Thought-Terminating Cliché
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
At the beginning, I really took it at face value, and patiently waited until I was X. Older. In a relationship. Having my own business.
I was very naive, I though people shared experience and knew something about life. Every time I ended up being disappointed when reaching the point X actually prove the other side was full of crap.
I didn't understand that it was only a way to stop the conversation. It had nothing to do with logic, it's a matter of saving face, getting out of a boring interaction, or about power.
A lot of human interactions are like that: if you think people means what they say, you are misunderstanding the communication. I used to take so many things literally, I though people chose their words for their dictionary sense. Turns out only a small part of communication is actually about the literal sense of words, like technical documentation or giving direction to reach the bakery, which I'm good at.
It's also a fact that is obvious to most humans, although they are mostly oblivious to their own fluency, since it's as transparent as walking to them. People on the autistic spectrum, however, need to figure it out.
But don't worry, you'll understand it all when you will be Z.
There are a lot of times when I was told "you'll understand when you're older/more experienced/whatever" and... yeah, they were right.
Usually "older" was a proxy for something like "had X and Y specific experiences and N years to develop perspective".
It probably depends on who is saying it and why. I wouldn't go through life assuming that it's always bad; it might just clumsy.
A friend recently observed that he had more in common with people in his opposite political tribe than he did with ostensible centerists, and he said it was because the people on the other team also believed something, where the ones in the middle were in-effect, nihilists, or believing nothing. I mention it because when I thought of nihilisim, I always interpreted it as an active kind of anti-belief, or against all belief, instead of a bland passivity, detached from a moral anchor or foundation. For this kind of nihilist, the thought-terminating cliché is the necessary boundary of their ontology about the world. It's the person saying, "it is what it is," as they do horrible things. If you have ever spent time in bureaucracies, it is easy to see how a bunch of people trained to accept small injustices passively can be mobilized into an atrocity machine. They're "de-moralized," which we misuse to describe frustrated efforts, when what it means is that by lacking roots to beliefs and replacing them with this thought-termination, they do not exercise moral agency. They're just following orders.
I've concluded the clichés are worse than thought terminating, they are jingoistic slogans of nihilism people repeat to justify and release themselves from moral agency. All this is to say, it's an important concept. Thought-terminating clichés are the mental reference points for the origins of what we understand now as the banality of evil.
One other thing I see it used for is to divert from negative topics people are tired of re-hashing. Talking about drought in a farm town gets pretty tiresome as the months go on, that's when you start getting the "it is what it is" statements. They care really, they just gain nothing from talking about it constantly.
People sometimes learn of Kahneman's system 1 and system 2 thinking and decide it's a failure to ever use system 1. No! System 1 is used for most of our day, to free us up for the decisions that really matter. An underrated aspect of the art of making decisions is deciding which decisions to make deliberately.
there is research into this? how did we get from "zomg conspiracy" to "banality of evil"?
"[Eichmann] was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché," and he used these clichés as a mental defense mechanism to avoid thinking about what he was doing for the Nazi Party."
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
-- Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"
> When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"
Keep this in the back of your head when you hear some SV gurus speak, and see what you can notice.
it's amazing how this phrase will shut down critical thought in otherwise smart folks
† A term that now exists.
Hard to think of an example that isn't.
It doesn't appear to be a common thought terminator, certainly not on the level of "conspiracy theory", the application of which we have seen, in both extreme and humorous terms, with respect to the covid lab-leak hypothesis, for example.
FYI, by now exists, parent means that he just made it up. I wasn't sure, but according to Google, the only result for this term is this post.
Awesome! Going to try and spread it :)
If OTOH I respond, "Ah, it is what it is", I'm disagreeing that we should do X but without taking any position on Y or explaining why I disagree. That's what TFA is discussing - ways to weasel out of a discussion without being pinned down to a position or an argument.
What you're talking about is actually the cliché of a "conspiracy theory".
A lot of things that are called like that aren't anything one could call "a theory" at all. The point is: Any random BS claim isn't a conspiracy theory.
A conspiracy theory is nothing more than speculating that some parties are working or worked together in secret (conspired) to achieve something. That's all. Such a theory can usually be falsified. (At least in theory).
