in? There is far too much damage control going on; is not blocking the steps needed to get the evidence you require, a red flag in itself for you?

I think those are all very good questions. No one should be shouted down for asking them.

I think it is very important to be critical of media controlled by a political party.

These are all very natural feelings, and as context they are important.

However, there is more context that is important. For instance, there are many many examples of viruses making the jump from animals to humans, some recent examples are Sars-COV1, MERS, and H5N1.

The questions you ask sound like the ones raised about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction - Saddam Hussein certainly was motivated to lie and cover up, but even with all those red flags, no WMDs were found.

In other words, to make a real case requires more than red flags.

The motivation of the people raising the accusations should also be examined. In the case of Iraq's WMDs, there was a desire to remove Hussein from power. In the case of China, there is a desire to discredit and diminish China's power on the world stage.

The bottom line is, you can not prove it was manufactured in one of the labs we know exists in China (and was partially funded by the US) because you cannot get in. Since we can't get more than red flags, then it's just a baseless conspiracy theory, right?

China's behavior with SARS was the same: lying about figures, refusing to cooperate etc. This time, as usual, the CCP's (local government) initial move was to silence whistleblowers, which helped it spread.

America's mass media and big tech, which is dominated by the Left, almost refuses to say anything negative about China.

> then it's just a baseless conspiracy theory, right?

I'm just saying that I find the motivation behind the conspiracy theory more interesting than the theories themselves, which are generally information light and insinuation rich.

It sounds like you have conspiracy theories about conspiracy theories.

Yes: an open conspiracy was the build up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Or was it Afgha—....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

It would be interesting to model modern identity politics as a kind of conspiracy. Here is an "Enemy Inside" variant that applies to any individual of a problematic identity. When some combination of tags white, male, straight, religious, disagrees-with-this applies to you, you are in a conspiracy whether you know it or not. It is a "conspiracy by default" that you must opt-out of in various ways, most importantly by being vocally supportive of the conspiracy theory itself!

As a conspiracy it blurs the distinction between "theory" and "practice" because there's a valid point to be made about systemic racism, and yet the theory goes much further.

> In sum, conspiracy theories do not inculcate powerlessness, so much as they are the signs and symptoms of powerlessness itself.

This captures it well. You can think of them as what people without power in a situation use to describe what they percieve the people who do have it are doing. There is the folk religion aspect of them, but even office politics are defined by similar conspiracy thinking. If you have thought you were being manipulated or managed with deception in an office environment, extending that to institutions is not a big leap.

Maybe I'm way down the rabbit hole, but I've often thought the crappy conspiracy theories with coarse and cartoonish explanations get actively promoted to discourage, discredit and isolate people who reason about real incentives and realpolitik.

Meta-commentators calling out conspiracies and inconsistencies are a real threat to the narratives insiders use to sustain the necessary dissonance to navigate the dynamic of influence within their networks. When you are an insider, you have to sustain the fictions that the power of your group is legitimate, your colleagues are honest and aligned to the same values, and that you are believer. You have to sustain the official optimisim line because that is what it means to be aligned to power. Summers' famous quote, "the first rule of being an insider is you don't criticize other insiders" captures it well. If you let these fictions slip, you essentially fall and define as an outsider and you are out of the game. You're marked as "bitter," "a sore loser," "hard to work with," "a loose cannon," etc.

Conspiracy theories 'concretize' counter narratives, which create a figure/ground relationship in an otherwise super complex dynamic, and this creates obstacles for the dynamic sustaining narratives. If you have ever heard someone accused of "black and white thinking," they are being accused of taking their ball and going home by attempting to end a dynamic power game by resolving it to a fact or constraint.

Nobody goes meta- when they are playing the game. You can't narrate and speculate about it and win it at the same time. I often tell people we only call it politics when we're losing, and these are all related to this idea of reasoning about people and power as an outsider, hence conspiracy theories are self-defining as powerless.

If you use a theory about others' motivations and incentives to explain their behavior and situate yourself outside of that dynamic, you're listening to commentators instead of getting into the game and playing.

>I've often thought the crappy conspiracy theories with coarse and cartoonish explanations get actively promoted to discourage, discredit and isolate people who reason about real incentives and realpolitik.

yes, this has been my experience. as you said, it's an effective tactic to defuse genuine threats to the narrative as being "unreasonable" or "not serious".

i have a hunch that learning to refrain from criticism of insiders is actually the biggest "lesson" taught at the universities and organizations that are traditional centers of elite power. it's part of the pedigree.

It's a version of "the Fox and the Hedgehog," parable everyone reads, where foxes know many smaller things and hedgehogs know one big one.

It's not explicit, but the "one big thing" the hedgehogs know effectively reduces to a triad of, "there is no truth only power," "trust and defend the system because you are it now, and it takes care of the people who support it" and, "protect insiders or be an ousider."

