Study conspiracy theories with compassion
nature.com
nature.com
What's changed my mind is realizing how often things that might be labeled as conspiracy theory actually happen. Even if something didn't happen, many of the fears are actually well grounded and labeling them as such in my opinion reflects a certain amount of lack of empathy on the part of the labeler.
I'm not saying certain beliefs aren't absurd or physically implausible etc. But if they are plausible they're often coming from somewhere reasonable. Widespread conspiracy theories tell you that a large segment of the population doesn't trust something, and the appropriate response is to figure out why that thing might be untrustworthy.
I agree with the linked article, and understand that they are writing to a specific audience. But it has a patronizing tone that I think just reinforces the problems involved. If there's a widespread conspiracy belief, it's not enough to say to have "empathy" for someone who holds it, as that casts the problem as being with the person rather than the things that caused them to lose trust to begin with. You need to be asking why such large parts of the population distrust the subject of the conspiracy and address that.
the labeler doesn't understand the difference between conspiracy and conspiracy theory.
I much agree with the article on how to deal with individuals arguing from a mistrustful position, but your insight that this doesn't deal with a problem on a societal level makes sense.
What has caused so much mistrust on a broad nebulous scale? Civil war and slavery are not unique of course, and every nation carries its traumas of war and disaster. But the American collective psyche is unique in relation to a series of events starting in the late 60s that seem somehow connected - Kennedy, Watergate, Vietnam, Chile, Cuba, Afghanistan, Iraq, 911, Snowden...
What links these is a strong perception of betrayal by government that has failed in its duty through corruption and preference for private power interests.
It is to the credit of American people that they have courage for sceptical introspection and aim to hold government to account.
But something else has happened. Now, because the US plays such a big role in replication of culture, a paranoia, which is practically dyed into Hollywood output (X-Files, Enemy of the State, JFK etc) reaches around the world.
Somehow this needs treating separately from there being, in reality, in actual fact, both an increase in corruption due to global financialisation and technology, as well as a much greater awareness of extant, quiescent skulduggery due to the internet.
And there is one more layer to add now. That some agencies in the world, deliberately fanning the flames of mistrust and division for political gain, have their power amplified by digital technology.
One has to wonder, what event would restore trust in competent and benign government? Is there such a thing as therapy for a whole culture?
One of the most extreme examples was the death of Officer Brian Sicknick [1] during the January 6th riots. The media ran a nonstop narrative (for months) that he had been brutally killed after being attacked by a rioter with a fire extinguisher: a visceral and discomforting image that helped to frame the riots. Politicians, up to and including the president, exploited this by having an honorary ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda historically used to honor the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, and RBG.
The problem is that not only was he not killed by a fire extinguisher, he wasn't killed at all. He died of a completely unrelated and preexisting medical condition (blood clot in the brain leading to stroke) well after the riots had ended. He texted his brother long after the riots stating he was feeling fine and had no problems except getting pepper sprayed twice. The media tried to pivot to claiming that he died of an allergic reaction to the pepper spray, but there was no basis in reality for that whatsoever and it was also completely dismissed by the medical examiner whose report was publicly released only months after its completion.
Events like this emphasize that the argument of scale against conspiracy theories simply doesn't hold. His family knew what happened, the examiner's office knew what happened, many politicians exploiting his death knew what happened, and I expect there's no doubt much of the media also knew. Yet they all ran with the same story because it helped advance the desired narrative. Efforts at countering it were effectively squished by a mixture of censorship and labels (such as conspiracy theory). And of course this event also emphasizes that the political establishment are more than happy to carry out amoral conspiracies even over such absurdly petty things, and that our media is now more of a tool for political manipulation of society than a balance against it.
So after events like this, what reason do I ever have to now believe the media or politicians on pretty much anything? Even science is now starting to go down the exact same myopic path with things like the famous open letter published by the Lancet [2] declaring any consideration that COVID may have come from a lab leak as being an unjustifiable conspiracy theory. Most of the scientists who signed that letter had direct ties to the Wuhan Lab. They declared no competing interests in the letter, and the Lancet editor who chose to publish it clearly didn't see it as a conflict of interest either.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Brian_Sicknick
[2] - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
but most of the rioters were there that day because they believed in some conspiracy theory
Or at least that was their esxcuse to wreak havoc and show their disrespect for any kind of common rule that should not be broken.
If you go there saying you're protecting your president from Hillary Clinton's gang who rallied in a pizza restaurant owned by HC herself but it was actually a cover up for a pedo-ring of satanists who also drank blood, well, even if you don't believe it when you say it, don't be surprised if they'll frame you as cop killers.
Psyops go both ways: sometimes you punch, sometimes you get punched in the face.
So no, that's not reason for distrust of the government, that's reason for not taking reports too seriously and read between the lines looking for the actual information, buried in the noise.
The reason for government distrust in USA is fabricated by those powerful people that do not want to make it obvious that they are abusing the rules and use the common people as human shields to protect their shady interests
Many of those powerful people work in the government, so yes the government is the reason of people distrusting the government.
don't know about the US, but AFAIU many of the people who want free hands try to put some of their people in the government
being directly the ones who work for the government means having your public and private life constantly under scrutiny and that's a no go for such people
One should ask (IMO) why people vote for them or believe that people like Sanders are commies who want to destroy US lifestyle ...
What if I told you that all governments are similarly corrupt, and that the USG (arguably, Western governments in general) is one of the least corrupt by reasonably objective measures. Let's not fall for this trite divisive propaganda dating back to old KGB psyops, that has now taken a zombie life of its own (like in the best Hollywood stinker movies).
There's no divisiveness to fall for. The public's loss of trust is legitimate and if anything, calling it KGB psyops propaganda is rich.. I suppose you think America doesn't engage in the exact same tactics?