But there is this framing that "conspiracy theory" means some arbitrary BS. That's actually why labeling something as "conspiracy theory" immediately shouts down critical thought in a lot of folks. Just call something "conspiracy theory" and the cliché kicks in and people will dismiss that something as BS.
By the way: The English version of the Wikipedia disagrees. But only the English version. I've also looked at Boarisch, Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, Nederlands, Polski, Русский. Only the English version adds that a conspiracy theory "is an explanation for an event or situation […] when other explanations are more probable. The term has a negative connotation, implying that the appeal to a conspiracy is based on prejudice or insufficient evidence." Should we proceed to construct a conspiracy theory form that observation? Someone got obviously their framing into Wikipedia!
Anytime you have an event or situation upon which origin or cause people have varied takes, some explanations might seem more probable than others. That doesn't make the others "conspiracy theories", it just makes them less probable possibilities. It's sometimes even used when the true probabilities aren't even known.
So it's falsifiable. Otherwise you couldn't ever present any evidence.
Whether someone is willing to believe in some evidence shown doesn't change anything about the fallibility property.
The context of conspiracy theories is different. It's emotional. Goalposts get shifted, evidence is made up, no rational discourse possible.
So they cannot be falsified.
I try one more time:
Your definition of conspiracy theory is simply wrong. You're not talking about conspiracy theories, you're talking about the cliché of a "conspiracy theory". You're repeating the made up framing.
Please look up the definition in Wikipedia. Any language version besides the English one supports what I've written a few comments above, and disagrees with what you're saying.
Ah, a prescriptivist, I see. Regardless of what you think is the "correct" meaning of conspiracy theory, it's in widespread use with a different meaning, what you call a "cliche". Whether you accept this or not doesn't make this usage less real; it just might make your conversations with other people harder.
PS: I speak Spanish and regardless of what Wikipedia says, the common usage of "teoría conspirativa" is the same as what you describe as a cliché.
What you describe as "common" is a framing. Someone tries to blur the distinction between "some random BS" (like alien abductions, flat earth, whatever) and proper theories that suspect some conspiracy. The goal is likely to push any conspiracy theories into the space of random BS so that they can be dismissed easily without further discussion.
That's exactly the topic we're talking about here: "Conspiracy theory" is made into a thought-terminating cliché.
It's not my burden to explain how. I'm not even sure why or how: it just is a widespread usage. I'm telling you it's also the widespread usage in my native language, and your answer seems to be "but Wikipedia!" -- go figure.
> That's exactly the topic we're talking about here: "Conspiracy theory" is made into a thought-terminating cliché.
I understand that's the gist of your argument. I'm just saying it's also a convenient defense deployed by people who engage in conspiracy theories, a sister defense of the old "you're narrow minded!". If something is a conspiracy theory, it's not a TTC to call it one.
That's a fair point.
Actually that's a good question!
I've suggested an explanation already.
>> Someone tries to blur the distinction between "some random BS" (like alien abductions, flat earth, whatever) and proper theories that suspect some conspiracy. The goal is likely to push any conspiracy theories into the space of random BS so that they can be dismissed easily without further discussion.
It's also notable that the German version of the Wikipedia proposes two distinct terms to resolve the ambiguity in the usage of the more and more blurred term "conspiracy theory": "conspiracy hypotheses" and "conspiracy myths". But I wouldn't call those terms common in any sense… (Indeed, as a native speaker I've never heard of those).
It would make discussion more easy. The term "conspiracy theory" may in fact be ambiguous to some folks. The other terms aren't. Only that almost nobody uses them (or I just don't know, as I'm avoiding most of the main stream media because of the constant bombardment with propaganda BS).
Rather it is whether the term "conspiracy theory" can be introduced into a conversation and terminate thinking.
"Someone called my rant a conspiracy theory, therefore I'm on to something!"
So it must be treated as "conspiracy", and not critical thought, according to you?
There can be no evidence yet, it becomes a problem when unfalsifiability makes evidence irrelevant.
Alice: Trump won Georgia, but the Dominion voting machines flipped it. Look at how many votes came in for Biden late at night.
