I disagree with this assertion to some extent. A large majority do like to blame their problems on an unknown entity or group of individuals. However enacted macroeconomic policies and geopolitical interests have repercussions that affect my day to day life hence why I do try to investigate the sources of claims, the interchange findings between related entities, the suspected motive interests and more to determine my course of action in life. I don’t do it for hot rage or demonization. If I was interested in selling a service or product and was a little more psychopathic and I was in a position of CEO, there wouldn’t be any reason why I could not make endorsements of them to every individual or industry if I obtained more wealth. The amount of promised claims of resources you can offer to other people dictates your utility to other people, possessing an infinite amount or superlative quantities means I can buy influence. So yes, if you are not intelligent you might be unable to observe human behaviour and understand the principles behind behavioural control and hence have a disadvantaged life as so to speak because you are swept up in the whimsical affairs of other entities. No farmer cares enough about the aristocratic desires of hegemony to go send themselves to the frontlines for a milieu of no gain.
I think it's just more fun to imagine a conspiracy of sinister rich people doing obviously terrible things for malign motives, rather than a conspiracy of overpromoted mediocrities making terrible decisions from a mix of boring corruption (the senator's wife is on the board of a company that cares a lot about the outcome of this bill) and honest incompetence (everyone involved in the decision didn't really understand its implications but thought everyone else did).
Covid lockdowns as a conspiracy by the global elite to reset everything and impose their rule on mankind >> covid lockdowns as a bunch of scientifically illiterate midwits trying to act sensibly while also doing whatever virtue signaling was best for their political future.
"But also, some conspiracy theorists don’t really seem to hate their subjects this much. A lot of Illuminati believers tend to be kind of chill hippies who believe without really worrying. Maybe these people are more akin to the Kennedy and Pyramid believers in Part 1?"
It seems worthwhile to think about belief, and belief of belief. Someone may think that they believe something, but not exhibit any of the characteristics that we (or likely even they) would think ought to correspond to such a belief.
For convenience, we can refer to this as belief of belief. The believer thinks that they believe it, but do not actually believe it in the sense that they believe in other things.
A common example of such a belief is religion. If many religions are true, they would imply a radically different model of the world than if they were not true. This can either lead to believers of these religions having entirely different models of how the world works than nonbelievers (which we could call true belief) or very similar models to nonbelievers (which we could call belief of belief). Both categories seem common when it comes to religion.
Coming back to conspiracy theories, it seems likely that some people nominally believe them (i.e. a hypothetical perfect lie detector would detect no lies in these people were they to say that they believe them), but in truth, only believe that they believe them, rather than actually believing them.
They may think that they believe that the Illuminati are real bad dudes, but that nominal belief is completely divorced from any model they have of the world. If they hear a bump in the night, for example, they won't for a moment consider that it may be Illuminati.
> For convenience, we can refer to this as belief of belief. The believer thinks that they believe it, but do not actually believe it in the sense that they believe in other things.
We can Taboo belief to make their comment a bit clearer. There are two things that are usually in accord, but not always:
Someone says "I believe X" or "I don't believe X".
Someone acts as though X is true, or acts as though X is false.
Belief in belief is when they have the first, but not the second.
A fun instance of this comes from a study on someone with anterograde amnesia (the inability to form long term memories). I'm going from memory, so the details here are fabricated. So there's this doctor taking care of a patient with amnesia and the doctor loses all sense of morality and decides to play a prank that will give them just as much sadistic glee every time they pull it off (or it was an important experiment or whatever). The doctor puts a little zapper in the palm of his hand so when he shakes hands with the patient he gets a nasty shock! The doctor has a good laugh, then they continue on with their experiments. Since the patient cannot form memories, he falls for the same prank the next day, and the day after that, and so on.
Eventually, when the doctor comes in, the patient is hesitant to shake his hand. When asked why, the patient will make things up, saying things like they need to wash their hands, or getting up to do something else, or express a hello by patting the doctor on the shoulder, or just saying that the doctor is a jerk and he doesn't have to shake his hand. The patient acts as if the doctor has a zapper in his hand *despite not knowing* that it's the case.
Usually, belief in belief is used to describe the opposite case, where someone will say something like "the doctor has a zapper in his hand" but then go on to happily shake hands anyways.
The process you describe, Procrustes, relates to the "explainer" function of the left hemisphere, which is revealed in patients who have undergone a "split-brain" procedure, where the corpus collosum connecting the hemispheres is severed (typically to relieve severe epilepsy). The right brain's activities become a black box for the left, but the left brain (where verbal skills chiefly reside) observes and explains them, often in a parodically rational (and inaccurate) way. The research is associated with Michael Gazzaniga, who has described it in non-technical writings. Here's an online interview that provides an overview:
I've myself observed that the type of learning you describe can occur in people who are severely disabled in memory creation. I think the basic thing to bear in mind is that we generally overstress the role of the prefrontal cortex's executive function in the ongoing maintenance state of a person interacting with the world. There are many areas of the brain with memory functions, and those functions operate independent of the executive function. (A pianist who tries to play a complex piece by "consciously" remembering every finger motion will be unable to play even a few bars in at tempo.)
Whenever someone says that they’re going to ‘taboo’ a particular word it never fails that what you get is a circuitous, verbose rediscovery of a common concept, often articulated simplistically and at least one level below where the conversation could have gone on.
Yes, you’ve correctly identified that some people who believe things often don’t act in accord with their beliefs. No, you don’t need a redundant and obtuse new term, “belief in belief” to get hold of this—it’s called hypocrisy, and it’s common with all kinds of beliefs, for all kinds of different reasons, at different times, which is the important bit: it’s not characteristic of certain beliefs, it’s characteristic of the circumstances under which you espouse them.
Thus a Christian in a country where Christians are persecuted and killed may continue to evangelize knowing that he is under threat of death; may hypocritically apostasize when actually arrested for his evangelism, despite his belief that says his martyrdom would lead to Heaven; may then be released, evangelize once more, and this time be condemned and happily sing hymns as he is lit on fire rather than apostasize.
People are weak; they don’t always follow their deeply-held beliefs under pressure, but that doesn’t mean that particular belief is special. The same goes for many stories of ideological spying, or those who want to do away with capitalism all their lives and yet happily go to their 9-5. Hypocrisy doesn’t mean disbelief necessarily, and you need more nuance to understand this that the rather cavalier frame you’re using now.
You've described hypocrisy accurately, and that isn't what was being discussed. What's being discussed is where the conscious mind says to itself that it believes something, but the actions don't correspond to what that belief would engender.
Or, maybe that *is* a kind of hypocrisy, but it's not a version where the person notices that their actions don't correspond to their claimed beliefs, or if they do they explain it away even to themselves.
But hypocrisy as used usually involved lying in the sense of full conscious awareness and participation, and that isn't what is being discussed.
One, we shouldn’t act as if we have full awareness of the internal mental phenomena of others. We don’t. When we see someone behaving hypocritically we don’t actually know if they are completely unaware of their hypocrisy or merely pretending unawareness. People are often self-contradictory and absent a miraculous machine which doesn’t exist that can probe their exact mental states and report their beliefs during confession and action, we have no standing to make the claims you are making.
Two, your definition of hypocrisy is just plain inaccurate to the concept. It doesn’t require conscious practice, even if much hypocrisy is conscious dissimulation (and I would argue that most hypocrisy is not conscious, or at least not fully conscious: many are the very rich who despise the greed of billionaires without feeling even a twinge about their own lack of charity). I checked a few dictionaries and none of them require self-awareness, although some have conscious lying as a secondary definition (though never to the exclusion of the more basic act of not practicing what you preach).
"If they hear a bump in the night, for example, they won't for a moment consider that it may be Illuminati."
I think we enjoy such 'beliefs' the same way we enjoy thriller and horror movies. We don't really believe in vampires or global secret societies, but it's entertainment and fun. The same way I like messing around with astrology in a very, very amateur fashion but I don't really believe it - I'll read up all about Mars in Leo and the influence of the Houses but I don't take that as a way to live my daily life. It's fun, it's fun to discuss all the finer points. The same way we get into debates about sports teams and TV shows and fantasy novels.
Do Balrogs have wings? In the real world this has zero effect one way or the other, even if it were true that Balrogs do indeed have wings. But it's fun to argue over it. That kind of "conspiracy theory" belief is the same level.
FWIW, when I was just out of college I spent a couple of years investigating whether astrology was valid. I was taught by someone who exchanged lessons in astrology for lessons in programming. (He wanted to accurately calculate certain astrological relationships, and this required Bessel functions.) The result was that I could accurately calculate a horoscope from first principles, and he stopped being an astrologer and became a programmer. But he *did* believe in astrology in the full sense. (I'm not sure about later.) I found that astrology really could explain just about anything after it happened, but I couldn't use it for useful predictions.
That said, my personal horoscope really does predict lots of things that are true of me, and I haven't noticed that it made any real errors. E.g. one of the meanings of Capricorn rising is "this person is/will be a structure freak". And even among programmers, that is one of my notable characteristics.
>explain just about anything after it happened, but I couldn't use it for useful predictions.
What other "accepted" branch of knowledge or field of endeavour that has the same property ?
The 2 things that immediately come to my mind is History and Economics. Every "Explanation" in history is like "XXX said in 1920 that maybe the Empire fell because money wasn't enough for all the conquests, then YYY came in 1940 and said XXX is obviously a dumbass and the true reason the Empire fell was because they relied too much/little on slaves, and then ZZZelina came in 1960 and said all those before her were dumb toxic males and the *true* reason the Empire fell was because they oppressed their women too much".
I don't want to send a wrong message with this, I absolutely love History. But its explanations are stories, they don't have any obvious utility besides tying loose ends, a satisfying curve to be imposed on raw data points but can't be extended beyond.
Economics are similar, with the additional pain that the speculative just-so ramblings have real world consequences, and sometimes they use impenetrable math and made up statistics so making fun of them is harder.
I think astrology is actually more like Tarot cards. I did a study of them, too. Properly understood they are always correct. (Well, except possibly for the court cards, I never did properly understand them.) This is because they are predicting things that are always true. (Or almost always true.) The value of Tarot is that it can cause you to examine choices you would have overlooked. (I don't find that a big enough value to continue investing time in it, but it really is present.) It's sort of like the I Ching in that way, but the real meaning is a bit less accessible. So if the sun is square Mars, something is going to happen involving action that will have a lot of friction. But this is nearly always true. However, it *can* be valuable to look over the situation and see how you can minimize that.
I could go into a lot more detail, but that's the basic idea. The systems can be useful, but you've got to understand what they do. (My teacher didn't understand that, and was hung up on accurate calculations.)
Honestly, shadowy elites pulling strings behind the curtains just doesn't sound that bad to me, given how well democracy is working out.
I have a quasi-conspiracy theory that I'm not sure how much I really believe: Politicians are actually pretty smart, and are just playing dumb to pander to the median voter. They're engaged in a delicate balancing act where they try to give voters just enough of what they ask for to get enough goodwill to keep getting reelected, while endlessly delaying giving into the masses on the stuff that really matters, in order to minimize the damage done.
If I knew for a fact that this were true, I'd have a lot more respect and and goodwill towards them than if I knew for a fact that they were playing it straight.
It's not at all unusual for politicians to develop an outward appearance, including different mannerisms, ways of speaking, *accents*, and level of intelligence that's different than their actual attributes. In many cases this is obvious and almost silly to elaborate on, like how Nixon swore like a sailor on the Nixon tapes, but not at public events. Of course politicians avoid being actively offensive to their voters! But then sometimes Hillary Clinton has a southern accent when speaking in South Carolina, or George Bush plays up acting dumb and "mis-speaking" to appear more folksy.
Unfortunately, my best guess is that reality is a mix of the two options. Most politicians are probably at least a little bit more canny than they appear, but some are really just idiots - including some idiots that seem to generate a lot of publicity, like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Though I think that she's a lot more capable than most people give her credit for, it's just that she really does use those skills to promote some really dumb ideas that she seems to genuinely find persuasive. I think Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are both incredibly intelligent and amazingly good at pursuing their goals. For Nancy my guess is that her goals are aligned with personal financial gain, and for Mitch power and control. The other stuff they do appears to be sometimes a smokescreen or something to get future votes. They do at least both seem very good at identifying things that "the people" want that would be bad (and silently killing those things) and also things that are needed no matter who is in charge (and those things miraculously fly through Congress on a voice vote after weeks of other bills being "just couldn't get the votes from [the other party]."
Based on the real politicians (local level) I've met, I'd say it's a mix. You get the smart cookies who fancy themselves statesmen (or women) who are just putting in the tedious time until they reach the real level they're going for, where they will bestride the world stage. They tend to go for the "pander to the masses but not too much" line and often it works, though equally often as well the voters know this is what they're doing and so they can turn on the smart cookies.
Then you get the dumb but earnest lot who really are playing it straight.
The ones who manage to thread the needle of being smart but also coming across as "one of you guys" are rare but do well. Bill Clinton versus Hillary Clinton is a great example of this; Bill was convincing as "ordinary guy who likes a beer and playing sax" while Hillary was excoriated for trying to do the same - see the hot sauce thing where even if she genuinely did like hot sauce, the way she did it was criticised as "does she think us black people are dumb enough to fall for this?"
Bush and Trump in their ways also managed to pull it off; the media in general and a lot of the public liked to present Dubya as a buffoon who couldn't tie his own shoelaces and only got where he was on Daddy's coat tails. That this was the public image of a scion of East Coast elite who went to Yale - a bumpkin if you disliked him, folksy if you liked him - was interesting and showed that the crafted image of the Texan down-home guy *worked*. (Apparently he and John Kerry had similar grades while at Yale, but Bush was Chimpy McHitler while Kerry was the smart guy smeared by right wingers).
Kerry always struck me as a guy who had spent his life around people who were sharper than he was, and he was desperate to keep them from figuring it out. He sounded good when speaking, but if you listened to the actual content, there was no there there.
I tend to think it's the opposite: the real terrifying truth is that the global elites aren't much smarter than the rest of us and are frantically making it up as they go along. The world is shitty and cruel a lot of the time; it's easier to believe this is due to some horrible evil Bad People out there being evilly evil than to believe, Moloch-style, that most people are genuinely doing their best with internally consistent moral frameworks and this is what we've ended up with. If the organ harvesting pedophiles are in charge than you can hate them while being simultaneously powerless against such devilish puppet masters. If everyone's just muddling along you're stuck instead debating a bunch of ambiguous political points without even being sure you're on the right side.
You could still question how much they are smarter than the average person in functional ways. For instance perfectly free global trade is fantastic in itself and smart to believe and promote. But rapid offshoring causes a large shock to the working class that is a pillar of support for Trump and causes human suffering. And it turns out trusting that trade would align democratic nations with Russia and China was smart but untrue and strategic things should be protected and the question asked whether trade with China irrespective of their politics is a good idea at all
“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.
The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.
I worked for about 4 years for a trade association in DC that did lots of lobbying for a sometimes vilified industry (Nuclear Power). When I started the job I thought politicians were dumb. But after my time there I came away with the impression that no all of them are pretty smart but the voters are dumb. Later reading the myth of the rational voter I came to the conclusion that the voters aren't dumb but they just have near zero incentive to become smart about politics.
So that leaves us with a situation where the number one qualification for the job is to appeal to a majority of voters that are not very well informed and pretty dumb about politics/government/economics etc. The only saving grace is that voters do tend to punish bad outcomes and high profile things that they don't like. So the intelligent politician needs to straddle the line of playing to dumb voters but not doing something so dumb that it causes really visible bad outcomes.
Of course at the fringes there are true believers in both parties with crazy views. But they usually come from very safe districts and are not the swing voter when it comes to legislating. I don't think even those folks are dumb. They certainly have IQs above average. Its just that even smart people can be crazy and because their districts are safe they don't face any feedback to limit the craziness.