While the road itself might be quite bumpy, the general situation now is much better than it was in the 1980’s, 50’s, 30’s etc. And I don’t see any reasons to believe this trend will change significantly in the future.
Other countries, like Russia, India, Brazil, or Nigeria, might like to be more corrupt than those, but just can't swing it. There is not enough money in play in their spheres.
The best I have is here https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021 but that does not seem to go far enough back
“ I have the honor to report that the Bogotá representative of the United Fruit Company told me yesterday that the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military exceeded 1000.”
‘ The US is today rivalled only by China in its degree and depth of corruption.’
Really? I mean you really believe that US is more corrupt than Russia where Yeltsin and Putin parceled off most of the resource extraction industry to their oligarch buddies (Putin also added his ex KGB colleagues) in exchange for political support?
As I said, Russia would like to be as corrupt as the US, but is not powerful enough to be. They had to invade two neighboring countries, and more than once, to get paid any attention.
"Loss of trust" is reductionism. Funny how most people who call about "loss of trust" somehow trust the comedic channel called Fox News. Reasonable people can trust but verify and question channels
Of course this is not one sided politically, we have people like Chomsky that make a sport of saying how the US is "the worse country in the world" while living in probably one of the few countries where such discourse would be tolerated.
While the US has several problems most people don't know how good they have in living in a democracy. A flawed one for sure, but a democracy
Cynics perhaps understand this and think instead outside of the dichotomy. Maybe we can do much better, and the forces in the way of that are powerful --hence the cynicism.
You won't find that in what I wrote. Especially since there are many different ways of government.
But I won't support sham elections, biased systems (add a special note for gerrymandering and the electoral college here)
Then I'd believe you and say, as I kinda tried to in my comment, that it's to the credit of US citizens that they still hold that government to the highest of standards.
In the colonial and early republic there was huge mistrust of Catholics, Jews, Masons, Native Americans and African Americans - many thought they were plotting against them. Why? Because at least some of them - say Native Americans - may well have been in order to stop their land being taken away and their families being slaughtered.
In the nineteenth century, "International Bankers" (shorthand for rich Jews), and other rich businessmen - Carnegie, Morgan, Mellon, Rockefeller - all joined the ranks. There is substance in the idea that they literally conspired to create cartels in some circumstances, so this is not unfounded.
And then we get to the 20th century.
If I told you that 10 servicemen who were serving in Roswell in 1947 have come forward and said "yeah, there was a cover up, I didn't want to say anything earlier because I was worried about prosecution and losing my pension", and all their individual testimonies mostly collaborate you might think there was some evidence of a cover up. What if I then told you the actual number was higher? How many ex-USAAF service personnel would need to say "that was not a weather balloon, there was a cover up" would it take for you to re-think whether there was indeed a conspiracy? 50? 100? The actual number is... over 600.
600 people with no reason to lie are basically going around thinking "wow, my government is really keen on lying". Perhaps telling their families that there are dark, secret forces in this World.
Then a couple of decades later, we have the assassination of JFK. For you to accept the official government explanation of what happened on that day in Dallas, you have to believe in magic bullets and a small entry wound to the front of the head and a large exit wound to the rear of the head is caused by a bullet fired from the rear.
All this sits swirling around people's heads and then _actual_ conspiracies are proved completely true: CIA assassination plots, Watergate, and Iran-Contra.
If somebody tells you that the CIA would "never" do something shady, there is ample evidence that they can, do and will.
The reason Americans believe in conspiracies is because at various points in time there has been ample evidence of them and some of them are actually true. Some of them are just racism, or anti-semitism, or shock, but some of them _are actual conspiracies_.
As to your last sentence, and the wonder what it would take to restore trust. Well, quite simply, the true conspiracies need to stop happening, and that means governments need to stop needing reason to form them. In short, nothing less than total revolution, then.
For me, an essential litmus test for whether a “conspiracy theory turned out to be true” is the timing between these three events:
1. Person claims something happened.
2. Government denies it.
3. Thing revealed to have actually happened.
The test is really whether #1 turned out to be valid reasoning, with the benefit of hindsight, i.e. were the claimants vindicated? And if the affair plays out over a matter of weeks, was there really a conspiracy movement?
The two examples you listed… I’m not expert in these, but they feel like controversies rather than conspiracies. Or was there an underground movement of suppressed believers telling us the truth and we just weren’t listening?
A conspiracy does not need a conspiracy theorist to be a conspiracy.
However, when a conspiracy becomes public knowledge, my point is that it will contribute to that collective cultural thought that conspiracies happen, they're real, and so other conspiracies being claimed with less evidence could also be real.
My point is that real conspiracies - on being unearthed - fuels support for theories that have less evidence, because as the article we're discussing points out, the reason for conspiracy theories existing that have little evidence of existence has little to do with established facts, and more a sense of what "could" be true.
Plus, since WW1 misinformation and conspiracy theories has been routinely used as a weapon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare
Disseminating (true or false) information is still one of the main tasks of secret services around the world.
> One has to wonder, what event would restore trust in competent and benign government? Is there such a thing as therapy for a whole culture?
The medicine is called healthy democracy. It requires free press, informed citizenship, schools to teach critical thinking...
(Unsurprisingly many conspiracy theories are undemocratic or spread in undemocratic environments)
Eisenhower warned of this new complex of US power in his farewell speech. Kennedy was going to do something about it and severely curtail the CIA. Then, IMO, they killed him for it. True US democracy died with Kennedy. Ever since then the American people have been pushed out of the picture more and more by the military-industrial-academic complex. Today we often refer to these people as the "elites". They are the ones that know better, they know who we should get to vote for, who we should send our sons to go fight for vague "national interests". We are the boiled frogs and our democracy is a dystopian nightmare and they are getting away with it because of petty politics.