Bob: It took a long time to finish counting the mail in ballots, and precincts report their results in large batches. Anyway, there was a hand recount of all the paper ballots that were scanned by the machines. If the machines had flipped votes, the paper ballots would still show the originals.
Alice: Then the hand recount was faked.
Bob: But observers from both parties were present for the recount. By this time the machine flip theory was widespread, so the Republican observers would be on high alert to make sure the recount is right.
Alice: Those might not be real Republicans. Like the Secretary of State, they are probably RINOs. Plus the paper ballots themselves were fraudulent. The signatures were faked.
Bob: So do you still think the Dominion machines did something wrong, or did they accurately scan the fraudulent paper ballots? Anyway, the state bureau of investigation did a signature audit in Cobb county and found no intentional fraud and only a couple of mistakes where somebody signed for their partner or something.
Alice: The GBI is in on it. The fraud was really in Fulton county, so that's where they should've done the signature audit. Didn't you see that batch of secret ballots they hid under a table and pulled out when nobody was looking?
Bob: The security camera footage shows that the ballots from under the table are the same ones that were opened from envelopes while the observers were watching. They were just the next batch waiting to be scanned, nothing abnormal about them. The state released the whole footage online, including the parts Trump's lawyers conveniently skipped past.
Alice: I know it was stolen. The details of how they did it might never come out, but I can tell Trump really won.
I'm guessing you're not a scientist.
And the last entry in Talk is about how it was removed.
There seems to be a reframing of the term "conspiracy theory" going on right now. I've noticed also something odd:
Contrast this with "best practices", which most people seem afraid to argue against for fear of being singled out as bad developers.
> I'm just saying.
> No need to get defensive.
> I never said I didn't like it.
Let's table it.
Anyway.
So... how about them Yankees?
Edit: to expand on that, "calories in, calories out" is a classic motte and bailey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy). Here the motte is "it's easy for anyone to lose weight, just input a few numbers in a few apps". The bailey is "calories in, calories out is scientifically true". I've never seen advocates of calories in, calories out offering a more precise way to measure the consumption of calories than a TDEE calculator that you can find online, where you usually input your weight, height, age and sex. The "calories in" part is easier to deal with, as if you measure everything you put in your mouth, you have the upper bound of the calories you can absorb. Still, the calories out are hard to measure reliably, especially in people that already have a slower metabolism than others (which makes it easier for them to gain weight in the first place).
There's also the distinction that "calorie intake" is often meant as "what you put into your mouth" but is actually "what you actually absorb".
That, in the mouth of some super-aggressive willpower, self-help, libertarian, laissez faire entrepreneur type, of course becomes an attack on weakness, but everything out of their mouths is going to stink of social darwinism. But I think it contains hope - it's not a curse or a punishment, it's a physical process.
You don't have to, precise calorie counting is a strawman argument against CICO. All the fat people I've ever known, which is most of my family and many of my friends, all eat way too much. I ate too much too, ever since I was a kid. Huge portion sizes and constantly grazing throughout the day without set meal times were the norm for me and those around me. After hearing CICO repeated often, I recognized these behaviors in myself and corrected them. I didn't need to count calories for any of it. Where I would once buy a pizza and devour it over the course of an evening, I now save half for lunch the next day. Anybody can do that if they choose to. By eating less, I've lost about 75 lbs in 5 years.
> precise calorie counting is a strawman argument against CICO
Precise calorie counting is what most people talking about CICO promote though. And not to "get an intuition for how much calories are in food", what you hear most often is "calculate your TDEE, eat 500 calories under".
There are all kinds of coping mechanisms people use to excuse themselves and stay fat. "I don't eat more than normal, I'm just a genetic anomaly who absorbs more nutrients from food than everybody else.." Well assuming that wasn't BS, the answer is still to eat less. Or "CICO is just a thought terminating cliche"; if I had fallen for that BS, I'd still be fat. I'm glad I saw through those lies.
Do you have trouble falling asleep while hungry?
Is it going to explain 20 pounds of bodyfat? Absolutely not. But "calories in, calories out" isn't backed up by the science.