If I recall correctly, George W Bush lost his first election for Texas governor by coming off as an educated elite (which he was), and won subsequent elections by playing up his Texas accent and moving his vocabulary and image downmarket.
I think the median high-level politician is quite a bit smarter than the median citizen, but maybe not so impressive compared to scientists or software developers or investment bankers or the like.
In 1958, George Wallace ran for governor of Alabama. He spoke out against the KKK and was endorsed by the NAACP. He lost the primary to a candidate endorsed by the KKK.
Thereafter, Wallace adopted a stance as a strong segregationist.
Can someone once again link that philosophical dialogue with the scientist with a machine that can prove someone's beliefs are different than they think? Google fails me.
FWIW, I've heard (friend of a friend) of a genuine paranoid who was convinced of multiple conspiracies, but decided that since he was still alive one of the stronger conspiracies wanted him to stay alive. OTOH, he HAD been committed to an asylum.
Why invent a new meta category like belief of belief ?
A much simpler model is the "Belief Network", I call it the spreadsheet model for reasons that will become clear.
1- Your beliefs are nodes in a graph in the Computer Science sense (a network of nodes interlinked by edges), an edge exists between 2 beliefs if they are related in some way (implication, falsification, contradiction, support, instance-of,etc...).
2- The correct way to update this graph is recursively : you update a single belief, then for each belief that was linked to it, you update it accordingly, and for each belief *those beliefs* link to, you update it accordingly, and so on and so forth till the whole thing stabilizes to a fixed point or you timeout.
3- But sometimes, people do a "truncated" or a "depth-limited" update. They update a single belief and forget to update all the beliefs that link to it, or they update those but forget to update the second level of linking, etc... In short, they don't "propagate" the belief all the way, the rest of the belief graph doesn't know a belief has been updated, only a small local part around the updated belief.
The spreadsheet analogy comes from the property of spreadsheets to recalculate all the formulas on each single-cell change, this is ideally what humans should also do : recompute the entire worldview on each new fact or realization, or at least periodically, but they don't for a variety of reasons. (Maybe Biology is just too crufty and inexact, maybe recomputing worldviews is intractable in general, maybe the true edges for the belief graph are unavailable and have to be inferred and sometimes we do a bad job and don't infer an edge for beliefs that should be linked, etc...)
Religions and Conspiracies that don't radically change other beliefs are just a failure of propagation in this model. Their believers don't propagate the massive update up the network.
Belief-propagation is computationally intensive. If your beliefs are statements in propositional logic, then seeing if all your beliefs are consistent with each other is an NP-complete problem that takes exponentially longer with each belief you add. So brains compartmentalize because not compartmentalizing is basically impossible.
What would you consider a “proper” response, given the things they believe? Maybe you think because nobody’s calling for the guillotine, that’s evidence of their “true” beliefs revealed. Alternatively, maybe it’s just evidence you misjudged their character.
Thanks for writing this so I didn't have to. However, I don't think the best way to describe this is just that they 'belive they believe' nor hypocrisy (tho it may also qualify as that).
It's just that their mental state shares some aspects with what we call belief and not others. It's like asking if ChatGPT believes some fact. Well maybe it regularly reports that the claim is true when prompted some ways but not when prompted in others. It may seem to reasons as if it is assuming that fact with some kinds of prompts but not others. Does it believe that fact is, ultimately, ill-defined (well maybe for chatGPT the and is no but make it a bit more capable in that case). Same thing here.
As an aside, this illuminates an important issue in AI safety. You can be very intelligent in one sense (able to reason generally etc) and still not transfer what you assert in a house of worship to other parts of your life and the same may we'll be true of AIs. So we can't assume that they'll act as if they are optimizing a single simple function across all kinds of interactions.
This is an excellent point. I'm frequently surprised how many Christians are perfectly happy to fervently believe in Jesus their whole lives, without ever inquiring as to what Jesus's name was.
Thanks for the compliment. Of all the examples of cognitive dissonance, though, I'm not sure this is the one I would choose.
Most Christians don't speak Ancient Hebrew or Greek, so they'll be dealing with imperfect transliterations regardless. Would their Christian experience obviously be enriched considering ישוע => Ἰησοῦ => Iesus => Jesus?
Learning Jesus's name would be kinda silly but that's just a poor example.
A better one is they don't act like they really believe in the afterlife or that the bible contains the secrets to a good life either. Most of my church growing up would go to church on Sunday but even though they said they believed in eternal reward for being good they never worried about that the way they would a promotion or a chance of cancer. If their relative moved across the world for a great life back when that meant little/no contaxt (even if it involved substantial risk) they'd miss them but be happy for them. I've yet to see a parent happy at a funeral.
If you take catholicism seriously probably the best thing you could possibly hope for is for your children to die right after their first confession. No one actually acts like that.
Maybe you think that's all just about the uncertainty? But then you can't explain why they rarely study theology or read the Bible for the insights they claim it contains. Why would you be reading self-help books before looking to the book you claim is written by god to guide you?
Sorry, this is a big part of why I became an atheist. When I believed I took the shit seriously. I learned that not only don't other ppl take it seriously but they also don't want to deal with someone who does.
Now that I've had enough friends become priests I realize many of them do really believe in something but what that thing is bears very little resemblance to the beliefs of your average catholic.
I'm just saying, if I literally believed that the most important thing in the history of the universe involved this one guy who was literally God, and people told me they refer to him as something or other, in like the first 5 minutes I would ask what his name is, and if people didn't know I'd try to find that out like probably before the next time I eat any food
Really? The whole time I was growing up religious I took it very seriously (indeed my problem was mostly that no one else did) and that seemed like the least important thing.
You believe these are events of deep metaphysical and moral significance involving a being beyond our comprehension and the thing you'd focus on is what arbitrary sound the people back then used to distinguish him from the other villagers?
That's like finding out David Bowie wants to pay you a bunch of money to jam with him onstage and asking what his real name is before asking how he heard of you, why he wants to jam with a musical nobody, what songs does he expect you to play and how/why he either faked his death or was resurrected. That's just a trivia question and there are alot more important matters to consider.
Tangential point but there’s a history podcast called MartyrMade which has a 3-episode series on Epstein, and somewhere in there the host spends 40 minutes going over the evidence for, but stopping short of endorsing, Pizzagate. It was an interesting listen and while I still find these conspiracy theories to be lunacy, I do think the world is weirder than I realized and I became a bit more sympathetic to its believers.
Not an easy listen since it goes into the gruesome details of child abuse rings, but I recommend it for those interested.
If you take out the very specific idea that rich elites were abusing children using a *pizza shop* then we already know that the allegations otherwise were true! Epstein was running a program where he took rich elites to a private island to have sex with underage girls. This is known, including lists of people who went to this island - if not proof that they actually raped the children who were there to be [statutorily] raped by the rich elites visiting.
If anything, it appears that those implicated wanted the theory to get as much press as possible in a misdirection about the pizza shop, making the pizza shop central instead of some weird detail that could be cut out as trivial.
Pizzagate predates the Epstein case, though. The original reason the pizza shop came to people's attention was because Hillary Clinton's emails mentioned a local pizza place and the crazies assumed that stuff like "taking the kids to get pizza" was code word for bringing kids to be trafficked. (Or something like that, I don't have the time to look up the exact emails they used as evidence). So Pizzagate had been circulating for almost 3 years before Epstein got arrested. If he's part of Pizzagate now, then that was a retcon, trying to give it some credibility by connecting it to a real sex criminal.
"This conspiracy was invented by the conspirators to distract from the real conspiracy" is a popular idea because it seems really clever, but trust me, conspiracy nuts don't need any help filling the air with crazy theories that sound more interesting than the real thing.
Minor detail here, but this conspiracy theory initially spread via online forums where "cheese pizza" was used as a cheeky code word for "child porn." It naturally made more sense to them that there'd be a coded conspiracy where talking about pizza somehow referred to child exploitation than it would to a person not immersed in that very specific Internet argot.
It's a bit like how there were bizarre news stories and police investigations over ritual satanic sexual abuse of children at daycares, which were plainly nuts, at the same time that there really was a decades-long conspiracy of silence and indifference over sexual abuse by priests in the Catholic church.
Pizzagate predated Epstein's most famous arrest, yes, but not Epstein's criminal behavior. It had been going on for years prior. Lots of people were nominally aware of it (I myself had read stories about Epstein being shady years before his eventual arrest). He was first investigated for similar charges in 2004. Pizzagate surfaced in 2016.
The second part is not that the conspirators *created* the conspiracy theory, but that once the heat was ramping up, amplified a very silly version of the conspiracy to distract from and discredit a more accurate version.
No, major outlets were occasionally writing about Epstein for a decade before society took action on it. For some reason (conspiracy!) it never gained traction ... until it did.
If you take out the pizza shop, and the specific participants allegedly involved, and the exact times and dates the crimes were supposed to have happened--in other words, all the central elements of the theory--then yes, it is true that some elites have abused some children. That claim is so banal that it's hardly worth affirming or denying, Epstein or not. It's like claiming that it's basically true that you're a serial killer of Swedish children, except it wasn't you who killed the children and the "Swedish children" were actually American gangbangers.
Scott, please, I'm begging you -- stop posting the good articles at 12AM Eastern, it drives me crazy. I see the post in my RSS feed, I click the post, then I'm too tired to read and go to bed and I don't read it in the morning when I'm fresh.
> For these conspiracies, maybe the evidence that people are trying to explain isn’t weird bullet trajectories or pyramid-related coincidences, it’s their own emotions.
I think another layer here, is why does asking for change have to hinge on a moral argument? It seems to be a human instinct to reach for arguments that are bigger than ourselves. For the global elite, it isn't enough for most other people to say, hey we don't prefer this arrangement, so we are going to work for change. We'd like to not have a global elite. Our preference doesn't feel like it matters, so we feel like we need to argue with big universal moral arguments to get at them.
"So the evidence in favor of “aliens who knew the speed of light built the Great Pyramid” is that it would explain this otherwise baffling coincidence."
But it wouldn't explain why aliens used metric measurements at a time when they had not been invented. Hence, any theory for aliens doing so would imply either:
a) the aliens were time travellers; or
b) the aliens instigated the adoption of metric measurements.
Note: I am generally wary of any claims relating to measurements, as measures are inherently arbitrary. (Does the speed of light theory also work for cubits and whatever time measure they used back then? (did they have a standard measurement of time like seconds?))
The comparison is of a velocity (speed of light) to a distance.
If:
x m/s = x m
and
1 m/s = 2 c/s (where c is some arbitrary unit of distance)
then
x m/s = 2x c/s = x m = 2x c
So yes, if only the unit for distance changes then it works. But it still arbitrarily defines the second, without which it will not work. e.g. if you state the speed of light as mph and measure the latitude of the pyramids as miles (though latitude is normally measured in degrees isn't it?), then it won't work.
Nope. The coincidence is in the numerical values *only* when they are expressed in certain units. If you make the measurements in any other units, the numerical values are different.
Concomitantly, if you allow yourself perfect freedom to choose your units, you can always find (or newly define) a set of units in which the numerical value of any distance measurement has the first 7, or 12, or 10,000 digits of the speed of light.
The SI adoption of universal weights and measures is based on:
"Since 2019, the magnitudes of all SI units have been defined by declaring that seven defining constants have certain exact numerical values when expressed in terms of their SI units. These defining constants are the speed of light in vacuum c, the hyperfine transition frequency of caesium ΔνCs, the Planck constant h, the elementary charge e, the Boltzmann constant k, the Avogadro constant NA, and the luminous efficacy Kcd."
And the Voyager golden disc uses binary numbers and depiction of hydrogen atoms to let aliens convert our measures into theirs:
"In the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0,70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom."
So for the aliens to construct the pyramid using a standard set of measures that were then taught to the natives as the metric system, so that in future they could translate the records left for them by the aliens, is congruent with the theory.
Aliens might reasonably infer the future definition of the meter, since its (original) definition was 1/10000 of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator passing through Paris. That's the kind of fixed natural standard Vulcans would imagine. But the second is trickier. How would they infer what the definition of the second would be? (And they have to get it right to within 1 part per million for the trick to work.) Google suggests to me that the ancient Egyptians did not measure time down to the second. They did use 24 hours apparently, but our hypothetical smart aliens would've had to guess that in the future we would divide each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds.
One might argue that division into 60 is pretty natural, on account of the many useful ways 60 can be divided evenly by small integers (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15...). But then why would we choose division by 10 in our future length units? Why stick with the number of our fingers in the one case, but in the other favor the ease of division (factors of 10 have unusually few even divisors)? The aliens have to accurately predict our inconsistency, so they need to be awesome human social psychologists.
Or maybe the Babylonians were interstellar refugees, who alll submitted to surgery to reduce their number of fingers and toes from 60 to 20 in order to blend in. But learning base-10 math for keeping time was too difficult for the older generation, fixed in their starborn ways, and we owe our watchfaces to cranky Kids These Days intergenerational scorn among the Babylonian BEMs from Betelgeuse...
If they did it in natural units (or even better, dimensionless quantities!), that would be more convincing. And if most weird coincidences of this sort were in natural units, I'd believe there's something freaky going on. Maybe God, maybe aliens, time travellers, I don't know.
The angular size of the moon in the sky being basically the same as the angular size of the sun in the sky is the most convincing ones of these. The only possible explanation is that aliens waited until the moon had drifted to precisely this distance from the Earth before they sent down the monolith that made us conscious. (And/or, they built the moon to be big enough for this to be possible.)
What I know about physics can fit in a thimble, but if aliens could travel faster than the speed of light (I'm assuming that's a base requirement for being able to get from Zybrag Gamma to Earth in less than 200b years, but maybe I have that wrong too), then wouldn't they also necessarily have the ability to time travel? Or is this not correct?
I know (or have 'heard', to be more accurate) that time travel would first require one to have the ability to travel FTTSOL, so maybe I have this wrong and just because it's a 'requirement' doesn't mean that time travel 'necessarily follows' from having that ability.
I tuned out Trump-Russiagate after it faded from the news, without ever updating to "oh, that's false." Is there a good summary of what people thought and how it turned out not to be true?
That's kind of the point, the question to ask is the opposite. This is a classic JFK/Oswald case.
There were so many reasons why it is not true (just compare him with known Soviet/Russian assets' in the US and the UK uncovered years or decades later), that there is a lot of evidence on the "not" side and very little on the "yes" side (Trump overtly likes Putin... and too dumb to hide it well).
Strong version of Russia gate: Trump is an active agent for Russia via either inclination or blackmail.
(Not much evidence to support this beyond the circumstantial. He likes Putin and his policies weakened the US.)
Weak version: Russia helped Trump's campaign to win. Some people in Trump's campaign knew about it. The most consequential help was the Russians hacking the emails of a Clinton staffer and then turning them over to Wikileaks. Wikileaks then released them into the news cycle right after the Trump access Hollywood tape came out and then drip fed the emails in 2500 mail batches over the next two weeks in order to keep "Clinton emails" in the headlines.
The strong version has never had any strong evidence while the weak version has been proven true.
The findings of the Muller report were pretty explicit that the Russian government deliberately released the information to help Trump's campaign. And that members of Trump's campaign were in touch with them.
First (some of whom later confessed and were convicted).
The issue was a) whether there was an explicit quid pro quo or the Russians were just helping Trump win because they preferred him, and the Trump campaign were happy to passively accept the help. And b) whether Trump was aware of members of the campaign communicating with the Russian government or they were freelancing.
The problem of quid pro quo was always the central issue with the strong version, to my mind. What exactly would the Russians be trying to get from the Trump campaign? They didn't have anything to offer. Indeed, the only thing they could have gotten from it is caught in the act, thereby discrediting the whole effort. If you're Russian intelligence, and you want to ensure Clinton isn't elected, your best approach is to NOT collude outright, but rather to help Trump in a deliberately disconnected way, like releasing the DNC emails (which they did). Indeed, this kind of statecraft is common. Everyone does it, including and especially US intelligence agencies. "I don't want this guy elected, so I'm going to do oppo research the other side can't do." But you don't want to be SEEN doing it, or you hand the other side the argument, "my opponent is a puppet of the CIA!"
