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Comment by Klinky | Hacker News Reader

I think a large portion of the conspiracy theorist population probably has a mental illness that makes them susceptible to delusional thinking. Delusional people can lead very normal fully functioning lives, but mix a certain topic that offers patterns which make their brain go down a certain path, and they suddenly become very adamant about believing something that is illogical and irrational.

There is probably little someone can do to really stop conspiracy theories. People certainly shouldn't censor themselves.

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What's the prevelance of conspiracy theories? About half of Americans claim creationism explains the existance of man; only about 20% say humans evolved without God.

50% of Americans think there was a wider conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK.

About 35% of Americans think that global warming is a hoax.

What you're doing is probably the conjunction fallacy. You see people with odd beliefs. You then have a choice: i) these people have odd beliefs ii) these people have a mental illness and odd beliefs. Even though i is more probable you have to explain the irrationality of the beliefs so yu pick ii, even though we know it's less likely.

Mental illness is very common (1 in 4 at any point in our lifetime; 1 in 6 right now) but these numbers talk about the widest interpretation of mental illhealth. Delusional thinking is thought to be less common. Mood disorders are thought to affect about 5% of the US population; schizophrenia about 1%. So you've suddenly diagnosed very many more people with a mental illness.

I think there is a difference between someone who is causally stating an opinion, and someone who has fully subscribed to a specific conspiracy theory.

> conjunction fallacy [...] you pick ii, even though we know it's less likely

We know that "mental illness and odd beliefs" is less likely than "odd beliefs". That doesn't mean we know that "mental illness and odd beliefs" is less likely than "no mental illness and odd beliefs", which is the relevant comparison here.

(But, for what it's worth, I think most people who embrace conspiracy theories don't do so as a result of anything that would be diagnosed as a mental illness.)

1 in 4, really?

Interesting choices:

> half of Americans claim creationism explains the existance of man

This is a fantastic explanation, it just doesn't originate from science.

> 50% of Americans think there was a wider conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK.

This is a perfectly logical thing to believe even in the absence of evidence. It's reasonable for any assassination of a prominent figure.

> 35% of Americans think that global warming is a hoax.

This topic is super-politicized. Uncritical acceptance would be unreasonable (and many do accept one side of this without questioning it). Most people aren't going to do any research into the topic. The 65% who believe global warming probably didn't do any research either.

I think it's not even very fair to call these 'odd beliefs'.

Agreed. They are "odd" only because they contradict mainstream scientific belief. The strange thing is that a lot of people take mainstream scientific belief and make it into a truth so absolute they don't even realize it's a belief anymore. And that is deeply ironic given that may scientific theory is only going to be around until a better one replaces it - it's supposed to be that way.

Even the creationist theory - we have to admit that the story of a bearded man putting dinosaur bones in the ground is pretty silly. But who knows if 65% realy believe that - maybe the majority of those believes in an alternate creationist theory which basically boils down to the universe having an inherent intelligence and an inherent purpose. Which is something that I personally do believe and which people who believe in the "random co-incidence" universe will at least discuss.

Either way the only thing that can be said with absolute certainty of any belief is that it will turn out to be false.

I don't think being a "conspiracy theorist" is delusonal at all if there are overwhelming facts supportig the theory. When did it become crazy to "...have an explanatory proposition that accuses two or more persons, a group, or an organization of having caused or covered up, through secret planning and deliberate action, an illegal or harmful event or situation." Watergate, Iran-contra, prism, the cia drug trafficking during Vietnam, Cia torture programs. All of them can be defined as conspiracies yet they are true. Something is not false just for being a conspiracy. Almost everything secret agencies do can be defined as a conspiracy.

Conspiracy theories are bizare explanations of events that don't fit reality.

Thus, Iran-Contra is not a conspiracy theory because it's true, even though it is a conspiracy.

That's a ridiculously narrow and exclusionary definition of conspiracy theories, one that's set up to only include those theories that are clearly delusional.