The strategies for foxes and hedgehogs are different. If you are a fox and know this about hedgehogs, you can lever them against variations of these axioms. If you are a hedgehog, you can usually succeed by betting foxes don't get traction no matter how spectacular their knowledge and displays.

The idea is if you practice these things, you're going to be lucky and stuff is going to work out. If you don't, you're the sucker at the table and you'll be preoccupied by conspiracy theories.

If you know this, some Bayeseanism, and some simple actuarial models, with practice you can play at a pretty high level. There are other great books on this like Pfeffer's "Power" (https://www.amazon.com/Power-Some-People-Have-Others/dp/0061...) that describe the game once you have those rules.

May the odds be ever in your favor!

> the idea that conspiracies themselves are [..] a typology through which people who lack definite or satisfactory narratives as citizens explain to themselves [..]

I really like this idea. To me it means that conspiracy theories create modern day mythology. Ancient people used myths to explain to themselves things they either didn't understand or feared. I've always wondered how did they come with these outrageous ideas but it now makes sense.

The procedure to invent a conspiracy is quite simple.

Write down all the topics which "seem important" right now.

Eg., China, USA, Trump, Biden, AI, Virus, etc.

(Where do these terms come from? Mostly the news, conversation. But each person will produce a different list.)

Now all you have to do is connect all of them. This is, in reality, not possible. So one has to dispense with every greater "obvious truths" in order to make the connection work.

It is in this attempt to rationalise a free association that we get such mythologies.

It is the heart of how schizophrenics think. Psychosis is the mistaking of importance and connection in one's perceptions. And so it is quite common to find schizophrenia in the conspiracy theory population.

However if you havent been taught to be sceptical of yourself, etc., its a fairly "natural" way to think.

Similarly, if one hasn't been taught how to think relatively and absolutely simultaneously and at all times, the world can look very simple, like schizophrenics are prone to cognitive errors but normies are not. This is just one example from a very long list.

Well I'm sad that I missed this conversation, but I'm thankful for all the people here who actually gave some very nuanced looks at the topic. This should give me a great start to understanding how to approach the topic on HN in the future. As for the article, I think it's interesting but doesn't go far enough, getting wrapped up in the meta too much for my tastes, but I understand why that approach is the one Snowden wanted to take.

So is the NSA spying on Tucker Carlson?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57663136

The NSA did not said "No we are not spying on you." which would have been the best and easiest way to refute Tucker.

> It took years — eight years and counting in exile — for me to realize that I was missing the point: we talk about conspiracy theories in order to avoid talking about conspiracy practices, which are often too daunting, too threatening, too total.

I disagree. People (at least, some people) are just naturally drawn to mysteries. Imaginary things aren't interesting despite the lack of evidence for them, they're interesting because of the lack of evidence. Everyone likes a good mystery.

Look at bigfoot. It's pretty much described as a great ape. It's described as being large, and being a little more bipedal than most apes, but there's no more interesting than a gorilla. I suppose it's a little interesting that an old world ape found its way to America (perhaps a descendent of the Yeti that travelled across through the arctic?), but there's similar interest in mysterious apes in most of the world.

Somehow, a lot of people are more interested in imaginary apes than real apes. Here's a quote about Bigfoot I found on Wikipedia:

> "Well now you will be amazed when I tell you that I'm sure that they exist."[162] She later added, chuckling, "Well, I'm a romantic, so I always wanted them to exist", and finally, "You know, why isn't there a body? I can't answer that, and maybe they don't exist, but I want them to."[163] In 2012, when asked again by the Huffington Post, Goodall said "I'm fascinated and would actually love them to exist," adding, "Of course, it's strange that there has never been a single authentic hide or hair of the Bigfoot, but I've read all the accounts."[164]

This is Jane Goodall, who is probably the best known primatologist of all time, not some conspiracy theorist. If Jane Goodall can be impressed by an ape simply because it's so mysterious (because it doesn't exist), this says a lot about the allure of a mystery.

But back to the main point - why is it that open conspiracies are less scary? I think it's fairly rational to be less worried at a visible threat, since a lack of widespread opposition shows that it's not taken to be a serious threat by the rest of the population. If the President announces that electronic communications are routinely being monitored, then that seems pretty safe. There's no serious opposition to it, so people must not care too much, so it's reasonable to assume it's not a great danger. On the other hand, if there was only a conspiracy theory, then you could assume that the lack of serious opposition was due to a lack of knowledge of the conspiracy.

If (picking something outlandish) Bill Gates announced that he was implanting everyone with micro-chips to extend 5G networks and help the police track criminals, a lot of people would grumble, but I doubt there would be a serious opposition to it, and people would feel reassured that this means it's not a serious issue.