This fact should have been a strong prior against the collusion hypothesis. Are there any arguments in favor of collusion being a net-benefit to the Russians? Or to the Trump campaign for that matter? Collusion seems like a lose-lose proposition. Indeed, in a world where Russian interference is discovered by members of the Trump campaign, the Machiavellian move would be to do nothing about it.
(I'm not saying this is the most ethical move, because if later it's found out that they probably knew about the Russian election interference, it might end up in a government report and they look bad.)
I guess you could claim, "Russia fed the Trump campaign secret intelligence about the Clinton campaign". This would imply the Russians offering the services of the FSB to Trump to help him defeat the Clinton campaign. But that was never asserted, to my knowledge. Maybe I just never gave Russiagate enough credulity to understand why people thought it was plausible. Can anyone enlighten me on this? What material gains were claimed/expected from direct collusion as opposed to standard election interference?
1. Collusion weakens people's belief in democracy as a whole. Communism has been the main alternative to democracy for the last seventy years. Thus collusion helps bring the US closer to becoming communist.
2. Potentially they're counting on partisam politics being so bad that exposing Russian collusion just makes half the country support Russian collusion.
3. Putin invaded Ukraine in a fit of nonsense, so Russia doesn't need a logical motive for the accusation to be true.
#1 only works if people find out. Except if they do find out the results become highly unpredictable that maybe Russia ends up undermining their own efforts. It's a one-off with a weird candidate and the result is probably that people don't vote for Trump the Puppet, he loses, and the whole effort is wasted.
I'm not sure Putin is interested in exporting communism to the US. He has expressed a strong desire to weaken the US, but not export communism, to my knowledge. I don't think he has even expressed a desire to reinstitute communism in Russia.
Collusion with the Trump campaign is a really bad strategy for making either communism happen, or for weakening the US.
All this reasoning feels post hoc, not like a plan that could actually work or that a rational actor might reasonably set out to do ahead of time, thinking it was a good strategy for achieving a defined objective.
Is Putin completely irrational? Does his war in Ukraine prove that? I don't think so. Putin invaded Ukraine because he thought he'd be able to roll through Kiev in a week and end the war before summer. Most pundits at the time believed this, too. That invasion was a miscalculation, not a fit of nonsense. Regardless, the collusion narrative predates the war.
If your conspiracy were, "Russian bot farms fuel unfounded conspiracy theories already in place, to weaken the US be stoke division" I'd be inclined to agree that's something they'd do. It fits the logic, and their pattern of behavior. It's the same kind of goose/gander payback for old cold war tricks Putin loves. The US used operation splinter factor - where we 'leaked' false information that we had a bunch of spies in Russia who were never US assets - to fuel Stalin's paranoia and make the purges worse. It was like kicking them when they were down and laughing about it. That's the kind of thing I could see the Russians doing back at us.
Actually the Mueller report found that the 'hack' was almost certainly faked, the FBI lied egregiously to the FISA courts on multiple occasions, and none of Christopher Steele's subsources had anything but rumor. Mueller chose not to report this but look at his own documents which were entered into court record by Durham. It's pretty clear.
right. partisans have always used the refutation of the strong version as an implicit refutation of the weak version. a motte/bailey or something similar. I am surprised that Scott both (1) ever assumed the strong version as probably true, and (2) dismisses the weak version as a consequence of the strong being false.
The strong evidence that Trump is not a Russian puppet is that his only military action was a missile strike in Syria killing 200 of Putin's 'Wagner Group' mercenaries. Puppets don't do that.
That's unlikely, given subsequent events. Iran retaliated to the strike with its own missile attacks on Americans stationed in Iraq, and it was paranoid enough about further escalation that it shot down Ukraine International Airlines flight 752 with air defenses.
An endorsed assassination attempt would had either pro forma or stage-managed retaliation, not leaving domestic air defense so paranoid that they get twitchy at a civilian flight on its usual route.
I thought it had been established that Russian agencies had also hacked the GOP but the Democrats were easier to overcome, hence why all their dirty laundry got aired in public?
"SINCE HACKERS STOLE emails from the Democratic National Committee and dispersed them across the internet last summer, the world has waited for a parallel leak of Republican secrets. Now on the other side of the election, that second reveal still hasn't materialized. But FBI director James Comey has now told Congress new details of the Republican prong of those political intrusions, which US intelligence now believe were carried out by the Russian government: The attackers penetrated GOP organizations, and also stole Republican National Committee emails, albeit ones less current than those stolen from the DNC."
But of course, equal opportunity attacks don't fit the partisan mongering of "Trump and the Russians worked together to cheat Hillary out of It's Her Turn Now".
If I steal nude pictures from two people, person A and person B, but I only make person B's photos public, it stands to reason that I want to hurt person B much more than person A.
Nor can you say that person A and person B suffered equal injury.
Yeah, I definitely agree that Putin hates Clinton far more than he hates Trump. I suspect that he sees Clinton as this decades-old family enemy who has been inimicably hostile to him and basically one of the parties responsible for America's general hostility to the Russian state
But I do think it's important to notice that none of this reflects badly on Trump, nor is it any reason not to vote for him
If I try stealing nude pictures from A and B, but the only photos of A I can find are ones where they're in a bikini, but the ones of B are in the same vein as those of the Duchess of Argyll*, and you are looking to maximise scandal - which ones are you going to make public?
In that case, if you publicise both A's and B's photos, people will be more inclined to mock you for thinking a beach photo of someone in a bikini is the same as a photo of a sex act.
*"The evidence discovered resulted in the 1963 divorce case, in which the Duke accused his wife of infidelity and included a set of Polaroid photographs of the Duchess naked, save for her signature three-strand pearl necklace, in the company of another man. There were also photographs of the Duchess fellating a naked man whose face was not shown. It was speculated that this "headless man" was the Minister of Defence Duncan Sandys (later Lord Duncan-Sandys, son-in-law of Winston Churchill), who offered to resign from the cabinet.
...Lord Denning, who was called upon by the government to track down the "headless man", compared the handwriting of the five leading "suspects", (Duncan Sandys; Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; John Cohane, an American businessman; Peter Combe, a former press officer at the Savoy Hotel; and Sigismund von Braun, brother of the German scientist Wernher von Braun) with the captions written on the photographs. It is claimed that this analysis proved that the man in question was Fairbanks, then long married to his second wife, but this was not made public.
...The Duchess never revealed the identity of the "headless man", and Fairbanks always denied the allegation. Long afterwards, it was claimed that there were actually two "headless men" in the photographs, Fairbanks and Sandys, the latter identified on the basis of the Duchess's statement that "the only Polaroid camera in the country at that time had been lent to the Ministry of Defence". In 2013, the daughter-in-law of the 11th Duke, Lady Colin Campbell, stated that the "headless man" was an American executive named Bill Lyons."
But we also can't say that you meant person A to benefit, even if in fact they do benefit from person B's suffering. And we certainly can't say that you and person A are co-conspirators or in any way "colluding". Not even if we have evidence that you talked to person A at some point.
Really, there's not much we can say against person A at all in this hypothetical. Unless we're so intent on damning A that we disregard both reason and decency.
Pardon, but to my last recollection, it has not been proven that the Wikileaks docs came from Russia. It has been asserted by a number of US intelligence agencies but Julian Assange and Wikileaks have always maintained that the source was not Russia. Did I miss an update to the story.
Because otherwise the source of the Wikileaks files depends on who you trust, because we have two groups asserting clearly different factual events and pretty clearly accusing each other of lying. And I get why someone would trust the US intelligence services over Wikileaks but hopefully you would get why people, upon reviewing the activities and statements of US intelligence from Vietnam to Iraq might have reservations.
But again, genuinely, was there ever a clear factual resolution here?
They also tried to hack the RNC. I don’t think they were pro Trump as much as pro chaos. And the bottom line is even in the “weak” version, the left and MSM blew the case wildly out of proportion with any evidence they ever had.
They hated Trump (as I do), and uses that as an excuse to believe silly shit and make up lies.
I mean, there's good reasons for them to have been pro-Trump, since Trump had well-documented favorable connections (business and otherwise) with Russia, which bias him in their favor. And if I were Putin, I would be more confident in my ability to manipulate Trump appealing to his narcissism compared to any other candidate. Also, it's not unreasonable to assume that Putin overestimated the degree to which he could puppeteer Trump, since *everyone's* probably estimates regarding Trump were off.
Sure there are good reasons, there are also good reasons to not want him (he could be unstable/unpredictable). I think the evidence we have from there behavior is that they were playing both sides and mostly just trying to increase rancor and partisan divide.
Right. The Senate Intelligence Committee (of which the majority was Republicans as was the committee chairman) investigated that "weak version" and in August 2018 published their report. While the public version of the report is partially redacted due to classified content, you can read it here:
"The Committee found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election...."
The committee spelled out how the Russian government worked with Trump campaign people to try to help Trump's campaign, notably Paul Manafort while he was campaign chairman.
The committee also concluded that "Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow's intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign...." And then "While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump's electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following the release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort...."
The closest that the Senate Intelligence Committee got to documenting personal participation by Donald Trump in this stuff is, "During the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle, Donald Trump and the Trump Organization pursued a business deal in Russia. Michael Cohen, then an executive vice president at the Trump Organization and personal attorney to Trump, primarily handled and advanced these efforts. In September 2015, Trump authorized Cohen to pursue a deal in Russia through Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of Trump. By early November 2015, Trump and a Russia-based developer signed a Letter of Intent laying out the main terms of a licensing deal that promised to provide the Trump Organization millions of dollars upon the signing of a deal, and hundreds of millions of dollars if the project advanced to completion. Cohen kept Trump updated on the progress of the deal. While these negotiations were ongoing, Trump made positive public comments about Putin in connection with his presidential campaign...."
All of that was put onto the record -- by a committee controlled by Republicans -- 9 months before Robert Mueller issued his investigation report. But in terms of public consciousness and media attention it sank without a trace, I guess because the "strong version" of Russiagate had so captured public discourse on this topic.
I'm sure the evidence implicating Russian influence is as solid as the evidence the government had implicating Russian accounts on Twitter, which Twitter refuted time and time again, according to the Twitter files released. Maybe be a little more skeptical of people who have a vested interest in antagonizing Russia, or at least spreading propaganda among the public establishing Russia as an enemy we simply must defeat.
How does the evidence for the weak version prove anything beyond "Someone important at wikileaks likes trump and\or is annoyed when people focus too much on the craziness of one politician and forget the others" ?
If Russia truly wanted to help Trump, wouldn't the best course of action be to leak the emails directly via social media or whatever other means countries leak things with ? Why go through the unreliable middle man of wikileaks ? for all they know, they could have never released it or released it too late to matter.
How it turned out to be not true was the Barr investigations. Every bit of the Steele dossier fails when the sources were interviewed. Igor Danchenko--the Russian source, is a Russian national working for The Brookings Institute, which is a liberal think tank. His testimony is that he and friends made up the pee-tape story over beers. The internet traffic was invented by Joffee who paid researchers to create bank accounts at Russian bank Alfa-Bank, using Trump's email address, sent phishing emails to Trump's computers with faked Alfa-Bank return addresses. The researchers recorded the resulting internet traffic and presented this as evidence of secret communication, to the FBI. Trump associate Carter Page was a regular information source for the CIA, having helped uncover and prosecute Russian spies. But when the FISA court asked CIA if Page was a CIA source, an FBI attorney intercepted the email to FISA court and added the word 'not' thus falsifying documents to the FISA court.
John Brennan, then head of the CIA received a briefly that the Hillary Clinton campaign was going to create the Russia Collusion story, then went on TV and supported the story, even though he knew it was false.
Peter Strozk sent a text to his girlfriend that Trump won't be president, we'll stop him. Strozk was the head of counterintelligence investigations for the FBI, laid a trap, and arrested General Flynn on his first day in office.
I hear there was a conspiracy on 9/11/2001 to bring down the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon. The conspirators sweet talked their way into the US, hacked a series of planes, and then flew them into the buildings. If you think there was no such conspiracy, you're a conspiracy theorist.
Sometimes people conspire. Maybe Trump et al conspired on behalf of Putin et al, or Putin et al conspired on behalf of Trump et al, or a bunch of lefty political types conspired against Trump et al, or... You get the point. If you have a theory for Russiagate that involves no shadowy dealings on anyone's part, I'd be interested to hear it, but I've yet to encounter that argument.
In August 2019, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet gave a speech to the NYT newsroom, which Slate.com published, in which he admitted that the NYT's Plan A conspiracy to dump Trump by promoting the RussiaGate conspiracy theory had flopped due to Mueller's testimony being a nothingburger. So now, Baquet announced, the NYT was switching to their Plan B conspiracy to dump Trump by promoting the 1619 conspiracy theory that America is built on racism and that blacks are the most important Americans.
Or at least that's how I interpret the transcript. Baquet is not all that articulate. Nobody else seems terribly struck by Baquet's speech, but it sure looks to me as if it explains a lot of the bizarre events of 2017 to, especially, 2020.
I think Russiagate is a great fit for Scott's "it's based around emotions" theory of conspiracy theories.
Here's Hillary, it's her turn now, she is going to be the First Female Ever, all the media and the pundits are predicting that she's going to win in a landslide. Her campaign is so sure of victory that they engage in internal back-stabbing to get close to the Empress in order to ensure the plum jobs in her court once the coronation is held, instead of working on winning the damn election.
I keep referring to this video, but see all the pundits and all the talk show heads going on about "delicious irony" and "tomorrow night when Hillary Clinton wins" and how preliminary polls show Hillary leading by a mile:
And then the night of the shock results, leaving a lot of people "literally shaking and crying". Nobody can believe it. It wasn't supposed to happen. Everyone is flailing around blaming everyone else. Not enough voters turned out! It was the fault of white women! Someone must be to blame! It was the sexists who hated the idea of a woman in power! It was the racists! It was the Russians! It was the Electoral College, that relict of the slave holders! It was the FBI and Comey and the emails, off with his head!
So Russiagate is a perfect fit for angry, shocked, disappointed people who can't accept that not enough voters wanted Hillary as the next president. It can't have been that simple, it must be down to a conspiracy.
Remember Jane back on SSC, the otherwise reasonable lady, who was firmly and unshakeably convinced the Russians had hacked the voting machines and fudged the results? Same reaction: emotionally this is impossible to accept, but a conspiracy makes sense of the unacceptable. Now there are Bad Guys to blame, not the faults of your own candidate and the myriad ways the entire thing went off the rails.
American elites (and many normal people) hated and feared Donald Trump for decades before he was elected president. There's a reason The Simpsons had an episode in the year 2000 with a dark joke about Donald Trump being POTUS twenty years in the future. Hillary Clinton had very little to do with any of the Trump hate.
I completely disagree with that. Trump has been regarded as a buffoon by certain people for decades, but hate and fear? Nope. The reason the Simpson's joke works at all is *because* it was comic exaggeration, like saying a yellow dog gets elected President. If a large numbe of people generally thought he was evil and generally thought it was possible he could have become President, nobody would make jokes about it, any more than they (outside of 4chan) would make jokes about Jeffrey Dahmer becoming President or OJ Simpson becoming dean at a women's college.
On the other hand, I find Deiseach's argument quite consistent with what I remember at the time. Indeed it was not shock that Trump had won the election so much as that Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton, icon and woman of destiny. Had Trump beaten Walter Mondale (or Joe Biden for that matter) the shock and outrage would not have been present.
To be fair, if I were conspiracy theory minded, finding out that the people investigating a Presidential candidate were texting each other about how afraid they were that the guy were going to be President and one of the investigators said, Don't worry, we have an insurance policy - that's something that could launch a few theories.