If you asked a average person three years ago whether they thought that all their calls were being recorded and that the NSA was hacking into companies and stealing data you would have been called delusional and your explanation would have been bizarre and unreal. Yet here we are today with clear evidence that all these things are being done with no repercussions for the perpetrators.

Ie, it's not because you're paranoid that they're not after you.

> If you asked a average person three years ago whether they thought that all their calls were being recorded and that the NSA was hacking into companies and stealing data you would have been called delusional

A person can still be operating under a conspiracy theory and talk about pervasive government surveillance. Just because it's true doesn't make it not a conspiracy theory.

But also, for your example, anyone paying attention had been saying, pretty loudly, that governments were surveiling their populations. See, for example, the EU parliament report into ECHELON. We know about ECHELON in the early 1990s. Thus, if someone had said "They've done it before, look at ECHELON, they're probably doing it now" -- that's a reasonable bit of evidence and a reasonable conclusion. If someone says "I hear clicks on my phone line and so the government is spying on me" that's a conspiracy theory (because the evidence is bogus) even though it's true (governments do spy on citizens).

I agree.

It's also a typical trait of conspiracy theories (in the negative sense) that they pretend to have figured out more than they possibly could have.

I mean they don't just sell you suspicions (that might even be reasonable), but overdetailed debunkings which are clearly fabricated.

As if they believed that the winner is whoever provides more details, wherever these would come from.

If Iran-Contra was not discovered you'd think it is a 'bizare explanation' and a conspiracy theory. And it was only by a chance that it was discovered. This is even more evident in the case of Watergate.

It just graduated from conspiracy theory to conspiracy fact.

I don't think "conspiracy theorist" is really accurate term to define what is going on in most of these cases.

The vast majority of "conspiracies" are more like Underpants Gnomes business models. There's no explantory proposition anywhere. There's no overwhelming theory - put ten truthers in a room and you'll get ten wildly different theories (if you get a theory at all), and no overwhelming facts.

Watergate didn't require any theory - people connected with the Nixon administration were caught red-handed breaking and entering. It's obvious why they might do what they did and to ask who knew what/when. It was obvious people had a motive for covering up a criminal action. It was just a matter of documenting it.

When Iran leaked the Iran-hostage story via a Lebanese newspaper, nobody had a conspiracy theory before that. There was no "why would Reagan do that?" - the motivation was obvious and it was in print. When the -Contra side came out, no one had a conspiracy theory about a connection there. It was more investigation/leaks and a total surprise.

So I don't see where Conspiracy Theories really equate to uncovering Criminal Conspiracies. They seem to be more exclusive than related to each other.

I'd say it's the opposite. The large portion of the population who believes everything the authorities tell them has a mental illness that prevents them from thinking critically and for themselves.

No one should abandon critical thinking.

I don't see how that's opposite. Not believing in conspiracy theories doesn't imply not thinking critically. In fact, critical thinking is pretty harmful to most conspiracy theories.

Correct, but some people are rejecting every conspiracy theory on the sole ground that it assumes conspiracy, and this heuristic is not critical thinking.

Given the amount of signal vs noise, I think it's pretty reasonable to ignore the crazies until they can back up their claims with hard evidence.

If they can't do that, their "theory" isn't worth my time. Now if one of the crazies keeps bugging me with his theory, I might apply critical thinking to shut him up, if I don't lose patience and punch him in the face first.

You've just contradicted yourself. On the one hand you state critical thinking is key and on the other hand you dismiss questioning popular opinion as crazy.

Conspiracy theories are not "questioning popular opinion". You can question popular opinion without coming up with crazy theories, or at least, you should take them as what they are: wild guesses at what might explain some discrepancies in that popular opinion.

Conspiracy theorists usually show a strong belief in something pretty improbable without a shred of tangible evidence. I think it's fair to label them as "crazies" because they tend to be very vocal about it and impervious to logical flaws in their own theories. And they're annoying, when you annoy people, you can expect some kind of negative feedback, like being mocked or called names.