> What's changed my mind is realizing how often things that might be labeled as conspiracy theory actually happen. Even if something didn't happen, many of the fears are actually well grounded and labeling them as such in my opinion reflects a certain amount of lack of empathy on the part of the labeler.
> I'm not saying certain beliefs aren't absurd or physically implausible etc. But if they are plausible they're often coming from somewhere reasonable. Widespread conspiracy theories tell you that a large segment of the population doesn't trust something, and the appropriate response is to figure out why that thing might be untrustworthy.
> I agree with the linked article, and understand that they are writing to a specific audience. But it has a patronizing tone that I think just reinforces the problems involved. If there's a widespread conspiracy belief, it's not enough to say to have "empathy" for someone who holds it, as that casts the problem as being with the person rather than the things that caused them to lose trust to begin with. You need to be asking why such large parts of the population distrust the subject of the conspiracy and address that.
I don't know if you have any "conspiracy theorists" in your close circles. One of my former friends has really gone done the deep end, and why you could argue that some of the arguments are funded in reasonable doubts, the whole world view is not. It is absolutely impossible to have any discussion with him, every argument is countered with "you can not trust mainstream, science media, people..." while at the same time those same sources get used easily for their own arguments. And it usually is not just one, there is 9/11, vaccinations being used by Bill Gates to steralize people, free vacuum energy, covid. At the same time he sees himself at the forefront of defending against a new emergence of nazism while supporting people who have literally been filmed doing a Hitler salute (supposedly that was "out of context").
It is true that these people are victims, but they are victims of propaganda who pull people toward more and more outrageous claims, and a social media machine which develops the most addictive media techniques and no care for the overall affect on society.
> while at the same time those same sources get used easily for their own arguments
100% this!
Telegram channels and Substack seem to be super popular for this sort of propaganda. I also did a technical analysis of many of the websites shared in these channels and found:
- they use very heavy trackers
- keylogging for webpages is common
- they all use privacy shields for `whois` info
- third party cookies
You can find some of these if you want to take a look in https://github.com/Langer81/Summer-REU-Research
I'm wondering about your friend. In hindsight I can see some of the behaviour also in how he was when he was young. He always had a bit of a chip on his shoulder (some of it justified being a Turkish emigrant in Germany), and always blamed bad things happening to him on outside influences never on his own behaviour. Very similar how he argues about conspiracies. Is/was that similar with your friend? I'm wondering if there is some pattern.
That's just not that damning.
Its pure information control by using etiquettes to discredit everything else.
Calling someone who is doing actual research that doesn’t go with the grain of consensus a conspiracy theorist is surely wrong, but I see a lot more of the former (Surprising thing X must be true because it somehow advantages my tribe or makes me special) on the internet than the latter (Surprising thing X must be true because I did research and the data is not matching up as you’d expect).
Someone who believes in it with just a bit of money could surely fly up and sample the air inside of one of the trails, for example.
I think this is part of the trap that believers fall into: the idea that if you can’t disprove it, then it might be true, and if it might be true, then a fun game of connect-the-dots begins.
Of course, an infinite number of things might be true, so the actual conspiracy theories that people choose to believe in start to be driven by their personality and social network. That’s why we hear about lizard-people but not, say, the equally plausible echidna-people.
Any theory that requires millions of people to systematically lie and hide evidence, with little to gain, across the whole world, and for many decades, is extremely unlikely.
...gets marginalised. This has always been true in research. But now that we can all do research, of an OSINT sort, this is happening more.
Usually when amateur researchers try to engage with and/or question the consensus/professional researchers, they are met with silence. Even when they point out good evidence; that you might call "inconvenient truths".
I've worked in academia so I have sympathy; you get plenty of approaches from true crackpots [0]. Researchers/academics/professional need to learn to better engage with the amateurs, and those peers they marginalise, who genuinely try to contribute to the debate.
or write a book (or books) or manufacture a miracoulous ointment "that bigfarma doesn't want you yo know about" and get rich appealing to those people that are or feel marginalized because they actually are border-line psycos or are members of a weaker segment of the population.
that has always been true in pseudoscience ("snake oil" comes from a real product of the 1800s) but now this is happening more.
What were the jews targetted by the Protocol of the Elder of Zion a threat to? Monarchy.
What did the real illuminati want? Democracy.
What does George Soros fund that makes him a target? Democracy.
What was the evil EU up to that caused Brexit. Democracy.
Why don't QAnon vote for democrats?
Why did birthers need a made up excuse to target a Black American president swept in on a massive uptick of voting?
Why is shutting down an economy to save human lives in a pandemic so scary to certain groups? Because poor people's lives shouldn't have the same worth as the rich.
Why is dealing with climate change so hard when everyone agrees it's the cheap and obvious thing to do?
Generally speaking, why do certain types of politician have to lie so much?
Possibly because they're doing stuff that isn't actually popular?
A conspiracy theory is either something true the powerful don't want you to know, or something false the powerful do want you to believe and weird echoes of those two things.
edit: a 'related article' at the bottom endorses this view:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00257-y
> Conspiracy theories are fundamentally a form of political propaganda,” says Quassim Cassam
Other true things like slavery being bad, the reasons for the civil war, rich people getting away with terrible crimes while poor people were killed for minor infractions, Nazis targeting trade unions, kings being dictators, royal families often being foreign parasites, human races not actually existing and so on fall into this weird realm as well.
Social media have made it incredibly easy to get a spectacular return for a very small propaganda budget.
In the same way there's financial and political asymmetry between the extremely privileged and everyone else, there's also informational asymmetry.
Most of the population lives in an incredibly polluted mental and emotional atmosphere. Conspiracy theories are being used - like smoking - to create toxic and self-harming addictive behaviours.