Instead, CW seems to have shifted the other way, that because there isn't conclusive evidence that affected their investigation, we can confidently conclude that it didn't. People are weird.
Noting that the evidence regarding collusion was not limited to the Steele dossier.
However, in defense of the dossier itself- according to podcasts I found from early in the reporting, by people who seemed knowledgeable about intelligence gathering, the dossier was recognizable at the time as a type of intel that a) is very valuable, and b) mostly consists of factually incorrect assertions.
Specifically, someone convinced a bunch of people (mostly Russians) to share rumors. Most rumors are false. However if it's likely to contain a couple true claims, it is very valuable to intelligence officers, much like a pile of turds with diamonds hidden in it is a very valuable pile of turds. Fishing for these diamonds is a messy but worthwhile process for intelligence agencies (or anyone else who benefits from non-public info), even if the raw turd pile comes from a process that's shittier than their usual.
When intel leaks to the media it is mostly diamonds, however this time Buzzfeed posted the raw turd pile. Most of us did not know to expect 90% turds.
Anyone whose case against Trump relied on uncritically accepting the dossier's claims- or uncritically assuming half of them were true- deserves to look bad. However to reject the whole thing based on the existence of the turds, or based on the existence of people who believed the turds, is the genetic fallacy.
You still don't know to expect 100% turds. The normal state of a turd-pile is not any percentage whatsoever of hidden diamonds, and it would take extraordinary evidence for it to be worth your while to either pay real money for a pile of turds or even to dig into one deposited on your doorstep, hoping to find diamonds.
The Steele Dossier appears to have been a standard-issue pile of turd and nothing but. And reasoning "there were a *lot* of accusations, so if even 10% of them are true than Trump is a Very Bad Man", makes you a fool to be manipulated at will by anyone willing to lie to you. And, not even type-7 lying, because they'll be saying that they heard this from some guy and they truly did hear it from some guy.
Seems like the obvious reason you can think that Hillary Clinton, who you hate, rapes babies and eats their organs, but you can't think the same thing about your wife, who you also hate, is that you actually know your wife and have a pretty realistic idea about what she's capable of. As far as most people are concerned Hillary Clinton or Trump or other conspiracy targets might as well be fictional characters.
I think something a lot of popular conspiracy theories have in common is that the specific theories address subjects that are way outside of the theorists' actual experience, where anything could be true as far as they know.
That's kind of the point. Conspiracy theories about people you actually know are no fun, because Debbie Downer common sense keeps interrupting to point out tedious deflating things like "well George couldn't actually hit the side of a barn with a rilfe" or "Elaine has to go sit down when she sees the tiny amount of blood that a finger cut brings."
For Clinton and other partisan figures, I suspect belief-as-attire plays a role. Once a negative belief about her becomes generally accepted among whatever group of conservatives you associate with, then denying it or expressing doubt can look like a sign that you're defecting from the group. Inversely, affirming more hostile claims (up to a point) signals more intense commitment to the group.
Well bear in mind she actually comes across as a shrill cold-hearted fake, as an individual human being. She could not have been elected county dogcatcher were she not married to the magnetic Bill Clinton, which is terribly ironic given her I Am Woman Hear Me Roar shtick[1]. By contrast even the most partisan righties acknowledged that Bill Clinton really seemed to feel your pain (unless you were a slightly chubby starry-eyed intern), and even the most committed lefties acknowledged that you had to really focus to hate "Teflon" Reagan personally, genial and gentle soul that he seemed to be.
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[1] And of course we all know it was her Lady Macbeth ambition that kept her married to the old rapey bastard, when any woman of spirit or conviction would have heaved his ass-groping ass out of the homestead as far back as Arkansas days. That did her no good either, although admittedly she was kind of damned if she did, damned if she didn't there.
I think it's a combination of this with the difference in scale. Around famous people there is always a thermal noise of rumors and speculations. If they aren't particularly hated, the rumors usually die down quickly, but if they are, then every rumor has a high chance to explode.
It's kinda like how whenever there is a protest the police hates, it can often find some incidence of violence as a pretext for escalation, since the larger the crowd is, the more statistically likely it is.
This reminds me I recently came across an astounding example of “bitch eating crackers” syndrome. Some politician had a pet pig and had to give it away when they moved. A long time later, that person then gave the pig to a third owner, then the pig got injured, the politician reached out to the place that was taking care of the pig to express his thanks, and this proved he was a terrible pet owner who never cared about the pig, somehow.
I think this is about Logan Paul, a popular Youtuber? He's been recently exposed as the organiser of a (yet another) crypto scam, and the pig thing was initially misrepresented as him apparently having directly abandoned it.
I agree with your take but I think it's a little more nuanced. The animal sanctuary that rescued the pig said essentially (a) we found this pig that Logan Paul owned, (b) it's in terrible condition and looks to have been abandoned, (c) isn't it terrible how people buy vanity pets and then abandon them. The implication was that Logan Paul had bought and then abandoned the pig himself.
Internet media outlets then reported this fairly uncritically. Subsequently, Paul gave a statement saying he had rehomed the pig, and unbeknownst to him it had then been rehomed again. This wasn't public knowledge before, and mostly new and existing articles took it into account and became more balanced.
The internet definitely dislikes Logan Paul (e.g. he was implicated in a recent NFT scam, although again his side of the story is that he didn't intend for it to be a scam and was mislead by bad faith counterparties) so people were definitely ready to believe this. The outlets reporting on the story also didn't get his take before publishing on the pig story, which they should have. I don't think it's quite "bitch eating crackers" because the facts as presented were quite unpleasant – it just turned out they weren't the whole story. It's more a case of, as Scott says,enthusiastically sharing 'proof' that someone you hate really is as bad as you say.
Coffeezilla is the Youtuber who exposed Logan Paul's "Cryptozoo" scam. I haven't watched the videos in their entirety, but one thing for sure: it's quite difficult to have any amount of sympathy/charity towards Logan after watching. He still bears responsibility for his fans having lost millions of dollars. Paul's defense in a rebuttal video (that is now deleted) assigns responsibility onto "conmen" developers that tricked him, but it doesn't justify his behavior in staying silent about the whole ordeal for months (assumedly hoping people will move on, no retribution would occur) until it was exposed to mainstream audiences via Coffeezilla. Yesterday, Logan did announce a "$1.3 million rewards program for disappointed players" where he claims he was unintentional and "I was defensive because I never scammed anyone with this project." I can't fully fault the man; some do have a genuine dislike for him after all the apology videos & the Japan suicide video incident. His reputation is already fragile enough. Maybe he was panicking in the background or so uncertain about what to do that he decided to keep quiet on the whole situation as it unfolded into disaster and fans lost money. People would've been slightly more forgiving if he just came out earlier and admitted he ****ed up, big time.
Donald Kingsbury's 'Psychohistorical Crisis' ends with a numerate, sensible argument that the units of measurement used in the Great Pryamid and later in ancient Rome were derived from an ancient version of Foucault's Pendulum. Kingsbury gets this from Livio Stecchini, who was a real expert on ancient metrology, but according to Wikipedia's passive voice was also considered wrong.
I don't foster any hate or resentment towards individuals in positions in power, The matter-of-fact is, people have aligned interests, and they coordinate together in real life to get to certain objectives. There is no objective reason to presume everyone in the world has the same interests as you, it is more of an advantage to assume a cynical position that people have interests that are counter to your own (i.e. stranger) and hence our levels of trust are variable/decreased relative to people whom we do know and encounter.
Just because individuals spend a majority of their lives working and ignorant of the things that occur around the world (i.e. men who enjoy blowing up people's bodies like ragdolls as shown in WikiLeaks videos of military officers commanding others, or the funding of bio-warfare labs amongst the Russian border) does not mean people don't act in concerted ways that may be deemed as 'evil'. There are many such quotes made by people in positions of power, the question is why do we possess a normalcy bias that just because everything in our every day life seems 'normal' and that there are no people who enjoy doing 'evil' or 'harming' people, why that applies to every individual in position of power, given the fact that there are many geopolitical interests of the elite that are not necessarily in the same lieu of interests as the general public.
There is also a notable vestige of available play-books and operation books by various think-tanks and well-funded conglomerates online which anyone can read, which also coincidentally aligns with many of the various narratives pushed out by the media.
The main question is, if you are in possession of the ability to instrument credit in any form without repercussion, why would it not lead to the concentration of power in the long-term if you pass an intergenerational dynasty of similar natures (i.e. being the best propogandists)? There are liability exclusion clauses, there are special interest groups, there is regulatory capture, there are groups with conflicts-of-interests -- if I gave you X amount of money and resources and ensured you the safety of your family and friends just to tell a modest lie, or to look the other way, why would it not be conceivable to do it for large entities of people who possess large influence, whether it be the media, the intelligence agencies, technocratic enterprises, etc? Is there a similiar 'trust' bias that people seem to possess or something?
There is often a tactic used in politics, ''poisoning the well' and 'limited hangout' where individuals make associations between the opposition strawman and the purported reality, with obfuscation of truths through half-truths/delayed-truths to make it more amenable/disagreeable to the general public, or co-opting. Not to mention the fact that behavioural scientists are employed to change the opinions, attitudes and behaviours of people. I find it difficult to reconcile why people believe it's hard to coordinate large factions of people who possess aligned interests. If I'm a CEO I would lobby for X if I know my ROR exceeded my costs. If I owned the ability to generate credit, I could tie it to explicit policies with vague criterions to further any ideological pursuit I wanted. If anything, the greater you ascent to power, the more likely you will be to abuse and use it. There are more self-interested and selfish people in the world than there are altruists, and high-trust individuals. From a game-theoretical point of view, groups are superior to individuals at a resource level. And groups that are highly 'kinship' oriented outperform humanitarian altruists because of their ability to use a strategy similiar to psychopaths (negative-frequency dependency) because they are able to mimic positive perceptions of themselves as cooperators while in reality they are defectors. While tit-for-tat with forgiveness/contrition might be the predominant solution, the reality is incrementalist policies with imperceptible changes that are seemingly innocuous is an intelligent method to subdue any population, because they increasingly become conditioned and accepted to a general prevailing environment -- in the same way we artificially select for domesticated dogs that best 'respond' to us, the 'elites' can do the same methods to the general public in the name of greater social good or social collectivism.
If I loudly preclaim ''I prefer the existence of X individuals over Y'' 50 years in the past and my descendants still live on, and the general public has not accepted ''X over Y" it does not mean I would not be working towards my political goals, it would just mean I would be more discrete about it. There is a scientific method towards anything, including political change and acceptance. The fact that people can't understand this and still think ''it can only happen in the past, it will never happen'' is a testament to the fact that the general population is becoming increasingly docile and self-domesticated, in a belief that there is an authority figure or some consolation of appointed experts that can dictate what is deemed to be truth or consensus when in reality, only independent self-investigation can affirm those notions or reject them on the precipice of merit (i.e. similar to geniuses outcast by the orthodoxy) simply because humans are social/herd animals that have a disposition to conform to those with similar views and have a hard time rejecting counter-evidence without a change in association of emotion with those beliefs.
It is not just X entity of people whom control everything, it is a network of networks of individuals who possess various modalities of power. In the similar way that the net used to be structured as an organic sphere of many nodes has consolidated, in the same way that our media companies, our banks, our food companies are all owned by the same supranational organizations (i.e. you can look it up, there is an illusion of choice with all these sub-brands of X entities). Just as network theory would predict.
We know age correlates with wealth, because people had more time to accumulate wealth. In the same way, dynasties with people who live and continue to share those values of preserving, maintaining and growing their wealth should see similar outcomes in reality. I am lambasted by the idea that people are incapable of imagining people planning to harm others, because I am one of those individuals who do possess said capacities to think so without such conscience, and I share certain inclinations and beliefs to those held by the elite. There are more than eight billion humans with various genetic configurations and environments, some must undoubtably have the ability a greater capacity for influence than others, whether by social control or not; to suggest the opposite, the orthodox view that humans are mostly equal, humans are not capable of organizing in large collectives (i.e. like corporations), humans are not interested in harming other humans for their own self-gain, humans cannot get away with large crimes (i.e. like FTX) seems to me like the largest ideological fallacy that anyone can possess, but I digress, I suppose if you lots believe that most people are nice and innocuous and that people are simply misguided or emotionally biased then I will give you the doubt of doing so as a post-ad hoc rationalization.
Personally I believe many people are lacking in the knowledge of area of political sciences, economics, biology and other fields which might be way higher-intelligence individuals are more susceptible to propaganda because they possess a higher aptitude for being capable of holding more complex belief structures. Usually you guys are given simplified models of the universe to operate on which are not-full descriptors of reality (i.e. lies of omission); e.g. it is not just the adaptive+innate immune system, but also includes the interferon, siRNA, virome, biome -- it is not just one form of gaseous mixture of radiative effect but a cumulation of solar flux densities, intergenerational cyclicities of distance/tilt/dynamic equilibras between interlinked processes within the environment, and the disposition to focus on metrics over a comprehensive understanding of the underlying assumptions of those metrics (i.e. efficacy in measures of purported test rates of various success rates vs mechanism-of-action explanations) which leads to an overabundance of above-intelligence individuals not engaging in the pursuit of truth, but some abstracted model/projected rooted not in ground truth.
My biggest problem with people-who-think-others-who-hold-the-belief-that-people-have-collective-self-interests-and-the-capability-to-enact-them-can't-possibly-do-so-because-it's-too-big is the fact that there can be incontrovertible lines of concordant circumstantial evidence that there is an established effort to enact something, but that the nature of such behaviour is too-out-of-normality to be propositionally testable.
(i.e. metrics of mentions of A, B, C in media going up; the associations of those editorials/authors being similar descendancy, many such articles/videos/media published directly by such individuals) and yet there is a post-ad hoc rationalization/justification that it is immiscibly impossible to have such preconscious thoughts.
This was an interesting post that summarized a lot of my thoughts. I think each point you make needs to be discussed in more detail, but there is a severe lack of dialogue between "non-conspiracy theorists" (like Scott and other rationalists in general) and "conspiracy theorists" (not exactly sure who I should include here, got any suggestion?).
Either way I think you should copy paste your comment and make a post out of it. It's far too long and far too hidden in the comment field for people to read and appreciate.
Speaking based on some of the people I know who've gotten into various conspiracy theories (several friends got into the weeds around the GameStop stock mess), a common factor I observe is wanting an explanation that gives order to the world as they perceive it.
Politics is horribly complicated, extremely contingent, and yet intrudes in people's lives in myriad ways, sometimes quite horribly so. "The illuminati control everything and the bad stuff is their fault" is a much simpler concept than any real causal explanation for most things. Do the details work? No, but that isn't the point, which is why they're often vague about the details. The point is there's a simple concept that explains their reality.
Beyond being bothered/offended by Trump, I think a lot of people are simply baffled by him. He doesn't make sense to them. Russiagate provided a coherent story for why he was the way he was. It didn't matter if that story made sense in detail (i.e. explained any particular of why Trump did X), so long as it gave them a nominally sensible narrative to fit him into their world.
This need for order is especially necessary for humans in a time where we are bombarded by more information than our brains could ever process. It's not possible for humans to spend all our cognitive power on trying to figure out every single thing, so humans would rather take shortcuts. It's a neurological explanation of Occam's Razor-esque thinking. Conspiracy theories make people's worldviews simpler instead of having to deal with tedious critical thinking and overcoming cognitive dissonance.
I call this the "big bad" kind of conspiracy. Life is full of gray areas, moral dilemmas, problems without clear solutions, misfortunes that don't make sense, etc. If suddenly everyone is suffering because there's COVID, it's hard to accept that that's just how life is sometimes. It's much more convenient to accept if you find the "big bad" who is to blame for this.
