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Comment by somethingAlex | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

>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.

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

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

You may be asking the wrong people.

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

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.

> 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.

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