This is a very different space to informed and educated debate which decides policy on merits and rational evaluation of likely outcomes.
It's more like Pavlovian conditioning of entire voter populations. This leaves the shell of a democracy, but the interior is poisoned by lies.
Why is this controversial for fossil fuels or lead in gasoline?
Why is the simple act of insulating your house or driving an efficient car considered part of a global communist plot?
You have all these insane people following the protestant work ethic, who want to work all day even if there is not enough for them to do. Yet simultaneously, they won't work on solving climate change because for some strange reason the "economics" (perceived or not) don't "work out". The interest rate that must be paid to investors i.e. 0% by far exceeds the interest rate that the market can actually deliver. Kind of amusing. It's like people purposefully put on a brain cage and then act completely helpless as if they didn't choose this to happen.
The fact that we even have to argue about this, while short term interest rates should be negative feels like a bad joke.
You must first work then play but if you keep working in your play time, then work itself becomes play, it won't remain work and no amount of distortion by decree will change that.
In my own experience, an important source (among others) for my own loss of trust is the impossibility of being (and/or feeling like I'm) part of that which I distrust.
for example, a false democracy (like in my own country) may fuel this.
another (better) example is the impossibility of being able to contribute (feel as a part of) to some scholarly field (these circles are riddled with authority appeals if only as a way to cope with the vast amounts of time required to wade through content).
Another issue is that the establishment tries to put vaccines in a separate box from the rest of modern human inventions and its a total disaster. Sure, vaccines are well tested, but look at what happened with the advent of PCB's, Agent Orange, Asbestos, Benzine, etc. The last 100 years has trained everyone to expect modern chemistry to be a disaster. You can't separate that knowledge from vaccines and say "this time it's different". Of course, none of those other chemicals were tested in the context of being injected into the human body, but that's just details at this point for most people. Combined with reducing a testing regiment that should run over a decade to 1 year and you no longer get to stand on your high-ground and say "your vaccine fears are misplaced". No, the onus is on the system to be 100% transparent and honest. But we didn't get any of that, in fact the stench of rot continues to linger: https://denvergazette.com/news/judge-scraps-75-year-fda-time...
I got both shots but I totally agree. That the FDA even tried to help Pfizer not release all the data before 2097 is beyond belief.
All hope is not lost though: the very reason they'll have eight months (not 75 years) before releasing it all is precisely because otherwise it undermines the public's confidence in the government.
We are not rational beings; we are still mostly creatures of instinct, with the ability to be rational. The latter brings with it the ability to rationalize.
We all, to some extent, prefer to hold beliefs that imply outcomes we prefer (or, equivalently, dispel undesirable outcomes), and that can lead us to take positions on that basis, rather than on what the evidence supports.
That, in itself, would not be a conspiracy theory, as there are many cases where the evidence is inconclusive. The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is, firstly, the doubling-down on a belief despite evidence to the contrary or a lack of supporting evidence that should be there, and secondly, a particular form of rationalization for doing so, which says the evidence must be fabricated or suppressed, as necessary. All considerations are subordinated to the goal of preserving the initial belief.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with 20th-century history has enough evidence to see how promulgating conspiracy theories can help nefarious actors, and also how they work.
All of the options are carefully worded to minimize the actual conspiracies (ex: they say the FBI “kept tabs on” MLK which doesn’t begin to describe what they did) and disqualify others (ex: one “incorrect” option is “Republicans cheated their way to win the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections” when it’s not inaccurate to say they cheated in 2000).
It’s a pretty blatant propaganda piece, intentional or not.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2021/con...
This article by Elżbieta Drążkiewicz is good. It puts far better and with powerful examples, something I have tried to express about the decline of trust in science due to the abuses visited on people through manipulative technologies.
It's surprising that many of the anti-vax crowd are well educated, middle class centrists who've just grown jaded with media lies, and also unsurprising when they then dig in deeper in response to being labelled idiots.
Any actual scientific arguments vanish into irrelevance in a proxy argument that's really about past lies and injustices and the inability of the interlocutors to demonstrate their good faith.
In positive influence you absolutely _must_ acknowledge and take into account people's legitimate grievances and understand why, even when you know your argument to be truthful and benevolent, you get rejected out of hand.
My thoughts often turn to the Verbal Judo work of Dr. George Thompson, about letting people have ground to stand on, separating the defensive venting from the objectives you want to achieve. Don't set out to win an argument - keep the other person's best interests foremost.
As for Thompson (who was a street cop), as scientists and technologists, whether in medicine, computing or whatever, we ought to recognise that a lot of people are mistrustful and angry about something they think we represent.
edit: grammar
Telling people they're privileged when they feel pretty ordinary or calling them stupid when they're literally just asking questions doesn't help matters, but neither does telling them that yes, actually they really are victims of X on a significant scale but it's not quite like the only people talking about a massive problem with X say it is...
And whether the underlying grievances are real or not, the trouble with "Qanon makes a very good point but..." is that not only does it not seem to win many true believers over, but it also seems to encourage lots of people that happen to have legitimate grievances (or feel like they should have some) but haven't paid the strange sounding theories the slightest attention before. Why would you trust the people admitting "yeah actually, we do lie all the time" over the people who have absolute conviction in their outlandish theories? Sometimes you have to keep the best interests of the nonbelievers in mind too.
I found trying to deal with them with compassion was a cast of setting yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.
Sooner or later you just have to leave them to their world views, and just accept that it will go badly for them.
As Keith Ng put it
"You can't just keep saying we have to acknowledge the hurt and the sense of alienation that the antivax protesters have felt without acknowledging the feelings we have about them
A sense of betrayal - the idea that a national project to defend ourselves is being actively undermined by them, for either entirely crazy or entirely unexplained ("it's my choice") reasons.