So people go looking for it, and spend unneccesary amount of energy arguing about whether it could have been an intentional lab leak or not, etc. So for this reason, I try to have a bias *against* any big bad theories. It's not that they can't ever be true, but there's going to be people every time who push these theories just for their own piece of mind. But, unfortunately, life is often far from simple.
You're going to want to do a clarifying post about "Russia gate".
"Trump is an active Russian agent either due to malice or blackmail" is the strong version and I don't think many people believed that.
Then you get to other things that may be called part of "Russia gate"
1. Russia actively helped Trump's election.
2.Trump's campaign knew about this and had some degree of collaboration.
3. The hacking of podesta's emails was done by a Russian agency
4. The leak from wikieaks was timed to bury the access Hollywood tape.
5. Some people in Trump's campaign knew about the wiki leaks dump before the release. "
These have all been proven to be true. And I think the debunking of "Trump is an active Russian agent" has been used to motte and bailey the other questionable things he did.
The fact that the podesta emails with banal info info were treated as scandalous by a credulous US media ecosystem is not the fault of trump or the Russians.
I would love to see a reasoned, researched deep dive on this.
I certainly would not have my hat on Taibbi. I read a lot of his articles on this subject. One thing that threw me was his idea of debunking the Manafort/Klimnik connection . He says he asked Klimnik if he was a Russian spy and the man laughed and said no of course not. Case closed.
Taibbi is too contrarian on this topic. He loved saying how nothing in Russiagate was true even when people still believed it. Now I think he's too committed to defend that position rather than tell me which claims are likely true and which are not.
When it comes to Russiagate, I am surprised at how vehemently a lot of people can now claim it was a giant hoax and/or nothing burger, when so much of it happened out in the open or is otherwise well documented.
It’s as though everyone who thinks there was anything inappropriate about the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia, is lumped in with Rachel Maddow’s hair-on-fire version of Russiagate. But I don’t think I ever believed that. (Hanlon’s razor, and all…)
OTOH, maybe I’m just fooling myself, and that I, and more of the liberal mainstream, was far less reasonable and much more conspiratorial at the time than I remember.
Konstantin Kilimnik is the person in question. He worked closely with Paul Manafort as part of his efforts to keep the Yanukovich regime in power. It's not like we have a copy of his FSB employee ID but given the nature of the evidence it's not reasonable to doubt that he is a Russian intelligence officer, and people who worked with the two said it was essentially an open secret at the time.
I get the sense that this is a true statement, but not true in the way it might be implied. What I mean is that the Russians were actively interfering in the U.S. election, both through their security agencies and through the use of hacker groups. But if I had to guess, I would say that their goal was to sew division and cast doubt on the election outcome, weakening a probable HRC administration. That Trump won was probably a happy accident for them. And it's not even clear that anything they did actually mattered to the outcome.
Hopefully you are not under any naive impression that the Russians (and before 1991 the Soviets) have ever *failed* to attempt to interfere with an American Presidential election, from approximately the time they first recruited agents here (the 1930s) to the present. They will certainly do whatever they can to influence the 2024 election in the direction they prefer, or at least to sow discord and disunion.
I mean, if they *hadn't* ever tried, the premier would be quite justified in having the entire KGB apparatus sent to the gulag for gross incompetence and lack of initiative.
The word "interfere" is doing a lot of work there. Me, I'd tend to assume *every* country does multiple things that would be likely to help *either* side of any major US election. Which means if you arbitrarily pick a country and a team you should be able to find a few things that country did which help that team...and if you looked harder you should also be able to find things that country did which hurt that team. But "interfere" is the wrong word - it implies the goal and effect is to unilaterally change the outcome from what it would have been to something different, rendering the vote moot. Which isn't so. Assuming the end outcome is the result of having Americans VOTE and tallying up the total according to the standard mechanisms, the election itself has NOT been "interfered" with, it happened exactly as intended.
"Influence" is the better word for what's actually being alleged. People both foreign and domestic constantly do things likely to *influence* our election results; this is something we should expect and not be particularly surprised by.
Regardless, those who run around hair-on-fire screaming that presidential candidate A was "helped" by country X and therefore is BEHOLDEN to that country...are being very silly and we should laugh at them.
I'd be interested to see some evidence of, say, France, or Canada, or Mexico using its intelligence or security services to "influence" American elections in a similar way (i.e. secretly, using illegal means, propaganda, troll farms, etc).
Every country is "influencing" American elections (presumably implying "in a similar way"), not just like, Macron saying "I like candidate X", is a hell of a claim.
Look up the British propaganda effort in the U.S. in the 1940s for sheer quality of propagandists, such as Larry Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Roald Dahl, C.S. Forrester, David Ogilvy, Errol Flynn, etc.
That wasn’t for a specific candidate, it was for a country’s interests, so it can’t really be called a bribe to one candidate. Also, it was paying public intellectuals to support their country. I sort of assume that any time an intellectual supports China strongly enough on Australian TV, there’s a 50% chance they’d lose their job if they were too harsh on China. I used not to apply the same scepticism to Facebook groups by people I hadn’t heard of.
Yes, I agree with you on all points. I was just using the same portentous word ("interfere") that the partisans use. But you add considerable value with your observation that even using that word is silly, as what we are talking about is "influence" and *every* country on the face of the Earth does their best to influence American elections, since those elections are deeply consequential for the world. Being shocked, shocked, to find that Russia is among them is naive (or cynical) to a pretty high degree.
There's also the fact that the US "influences" the elections of other countries *all the time*. Including those of our allies, eg the CIA infiltrated all major French parties in the 7 months leading up to their 2012 election. We have ongoing spying efforts against the French government and French industrial concerns which make it possible the information we've illicitly obtained could potentially be leaked or managed to help firms and groups we like and hurt ones we don't as appropriate...whether or not the option is exercised in any particular case. We do that to all sorts of countries and sometimes they do it back to us. Meanwhile a successful political campaign involves meeting *everyone who could potentially help your candidate win* and a *winning* campaign is attractive to influence-seekers. Some of the people that a campaign, or friends of the campaign, or friends-of-friends of the campaign meet will undoubtedly turn out to be spies or spy-adjacent - that realistically can't be helped. Because spies are among those most able to throw resources around and most incentivized to make high-level connections that might leak information. So when I look at these alleged Russia connections I don't compare it to some perfect world where there's NO spying, I compare it to the actual world in which everybody who has the resources to spy does *some* amount of spying...most of which has little practical effect on outcomes and much of which is never noticed.
Twitter apparently contacted 1.4 million people who’d heard from the Russian Twitter farm in the ten weeks before the election. I don’t think they’d ever had anywhere near that much direct, covert reach before. And yes, Twitter is great at exaggerating people’s impact, but also the mainstream media picked a lot of these stories up and ran with them.
Well, I think that's naive. Being able to reach a mere 0.5-1% of potential voters with an advertising message tuned to Russian interests is so marginal and quotidian an accomplishment it would be shocking if it didn't happen biannually, or even continuously. As I said above, if the KGB couldn't even bestir itself *that* far they hardly deserve the title of "intelligence" agency. (And by the way hopefully nobody is under the impression that the CIA doesn't similarly exert itself to influence elections in other countries, even -- shock! dismay! -- those of our allies. Politics ain't beanbag, not even or especially not international politics.)
I said “covertly”. You can say “shocking”, but can you point to a time when it happened? I claim doing something on this scale covertly was much easier because of social media, and that the difference in impact on Russia in 2016 was larger than the difference in 2008 or 2012.
In countries not allied with the US, it counted against politicians in those countries if they were US figureheads (offset against the aid those politicians attracted, but Russia didn’t give the US any foreign aid to support Trump). Can you describe how the US covertly interferes with its allies’ elections? I’m guessing it didn’t involve contacting anywhere near 0.5% of voters.
Ha ha, well you have a lot more faith in social media having a real influence on human beings than I do. I mean, I can't think of a single human being I know in real life -- we're not counting Internet randos -- who appears to be seriously influenced by what gets said on Twitter. Indeed, most of them don't even use it at all. I get that journalists and talking heads absolutely live there 24/7, so they might have gotten some grossly exaggerated view of what people were hearing. And maybe they stayed up all night or were stoned, so it didn't occur to them that a fraction of tweets pales into complete insignificance compared to the wall-to-wall political ad buys saturating every media market. $6 billion was spent domestically on the 2016 election in a strenuous effort by very smart operatives in both parties to influence the election. What did the Russians spend? A million or two? They must've had some real powerful mind-control rays to actually have a measureable impact. Might as well throw a glass of water at someone standing in a pouring rain.
No, sorry, I have neither the patience nor the interest in going over 20th century history for you. I'm sure you can dig into it yourself if you're genuinely interested.
My skepticism is based on finding the proposition, even taking the assertions of Russian Twiitter bots at full face value, that this is some remarkable unique event to be ludicrous. I'm expected to find it even remotely plausible that never ever in the entire history of the Cold War, for example, did the Soviets attempt to use their many agents to influence US elections? Or never ever did some political ad buys using front organizations? They went to strenuous lengths to infiltrate American command apparatus but it never occured to them to just try nudging voters to choose a more congenial Commander in Chief? I'd have to believe the Soviets were complete morons to find this a hypothesis sufficiently plausible that I would care to take the time to demonstrate its inanity, as you are asking.
Hmm... the Mueller report? I'm not from the USA, have no horse in this race, and I have no idea to what exactly "Russia gate" refers to in the media over there.
I have, though, read Mueller's report, and was utterly shocked by its content. To me, the fact that afterwards Trump didn't end up in jail but instead kept his position as President is a clear indication that USA's institutes are a complete failure.
The 4-page Justice Department summary of the Muller report says: "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."
Thus, I take the Muller report as explicitly finding Mathew's item #2 to be false. Or at least explicitly *failing* to find it true - it's hard to prove a negative.
This summary is misleading without explicitly lying in all the ways Scott just discussed in his previous post. Do yourself a favour, and read the report itself.
(Mueller himself wrote to Barr: "The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office's work and conclusions". This is, I will add, an understatement).
I read the report itself at the time and was unimpressed. Not gonna read the entire thing again now but if you think there's something there that *does* establish Mathew's #2, feel free to tell us what it is!
ALL summaries "do not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of the thing being summarized - if they did you wouldn't need the full report!
The story the report establishes easily dwarfs any scandal I can remember from any democratic country in the last few decades, including the original Watergate scandal. if you really read it and was unimpressed - then I am truly impressed by your unimpressedness, and I doubt there's a point to continue this conversation.
They concluded unambiguously that "Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian
effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak
information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow's intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process. WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian influence campaign...."
"While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump's electoral prospects...."
Etc.
That Republican-controlled committee's findings of fact related to Paul Manafort alone, while he was chairman of the Trump campaign, were more than enough to validate the "weak version" of Russiagate. Never mind whatever else they found which isn't yet public because it involved classified sources or information (hence is redacted in the public report).
People also have a delusional idea of what intelligence assets actually look like. It's much more like the mob than it is like James Bond. Assets usually don't even know that they are assets, because that protects the agent who recruited them. You don't sit them down and say hey let's agree, you will do a treason for money LOL.
And if the standard of evidence for "is an asset" is "we could convict them of it in a court of law", then yeah, not too surprising you would find that to be "false". The intelligence agency will be working hard to cover its tracks and muddy the waters.
Okay, but if I'm claiming you were an agent of a foreign country and thus were engaged in some kind of treason, it's hard to make sense of that if what I mean is that you're a dupe who occasionally leaks some useful information to a Russian agent whom you think is just some nice dude who works next door and is a good listener over chess games at lunch.
We should split what Trump did or intended from what Paul Manafort did and admitted to. Paul Manafort was up to his ass in dirty Russian money and was playing his own game. The extent to which Trump knew or cared is unknown and at this point unknowable, although he did pardon Manafort in exchange for his loyalty (compare with Michael Cohen).
Please. In the US treason is defined in the Constitution. I don't think I've ever heard anyone make a serious claim that that applied to Trump, or any of his election committee. It's a *very* high bar.
That matches my understanding. I continue to be shocked that people point to "RussiaGate" as a "conspiracy theory", as my understanding is that what you call the "weak version" was essentially established fact.
I think the term "Russiagate" is kind of designed to obscure the differences there. The strong version that almost no one believed is not true so we can feel OK about ignoring the true and damning stuff.
It's an interesting motte and bailey, but almost a reverse one. We have an expansive version that we can deny, and then move on to denying the tight one too whenever no one is paying attention.
>"Trump is an active Russian agent either due to malice or blackmail" is the strong version and I don't think many people believed that.
I think I recall a great many people expressing that belief, whether sincerely or performatively.
I also seem to recall quite a few people expressing the belief that Russia had actively interfered in the casting or counting of votes in the 2016 election.
In both cases usually hedged with enough careful weasel-wording that we probably can't accuse them of Type 7 Lying; I think I've already made it clear that I really don't care.
That was the bailey. The motte, yes, that was "Russia hacked Podesta's emails and timed the release for maximum electoral impact". The bailey needs to be burned to the ground and the ground sowed with salt; if there was ever anything of value there it was long gone by 2017. And the motte, was never of any value without the bailey and its defenders were naive at best. If all you can say is that the intelligence service of a foreign power spied on American politicians and/or released information into the public discourse in a manner calculated to affect an election, then yes, of course - also, the Pope is still Catholic and bears still do their business in the woods.
The reality is substantially different than what you describe. You present it as if Russia operated on its own, almost just accidentally helping Trump by the way.
In reality, Trump's campaign and administrators were neck-deep in communication, coordination and negotiation with the Russians on these regards. They were active agents, not passive beneficiaries.
in reality, Trump illegally obstructed and sabotaged the investigation into the details of the communication between his people (and himself) with the Russian, which is a severe crime on its own.
in reality, due to this successful blunt obstruction, what we surely know about the negotiation with the Russian (which is seriously damning in itself) is just a conservative lower-bound on how bad things are, not an upper-bound as you seem to imply. Moreover, since the obstruction was a risky crime, it should push anyone's priors regarding the graveness of the more likely scenarios that actually occurred.
The "motte" (i.e. the Mueller report and the following) is extremely serious scandal, and saying it was "never of any value" is absolutely ridicules. I have no doubt that future historians, after Trump will be long gone and the political relevance of this affairs fades, will strongly disagree with you.
"Quite a few," sure. It's a big country. That wasn't a mainstream view even among hardcore Democrats, and I doubt very much that was what Scott was referring to (remember the context here is that Scott says he fell for the conspiracy theory). Similarly, claims about interference with vote counting were out there but weren't mainstream and are unlikely to be what he was referring to.
Also, what we know goes a bit further than you say. In addition to the quoted statement, the campaign knew about the efforts, provided private data to help Russia execute the efforts, met with Russian representatives to discuss possible trades, and covered up what they knew rather than reporting it or even just being honest when asked. We also know that Trump obstructed the investigation that followed. Also, you suggest that that's all normal, but I'm genuinely not aware of any other times something like it has happened. A counter example (didn't involve a foreign power, IIRC) was in 2000, when the Gore campaign was sent Bush's debate prep material and they immediately reported it to the FBI. I think a more-normal, less-corrupt president would have been sunk by the facts we are aware of. Or his survival could just be a result of increased polarization, which makes it harder for one faction to give the other a win.
The thesis that Elders of Zion style conspiracies and Trump-Russia conspiracies are driven by a desire to justify a preexisting hatred by simplifying and amplifying alleged wrongdoing, seems ad hoc, short of evidence, and dubious.
"Most people, deep down, are not fans of the global elite. Probably they’re screwing the rest of us over somehow. But realistically they’ll keep getting away with it, because you can’t exactly prove that they’re evil."
Really? Is the average conspiracist bothered by the global powers that be specifically because he thinks that he can't personally stop them?
And does the average conspiracist think that he can't stop the global powers that be *specifically because* he can't prove their wrongdoing?