Now, you can get more specific than that and say "well this medical condition makes you more hungry" or "this medical condition means you can't get as much energy as you should from eating". But fundamentally, a condition like say PCOS isn't magic. It doesn't make you absorb food better, otherwise we would have already evolved to use that absorption process.
Having said all that: yes, no two people are exactly the same, we're not bunsen burners, etc. But the reason you're[1] fat is because you eat too much.
[1]: general you, not you specifically
While I don't know about the first half of this sentence (though I have my suspicions!) it's pretty obvious the second half is false. You're saying that we all have to process food identically because evolution has selected the optimal result in humans. But evolution does not product perfectly consistent results. In fact it relies on producing inconsistent results! Because sometimes small flaws turn out to actually be a benefit and get selected, that's how evolation works. So the fact that humans are a result of evolution does not prevent different people from having different abilities to absorb nutrients.
> But the reason you're[1] fat is because you eat too much.
You went to the trouble of mentioning CICO and then totally forgot about CO! Obviously you could extend this sentence to "... and/or you don't do enough exercise" but, similar to the previous point, there are likely to naturally be variation in calorie outputs. In fact "running hot" might seem like a weakness but could be a perfectly valid evolutionary strategy, presuming it gave some other benefit (like sharper mind or stronger body, better for obtaining more food). It's quite possible for both strategies to be baked into one set of genes, perhaps selected by activity in childhood.
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It's self evident that CICO is true. It's just completely worthless for providing any insight. Very much a thought-terminating cliché as originally described.
This is technically true but a but specious. Obviously you shouldn't eat as much as Michael Phelps if you don't train like Michael Phelps. But it's probably a lot more actionable for you to eat fewer calories than for you to start training like an Olympic athlete.
It's really not. As I said above, people are not identical. Yes, evolution doesn't produce perfectly consistent results. However, absorbing nutrients is the direct foundation for the only thing that matters in the process of evolution: reproduction. You can't reproduce if you die from lack of nutrients. Given how much of humanity's existence has been staving off starvation and famine, any improvements would be heavily selected for, and would quickly spread.
As an extreme example, if you could survive on an apple per day, the next famine that rolled around would leave you pretty free to repopulate with your superdigestive genes, since most everyone else would be dead.
> You went to the trouble of mentioning CICO and then totally forgot about CO!
I don't really understand the point you're trying to make in this paragraph. Even if some people "run hot" or they have some magic gut that lets them survive on an apple per day or whatever, it's still a fundamental truth that if they're fat, they're eating too much. Yes, someone can exercise more or whatever to change their output, but the reason they're currently fat is because they're currently eating too much.
> It's self evident that CICO is true. It's just completely worthless for providing any insight. Very much a thought-terminating cliché as originally described.
Yes, no, and no. As described above, there really are people that think "I eat just an apple a day and I can't lose weight!". CICO is a baseline for saying "no, that's impossible". It's not a thought-terminating cliché, it's making sure that everybody is on the same page of accepting basic science.
If that was true, shouldn't we have evolved to hibernate at some point?
> You can't reproduce if you die from lack of nutrients.
You also can't reproduce if you can't run fast when a wolf is hunting you. Those muscles are going to take some energy even while not running away from a wolf. I think you're trying to reduce evolution and reproduction to a single variable, which is a mistake.
I dunno, I think you might be surprised by how many people genuinely do not seem to understand it. It's valuable to them if they are willing to listen, problem is a lot of the time they really aren't, hence their problem.
This is itself a thought terminating cliche. Has anyone actually checked?
Within a pretty tight margin, calories in minus calories out DOES predict weight gain. The real question is why someone feels the need to eat more calories than they burn even when they already have ample stores of calories, and what they or others can do to change this. And THAT is a much more interesting question.
Thermic effect of food, for instance, seems to be the phenomenon where the metabolism increases after a meal. Metabolism is calories-out. So thermic effect of food isn't a refutation of CICO, just a complication. CICO is still the primary mechanism of weight control.
The main actual counterexample to CICO is water retention.
You are correct that water weight can cause spikes in weight measurement, but this is just a contributor to weight as a noisy measurement, not an example that it is not helpful.