How serious is mass surveillance, really? I certainly understand some people strongly objecting, but it's not like I do much more than use a VPN (which might be compromised anyway).

To respond to your last question: I think the issue is that it puts a lot of power in the hands of whomever is controlling then surveillance system.

This can be bad because of rogue operators (creep spying on women, blackmail, spionage to get info for insider trading, data leaks, etc etc)

But even if you have some 'perfect system to prevent unauthorized use', and a 'perfect system to determine authorisation' (both of which are highly theoretical) the issue remains.

For you may agree with whomever controls the surveillance system currently ('the state'), but that may change.

If Donald Trump had won a second term, or successfuly stolen it, and the US was more and more transformed.. would you still be OK with the state having that capability? Same argument but in reverse with Sanders if you're a republican.

To give a concrete historical example: during the 1930's there was a census in the Netherlands. All the law abiding citizens gently filled in a form, stating the religion of their family. After all, no harm for the government to know all that, right?

Unfortunately 10 years later that government was controlled by Nazi Germany. And they knew exactly where to find the jews.

Result: 95% of Dutch Jewish citizens died during WW II. For reference, in France, where even today the state has a less detailed and precise administration, this number is 25%.

Conspiracy theories are a placebo effect for control. I can't control the world but I can control what I want to believe about the world and that helps me feel like I'm in control.

My pet theory is that Snowden's disclosure is both a bit of CIA/NSA sibling rivalry and a misinformation campaign to scare people into thinking that the NSA has far more surveillance capabilities than it really does. The goals being to frighten people into inaction and to herd them onto platforms these entities can monitor (TOR & ANOM come to mind).

That Snowden is able to rake in book and movie deals while 'on the run' makes me doubt that anybody is actually interested in catching him.

Are those huge NSA data centers in Utah also just for the show, then?

No, but I think it's unlikely that anybody, including the NSA, can collect, index, catalog and parse meaning out of hundreds of GB _per second_ (I'm using Statista numbers for global IP traffic). I would be skeptical that it's even physically possible with any amount of hardware in existence. If you really want a concentrated haul of the most interesting stuff, then I would say that platforms which openly market themselves as safe venues for criminals and dissidents would be strong candidates. You would still have extraordinary data warehousing needs just for that limited subset of traffic.

I don't think they can parse all of it in real time, but storing it with basic metadata (like IP addresses) is another matter. Then it can be selectively extracted and parsed when needed.

> unlikely that anybody, including the NSA, can collect, index, catalog and parse meaning out of hundreds of GB _per second

No, it's actually very likely. I've noticed people often make this argument as if it is obvious that the data that is being processed is somehow too large to handle. But they misunderstand the ways this can be done and underestimate current technological capabilities.

One big switch in single datacenter can handle all traffic of that datacenter, hundreds of GB/s. Make a special one with custom FPGA/cpus and in addition to switching, it can do decrypting, parsing, matching and filtering the way you like, hundreds of GB per second, real-time. This is a highly paralelizable job and the hardware is made to exploit that.

The resulting stream of interesting data is probably much thinner and can be easily sent to some central location, realtime. The rest can be stored locally and sent on demand.

I can see how hardware handling of switching, some filtering and maybe stripping TLS is feasible. Since you're knowledgeable of the subject, how would you index that information for future retrieval, which could be anything in the set of all digital representations of information in all possible languages and encodings? How would you determine what information is important?

packet metadata, intercept location and timestamp, will form the index.

You are not incorrect about that hardware.

Splice off fibre optics, copy packets, localised hardware processes like you say, directs to data center for future processing or active surveillance or active legal interception, etc.

Which part is incorrect?

So Emmanuel Goldstein basically?

No, Snowden is portrayed as a hero. Emmanual Goldstein is "whiteness".

> Or to put it another way, conspiracy practices — the methods by which true conspiracies such as gerrymandering, or the debt industry, or mass surveillance are realized — are almost always overshadowed by conspiracy theorie

There's a conspiracy theory about how Q Annon was actually a disinformation campaign crafted against Trump supporters and /pol/acks (you the kind I'm talking about). That's actually something I think is possible although it's all conjecture.

I love how they illustrated "conspiracy" with the picture of Trump. Trump derangement syndrome much? Anyway, most of Trump's statements previously labelled by leftist media as "conspiracy" turned out to be... true.

By the way, program named ECHELON didn't go anywhere, it got legalized and civilized under the name of Five Eyes global SIGINT alliance. And don't let "five" to fool you, there more like 15 countries are just fine with mass surveillance with the generous help from No Such Agency. Don't get me wrong, I'm okay with improving public safety and stuff but they've been so busy spying on citizens so managed to overlook, for example, rather trivial and almost decade-old open sesame in SolarWinds.

