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Comment by cauch | Hacker News Reader

But the fact that the conspiracy is true or not is irrelevant.

The problem of the "conspiracy theory" is that it is a witch trial: a group of people have absolutely no proof what-so-ever, they just "want to believe they are right".

It does not matter if they end up being right, their logic is toxic for society, and if we are accepting their logic, then it means that tomorrow you can be fired from your job because your boss just had a dream in which you were a thief. Your argument is the same as saying "well, your boss says you are a thief, but thieves exist for real, and, who knows, maybe you are in fact really a thief, so it's fine".

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A lot of conspiracy theorists are not like that. They are more like "My neighbor is behaving suspiciously. I have no concrete proof of wrong doing, but maybe I should start bolting my door".

I don't remember anyone behaving like that being called a conspiracy theorist.

I saw a lot of people not behaving like that, spreading misinformation as if it was fact without caring about the consequences of the person they accused, but then pretending that they just "started bolting their door", though.

And the CNN article that started this conversation is certainly not talking about these kind of people (not sure if they even would call such people "conspiracy theorists"), they are talking about people who decide to destroy their neighbor's life just because, in their book, the neighbor deserved it by doing something that they decided was suspicious. In fact, this article talks about people who attacks honest scientists just doing their job who haven't done anything suspicious in the first place.

"a group of people have absolutely no proof what-so-ever"

Something not being provable underlies the definition of the term theory, Google this phrase, "is it required for a theory to have proof" to understand.

"It does not matter if they end up being right"

This is not a logical stance.

They have a "theory", no proof. My point is that a healthy society should not rely on "theory" to destroy other people's life, to bully them or to make societal decisions, especially if there are processes that can go further than just theory.

And, yes, it does not matter if they end up being right, the same way it does not matter if a broken clock end up being right: it is still a very very unethical and unfair way of managing a society. I can throw knives from the top of my building, and sometimes I will hit someone that deserve it. According to your logic, it's fine.

On top of that, if you learn they end up being right, it means that someone else came up with the proof, demonstrating that they were utterly useless: their "belief" did not change anything, because the proof would have appeared anyway. All they have done is being counter-productive and delayed the discovery of the proof (and sometimes ruining it totally).

It's a bit like bad cops that "get the bad guy" by breaking the rules and end up with the bad guy being released due to breach of procedure. It's just totally stupid: if they believe there is a problem, they investigate and bring proofs upfront, not start accusing without proofs.

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