Anecdotally, I've seen tons of people fight through different fad diets with no success. They spend tons of time talking about ways to trick their metabolisms, naturalistic arguments about what to eat and not eat, etc. Perhaps they would be more successful if they stopped over-thinking and focussed purely on reducing their portion sizes and increasing their exercise. Again anecdotally, it seems like usually exercise is emphasized along with diet at first, but quickly gets dropped. Within a couple weeks, the fad diet is forgotten as well.
Additionally, from the link:
> Bennett explains that exceptions are made to the use of phrases, that would otherwise be considered thought-terminating if they are used in addition to evidence or strong claims.
I'm happy to continue to discuss this with you, but I would ask that you please refrain from name calling.
Weight loss methods include a lot of pseudo science and I think it's important to keep in mind that whatever low fat or low carb or paleo diet you try is ultimately only going to succeed if you lower your calorie intake or raise your calorie expenditure.
Obviously there are some exceptions to that rule if you aren't accounting for changes in calorie absorption or bmr, but everything I've seen or read seems to show that those variations are miniscule.
(Yes, weight loss is substantially through exhaled CO2)
As a diet, you could plan out what you want to weigh over time, and then before each meal calculate how far below that goal you are and limit your consumption to the difference.
Sadly that's not particularly applicable to linear time-based human conversation, and people exploit that in meetings and other environments to sidetrack, limit and shut down discussion (while it's also true that some tangents are introduced to achieve similar ends).
Are there good strategies to 'roll back' while maintaining composure and context during important conversations? Or is it necessary to move the conversations to other (threaded, for example) mediums?
And personally I think that if it's clear someone is interfering then it may be necessary and advisable to call them out on it depending on the urgency. But it's not a minor issue. Something like that can absolutely kill a project or your career.
My belief is that they only way to really be free of that is to have the ability to fire people who do too much politicking or whatever. Such as being the boss.
Depending on the circumstances, it might be possible to bring up the issue later via email or a group chat, saying something like "One idea from the meeting which I think wasn't fully explored was...".
For in-person meetings, though, I think that we can probably learn a lot from the rules of order used in places like parliaments and courts, where discussions are deliberately arranged to be turn-based, with an ostensibly neutral party (the speaker or the judge) who guides proceedings but isn't an active participant in the flow of dialogue.
What are some thought-terminating clichés in the software industry? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27012428
and earlier only a year ago a few discussions:
"no, I'm thinking the right amount"
It may be true, but it does not actually address the question. The question is, are they more violent than those who are not mentally ill?
If your thought bus isn't terminated, you will get unwanted reflection.
Also, we don't count posts as dupes if the previous post didn't get significant attention. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
It works like this:
A. You believe X.
B. A crazy person also believes/believed X.
C. Since you believe X and a crazy person also believed X, you are a crazy person.
D. Optionally: I won't consider your argument unless you tell me why being a crazy person is ok. Why do you support doing crazy people things like being a serial killer?
Example:
A. You are against cigarette smoking.
B. The Nazis were also against cigarette smoking[2].
C. Therefore you are a Nazi.
D. Optionally: I won't consider your argument unless you tell me why being a Nazi is ok. Why do you support anti-semitism?
The latest updated version of this is: What you believe is arbitrarily labeled a conspiracy theory. People that believe in conspiracy theories believe the earth is flat. Why do you believe the earth is flat?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy#Guilt_by_a...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/251213.The_Nazi_War_on_C...
A. The mainstream media, M, is biased and sometimes delivers incomplete or inaccurate information. They tell $mainstream_story.
B. Alternative source, A, rejects $mainstream_story and says that actually, $alternative_story is the truth.
C. Any data M points to to debunk $alternative_story and support $mainstream_story is assumed to be fake or manipulated, because M lies.
D. There is no need to apply the same skepticism to A and their arguments, because by going against M, they have already demonstrated that they are "good guys".
This is more a form of spam filtering; given finite intellectual effort, strangers who talk about certain subjects get ruled out of consideration. Just as sending a lot of mail about Cialis will get your IP on a list.
For example, the ad hominem fallacy, where we might trust a doctor just because they are a doctor. Or when we might avoid a restaurant just because of popular opinion (bandwagon fallacy). It's strange that people would seek out these fancy words when we can just say credibility.