A sense of threat - they used violence and intimidation to assert their power.
A sense of provocation - when they keep insisting that we are stupid, cowardly, blindly obedient sheeple, that they are the smart ones, the brave ones, the ones who are truly free, yeah, that makes me angry.
The Big Clean-up was my way of addressing that anger and frustration without giving into it.
That anger is unproductive, but it's not unwarranted. And it needs to be acknowledged, every bit as much as the protesters' feelings of hurt, isolation and abandonment.
But when you acknowledge their feelings and not ours, say that theirs is legitimate at some level then be silent on ours, and not acknowledge all the things that they've done that have led us to this place of anger - that's not reconciliation, that's digging the hole deeper. "
Same would go say for Ukraine invasion - from moderate 'alternative truth' folks weakly defending russian invasion as 'forced by the west'. I would require so much mental gymnastics to accept this as some middle ground it would break my proverbial mental neck.
Entire pillars of progress of what mankind achieved till 21st century included need to be abandoned to find middle ground in such cases. Just because some folks can't handle their emotional side of their being which can be very easily used to steer them (well anybody in such situation) as needed.
You want to have productive discussion with somebody like me? Let's bring out the facts, proven, peer-reviewed if possible. There is no 'alternative truth', just alternatives to truth.
You know why people don’t trust science? It’s this, the whole article should be about this and not a footnote at the end. It’s condescension, belittling and othering. You don’t get people to believe you and trust you by treating them like they are stupid for not already doing so. Particularly not people on the right, where respect is of more value than social acceptance. You start a conversation with insulting them, why would they listen to anything else you have to say?
Because scientists work by aggressively cutting down bad ideas. The basic mindset calls for being efficient-and-ruthless in identifying-and-eliminating low-quality thinking.
If the world were a simpler place where there wasn't much complexity to deal with, then presumably scientists could afford to move along at a slower, more polite pace that doesn't leave anyone behind. But in a complex world where every answer just leads to more questions, scientists simply can't afford to show respect to bad ideas -- even if they would otherwise want to be respectful to others.
The result seems to be social-fragmentation: there's not just one cohesive social-group that involves everyone, but rather differing groups with differing standards.
This can then be a problem for social-mobility. Because, personally, I like the idea where groups are accessible; for example, I like the idea that anyone who's willing to adopt a scientific-mindset could do so, without barriers-to-entry keeping them out. However, if other folks tend to find scientific-thought caustic and degrading, then this same openness would seem to expose other groups to scientific-thought even if they don't like it, possibly promoting animosity.
Worse, this problem isn't simply dichotomous, but rather occurs many times over. For example, not all scientists are working on the same level; there's a lot of fragmentation within the scientific-world, too.
A funny consequence of this can be that scientists would reject more advanced science, too. For example, folks around Newton's time might've found ideas from quantum-mechanics and general-relativity to be absurd.
Generally, people actually doing the science haven't been condescending, in my experience. You can challenge incorrectness without condescension (and its usually more effective that way.)
The condescension comes from the way a certain type of science communicator decides to use the name and gravitas of science to belittle those who don't agree.
In short bursts, sure. Sorta like, if someone believes that Elvis is secretly a lizard-man who is now pretending to be President Biden, then that could be responded to in simple, polite terms that aren't immediately condescending.
However, the scientific-community, literature, etc., would tend to be cumulatively dismissive and condescending toward the idea, failing to take it seriously. For example, such an idea wouldn't tend to get a mention in every article that mentions President Biden, even if proponents of the idea might continue to hold a strong interest in that belief.
This might lead to folks who'd hold such a belief continuing to find the literature dismissive and condescending toward their beliefs, even if no-one overtly makes rude comments on the topic.
But even avoiding rudeness is unrealistic. For example, someone who believes that Elvis is a lizard-man who is now pretending to be President Biden, and they start advertising their idea everywhere -- say on Wikipedia-articles and in comment-sections of articles -- how does one respond to that? If they're treated politely and accepted, then everything gets bogged down with non-sense. Eventually, everything's covered with conspiracy-theories about how President Biden's secretly a lizard-man, or a fish-man, or a real man pretending to be a lizard-man, or an alien pretending to be an AI pretending to be a fish, etc., and then everything's just noise.
You JUST did the exact thing I am talking about. You equated having an incorrect understanding of science with believing Biden is a lizard man Elvis.
You aren't conducting science, explaining science, or even challenging incorrect scientific beliefs. You are using science as a bludgeon to demean people you don't agree with.
It is OK to be wrong and it is OK to entertain incorrect ideas. These are critical parts of learning. It is also OK to say when things are wrong. Mocking people for being wrong is alienating and counter productive.
I was concerned that, if I selected a common conspiracy-theory, folks who believe in it might feel attacked. So I picked a made-up conspiracy-theory that I didn't think anyone would feel emotionally invested in.
You picked one that was absurd but yet similar enough to existing beliefs to mock them with that absurdity. This is exactly the kind of 'othering' that the article pushes back against.
Which may be the case here?
I also like this excerpt:
"In his 1786 Letters on Infidelity, George Horne writes that:
Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject. And as people in general, for one reason or another, like short objections better than long answers, in this mode of disputation (if it can be styled such) the odds must ever be against us; and we must be content with those for our friends who have honesty and erudition, candor and patience, to study both sides of the question."
- they show you which parts of society inspire distrust (COVID is more a trust crisis than a health one IMO).
- they can show a lot of creativity (lizard people, come on!).
- they may point at something that will turn out to be in need of examination (remember before snowden how the gov spying on everyone was tinfoil hat BS?).
- they force public debate, and raise attention to important questions (e.g: how social network apps influence our society).