And does amplifying the magnitude of their alleged crimes really make it easier to "prove" that they're evil? Are worse crimes necessarily easier to prove than less severe ones? Surely their crimes of globalism, "globohomo" (sic), free-trade, promotion of immigration, etc. are sufficient in the minds of those predisposed to believe in such conspiracies.
"Sure, they have billions of dollars while other people starve, but capitalism has lots of advantages and all the alternatives seem worse."
Do average conspiracists have a firm a priori model of optimal economic policy? And if they do, are they typically overtly market-oriented?
"Sure, they’re complicit in climate change and moral decay and so on. But so are the rest of us..."
Does the average such conspiracist even believe in (anthropogenic) climate change (that should be mitigated)?
I realize I'm picking on what are meant to be vague subconscious musings of conspiracists, but I think that their complete implausibility is reflective of a difficulty articulating the thinking speaks poorly for the theory as a whole.
If anything, it seems like the theory is more useful for someone like Trump, than for "global elite" conspiracies.
In the case of the former, it does indeed seem likely that people would have strong feelings about him from the outset, and it is therefore conceivable that they would then try to justify them more simply (as per the theory).
But in the case of the "global elite", why would anyone have such strong opinions about them a priori? Even the very existence of the group seems a posteriori to the sentiments. Who is the global elite? Is Hillary Clinton part of the elite? Donald Trump? Carlos Slim? Klaus Schwab? Sean Hannity?
Membership in the mental category seems to depend on the conspiracist already feeling negatively about them.
It seems relatively likely, that the simpler explanation - that when a person dislikes a group or person that he is apt to see the worst in them, is correct.
The supposed evidence against this theory (the “bitch eating crackers” theory) is that people (presumably even conspiracists) don't tend to believe that their spouses are cannibalistic pedophiles.
However, this counterevidence seems underwhelming. After all, the alternative hypothesis would seem to suffer the same weakness. If someone disliking someone intensely and not being able to sufficiently and succinctly explain why, leads to coming up with conspiracies about them, then again, why would this too not apply to spouses?
[After all, it seems likely that the intensely negative feelings that a person may feel for a spouse would be even more apt to lead to the proposed phenomenon than the Trump example for a couple of reasons, one of which is that a person will have a much greater number of exposures to their spouse, than to Trump. If someone forms a negative feeling for a spouse, it could more easily be based on a larger number of potentially smaller factors, that ought to be smaller, and therefore more difficult to articulate, that should make the desire for simple dramatic conspiracies more acute.]
I suspect that many nominal believers in such conspiracies believe these things in a vacuum, mostly without integrating such beliefs systematically into the rest of their thoughts and behaviors.
It is easier to maintain belief in such a belief about distant figures than about one's spouse.
If one's spouse were really a cannibalistic pedophile, one couldn't go on acting normally.
Therefore, even conspiracists are much less likely to believe that they believe that their spouses are cannibalistic pedophiles.
However, as with other religions, believers in QAnon come in both varieties - actual believers, and believer-believers. The former *do* sometimes integrate the beliefs into practice, leading to acts of violence, including against family members.
A lot of conspiracy theorists do talk about "redpilling" people or "dropping breadcrumbs" or otherwise hoping that, if they can circulate their ideas widely enough, this will make people finally rise up and overthrow the evil elites. So I do think "we can't stop the elites or prove that they're evil" is a significant component of how conspiracy theories start. A conspiracy theory is a personification of the problems in your life you can't fix - the reason the world is a mess is because of specific evil people doing specific evil things, and all we have to do is stop them from doing that and everything will be fine. It's much more hopeful and solution-oriented than "sorry, running a global economy is complicated, we haven't found anything better than capitalism, and overthrowing the elites won't change the fact that your coal mining job is obsolete."
(QAnon in particular is very messianic in its thinking, not only promising that there are elites you can blame, but also promising that Any Day Now, the good guys working behind the scenes will succeed in overthrowing them and solve all the world's problems and also cure your cancer.)
This personification also explains why specific elites get drawn into it - "We just need to kill George Soros" promises more of a solution than "Unfortunately, killing a specific wealthy capitalist won't change the incentive structures that cause wealthy capitalists to act against your interests."
Amplifying the elites' crimes serves to make the real policies they're complaining about sound worse. "Gay marriage is just the start, next they'll push us to accept pedophilia" or "Environmental regulations are just a smokescreen, the government is going to lock you in a pod and make you eat bugs." It enables you to use a conspiracy to argue against even things that are pretty innocuous - "If I call people by different pronouns I'm basically enabling child abuse!"
These forces don't apply to a spouse you hate because there's already a specific person to blame - your spouse. I don't think many people feel like they're trapped in their marriage by impersonal economic forces.
The biases you describe are mostly distinct from the particular one described by Scott in the paragraph starting "But second."
I don't doubt that some conspiracies, QAnon in particular, hold eschatological promise to their believers.
I was specifically questioning Scott's thesis that a primary driver of these conspiracies is the attempt by conspiracists to justify their own preexisting negative emotions about given parties.
The bias you describe is almost the opposite. Rather than starting with negative feelings towards someone that may have resulted from many impressions which are hard to collate into a single coherent explanation, and then coming up with dramatic, and therefore simple reasons to hate them, you describe a process where the subjects of the conspiracy are selected *because* conspiracies about them in particular allow for an eschatological future once their schemes are defeated.
In other words, someone may indeed have built up a very negative impression of Trump, based on exposure to him, and then try to justify those feelings, but presumably nobody is starting with any sort of strong feelings - positive or negative - about someone like Klaus Schwab. The only reason anyone has even heard of him is because of conspiracies.
The reason for these conspiracies may well be, as you suggest, that it allows for an eschatological future once he has been defeated, but that was not Scott's second proposed conspiracy of emotion.
This feels right to me. It's not that they want their to be a literal pedophile cabal (or for Trump to be a Russian spy) per se, but they want a clear fact that justifies their own emotions. That's easy to relate to.
It's also important to understand that it is hard to let go of those emotions, and to understand that trying to convince them that the conspiracy is wrong won't fix the underlying emotional issues.
I would say the emotions people are trying to explain are their sense of alienation from too many of their fellow countrymen. The shock with which people of a certain type were struggling to come to terms was not the existence of Donald Trump, even in his most evil avatar -- most people have no problem at all believing that such people exist -- but that 63 million regular American citizens would vote to make him President, and he would defeat Hillary Clinton, the Historic First Woman President who was just a natural shoo-in. How the fuck does *this* happen? The mind just boggles at the concept that I can be so incredibly wrong about what half my fellow citizens are like[1], and so I recoil from the notion. Nobody likes to feel like he so grossly misunderstands everybody else. Therefore, it must be due to some fiendishly clever mind-control rays that diabolic bastard Trump sent out[2].
---------------------------
[1] Of course, the even more boggling concept that I myself might be wrong, that half my fellow citizens might understand something to which I am blind, is even further off the mental table.
[2] I'm sure most normal people could readily comprehend Trump getting a million or even 10 million votes. We all know there are crazies around. It's the fact that he *won the election* that is inconceivable.
I don't know if it really requires anything other than Trump having the wrong letter after his name.
People believe(d) crazy theories about Hilary Clinton as well, and George W. Bush, and they (unlike Trump) are both perfectly ordinary representatives of their respective parties. I don't like Hillary (or Bush) but I'm not shocked that tens of millions voted for them.
Well, that doesn't contradict what I said, it only means the problem of finding a route to comforting denial is general. But I also think the level of hysteria about Trump was much higher than for, say, GWB or Bush Senior. Also than for Reagan, now I think about it, but that might be because Reagan actually tried to get along with people on a personal level and avoid yanking their chain -- even if he had no intention of conforming to their wishes -- while Trump had this reality TV habit of enjoying making people foam at the mouth.
Trump certainly was an unusual candidate from a major party, who played up his anti-establishment cred, but of course he managed to get to that point in no small part due to the general intensification of polarization/culture war.
You seem very preoccupied with personalities, as your entire post was about comparing Trump with Clinton. But to many people that is shallow, and it is the policies which matter far more, and the politicians are almost irrelevant.
For example, most of those people you claim boggle your mind didn't give a flying f*ck if Hilary Clinton would have been the "Historic First Woman President". What difference would that make to their lives?
If anything the idea would repel many, especially men, as yet another example of trendy feminism and "women taking over". (c.f. almost every Hollywood film for the last 20 years, where the hero is a woman and the men, as often as not, are portrayed as hopeless ineffectual cucks and nincompoops!)
But if in a parallel universe Hilary had expoused Trump's policies and vice versa, then I am sure she would have won!
Trump's appeal to so many was that he declared a determination to "put America first" in various ways, including especially suppressing mass illegal immigration (which undoubtedly pushes low-skill wages down and property prices up).
Of course some people found his crass outbursts and erratic impulsive behaviour somewhat offputting, and I believe he has been known to tell the occasional fib (like any politician), and he wasn't able to achieve all his goals (partly due to his own shortcomings, and in part owing to passive aggressive resistance from "the establishment")
All the same, I think Trump Derangement Syndrome (an affliction of most Democrats and, it must be said, some Republicans!) stems largely from snobbery, as as if some loud-mouthed maverick new unknown artist wearing a garish checked suit turned up at a fancy New York art gallery during a viewing. One can imagine all the appalled guests whispering to each other. "My dear, _who_ is _that_? What _is_ he _wearing_? He's not one of _us_!" etc etc
Please don't think I am trying to defend Trump necessarily (though I applaud his aims - Why shouldn't a country's leader seek to put its own citizens first, instead of self-aggrandisizingly presuming to put the world to rights at its citizens expense?). I am merely trying to sketch how those Trump voters who so mystify you think, putting myself in their shoes as it were.
Wait, are you responding to what I said? If so, I think you completely misunderstood me, and it would be helpful if you said a word about what you think I said, so I could say it better.
I mean, for one thing, it certainly didn't boggle *my* mind that Trump beat Clinton. I was speaking of the geese weeping as if their mother died at the aborted Clinton "victory" party on Election Night.
Ah, OK. I took your post at face value, i.e. you expressing bafflement that so many people voted for Trump, meaning their world view was so far at odds from yours. But re-reading your post, I see now it could and presumably should be construed as you putting yourself in the shoes of people who were mystified, with those not including you necessarily. It was all the "I's" toward the end that misled me!
I think there is something to be said for this taxonomy but I think that even the "conspiracies of cognition" are based on conspiracies of emotion.
People didn't start believing weird things about JFK because they analysed the footage frame by frame and thought something was weird. They started out from the point of view of not wanting to think that this huge event had the prosaic cause of one unconnected communist loony, and then they started analysing footage until they found something that looked weird. Same deal with 9/11 conspiracies or pizza gate or Obama's birth certificate -- you start with the desire to believe something and then go find something you can fool yourself into thinking is evidence.
"People didn't start" is ambiguous between the first person to invent the theory, and later people who came across it.
I remember reading a conspiracy theory 5-10 years ago that Shakespeare was someone else, maybe Ben Johnson, I can't remember. I found it really convincing at the time. I could not care less about this and I have no reason to want Shakespeare to be any particular person, but the weird website I stumbled across laid out a bunch of weird suggestive evidence that I didn't have good answers for. I since overcome my believe in that conspiracy theory through the amazing rational process of losing the website and forgetting what was on it (something about a poem and an epitaph, but all the specifics are lost).
One difference between me and big-time conspiracy believers is that I shrugged and didn't really care that much. Maybe it takes some kind of emotional connection to go from "this website has lots of stuff I can't explain" to "I care a lot about this". But I think there's an alternate world where, for example, I posted about that approvingly on my blog, lots of people dunked on me and told me I was an idiot for believing it (without having good counterarguments), and then I got angry and made it my life goal to prove Ben Johnson was Shakespeare from then on.
Yes, I think that Shakespeare theories might be a better example of a purely cognitive conspiracy theory than the JFK example.
There's still an emotional core of course, but it's just about the thrill of discovery, the fun of being right about something that other people are wrong about, and maybe a little bit of revenge on those English teachers who made you read As You Like It in ninth grade.
I've heard there was also some snobbishness involved at some point, Shakespeare was too low-class to have been so brilliant, but I don't think that's a big motivating factor these days.
There was a deal of snobbishness - Shakespeare was thought to be uneducated (the son of a draper), he'd never travelled much (Stratford to London and back was about as far as he ever got) and, aside from writing his plays, lived a relatively ordinary life.
People expect someone with extraordinary talent to be an extraordinary person (which is one reason why talented artists get away with so much) and Shakespeare was relentlessly ordinary and normal.
But some of the evidence is obvious nonsense, like the arguments that the actual author must have travelled to Italy because look at all the plays set there (Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Othello, etc). Of course, travelling to Italy was the sign of a gentleman ("the Grand Tour" and so on).
But the plays get the geography wrong in ways that anyone who'd travelled there would not (anyone who'd looked at a map, for that matter, but maps were rarer and more expensive in the 1580s than now); placing cities on the coast that are inland and vice versa and so on.
Shakespeare did not even get the geography of much-closer Scandinavia right. In Hamlet, he apparently thought Fortinbras, the King of Norway, could march to Denmark through Poland. I mean, travel from Norway to Denmark without ships - and with a stopover in Poland, of all places? He'd have to march all the way up the Gulf of Bothnia, just for starters! Text here:
Hamlet:
As th'art a man,
Give me the cup. Let go! By heaven, I'll ha't.
O good Horatio, what a wounded name
(Things standing thus unknown) shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.
[March afar off, and shot within.]
What warlike noise is this?
Osric:
Young Fortinbras, with conquest come from Poland,
To the ambassadors of England gives
This warlike volley.
Hamlet:
O, I die, Horatio!
The potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit.
I cannot live to hear the news from England,
But I do prophesy th' election lights
On Fortinbras. He has my dying voice.
So tell him, with th' occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited- the rest is silence. [Dies.]
Horatio:
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
[March within.]
Why does the drum come hither?
[Enter Fortinbras and English Ambassadors, with Drum, Colours, and Attendants.]
Fortinbras:
Where is this sight?
Horatio:
What is it you will see?
If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search.
Fortinbras:
This quarry cries on havoc. O proud Death,
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast struck.
Ambassador:
The sight is dismal;
And our affairs from England come too late.
The ears are senseless that should give us hearing
To tell him his commandment is fulfill'd
That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
Where should we have our thanks?
Horatio:
Not from his mouth,
Had it th' ability of life to thank you.
He never gave commandment for their death.
But since, so jump upon this bloody question,
You from the Polack wars, and you from England,
Are here arriv'd, give order that these bodies
High on a stage be placed to the view;
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts;
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters;
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause;
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on th' inventors' heads. All this can I
Truly deliver.
Fortinbras:
Let us haste to hear it,
And call the noblest to the audience.
For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune.
I have some rights of memory in this kingdom
Which now, to claim my vantage doth invite me.
Horatio:
Of that I shall have also cause to speak,
And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more.
But let this same be presently perform'd,
Even while men's minds are wild, lest more mischance
On plots and errors happen.
Fortinbras:
Let four captains
Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have prov'd most royally; and for his passage
The soldiers' music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this
Becomes the field but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.
[Exeunt marching; after the which a peal of ordnance are shot off.]
Shakespeare's history is as rocky as his geography; the play was written in 1601 but is set in some vague period anywhere from the 14th century onwards. Internal consistency is not something he's aiming for - Hamlet says he has come home from studying in Wittenberg but that university wasn't founded until 1502.
So generally the time period that the contemporary play-goers would have accepted uncritically was "some time back in the past". As to Poland, there were wars between the Swedes (on one hand) and a combination of the Danish-Norwegians and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on the other (I've had to look all this up since you raised the question):
"The Northern Seven Years' War (also known as the Nordic Seven Years' War, the First Northern War or the Seven Years War in Scandinavia) was fought between the Kingdom of Sweden and a coalition of Denmark–Norway, Lübeck, and Poland–Lithuania between 1563 and 1570. The war was motivated by the dissatisfaction of King Frederick II of Denmark with the dissolution of the Kalmar Union, and the will of King Eric XIV of Sweden to break Denmark's dominating position. The fighting continued until both armies had been exhausted, and many men died. The resulting Treaty of Stettin was a stalemate, with neither party gaining any new territory."