Corporations like Facebook and Google do far more surveillance of any citizen than the government does. Surveillance capitalism. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/03/harvard-profe...

Russia surveilles its citizens mostly any way it wants. The US government has more controls (as long as the US remains a democracy.) The Church Committee actually made real reforms.

And sadly, everything that Snowden writes now is approved by the Russian intelligence services. You can decide how that influences what you think of his writing.

If it is done in the open, it is by definition not a conspiracy.

You’ve never heard of an “open secret”?

The conspiracy film by Gabe "lawsuit" Hoffman? I think it was more of a projectionary film. That guy is a creep.

The act itself can be open but the true motive secret. Snowden's example of gerrymandering shows what he means, it's a practice ostensibly to balance voting districts but there is clearly a conspiracy to use it for political gain.

but is it not 'conspiring' ?

it's not a 'secret conspiracy' sure, but it is a 'product of conspiring'; and x-acy is a linguistic construct for expressing 'product of x'

Define “in the open”.

Through lens of (social) media and through our own cognitive biases the idea of anything being done “in the open” seems more like self delusion.

I think it may be helpful to evaluate the extent to which things have gravity, or create their own weather.

Some things can be hard to make sense of if your perspective is either too local, or too global.

I found the post interesting, but it also felt like he isn't seeing (or is perhaps not naming...) the forces that structure this corner of the universe?

"I'll begin by offering a fundamental proposition: namely, that to believe in any conspiracy, whether true or false, is to believe in a system or sector run not by popular consent but by an elite, acting in its own self-interest."

This definition of "conspiracy" does not match the dictionary definition of the word "conspiracy". There is nothing about "system[s], sector[s], popular consent, elite or self-interest."

The following definition is provided by the authors of The Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

220 dict.dict.org dictd 1.12.1/rf on Linux 4.19.0-10-amd64 <auth.mime> <46338037.19753.1625025739@dict.dict.org> 150 27 definitions retrieved 151 "Conspiracy" gcide "The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48" Conspiracy \Conspir"acy\, n.; pl. {Conspiracies}. [See {Conspiration}.]

   1. A combination of people for an evil purpose; an agreement,
      between two or more persons, to commit a crime in concert,
      as treason; a plot.

   2. A concurence or general tendency, as of circumstances, to
      one event, as if by agreement.

   3. (Law) An agreement, manifesting itself in words or deeds,
      by which two or more persons confederate to do an unlawful
      act, or to use unlawful to do an act which is lawful;
      confederacy.

Snowden’s description matches the definition you provide. The “two or more persons” is the “system”.

Missing: sector, popular consent, self-interest, elite

Further, the dictionary definition of "system" does not match the one you provide. Groups of people are not "systems".

220 dict.dict.org dictd 1.12.1/rf on Linux 4.19.0-10-amd64 <auth.mime> <46521789.8886.1625096684@dict.dict.org>

150 84 definitions retrieved

151 "System" gcide "The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48"

System \Sys"tem\, n. [L. systema, Gr. ?, fr. ? to place together; sy`n with + ? to place: cf. F. syst[`e]me. See {Stand}.]

   1. An assemblage of objects arranged in regular
      subordination, or after some distinct method, usually
      logical or scientific; a complete whole of objects related
      by some common law, principle, or end; a complete
      exhibition of essential principles or facts, arranged in a
      rational dependence or connection; a regular union of
      principles or parts forming one entire thing; as, a system
      of philosophy; a system of government; a system of
      divinity; a system of botany or chemistry; a military
      system; the solar system.
      [1913 Webster]

            The best way to learn any science, is to begin with
            a regular system, or a short and plain scheme of
            that science well drawn up into a narrow compass.
                                                  --I. Watts.
      [1913 Webster]

   2. Hence, the whole scheme of created things regarded as
      forming one complete plan of whole; the universe. "The
      great system of the world." --Boyle.
      [1913 Webster]

   3. Regular method or order; formal arrangement; plan; as, to
      have a system in one's business.
      [1913 Webster]

   4. (Mus.) The collection of staves which form a full score.
      See {Score}, n.
      [1913 Webster]

   5. (Biol.) An assemblage of parts or organs, either in animal
      or plant, essential to the performance of some particular
      function or functions which as a rule are of greater
      complexity than those manifested by a single organ; as,
      the capillary system, the muscular system, the digestive
      system, etc.; hence, the whole body as a functional unity.
      [1913 Webster]

   6. (Zool.) One of the stellate or irregular clusters of
      intimately united zooids which are imbedded in, or
      scattered over, the surface of the common tissue of many
      compound ascidians.
      [1913 Webster]

   {Block system}, {Conservative system}, etc. See under
      {Block}, {Conservative}, etc.
      [1913 Webster] Systematic
.

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