A like the article says, they show you in which way people secretly suffer. And that deserves compassion.
No, not at all. Before Snowden people regularly talked about the government spying on everyone, we just didn't know any details of how it worked.
I remember there was absoultely no shortage of discussion among conspiracy theorists and regular people alike about "echelon" in the nineties for example.
Pretending that everyone thought the government was innocent and not spying on everyone before the Snowden leaks is an attempt to rewrite history and place a false narrative.
That being said, I think a lot of people didn't believe in this stuff, which I guess makes it sort of fringe, but I think it was more like there was an attitude of laziness, technical ignorance, and a lot of nationalism to catch the terrorists.
I think you are the one rewritting history here.
It was anyway for sure not limited to Art Bell types.
We always knew about some spying, but if you have said something resembling to xkeyscore, it would have looked like science fiction.
Even the patriot act: people believed it was temporary. In fact, they were happy it was voted. Somebody was doing something about 9/11. The voices against it were a minority.
Worst, people talking about the mass spying were associated with 9/11 denyiers to remove credibility from them.
One has to remember it was still a boomer world, meaning the perception from the public of what computer systems could do was still somewhat limited. Snowden revelations were in 2013. In 2010 my mother was still missing icons when trying to click on them and the last phone books arrived in her mailbox. I remember gently mocking her about it, but for her, it was easier to use.
By the same token, nobody needs to trust authorities and institutions. What goes astray in conspracy theories is not trust in testimony per se, but the judgement of one's own abilities and epistemic position versus those of others. People have a natural bias of overestimating their own abilities but with modern media this has gone completely astray; even well-educated people have started to confuse genuine knowledge with knowing where to look up allaged facts. Somebody with a realistic attitude towards their own abilities is able to correctly judge when someone else knows more about a subject matter. This doesn't mean that you have to or should trust that other person, but - if you insist in putting this in terms of trust, which I don't recommend - you need to be able to recognize when you cannot trust your own judgement more than that of others.
Losing this ability to evaluate one's own epistemic capacity versus that of others in a subject matter seems to be a rather natural consequence of the liberation of knowledge by the internet. The same phenomenon of misjudging one's own abailities might have existed with owners of the complete volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, only those were extremely rare, already very educated, and it was probably harder to recognize.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I believe that epistemologists are wrong to consider "knowledge by testimony" necessarily based on trust, or at least the role of trust in it is overrated and the phrase "knowledge by testimony" is doubtful to start with. Trust in authorities is not needed, what is needed is a correct judgement of one's own beliefs in relation to those of others, and this requires intellectual humility. If people would conclude from comspiracy theories that they should remain agnostic about certain subject matters and leave those to experts who spent more time delving into them, they would not be a problem at all - they would simply just be what they are, more or less outlandish hypotheses and alternative explanations with a certain lack of publicly verifiable evidence. The problem is that people lack intellectual humility and form very strong beliefs about subject matters they haven't studied in detail.
My 2 cents, sorry for the long rant. It is based on substantial disagreement with colleagues about this topic.
"How can you not believe that vaccines are the solution to COVID ?" Is a question that for most people, imply more faith than knowledge.
More foundationally we're in an intellectual-ideological crisis.
Conspiracy theories are different than conspiracy hypotheses - the quality of the proof or argument points.
I think it's important to understand too though that "conspiracy theory" is the same if not very close to ideology, or say an ideologue, just an ideology has a more developed framework.
This does all tie back to trust and knowledge/education, or different funnels or channels of indoctrination - and whether the information seen is ripe with critical thinking or devoid of it; whether it has been analyzed and adequately criticized, challenged, or if it is more akin to propaganda and manipulation.
The rich rule the world. They do not answer before anyone. They can start wars, profit from them, and then get to be peacemakers. They get to pay less taxes, even if they earn much more than regular citizens.
See current forms of governments, which is mostly a parody of choice between red/blue team, and with the only expectancy of each team -looking- for each other. They're the same thing.
In the US you can legally -lobby- someone in congress or whatever into doing what you want. That's called bribery everywhere else...
All the bull shit is there so the fog is bigger and the real shit can't be prosecuted or condemned.
Divide et impera, as long as they can feed us bullshit to divide us against ourselves, they won't be the target.
But you’re right that the rich are often above the law.
What if the real problem is that nobody understands the true nature of money?
What if the real problem is that nobody understands the significance of land?
Chartalism sounds close to the truth considering ancient egypt adopted a grain bank system which is a commodity standard that is not based around the control of the economy. After all, anyone who farms grains, can "print money" because grains themselves were money! If you want aristocracy to have power over the "legitimate" economy, i.e. the economy characterized by a high degree of specialization and quite specifically the division of labor, then having money that does not grow and shrink in accordance to people's activity, and exclusively obeys its holder, more specifically, those who earned their money in the past and have yet to decide what to do with it, is the easiest way to achieve that.
If you think about it, if the saver or land owner has complete authority over his money and land then he is transferring power from the past into the present and the future in a world that otherwise does not stand still, where growth and decay are par for the course.
Socially speaking, death is quite useful, it prevents the elderly from halting the progress of humanity. What if we put a stop to that? Now imagine a world where you need to acquire power once and keep it forever. Power doesn't die but humans do. Then suddenly, everyone will be encouraged to acquire power at all costs, the sooner the better. Everyone will be living their entire life in a rat race.
We could go after flat earthers, burn their books, and imprison their prophets. There wouldn't be many flat earthers if we did that. But we would probably also be oppressing people who have the wrong opinions about how to run the economy, along with a number of other issues.
To your point they are literally saying freedom of belief is a threat to democracy, I don’t think they actually want democracy.
A lot of conspiracy theories these days are anti-West and anti-democracy.