No one believes everything authorities say. Congress has a 15% approval rating ...

Something that confuses a lot of conspiracy theorists is that global issues just aren't as important as local issues to people. Having a house, doing your job, raising your kids, spending time with loved ones, and anything that directly affects your ability to do so (e.g. your health, actions of people around you) are important and have a profound impact on your life.

Sometimes the actions of authorities have a direct impact on your life as well, but mostly at a much smaller scale and with less relevance.

Treating MH370 as something that's important to anyone other than people related to those involved leads to typical thinking errors like assuming Russia would care about this plane, or that people are being deluded. The horrible truth is that the whole thing just doesn't matter much.

Its important to look for supporting evidence and gather facts. Yes you're right the masses still believes everything they see on TV and other officially controlled media. The more time someone believes something, the more time it takes to break him out of it.

As for conspiracy theorists these people generally have had atleast 1 experience in the past, where they had picked the right trail and were mislead. These guys generally tend to negate everything they get from mainstream sources and continue to advertise their version of events. I am not saying they are wrong or right, its just psychology. Most of these guys just need a single clue to say to themselves, "You see, i was right".

> Its important to look for supporting evidence and gather facts.

That's a reasonable stance. I tend to agree with you. It seems uncontroversial that it is important to look for supporting evidence and gather facts.

I wonder what do you make of this public statement, published by Le Monde and written by 34 French scholars, made in February of 1979:

"The question of how technically such a mass murder was possible should not be raised. It was technically possible because it occurred... There is not nor can there be a debate over the existence of the gas chambers."

Do historians get a pass? Do they not need to look for supporting evidence and gather facts?

I don't mean to be inflammatory so please don't vote me down. The point I'm making is that it's easy to dismiss "conspiracy theorists" for their silly ideas, and have these lofty goals of "evidence first", but when an extraordinary claim that is politically motivated stands on very shaky grounds, and "evidence first" is called into action as a modus operandi, then people are told they should not raise questions.

I'd like to remind everyone that it is not controversial to state that there is no documentary evidence for the use of gas chambers between 1942 and 1945. This much has been stated in public television by Tim Sebastian in a 2000 BBC "Hardtalk" interview with a WW2 historian, and stated under oath by the leading WW2 atrocities historian Raul Hilberg.

It's also important to talk about this because this places 99% of people firmly in the "conspiracy theorist" camp, as most people believe these unquestionable claims based on hearsay and not on any body of evidence. If someone disagrees and can show me wrong, please do so without naively assuming that I must have some racial agenda, which I can assure you - I don't.

You say you don't mean to be inflammatory.

This is bizarre, because you have written a confused set of paragraphs taken out of the playbook of Holocaust deniers. You have quoted a small piece of an article from Le Monde (out of context). The context was the need to debunk claims by Robert Faurisson, who was and is a notorious Holocaust denier.

You have also made truly outrageous claims about gas chambers, with justification, amazingly, from a television interview (unsourced) and a noted historian (unsourced). I am unconvinced.

The only way I can make sense of what you have written is as an ironic gesture -- an unhinged collage of junk from one of the oldest conspiracy theories, the one that believes in a Jewish cabal.

Indeed the published Le Monde statement was in response to Faurisson. I don't see how this is important. What's important is the attitude of the historians and academics that made that statement. The statement is very clear in that it seeks to supress certain questions from being asked. I don't understand your accusation that the quote is "out of context". The context is that someone questioned something, and 34 scholars published a statement saying that they, as scholars, think that question should not be raised.

I have no problem sourcing the statements I made here. For the BBC interview, see here (timestamp: 3:33): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF4GFGMNm3g which I quote below:

David: "The judge says 'I always assumed that there was the evidence that Auschwitz had gas chambers, I was surprised to find that there wasn't until this case came along"

Tim: "There wasn't documentary evidence, is what he said, he doesn't say there wasn't any evidence, he said there wasn't documentary evidence"

David: "There were eyewitnesses and he relies on half a dozen eyewitnesses"

The transcripts for the trial are available for you to investigate for yourself, but the BBC acknowledging in public there's no documentary evidence for it, and quoting from the trial itself, should be enough for you to investigate for yourself from now on, and should be convincing enough.