Similarly, we culturally expect that judges are not receiving re-election funds from the parties that appear before their court, and not because money necessarily damages their judgment, but rather for the sake of judicial credibility.
The effective judgment of credibility is not as simple as logic.
That's not an ad hominem fallacy. At worst it's an argument from authority. Ad hominem is something like: the person advancing this argument has done something bad, therefore the argument they are advancing must be false (or the converse -- the person advancing this argument has done something good, therefore the argument they are advancing must be true).
An argument-from-authority fallacy is a kind of ad hominem, usually employed with respect to some third party not involved in the dispute: "This person has a credential, and they say X, therefore X must be true." The problem is that this might not be a fallacy depending on the specific credential and the value of X. If someone is a doctor, then what they have to say about medicine is actually more likely to be true than someone who is not, all else being equal. Asking your doctor for advice on how to fix your car, on the other hand, is something you probably ought to avoid, unless your doctor also happens to be into cars.
The matter of a judge also brings up an interesting problem. The fact that a judge has financial entanglements does not preclude them from quality legal reasoning, but it does diminish their moral credibility. Would anyone say that it is an ad hominem attack to sour on a judge because of mere financial entanglement? That the legal profession would develop ethical consensus on this matter means they also believe that credibility is an essential ingredient to legal practice, and not mere truthfulness.
And on the matter of logic, that a doctor is likely to be truthful is as logical as telling a mathematician that a famous conjecture is likely true; more accurately, these are both arguments of empiricism. This is why I see insistence on terminology like "logical fallacy" to be the habit of those who enjoy intellectual ornamentation.
However, the idea of a logical fallacy is one can take an argument apart and out it back together and identify bad arguments without relying on an authority figure's arbitrary pronouncements. If one reads a restaurant review and the reviewer said they didn't like the restaurant because some hated person said they liked the food there, we can easily conclude that this is the association fallacy at work and disregard that review. If we see 1000 1 star reviews because A Bad Person said he liked the food there, and we believe it, we are falling for the bandwagon effect fallacy, by a bunch of people who believed the association fallacy.
I find there's an over-obsession with logic in some discussions too; as in, ancient-greek-style modus ponens stuff. To me, that's not particularly interesting when it comes to the real world[1]; after all, logically-speaking we could just be a brain in a jar, or whatever.
An argument being "logical" (as in, not self-contradicting) is not enough to make it credible; it's just a very low bar, which lets us dismiss the most nonsensical claims quickly. Arguments which cross the "logical" bar should also align with empirical evidence, have a likelihood that's at least comparable to alternative explanations, etc.
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I don't think "conspiracy theory" has quite become a thought-terminating cliche yet. It can usefully describe a common failure-mode in thinking.
In particular, conspiracy theories become less and less likely as they're inspected closer and closer; e.g. requiring even more people to be "in on it" (making it less likely to be kept secret), requiring ever-more elaborate epicycles to explain-away observations/experiments/events, etc. They can't be disproved, but who cares? That's not a good enough reason, on its own, to affect anything.
Another legitimate use of the phrase "conspiracy theory" is a particular case of "affirming the consequent" (i.e. getting implications the wrong way around). For example "if X is true, Y would make so much sense", where X is the "conspiracy" and Y is some well-known/self-evident fact about the world. This might be true, but the mistake is to treat Y as proof of X: this would give us "if X is true, Y would make so much sense, so X is true", which is an elaborate way of saying 'if X is true, X is true'. Here Y isn't actually proof of anything, it's just a distraction.[2]
[1] In artificial contexts, like mathematics and programming, I find logic to be fascinating and rich; e.g. I spent a lot of time studying topics like type theory and co-induction at grad school!
[2] The "logical fallacy" here is assuming (X -> Y) -> (Y -> X)
PS: From a bayesian perspective, 'if X were true, Y would make so much sense' is evidence for X. It's not proof, but it makes X more likely (essentially by ruling-out the potential for Y to disprove X). However, (a) the change in likelihood depends on the prior probability, if X were wildly unlikely then such weak, indirect evidence cannot make up for that; and (b) this sort of nuance of probabilities is negligible compared to the wild chains of "logic" spewed by the conspiracy theorists I know.