Comment by NoZebra120vClip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NoZebra120vClip | Hacker News Reader

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NoZebra120vClip

It's unfortunate that "conspiracy theory" has taken on an indisputably negative connotation now. Conspiracies do occur, theories about them form. More often, people and entities behave in concert without conspiring per se, and this could be because of aligned goals or beliefs, or simply regulations that cause corporations to do the same sort of thing, especially when they keep an eye on one another.

For example, is "market rent" a conspiracy? Is it price-fixing or collusion? Hey, I just caught you making a theory!

I think the main bad thing about conspiracy theories (and other theories that may belong to crackpots and crazies) is that the facts mostly can't be known. If in fact there are conspiracies, nobody who's involved will speak openly and truthfully about them, so I guess just follow the money.

Or don't. Why not concern yourself with living your life, enjoying your family and friends, being a good neighbor, having some recreation time outdoors and stuff. All of these things are known cures for the "cluster of psychological features" that may trouble you.

The use of noun-, verb- and adjectival phrases, in lieu of either inventing a neologism or writing out in full a dictionary definition every time you want to use the associated concept, is commonplace in the English language, and complaining about it is not going to change anything, as it is more convenient than the alternatives.

Conspiracy:

An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.

Insofar as 2 or more people have coordinated, colluded, or planned an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act, a conspiracy is afoot.

In fact, almost all significant illegal, wrongful, or subversive acts include conspiracies to commit said acts.

I think it is safe to say that the present sociopolitical and socioeconomic landscapes are rife with activities, writ large, that are, from some reasonable perspective, illegal, wrongful, or subversive in nature.

To remove the idea of conspiracy as a valid concept wielded by reasonable people is perhaps the most surgical of injuries to society which might otherwise seek to prevent or interfere with these kinds of illegal, wrongful, or subversive acts.

When a couple of people decide to rob a liquor store, we call it a conspiracy. When someone suspects that a global cabal of banks might be colluding to screw the world over, we discredit them as a “conspiracy theorist”. (Libor)

Insofar as it is reasonable to suspect that an individual might be capable of doing something illegal, wrongful, or subversive, it is also reasonable to suspect that an organisation might might do the same.

We are conditioned to protect the systems and individuals that parasitise society, because we do not wish to confront the flaws in the system we serve.

That said, there are plenty of nutjobs out there with outrageous claims. Some of them are delusional, some of them are attention seekers, some of them are merely ignorant or misinformed. But we should call them nutjobs, not conspiracy theorists.

We ignore our civic duty to be vigilant “conspiracy theorists” at our peril. In doing so, we give cover to the lies that are big enough to be easy to believe.

Society is full of real, actual conspiracies and collusion that are harmful to people, whether they’re currently illegal or not. It’s just that the people promoting what popular media refers to as “conspiracy theory” throw enormous resources at distracting from those substantive issues by focusing on 5G, microchips in vaccines, chemtrails, and various silly theories of secret cabals running the world.

If I was one of the people actually benefiting from a conspiracy that extracts value from society, I would be thrilled about this. I would even work hard to promote it. I would even try to elect political candidates that support or wink at obviously-lunatic conspiracy theories.

Exactly, it is extremely effective cover for people actually doing harmful things.

Also, that sounds like something a conspiracy theorist would say (lol).

Here’s a conspiracy theory: it’s not the 5G vaccine microchip fringe that’s the problem, it’s the people who make sure to bring up the wildest, most extreme oppositional “conspiracy theories” when defending their beliefs in order to paint all critique of their position with the same brush, even if more reasonable “conspiracy theories” are vastly more common.

IE, it’s not the rare lunatic fringe that’s the issue, it’s the people in your last paragraph. That said, I think this grace should be given to the lunatic fringe: they instinctually feel something’s “not right” and the rest is all rationalization and theorycrafting divorced from reality. If they had the education and abilities they’d be among the reasonable set. But human instincts honed by millions of years of evolution should not be ignored, even if the rationalized theories are nonsense: SOMETHING really is wrong and needs to be corrected. Instead of ignoring these people we should be asking what in the social environment is setting them off.

>That said, I think this grace should be given to the lunatic fringe: they instinctually feel something’s “not right” and the rest is all rationalization and theorycrafting divorced from reality.

