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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

It is important to distinguish between two kinds of conspiracy theories:

1. Conspiracies where there is evidence of a conspiracy (like sworn testimony from conspirators)

2. Conspiracies where there is no evidence of a conspiracy, i.e. the hypothesis is that it is a successful conspiracy.

Type 2 conspiracy theories are are like invisible pink unicorns: by design they are unfalsifiable, and hence unscientific, and so can be dismissed on those grounds alone.

Contrary to popular opinion, extraordinary claims do not require extraordinary evidence to merit serious consideration, they merely require some evidence that cannot be accounted for by more mundane explanations. Weird video artifacts don't qualify.

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I found the train of thought of "unfalsible == unscientific == can be dismissed"

worrying. There are so much knowledge unfalsible yet we relied on. This overestimate our ability to reason, or gathering evidence.

> so much knowledge unfalsible yet we relied on

Like what?

It’s impossible to falsify patient reports of pain, yet the medical field takes them quite seriously.

That's not true. For example, if someone suddenly stops acting like they are in pain when they think they are not being observed that's a pretty good indication that they are faking it.

The medical field will often ignore out of hand any reports of pain as drug seeking and do nothing about it.

I have first hand experience with this.

Well, to go recursive on you: like "we can only be sure of things we can empirically verify". But we can't empirically verify that statement, because it's a statement of epistemology. (This is one of the fundamental flaws of logical positivism, though not the one that killed it.)

Or the opposite: Our observations reflect actual reality.

Or that induction actually leads us to truth.

Or that our logical processes arrive at things that are actually true, not just that seem true.

That's probably enough for a start...

> we can only be sure of things we can empirically verify

That's a straw man. I never said anything about being sure. We can never be sure about anything. Type 2 conspiracy theories might be true. So could last-thursday-ism.

The reason these things can be rejected is not because there is evidence against them. Last-thursday-ism might be right. But so could last-wenesday-ism or last-tuesday-ism or last-monday-ism or... Each of these is an instance of a large family of hypotheses, none of which are falsifiable. Only one of them can possibly be right, so even if one of them is right the odds that you've picked the right one are indistinguishable from zero. That is why all unfalsifiable hypotheses can be rejected.

I never said that you said that.

I never said you said that I said it.

See, I can play that game too.

I was not attempting to play games. But since you seem to be, I'm out.

this is too simplistic.

There are LOTS of conspiracy theories where the 'conspiracy' is not at all hidden, but out in the open and it's an open question of whether it's a coincidence or actually coordinated action. Based on common sense discernment, some of these range from "almost certainly true" to "probably nonsense".

There are also conspiracy theories where there is no longer evidence of conspiracy, but lots of evidence of deliberate data destruction. One can only infer the motive behind the data destruction, but I wouldn't call this type 1 or type 2. It's not inherently unfalsifiable by design, but extremely hard to falsify. If you mark such a conspiracy theory with the label, you risk discouraging people from trying to uncover what actually happened, and converting a "maybe successful conspiracy" to an "actually successful conspiracy" (if indeed it is a conspiracy).

> lots of evidence of deliberate data destruction

But evidence of deliberate data destruction is evidence. It might be an open question of what it is evidence of -- for example, maybe someone is just clearing out old records. But if someone is trying to destroy -- oh, I dunno, just spitballing here -- surveillance footage of someone moving boxes of classified materials after a subpoena has been issued for those materials, it's hard to explain that as anything other than a cover-up.

They might be trying to cover up something else that isn't the conspiracy theory.

Suppose there's a theory that some person got suicided in jail. And a lot of security footage got deleted. It could be that the prison guards were torturing the person in the cell for information that they could use to blackmail important people, and covering that up and there was not (yet) a higher level call for the person to be suicided.

Not saying that's the case in any particular incident, just conjuring a hypothetical example.

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