Briefly, Denmark and Norway and Sweden had all been part of a unit under a single monarch. Sweden pulled out of this eventually and set up as a separate kingdom (it's kind of messy, since the various monarchs involved could be kings of Sweden, or of Norway and/or Denmark). The Danish-Norwegian element disliked this, hence the wars.
So Shakespeare had some idea that at some time in the past, Denmark and Norway were united under a single king (hence his explanation as to how Fortinbras, king of Norway, becomes king of Denmark as well) and that there had been a war involving Norway-Denmark and Poland-Lithuania, he just got mixed up on who was fighting whom where. And at the time (1601), there was a war going on between Poland and Sweden (the Polish-Swedish War of 1600-1611) so it would have been hot recent relevant news to have someone "with conquest come from Poland" in the play.
I can't blame him, even after reading three different Wikipedia articles I'm still not sure who fought whom where over what and what the difference was between being King of Norway and King of the Kalmar Union, especially when it was the Danes who held all the real power anyway.
Besides, there was always some war going on involving Poland, anyway 😁
Denmark-Norway was not only united in Shakespeare's past, but also in Shakespeare's present; that union was only broken in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. It was Sweden that separated and became a rival power.
True, you can always count on a war in Poland in the distant past. Shakespeare was on safe ground there. As a Polish friend once told me: I curse the mythical Polish kings who led their people, of all places, to this land where there are no natural borders either against our eastern neighbour or our western neighbour. What were they thinking?
I actually think he got things wrong that anyone at the time could see were wrong. But that didn't matter, because the plays were really about England in sufficient disguise that he could safely write them. For that matter, Macbeth was taken from Scots history. Of course the original events played out over a period of about 20 years, and it was distorted in various other ways to make it more dramatic. And LOTS of people probably knew that. And it didn't matter. Think of "West Side Story", the distortions don't matter, and if they help the plot, they're good.
I think there's also an alternate world where you (not actually you) visited a few websites and discussion boards on the topic, remembered something you'd read that was semi-relevant and posted it, got a ton of likes and comments, and then really set out in earnest to find more evidence. It seems to me that a lot of people get a community from participating in conspiracy theories. I'm on the board of a scholarly journal, and we regularly get submissions of conspiracy theory articles -- but they're not just on random topics, they're mostly on Shakespearean authorship (it's mostly the Earl of Oxford these days) and the Voynich manuscript, as well as a handful of others. And the people who submit them are typically well-known figures within a kind of small, para-academic online universe devoted to the study of these questions. You can participate in this community without any of the barriers to entry in mainstream academia / scholarship, which naturally makes it attractive.
In terms of the "where people start" aspect, Scott, I submit two additional items for your consideration: looks compounded by fame.
It's an old joke that Washington DC is Hollywood for ugly people, but appearance matters a great deal for human bias. If we really look closely at the members of congress on either side of the aisle, they 'look' evil -- they look like men and women who have grown old being accustomed to power and dishonesty, and they all look a bit like each other (the way married couples come to resemble one another). Now, most voters already know they're voting for their own team, and don't spend much time scrutinizing their team's members. But if you were to talk a random somewhat-politics-naive person and show him a picture of an unknown politician from his own side and say "look at this monster the opposition wants to elevate to majority leader" or whatever, he'd look at the photo and be appalled at what he saw.
In the case of famous people, the fame magnifies whatever we see in them. Consider Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson, for instance: they look like what we think they are, but their faces 'look' far more like what we think they are than they would if we saw ordinary people with identical features.
This meets conspiracy theory in the following way: someone 'good' and handsome like JFK gets shot by a nobody doesn't work cognitively. He is huge and good, so what takes him down must be huge and bad. Or with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: really look at these people and they're unsettlingly unpleasant to look at: and they're hugely important. What things might such oversized ugly creatures be capable of? Obviously anything an ogre could do: that's what ogres are. They're ugly in an evil-looking way and they're too big, bigger than anybody has a right to be.
Even knowing how impressionable I am as a human to charisma and attractiveness, I can't deny that none of the available information about JFK and LBJ (and their personal private character as human beings) can prevent me from seeing in pictures of one a handsome good person and in the other an ugly troll (especially in the photos from Air Force One before and after Albert Thomas is supposedly winking at him, where he looks kinda happy that JFK is dead).
Thus I'm not starting from emotion alone, exactly -- I'm starting in the middle of a feedback loop involving visual bias, emotion, dominance hierarchy, etc.
> I remember reading a conspiracy theory 5-10 years ago that Shakespeare was someone else,
The most popular candidate used to be the philosopher Sir Francis Bacon. To me it always seemed completely ludicrous, as their prose styles were opposites. Bacon, in his Essays for example, was laconic and spare, whereas Shakespeare was exuberant and expansive.
If it was Ben Jonson, that's a new one to me. He's usually assumed "of course he can't be the real author of Shakespeare's plays" to the extent that stylometric analysis and machine learning clustering studies often use Jonson as a control to show how much of the similarity between Shakespeare's works and various candidates is just the inherent characteristics of being an Englishman writing plays in unrhymed iambic pentameter around 1600 AD.
The ones I'm familiar with, in roughly declining order of historical popularity are Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere (17th Earl of Oxford), Christopher Marlowe, and William Stanley (6th Earl of Derby). Of these, Bacon seems to have gone out of fashion in recent decades, with Oxford supplanting him as the main candidate.
But the Marlowe theory is the one I've found most intriguing. The idea being that Marlowe's recorded death in 1593 was actually faked (several motives have been proposed), with M continuing to write while in hiding and using William Shakespeare as a frontman and producer to get the plays performed and make money from them without risking exposure. The main evidence cited for this is the coincidence that Shakespeare's writing career starts up almost immediately after Marlowe's leaves off, and that some stylometric analyses show a very strong resemblance between Shakespeare's plays (especially his early ones) and Marlowe's, with Shakespeare's early works a bit closer to Marlowe's than to Shakespeare's own later ones, but both very different from known works by Jonson, Oxford, or Bacon. Also, of the proposed candidates (unless you count Jonson as a candidate), Marlowe is the only one who's known to be a great playwright and poet in his own right.
The arguments against Marlowe, apart from the affirmative evidence for William Shakespeare writing his own plays (his name's on the title page, his troupe is known to have been the main performers of the plays, all known contemporary attributions of the plays point to Shakespeare, and his known life and career align with the time period when the plays were likely written and first performed in a way that doesn't line up for any of the other candidates), are that the evidence for Marlowe's death being faked doesn't hold up well under critical scrutiny, that AI clustering analysis shows Shakespeare similar to buy distinct from Marlowe even if we separate Shakespeare's early plays from his later ones, Marlowe was a great tragedian but showed little or no gift for comedy, and that the similarities between Shakespeare's and Marlowe's works can be sufficiently explained by 1) Shakespeare in his early career consciously imitating Marlowe's style, and 2) the possibility that one or two of Shakespeare's early plays were posthumous collaborations with Marlowe, with Shakespeare picking up an unfinished Marlowe play and using it as the basis for his own work.
AFAIK, #1 is a commonplace idea in mainstream Shakespearean scholarship and #2 is a hypothesis that's taken seriously as a possibility.
Great summary! Yeah, in my experience, it's basically all Oxfordians (as they call themselves) these days. Although there was that bizarre thing about Amelia Lanyer in The Atlantic, if you caught that?
I can't say for sure it was Jonson rather than Marlowe - this Marlowe site ( https://www.oocities.org/chr_marlowe/shakespeare_epitaphs.html ) seems pretty similar to how I remember the argument, although it doesn't seem so convincing now. I don't know if that's because it's a different argument than the one I read before, or I'm just older and wiser.
The thesis of Samuel Crowell's "William Fortyhands" is that Shakespeare's place were not written by any one person, and instead Shakespeare was the most successful producer of his day who bought plays from lowly scribblers and then had them be revised to the "bad" versions that audiences of the time actually enjoyed:
Don't forget the desire to believe that I, and I alone, have discovered something so profound that it will rock the councils of the wise. It's exciting to believe you are the first archaeologist to open the tomb and discover the shocking truth.
Umberto Eco wrote a whole marvelous book about the seductivity of conspiracy theories, "Foucault's Pendulum," in which a group of friends comes to believe deeply in a massive century-spanning conspiracy with enormous implications, starting from the portentous clues about the conspiracy found in deciphering a 13th century scrap of Templar writing one of them finds. Late in the book, the protaganist's girlfriend talks him down from his adrenaline psychosis by pointing out that the scrap can also be interpreted equally plausibly as a discarded shopping list.
I love that book, it goes so deeply into how conspiracy theories can be created as a joke or a hoax or for ulterior motives, then they come to be believed sincerely, and how it's human nature that we get bored with the surface-level explanation because that's too dull and simple, so conspiracy theories will always thrive since the draw of "secret, hidden, world-changing knowledge that only an elite few are party to" (and now you are one of the elite few who know) is irresistable.
Yes. But he also shows how the obsession can start off harmless and then...evolve, take over like some malignant mental cancer, that there are sometimes good reasons why we put up certain No Thoroughfare signs in front of certain grassy paths that twist into the dark shrubbery...oh, it wouldn't harm to just...walk down a little and take a peek... It was a tour de force, and I sometimes wonder from what strange internal well he drew it.
What did you think of "The Name Of The Rose," then? And did you think the Sean Connery movie did a good job with it?
Many people joined the 9/11 truth movement because they learned about WTC-7 and realized that the official narrative was deliberately leaving out important evidence and was engaging in dishonest argumentation. They did not start out wanting to believe it; they wished it wasn't true but couldn't otherwise explain the evidence they were seeing. It is often very psychologically challenging when people "wake up" in this way and there are countless testimonials online to that effect, as well as sociological analyses saying the same thing. Conspiracy theory is properly conceptualized as a branch of elite theory: https://overduerevolutions.wordpress.com/2022/12/27/elite-theory-as-the-intellectual-basis-of-conspiracy-theory/
Well, that the government likes lies is nothing that should surprise anyone. And I am rather convinced that they knew ahead of time that *something* was going to happen about then, and that the either knew, or had reason to know, that it involved airplanes. And that they had legislation already written, just needing a few touches, ready to be passed.
But this is a lot different from believing that they knew the details in advance. Or planted explosives in the skyscraper. Both of those would take a lot more evidence than I've seen. (Though if you look there's enough to raise questions.)
But it was pretty clear from the beginning that he government wasn't going to come clean, even of the parts where they were innocent, because that would reveal them as incompetent.
Also "the government" is the wrong abstraction here. It should be more "some people within the government". And it's not clear how many those were, or what their positions were. And just who knew just what. I can easily believe some folks in the FBI though the reports of activity were a foolish waste of time to check out, and others thought they could surely catch the guys before they did anything and....and a whole cascade of errors. And perhaps that legislation had been sitting around for a decade just waiting for a good chance to get passed. So it was the combined result of an idiot bureaucracy, and over ambitious agents and patient schemers...and they weren't working together, they just collided. And then the government lied about it to save face.
The correct abstraction is the ruling class, which includes people in government, business, finance, etc. The ruling class in every society has used lies in order to exploit and control the masses. Conspiracy theory is simply studying that, as I wrote.
There is a conspiracy theory on the left that Russia/Putin helped Trump win in 2016. One needs to believe a number of extremely low-probability contradictory statements at the same time:
- the balance of power in the US is very precarious and easily tipped over.
- at the same time neither the US left nor right can tip it over, despite being well-versed in the politics, very well financed and with few scruples, and not for the lack of trying.
- and yet a foreign power spending less than 0.1% of that in the US, with little presence in the US politics beyond an army of twitter bots, and not nearly as familiar with the intricate details of the US politics, and not nearly as technologically sophisticated can still tip it over.
This strikes me almost as likely as 9/11 truthers and moon fakers being right.
Not sure if it fits the first or the second type in the OP's classification.
Why don’t you and Matthew fight? He’s got a bunch of specific claims he thinks are true, which don’t necessarily imply the claims you’re disbelieving in.
I disagree with you on a definitional point and on a point of fact. The “Trump-gate” claim is that Trump colluded with Russia, not that he achieved anything by doing so. That would be clear evidence of “evil”, if “it” was “true”. Even if he would have got into power anyway, it would have put him in Russia’s debt, and possibly also exposed him to Russian blackmail. In turn, accepting such a debt to a foreign power would mean he wasn’t putting America first, in an unambiguous way.
But also, I don’t understand your model of the major parties’ agency over the election results. I imagine it like a chess game (or some asymmetric variant). Each side tries lots of strategies, and in the end one side wins. A blunder can easily cause a swing of 5% in polls, and politicians have lots of blunders. If the election margin is less than 5%, then each blunder avoided is responsible for the election result, because the result would be reversed if the blunder had happened. I can easily imagine Russia’s influence being at least that large.
Edit: as to which type of conspiracy caused that view, it’s all about the “evidence”. Mine is emotional (I’m personally aggrieved by some capitulations by some politicians to interest groups which they thought could affect their elections), I suspect Matthew’s above is fact-based (I think he thinks he saw some document which he thinks would be really weird unless Trump’s campaign knew of Russian involvement and said nothing).
> he wasn’t putting America first, in an unambiguous way
This ship sailed and sunk long ago. Almost no one in the congress does that. It is all about political maneuvering and sticking it to the other side. One can also frame it as anti-maskers against anti-Muskers. Or choice vs life. Or whatever. "Putting America first" is nowhere on the map.
> The “Trump-gate” claim is that Trump colluded with Russia, not that he achieved anything by doing so.
I... don't think this is the claim? The left would say that Russian interference put him in the White House in 2016 but was not enough to do so in 2020. The right would probably waffle on the topic right now, saying how the election was won despite Dems' interference in 2016 and stolen by them in 2020, and then switch to talking about Hunter Biden's laptop or something.
> I imagine it like a chess game (or some asymmetric variant). Each side tries lots of strategies, and in the end one side wins. [...] each blunder avoided is responsible for the election result, because the result would be reversed if the blunder had happened. I can easily imagine Russia’s influence being at least that large.
That does not make a lot of sense. In this model when two equally strong giants fight it out, and the decision is basically random because of all the swings and hacks, hits and misses (I am not saying I agree with this model, but that seems to be what you are proposing), then the odds of some tiny influence way below the noise level intentionally affecting the outcome is extremely unlikely, given all the other influences in play. Barring some unfathomable conspiracy where Putin knows the playing field better than anyone else and either secretly spends untold hundreds of millions or knows exactly which lever to push even though neither side does.
Sure, Putin wanted Trump to win, that is no secret. Sure, Russans were happy he won in 2016 and unhappy he lost in 2020. Sure, they launched plenty of low-budget but coordinated twitter bot attacks. But assuming that that particular genius move, and not TV ads, rallies, robocalls swayed the outcome is... just silly. Unless you think that Putin is way smarter than everyone in the West and found a magic outsized lever no one else could. Which does not seem to match reality, given how the war in Ukraine is going.
My understanding was that the mechanism by which the Russians are alleged to have affected the 2016 election outcome is by the hack and leak of the DNC emails.
Right, good point, another bit of "evidence" that boils down to "Putin is so much smarter and more resourceful than both Republicans and Democrats, despite spending almost zero cash or resources".
Hard to see how the exposure of plain true facts qualifies as evil manipulation. One might just as reasonably argue if the Russians did this they did the American voter a big favor, by exposing information they ought to know before voting.
I mean, people hold up Woodward and Bernstein as big heroes because they exposed stuff about the 1972 Nixon re-election campaign that turned out to be so damaging that Nixon had to resign. Are they heroes and the putative Russian operatives evil just because of their nationality? ("It's heroic when Americans do it, but evil when Russians do the same thing.") Or because the outcome pleases one tribe more than the other?
