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Comment by suoduandao3 | Hacker News Reader

Why dismiss conspiracy hypotheses out of hand? Conspiracies happen all the time. As Data becomes a more important resource, asymmetric access to data will become an ever more prominent feature of those in power.

I would say the important thing is to recognize that our pattern recognition overfits for malicious actors with hidden knowledge, probably for evolutionary reasons. The fact we evolved to have more false positives than negatives in this field is emphatically not a reason to dismiss all such hypotheses out of hand.

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> Why dismiss conspiracy hypotheses out of hand?

"Out of hand" is too harsh, but we should lean towards dismissing them unless/until the evidence is compelling.

Why? Well, simply put, because doing otherwise wastes too much time and attention. Conspiracy theories are almost always created by people who are not subject matter experts (at best they are self-taught, but usually this means they watched lots of dodgy YouTube videos), bypassing or ignoring all procedures that exist for a good reason, propelled more by a "I want to believe" rather than a skeptical point of view, and are far easier to create than actual science.

Doing a proper experiment based on clear assumptions is hard. Being skeptical, trying to rule out confounding variables, considering alternative explanations, all of that is hard.

Anyone can create a conspiracy theory, and it requires no skill other than being passionate and having a platform -- like YouTube -- to disseminate your fringe opinion. And because conspiracy theorists seldom follow the scientific method, they can always "ad-hoc patch up" whatever gap you find in their "theory", so it's an uphill battle. It requires no effort to make wild assertions, but it takes a lot of effort to convincingly disprove them.

So it makes sense to dismiss them as default. If one is true, it will gather compelling evidence with time regardless of the crackpot that is currently proposing the theory.

The kind of conspiracies that happen all the time are tiny ones, and typically (and that's how the word is most often defined in text) about a small group planning to do something illegal. The term "conspiracy theory" is instead used about when a (typically very large) group of people creates a conspiracy to suppress a scientific or factual truth, and that does not happen all the time - it's very hard to find even one case like that. So no, conspiracies, in this kind of context, does not happen all the time.

What would you call WMDs in Iraq? Do you have an alternate name for this kind of mass deception if not conspiracy?

That wasn't exactly mass deception. It was basically group think inside a certain administration, supported by an at that time must-keep-in-sync-with-them UK prime IIRC. Most of Europe had access to more information and knew it to be incorrect (there were investigative TV programs etc showing why). Most people actually believed that the WMD claim was just a stunt to make an excuse for going in and finally finish the '91 war. It certainly wasn't a global conspiracy by scientists in any sense.

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