I do not believe in the racial conspiracy theories you're trying to accuse me of. Nor do I need to. I do not need to believe in any conspiracy theory in order to be interested in the facts about WW2, and in order to understand that in the reality we live in, there is no documentary evidence for an event that is heavily glorified and propagandized in the mainstream education system and media.

You're quoting from a TV interview focused on a very narrow question (specific kind of evidence, specific location, specific killing mechanism, etc.) -- and treating an offhand interjection from an interviewer as some kind of BBC statement. Neither of us is qualified to judge this, and certainly NOT from such a third-hand source.

The gap between the Le Monde excerpt you quote and your claim about what it shows is similarly large.

You are not arguing honestly, so I'm done.

I don't understand your complaint about the narrow focus here. This is on purpose. No one says Jews didn't suffer. They were round up and uprooted and shoved into trains and drained of their wealth and they suffered immense and undeniable horrors along with all sorts of other victim groups. The narrow focus here is on the question of gas chambers. This specific alleged killing mechanism never existed. It is a conspiracy theory to think they did. A conspiracy theory that 99% of people firmly believe in, without evidence. That is all that is being argued. In the same way that all historians deny the existence of steam chambers, electrocution schemes, head shrinking procedures, killing machines powered by pedaling, some more brave historians also deny the existence of gas chambers, because there's as much evidence for it (none) as there is for those other wartime rumors.

Why are you not overly analytical like that with regards to the claims that there were gas chambers? If you are in possession of any documentary evidence for them, which seems to be the case since you dispute what two people on opposite sides of an interview take for granted, then you should just show it and the discussion would be over.

I'm giving you a shortcut into this. Look up the trial of Ernst Zundel and you can read the transcript of when Raul Hilberg declares that, from the (literally) tons of records that the Nazis left, there is no document that can serve as evidence for there being gas chambers, or for gas chambers being used as an extermination method. Also look into the work of David Cole who was responsible for unearthing the now mainstream fact that the supposed gas chambers in Auschwitz are post-war reconstructions.

If you want more information on the Le Monde publication, you can go and read or watch what Sylvia Stolz has to say. She is a lawyer who was arrested while doing her job of arguing for her client.

I am 100% arguing honestly. I have no agenda but to show people that everyone falls for conspiracy theories, and that they should get out of their high horses with all of this armchair psychiatry of judging other people's characters by what they believe in.

Please show me where I'm wrong.

I will post here a response to a reply that was briefly posted but then deleted.

> Gas chambers did exist

There were definitely delousing chambers that no mainstream historian denies were used to control the typhus epidemic. If you call those gas chambers, fine. Generally, when this topic is being discussed, "gas chambers" is a shorthand for homicidal gas chambers. IF you have evidence for those, please show.

I'm sorry if you think I am deliberately trying to twist things. I'm not. Yes, there were many camps. Out of all the concentration camps, only these camps in Poland are nowadays said to have housed homicidal gas chambers: Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka etc (etc being Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno). Also of notice is that only those camps liberated by the Soviets are said today to have housed gas chambers. Right after the war, and for quite some time, it was said there were gas chambers in Dachau and in all the 17 german camps. Today no mainstream historian argues that no german camp had ever housed gas chambers.

Indeed some camps were transit camps, like Treblinka, even though Arad himself (a prominent mainstream jewish holocaust historian) argues in his book that Treblinka was a death camp, and that all who arrived were killed within 15 minutes. This can be easily dismissed by listening to the testimonies themselves, many of which relate that they stopped at Treblinka, took a shower, re-entered the trains and headed to other camps; we also have tons of photos of train tickets showing Treblinka as a transit camp.