Of course it can and has happened. You have to ask yourself whether those societies were actually free and open, which I know sounds like a cop-out.
It is always the people saying how democracy is flawed and we should be more like China that are also trying to crack down on conspiracy theories.
It is entirely plausible that a free and open society is better than the alternatives on several different bases, despite the possibility that it could all go wrong and end up as becoming one of the alternatives. There is no evidence in human history that society has any stable points, let alone that it has desirable points of stability.
> Of course it can and has happened. You have to ask yourself whether those societies were actually free and open, which I know sounds like a cop-out.
... it also has elements of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Also though, just because he wins doesn't mean he can actually deliver that promise. Most democracies have multiple layers of laws that would have to be passed after the election and would probably result in civil war without a super majority.
This annoys me.
As was the case with the pervasive NSA spying pre-Snowden (your phone can listen in!) and early Covid lab-escape hypotheses, "conspiracy theories", can also simply be true (or likely), and denying them is harmful.
Read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" for example, and you'll get another look on "conspiracy theories" and what the USA as a country is willing and capable of doing. Strange that this angle is not covered in this piece. By not acknowledging this you are pushing people with non-mainstream hypotheses even further away, it is indeed counterproductive.
Simply defining conspiracy theories as theories that are not true or not held by the majority is too simple and an impossible definition.
It's a nice companion piece to this: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-...
tl;dr Trump's power came from the fact that he was a big "fuck you" to smart and cultured people. His voters were sick of being looked down on and treated like shit.
Are there “coastal elites” who look down on “flyover country?” Sure. No group is perfectly free of prejudice. It works the other way too; I have family that sneer at educated idiots, latte drinking city liberals and so on.
Try to keep in mind, who or what is emphasizing and amplifying these fault lines, and why? Why is it important to keep insisting on binary labels and othering? From keeping people angry and, thus, engaged?
I do believe trade liberalization has important benefits, and may even contribute to increasing the total wealth of the planet and alleviating extreme poverty, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be aware of the costs, and to mitigate damage and ensure that huge swaths of the country aren't insulted in the process.
This is unalloyed nonsense and the commonly used ploy of implying anyone with an inquiring mind is in some way a weak minded person easily influenced and desperate to join like minded souls. One persons 'conspiracist' is another persons investigative journalist...
The elites vilify and ridicule conspiracy theories precisely because some of them are or will be true. In a healthy world, they would be welcomed.
The few where that isn't so are worth consideration.
According to your theory the doctor has more knowledge than me and I shouldn't question what they tell me. I've had several similar experiences from multiple doctors that told me things that were flat out wrong.
According to you, people that have been misled by doctors including medical malpractice, and the government performing illegal experiments should all be disregarded that and we should just immediately trust a power structure of people just repeating whatever they were led to believe.
Don't get me wrong, there are actual scientists doing the work but that doesn't mean that people don't have an agenda.
The comment you are responding to doesn’t prescribe what you should or shouldn’t question.
Their theory describes how they think conspiracy theories start. You are attacking a complete strawman of your own imagination here I’m afraid.
Furthermore the example you bring up is not even a conspiracy theory. Some doctor believes that a teeth will disolve in soda overnight. They are wrong. Who are the conspiring parties here?
I suspect your dentist in this case would just say “oh, I guess I heard that at some point and never thought to actually check it.”
Then when they got caught lying, they doubled down on the lies. Then when people started getting angry, the 'elites' called them murderers (without a shred of evidence) and organized angry mobs to abuse them in the media. Then when people still wouldn't comply they forcibly imprisoned people in their homes for years. Then when people fought back they got the police to violently attack them in the streets.
All this instead of just apologizing for lying and having an honest dialogue about what was and wasn't know.
Narrative exists since ever, some people have observed some others and discover common patterns to bend those others wills, that's nothing new, the term and the meaning "conspiracy theory" is just a way to label adverse narratives, the official is named "pravda" or "the real truth" or "facts checked contents" etc.
What it matter is:
- identify patterns that push so many following narrative, not just to abuse/steer them but also to moderate all narratives in public to avoid dangerous paths;
- learn to reason, teach to reason. For instance we read about something depicted as really good and something else depicted as really bad. Do we just follow written emotions or we analyze the writing trying to imagine those written thing in reality?
Unfortunately essentially no "élites" or "common people" want that, the first just because they need to label adverse narrative, but they do want "common people" trust their own; the seconds just because facing truth and trying to determine is something can be true or false demand effort and might be unpleasant to a point so many prefer follow one who promise the Paradise on Earth in a snap of his/she's fingers than someone who say "we need to face harsh situations and work toward a better future for years".
However, people of culture, who happen to gravitate around Science should and MUST be not of the same kind of the above mentioned cohorts...
Example, hmm. OK, I got one. The idea that the WTC buildings were blown down with explosives is not a conspiracy per se. The terrorists could have done that. To be a conspiracy, you need some wacky element, like the US government itself was behind it.
"Conspiracy" isn't a synonym for "unlikely" or "false".
> I understand and share concerns that a more empathetic approach has risks.
In my impression trying to understand people to make everything better for everyone is definitely the harder way, and therefore often dismissed by people. For most of the time no one will thank you for doing something that way, and still this is what we need the most imho.
That's still would be a good outcome. More likely, is that conspiracy theories would appear about that person's work and they would start facing abuse.
You could cure cancer, and there would be a number of people who would hate you for it.
You just can't make everyone happy.
You missed the whole putin hair-splitting abstract bullshit.
Part of the reason this happens is that the people who are constantly peddling conspiracies say whatever they can spin together from today's news, even if it contradicts itself from one sentence to the next.
