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Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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