Speaking as a formerly-"Moral-Majority-esque" Christian, who still lives in the deep red of the Bible belt, I assure you that this sense that "something is wrong" is _not_ a credit, depending on what the "something" is.

In the county where I lived as a child, the KKK ran the county seat as a "sundown town" as late as the 80s, and only when an Oprah special on the area drew public attention and scrutiny did the KKK lose (official) power. It remains a starkly-white county just outside one of America's blackest cities, and its overwhelming majority is in fervent support of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who calls that area her home.

To that crowd, yes, something is wrong: namely, the whites-only "order" they once enforced is now denied them by the force of both law and social pressure.

And so, they lean _hard_ into white supremacy and "great replacement" conspiracy theories, in pursuit of their racially-homogeneous comfort zone of dominance.

The feeling that something's "not right" is not a credit on its own; that depends greatly on what the "something" is identified to be, and what "right" means to that person.

That’s a good point, insofar as we should not give people a pass just because they have a sense of unease. But I think the parent comment still stands in that these reactions can be canaries or indications of an unwell society.

In your example, of course, this unwellness itself directly manifests as source of the unease. But follow that pathology one step deeper and perhaps there is insight to be gained?

What I am sure of is that we have left our sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems to their own devices without carefully examining their impacts for a long time now. This has left them rife with technical debt and exploitable bugs that some parasitic elements of society are using automation to aggressively exploit.

I’m not saying that engineering them will have a better outcome, but perhaps if we study them with real rigour it is possible that one day it might.

We would do well to remember that these constructs exist to serve humanity, and not the other way around.

Also, 5g vaccine chemtrails is my next band name.

I can't wait to see how your fans search for you on the web.

Yes, there are a lot of conspiracies, but "Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead;" so if a conspiracy involves enough actors, it is unlikely that it will be kept secret from the public except from some lunatic fringe.

This is a common trope paraded by conspiracy perpetrators. “Do you really think we could keep something like that secret?”

Also, it doesn’t have to be secret to be a conspiracy.

Fossil fuel companies more or less openly conspired to obfuscate, deny, discredit, and discourage evidence from their own scientists and the scientific community at large that fossil fuel use could cause significant heating and possible thermal runaway of the planetary climate for over 70 years in order to continue to exploit fossil fuels which they knew to pose a threat to human civilisation as a whole.

Cigarette companies acted similarly. Automotive companies have done similar things many times over.

Naively believing that collective human incompetence makes effective obfuscation impossible ignores a great many examples of successful collusion and implies a very naive optimism about the information dissemination mechanisms within society.

It is more plausible that collective human incompetence makes perfect secrecy unnecessary.

> Fossil fuel companies...

And we know about it. The documents were leaked and uncovered by lawsuits.

> Cigarette companies acted similarly

And again, we know about it.

> Naively believing that collective human incompetence makes effective obfuscation impossible ignores a great many examples of successful collusion

Where? It's not incompetence. Every actor is facing a prisoner's dilemma, and at least one will act rationally and squeal on the rest.

This is a common misconception. The US system of state secrets for example is enormous, and while leaks do occur, they are negligible compared to what is kept hidden.

There are multiple tricks employable, one is to keep any single collaborator in the dark aboout most of the conspiracy. That way, any single leak is manageable.

Your conviction of believing conspiracies to be unrealistic is common and helps conspirators a lot. It disincentivises whistleblowers in particular.

> The US system of state secrets for example is enormous, and while leaks do occur, they are negligible compared to what is kept hidden.

Not from those whose job it is to find them. The Manhattan Project leaked to the Soviets multiple times over. Any time the government does something illegal, a whistleblower has leaked it to reporters.

> unfortunate that "conspiracy theory"

Ya. Some new phrases might help.

Something like the distinctions between science -fiction ("sci-fi"), -fantasy ("syfy"), and -fact (aka "science").

Just sounding it out: Conspiracy-fantasy, -fiction, and -fact.

That is the point. It's meant to diminish, discredit, and discriminate. It's a conspiracy theory until it's not. People used to wonder why Iphones got slow overtime and then Apple admits to slowing their phones down albeit for other eXcuses.

The thing you described (batterygate) happened once. It was a feature brought out on a single release and it still exists today.

It does not fit with the other narrative that phones slow down over time, or with the release of a new OS. People love to misunderstand it though.

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