The Venn diagram of people who said COVID doesn't exist, COVID came from a lab to depopulate the planet, COVID is a ploy to steal Trump's presidency and COVID is just the flu is pretty much a circle. Now that one of these claims is getting some more serious consideration they go around saying "I told you so", patting themselves on the back and using their supposed early insight to add weight to the next round of fabrications, completely neglecting the fact that you would have had to ignore 95% of what they said. A coin toss would be a more credible source, but they were "right" so who cares anyway.
I don't want to speak for the conspiracy as a singular, but these clusters of conspiracies, most notably Q/anon, are just an amalgamation of weaponized cherry-picking, contrarianism and new-age gullibility, not to mention thinly veiled fascism.
Robert Anton Wilson points out that over half of the regime changes in the 21st century happened as the result of some kind of coup. By that measure conspiracy is the norm.
"Fake News is what we tell you! Conspiracy Theories are what we tell you! Believe The State! Don't trust your eyes, ears and common sense!"
In the article she talks about people being suspicious of science or other authorities. She says its that lack of trust that we need to deal with not the difference in opinion.
And you seem to be saying, this is bulls*it, I don't trust this person?
Have I misunderstood your comment or the article?
Regarding:
> I'm also missing a list of all those so called conspiracy theories which turned out to be true.
They probably meant to suggest that the article is obviously unbalanced as it's consistently critical of conspiracy-theories, without offering a list of counter-examples of conspiracy-theories that turned out to be true.
Who declares themselves to be one?
Who are we supposed to trust?
Why should we trust someone who does not earn it?
Why should we trust anyone who governs us, when there is no evidence that they are to be trusted?
Why should I trust "science", when "science" in any big-scale-context only means that those who govern us control what "science" is/means/gets attention?
Why should I not trust my own ability to analyse and deduct what is, and is not the closest to the truth? It's not my fault that I'm literally surrounded by literal idiots.
Mate. You don't understand. You have to look at all of this from a meta perspective. Most of the bullshit you get to read is propaganda simply because it is meant to steer your thinking into certain directions. It's not just about "lies", or "omission of truth/detail", it's also about you thinking only about what you're supposed to be thinking about.
This includes things you read which are meant to distract from other things.
Examples?
By whom's authority are people declaring themselves authority, which includes the self granted privilege of telling us what is true and real?
By whom's authority are those, who are being declared authority, more authority than those who disagree with them?
99% of the people reading this post will be too stupid to even consider that they could just look up a list of actually proven conspiracy-"theories" and that's not because I'm the one supposed to be doing it for them, but because they're so submissive to __authority__, they think high of themselves when it comes to those who have time and time again proven that thinking critically is the only sane way to go.
If you actually were a critical thinker, as you *MOST LIKELY BELIEVE OF YOURSELF*, then you would NEVER dismiss anything at all just because a self declared authority tells you!
You would INSTEAD seek out the opposing opinions. You would seek understanding of why opposing voices, regardless of experteese, are always being ridiculed and socially shunned, instead of critically listened to.
So, to end this post ...
We ABSOLUTELY need to deal with the difference in opinion!
The difference in opinion is what makes sure that ...
*... we don't all think the same!*
Our core problem is that 99% of the people do not think critically at all and are seriously just mindless morons parrotting what's being presented to them on a massive scale. A lie only has to be repeated often enough until it is being accepted as truth!
Get it now?
That said, why might you take such things seriously?
https://www.wcvb.com/article/qanon-postcards-delivered-in-bo...
I also know Romanian ex-pats who would not get vaccinated for similar reasons stated in the article. I would even take it further, where the prime minister in canada called people racists and sexists for not trusting his mandate policies, and as hallucinatory as that seemed, he was accurate for potentially the wrong reasons. What makes him and his cabinet untrustworthy are that they do not represent or signal virtues that are known to be trustworthy in western culture. Everything about them is an artifact of power narratives that people from the traditional culture interpret as "fake." As an example, the PM himself is an actual actor, a cultural symbol that means "do not trust, this is an act." But this is the divide in society, where the old way of thinking is that there is distance between the represented and the real, where the new progressives have only the represented and power.
The reason we have "conspiracy theories," is that the people in instutions are in fact not trustworthy, and interestingly, they may even agree enthusiastically with that statement, because trustworthiness itself is a traditional and patriarchical concept. In the progressive view, requiring administrators to be trustworthy means requiring them to conform to traditional identities with trust signals relative to a culture they have been educated to dissolve for progress. When we talk about racism and "whiteness," it's not biological or actual skin colour, it's an abstraction or umbrella to describe the culture that is the target of criticism in marxist theory, wherein white still represents the Whites and the traditional society being dissolved, but intersectional identities are the new Red.
Conspiracy theories are the expression of mistrust of elites who are not recognized as legitimate (honest, trustworthy, annointed, etc.) because they do not conserve, reflect, or preserve the culture of the people. Elites and their allies can't say this part out loud, but they don't care, because yes, they are making permanent change, so you are either a part of the change, or you are the subject of the change.
Conspiracy theorists are in fact very accurate in placing their mistrust, because if they value stability and continuity of their culture and see their elites as not reflecting their values, and so they are a reaction to the change - hence they are the direct targets of change agents. In this sense, yes, if you demand that they be trustworthy, they are absolutely out to get you.
A lot of conspiracy theories are dumb, and many are even invented as confusion and chaff to prevent people from aligning to a coherent belief or truth that would politically activate them. However, if you have an intellectual understanding of power and politics, you understand what should be mistrusted.
If you want to understand the mechanism, what is actually happening is a new progressive elite is politically activated, and spending its effort on keeping any conservative resistance effectively neutralized using aggression, deception, and confusion to install levers for permanent change (read:control). Theory is neutralizing, and so spreading it means clouding discourse and making people give up on any truth that they could organize around and resist the change from this small cadre who are activated.
That is, so that good men do nothing.