Yes, we have eyewitness testimony. Have you looked into them yourself? I have. We can talk about it after you do. The testimonies are entirely exaggerated and have no basis in reality. Dario Gabbai, a self-alleged Sonderkommando (the folks that allegedly operated the gas chambers), said he would cut the hair of the "gassed victims" after they were gassed. He said the victims would turn black and blue, and he'd walk inside the chamber, treading over the corpses, to cut their hair after the fact. I can link you the video to Dario Gabbai himself saying these things but it's on Youtube. This is in direct contradiction with what we know from pictures happened, namely that they had their hair cut as a life-saving measure to avoid typhus through hair lice, which was done, obviously, before they shwoered, and not after they were "gassed".

Regarding Prussic acid, it is a mainstream fact that 95% of all Zyklon-B was used for delousing purposes. The exterminationists have to try and explain the death of 6 million people with only 5% of the available Zyklon-B. Regarding engine exhaust, if you read Pressac, who was a "holocaust denier" (to use your terms) but converted to being an exterminationist, you will see the story about the engine exhaust is very hard to explain and has several technical problems. It is variedly told to be a submarine engine, a Soviet tank diesel engine (which doesn't work for gassing), etc, while no evidence of such engine has ever been found. Plus, it seems a rather ad hoc method for the exterminationists to tout, when usually they defend there was a policy of systematic killing.

I don't believe millions of Jews were killed, because no one has bothered to put together a cogent case for the logistics thereof. Pressac in his book about the operations of the gas chambers attempts to do just that and comes incredibly short of it. I'm definitely interested in that evidence so if you come across it, please send it my way. One of the reasons I got interested in this topic was precisely because the purported method of killing was so dehumanizing and so fantastical that I wanted to know the details. Then I found out there are no details being put forward by the exterminationists.

If there were a cogent case to be made about the holocaust, it would have been made during the trial where Sylvia Stolz worked. The person she was defending was being accused of "denying the holocaust" when no forensic definition for "holocaust" exists. There is no case that can be constructed to define what the holocaust was because it is based entirely on second-hand hearsay and dubious stories of supposed participants that do not match the reality of the events.

I think you're confusing those who believe in lizard-people with those that might question the government version of certain events. This is the purpose of the term consipracy theory/theorist, to group together anyone who believes in, or merely just questions, a certain accepted event or idea. It really is a great term, as it's something that negates any other possible outcome.

What really should be considered here is the fact that proof requires a scientific setting. One cannot prove anything that occurs outside of a controlled setting, simply because it's not repeatable. Theories, both those set in reality and those that exist outside it, will forever be subject to this fact, and therefore be very questionable to (ie, not accepted by) the masses.

I consider peoples need for a conspiracy theory to be the same as peoples need for religion or superstition. It's about a need to believe in some higher order to seemingly uncontrollable chaos.

I don't think it's fair to call this evolutionary trait as a "mental illness" either, since correlating cause and effect is what helped us learn to farm and such like. The hard part is separating linked events from coincidences - which is where the scientific method comes in of using larger sample groups, control groups and peer reviews. However lets also remember that this is an extremely recent development in our evolution.

As a footnote, it's also worth noting that these traits have also been observed in other species such as pigeons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner#Superstition_in_t...

Two quotes by Alan Moore about conspiracy theories which I think are apt:

    "The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy
    theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. 
    The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is 
    not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot 
    reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more
    frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless."

    "Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of 
    conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those 
    conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. 
    If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing 
    to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody 
    on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead."

I don't think it counts as a disease if the majority of people, including most successful people "suffer" from it without any negative consequences for themselves. For example religion.

A mental illness does not have to result in major negative side effects to be considered an illness. People can live very normal looking lives, while also having delusional thoughts.

Or maybe this obsession with calling absolutely everything that doesn't fit the everyday-narrower definition of a "normal person" a mental illness needs to stop.

Next thing you know, "People who don't want to be snooped on by the government have a mental illness and don't understand why it's a good thing."

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