Interesting question. I hadn’t thought about Watergate as a privacy issue. The boring answer is that for Watergate, the media mostly reported based on anonymous sources, not on their own spying. I’m much more okay with using interviews than I am with spying on people. But I didn’t know that until I checked, so it’s not my real answer.
My main answer is that if the Watergate investigation had involved spying, it would have been looking for evidence about a known story, and it hypothetically would’ve only involved publishing evidence for that story. The big legal question justifies some invasion of privacy to investigate it. The email hack was more “Let’s see what’s out there”. There was no prior justification other than general suspicion.
But you’re right, part of my answer is partisan. My immediate gut reaction is that I wouldn’t have been so upset if Wikileaks had published the Republicans’ emails after someone left their computer logged in. Yet I would have been upset if a Democrat staffer had published the Republicans’ emails. If the data is obtained because of politics, it feels like a hit job to me. My second gut reaction is that I feel like people deserve privacy unless they’ve done something wrong. (I always felt less pro-Wikileaks as I thought about it more, although I think I mostly supported them.) Maybe in that sense, my gut reaction is left-right partisan, in that my threshold for “something wrong” is stricter on the right than on the left (I have no idea how to measure that). But I think I would still see all the other emails that got published despite having nothing incriminating in them, and be upset. That could have been me, even if it’s the wrong side of the aisle. Watergate couldn’t have been me because I haven’t done anything that illegal. And maybe if the actual email dump contained only emails that the journalists specifically thought were bad, I would have minded less.
What about this, then? The Obama (Senate) campaign coordinated with the press to get a friendly (California) judge to unseal divorce records. This contained no political information whatsoever, of course. Just squalid personal details, enough to sink Jack Ryan's chances and propel Obama to his Senate seat.
Don't people involved in a divorce with children have an even greater expectation of privacy then a Secretary fo State e-mailing her staff, or a President consulting with his Oval Office advisors?
I'm not, by the way, suggesting the Obama campaign (or the Chicago Trib) did anything unusually wicked. Quite the contrary. This is how the game is played, among our species. Politics is a knife fight with not much rules. I can understand anyone wanting to reduce the general level of barroom brawl with broken bottles aspects of the game -- but thinking Candidate X from Party We Dislike is the very first ever to cut a few ethical corners is either naive or disingenuous, and that I find tedious[1]
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[1] Indeed I believe Nixon himself was surprised that the Watergate story had the legs it did. He was 100% correct that what he did, modestly illegal that it was, was nothing much by historical standards. Certainly the Kennedy campaign against him in 1960 did as much, or worse, and let us not even get into the machines in the Truman era. Nixon just didn't get that the Zeitgeist was different, or perhaps that he was too personally unlikeable to laugh it off.
I don't think I quite agree. Suppose the FBI selectively leaks information they have on politicians. They only leak true information, but also they only leak embarrassing or incriminating information about politicians who oppose increased FBI funding or power. If that happened, I'd consider it to be a serious and worrying instance of the FBI influencing elections in an illegitimate way, even though they never made anything up.
Yeah, and if the KGB were hacking Russian elections I imagine Russian voters might complain like that[1]. Anyway, the way to proof yourself against the leak of embarassing information about how you handled official secrets is to not be an arrogant idiot about how you handle official secrets -- to adhere to the same principles your staff demands of the lowliest intern.
And as I said, a decent argument can be made that the public deserved to know in advance of voting for her all about Clinton's issues with this, pretty much for the same reason it was suggested the public deserved to know in advance of voting for him (in 2020) just how much or little the Trump 2016 campaign collaborated with the KGB. Expectations of privacy for private actions in private lives are one thing, but they should rarely exist for actions that elected officials take that bear directly on their jobs.
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[1] I mean, hypothetical Russians who aren't relieved to find that the apparat has restrained itself to merely releasing juicy gossip, instead of breaking legs or shooting people to get their point across.
I don’t recall the DNC hack, exposing any really serious, important information that brought it anywhere close to what happened in Watergate. As I recollect, it was just embarrassing. Oh the thing that got the most play was that the DNC was doing everything they could to cut Sanders off at the knees and make sure Clinton got the nomination. So back room politicking exposed for all to see which is always embarrassing. Maybe I missed something.
> Sure, Putin wanted Trump to win, that is no secret. Sure, Russans were happy he won in 2016 and unhappy he lost in 2020. Sure, they launched plenty of low-budget but coordinated twitter bot attacks. But assuming that that particular genius move, and not TV ads, rallies, robocalls swayed the outcome is... just silly.
Isn't the argument that all of those things swayed the outcome in different directions, leading to the verdict we had? I don't think we could ever quantify how much any of them actually work. Maybe we are working with different definitions of 'sway'? I am not too sure you can ever pinpoint one thing and say that was the one that caused candidate X to win. It's always a messy jumble.
My claim is that the misinformation spreading, Facebook-group-against-vaccines and similar things had an impact on a similar scale to robocalls etc. They weren’t just one-offs, they went on over a long time and got a lot of media attention.
> “…Knows exactly what lever to push…”:
My claim is that both sides know what levers to push. They both run TV ads and rallies and robocalls (and TV interviews and debates, support from friendly media etc.). If any one of those strategies got blocked (and wasn’t compensated for), it would swing the election. I’m not claiming Russia’s influence was bigger than that of the TV ads. I am claiming that even if Russia affected the election less than TV ads, it might still have affected the election enough to reverse the result.
> “…The left would say…”:
Okay, you might be right here. The stories I saw in the Australian media focused more on the undue influence side, but that might be because that was a hot topic here at the time.
> “…Putting America first…”:
The difference is how defensible it is, to one’s own supporters. In all the debates you mentioned, politicians can claim they are doing the right thing, and many of their supporters will believe them. If Trump had clearly asked for support from Russia, it would be unambiguously bad for the country. Maybe Trump could have prevented it sticking, but most politicians would have to apologise for it, and lose face.
> Sure, they launched plenty of low-budget but coordinated twitter bot attacks
Actually there's little evidence of this. The Facebook ads that were tied to Russia were all financially motivated, which is a much simpler explanation, and nearly all of the people who saw that content were already staunch Republicans. Just another big nothingburger.
"The balance of power in the US is very precarious" is true in the technical sense that we sometimes have close elections where various random events could be the tie breaker.
When an election is close, there are many causes that count as "deciding the election." A spectacular version of this was the 2000 presidential election where you could say that Ralph Nader's candidacy or butterfly ballots or a Supreme Court decision decided the election. They're all causes.
The 2016 election wasn't as close, but there were multiple news events leading up to it that were arguably causal.
People don't want to believe that important decisions like that can be decided randomly, but that's always going to be possible when you compare two large numbers to see which one is bigger, and they're close enough to each other.
Yeah, I agree with all that. Which makes pointing to Putin as having an outsized effect rather dubious, given much larger in magnitude warring influences.
Why does it require Putin having an outsized effect on the election? If Trump lost, and then evidence surfaced of Putin having influenced the outcome with the Trump campaign's knowledge, would that not be equally damning?
- Did Russia work to help Trump's side? That is obviously accurate.
- Did Trump passively accept it? Yes, of course, any politician would.
- Was Trump easy on Putin because of it? Yes, Trump rewards support and loyalty.
- Did it materially affect the outcome? Highly implausible, given all other more powerful actors whose livelihood was on the line.
- Was Trump a paid Russian asset? Super duper unlikely.
- Did Trump financially benefit from Putin's tacit support? Possibly, though I have no specific example in mind.
- Did Trump later reach out to Putin the way he did try to get kompromat on Hunter Biden from Zelenskyy (if I recall correctly) by making financial aid conditional on this? Who knows, would not be out of character for him.
- Was some of what Trump did likely illegal? Muller hints that it probably was and would definitely have been for someone other than the sitting president.
The left conflates all of the above into one big blob of conspiracies and collusion between Trump and Putin.
"- Did Trump passively accept it ? Yes, of course, any politician would"
Actually, no. There are in fact lots of examples of politicians explicitly rejected help from illegal sources. This isn't as one sided as you'd believe. Gore handed over the stolen Bush debate prep to the FBI.
Even if you want to maintain "most candidates do this" its also very clear that what most candidates don't do is publicly and openly welcome it and explicitly ask the foreign government source of the illegally obtained material *provide more of it* as Trump did.
Accepting a windfall that came your way is one thing, inviting the Russian ambassador to a public speech, sitting him in the front row, and then explicitly stating "Russia if you are listening, America would greatly reward anyone who provides more of this material" is something else.
Sure, but PR/propaganda/trolling on Twitter are all legal in the US, and that's most of what Russia is accused of doing. You can write all the misleading propaganda you like and publish it as widely as you can manage, and you're not going to be arrested for it.
Very close elections can be decisively influenced by small events. The ballot design choices of a single county in Florida determined whether George W. Bush or Al Gore won in 2000. That election was, in fact, so close that incredibly incidental factors may have been decisive. The odd makeup choices of the Gore team in one debate potentially cost him that election.
With that in mind, it is entirely possible that the Wikileaks drops' effect on media coverage was such that it shifted just enough votes in a very narrow election to cost Clinton the race. This does not mean that Russia has an all powerful influence over American elections, but rather that close events can turn on modest factors.
The Russian espionage hack and release efforts on behalf of the Trump campaign had two important effects. The first is the they were timed, within a matter of hours, right after the Access Hollywood tapes dropped and to some extent blunted the impact of that story as it divided media coverage. The second was that they added a secondary malaise of scandal around Clinton associated with the word "emails." While there was nothing to them, the US media coverage tone was scandalous and it may have contributed to low info voters sense that something untoward was going on with Clinton and email secrecy. Was this enough to flip the election in Trump's direction? It's almost impossible to say, but it is plausible that these factors moved a little less than a point of voters in 3 Midwestern states.
The thing is, the closer the election, the more things can be said to have influenced its outcome. Trump/Clinton and Trump/Biden were both *very* close elections, so all kinds of not-that-big stuff might have influenced their outcome. Did Russian troll farms, leaked DNC emails, and the perfectly-timed reopening of the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server scandal change the election outcome? Quite possibly. Did the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the delay of the good news on covid vaccine effectiveness till after the election, and biased moderation on social media change the election outcome? Quite possibly. Get the election close enough, and bad weather on election day might change the outcome.
How much leverage you have doesn't just depend on your knowledge and resources , it depends on the rules you are playing under. If illegal things didn't give you an advantage, there would be no need to make them illegal. Parties within the U.S. don't want to do anything too illegal ,parties outside the US are already playing outside the rules.
Hmm, I don't think I buy the argument that Putin's influence was significantly leveraged by him doing something illegal that the US parties would love to do but cannot. For example gerrymandering is (sadly) legal and has an effect that is many orders of magnitude larger. Robocalls, TV ads and news coverage in general are very much legal and way more effective than some twitter bots. Which are also legal, as far as I can tell. Additionally, US forces never shied away from shady tactics, like delaying the release of hostages in 1980 until after the election. Whether it would have helped Carter to win the second term is doubtful, but who knows.
How much leverage would that be? I can recall maybe one or two cases in the past decades in which a hacker was identified, caught, prosecuted, and served some kind of real punishment. Most of the time, even identifying who hacked into some half-assedly protected database can't be done. I'm having a hard time seeing how US Black Hat finds it preferable to pay Russians to do a hack (which would also be illegal) rather than do it himself, or hire out to domestic thugs. Or for that matter, just find some insider he can bribe to provide him with the juicy stuff.
> the balance of power in the US is very precarious and easily tipped over
What it comes to presidential elections there is a lot of truth in this. You can get a lot of electoral college votes by shifting maybe 10 or 20,000 people in the popular vote.
The Trump campaign had very granular polling data based on regions, which was entirely proprietary (it wasn’t publicly available information.)
Paul Manafort met with Klimnik somewhere in New York City, and gave him paper copies of it . Just for fun, you know, for something to talk about I guess. The Russian bots were very regional, specific and targeted. They didn’t need to spend a lot of money.
“ Of the more than 120 million votes cast in the 2016 election, 107,000 votes in three states effectively decided the election.” - Washington Post
Clinton won the popular vote nationwide in the election.
Yes, the theory that Trump is a puppet of Putin and is being blackmailed by him, etc. is nonsense but that’s not really the issue. The fire breathing, Wizard of Oz does not exist but the man behind the curtain certainly does.
> But if Trump was secretly an agent in the pay of Vladimir Putin, sent to destroy democracy, then that’s literal treason. There are no gray areas. You could explain in a single, objectively true sentence why he was one of the greatest villains in American history. There is a sense in which Trump being a literal traitor compresses information elegantly; instead of a mountain of vague cues suggesting that he is evil, there is a single fact that sums up his evilness perfectly.
I don't like the T-word. It's almost exclusively used as a rhetorical slap, which is still an *upgrade* from being used as a catch-all reason to execute dissidents. There is a reason it is the only crime expressly spelled out in the Constitution.
If Trump was explicitly on Putin's payroll and was actively working the interests of the United States with every scrap of power he legitimately was elected to hold *and* criminally acquired, that *still* would not be treason. "Enemy" does not mean "people we are mad at". There is a decided difference between cold and hot wars.
I don't like Trump, but I dislike accusations of capital offenses being thrown around for political expedience even less. Maybe this is nitpicky, maybe not. But even if it is, I feel like it's invited after such a tripling down.
It is not legally treason-as-narrowly-defined-by-the-US-constitution, but it would unquestionably be treason in the more colloquial sense, i.e. the act of betraying ones country.
There is a very good reason the set of actions the legal system can charge you with as treason is narrow, that does not in fact mean the legal system gets to decide how language works generally.
That's the same colloquial definition that led to people saying Obama committed treason by "bowing to Saudi leadership" or "promoting Marxism." He was literally giving "comfort" or "aid" to [some subset of the country's definition of] our enemies. It's also hogwash meant to elicit an emotional response.
A definition broad enough to include someone who is "secretly an agent in the pay of Vladimir Putin, sent to destroy democracy" as a traitor does not need to be broad enough to include everyone who ever takes a conciliatory attitude to Saudi Arabia or ... whatever the hell Obama is supposed to have done that counts as "promoting Marxism".
The precise legal definition of "treason" in the US (and likely in other jurisdictions) may be narrow enough to exclude a hypothetical version of Donald Trump who is on a foreign nation's payroll and given the explicit mission of becoming president in order to destroy Democracy in the USA. But my opinion is slightly different from Dan L's: for any purpose other than the law, any sense of "treason" or "traitor" that _wouldn't_ include someone doing that can fuck right off into the sun.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I do not in fact think that Donald Trump was or is in the pay of Vladimir Putin, or "sent to destroy democracy", and I don't think any of the things _credibly_ alleged about him make him "a literal traitor". Nor, so far as I can tell, does Scott.)
We do not sanction our enemies. We kill them. As quickly and efficiently as possible. For all our mutual hostility and conflicting interests, Russia is not an enemy of the United States.
In general: it is theoretically possible but extremely difficult to be guilty of treason in the absence of either actual armed rebellion or a formal declaration of war. The war in Ukraine does not rise to that level, not even close. Plenty of people were convicted of capital crimes during the Cold War, but it is not a coincidence that the last treason case dates back to WWII.
Actual armed rebellion like, say, an angry mob breaking into the building where the legislature is assembled, while erecting a gallows on the lawn out front and chanting about it's intended use?
Actual armed rebellion, yes, that would be treason. A riot at the Capitol, no, but you can get arrested for rioting and vandalism and such, as several 1/6 defendants have discovered. Erecting a gallows on the front lawn and chanting about its intended use is first-amendment protected speech, and similar stuff happens at tons of political protests and rallies. Like saying "Fuck the cops" or bringing a guillotine to a protest against Wall Street types.
I remember reading a recent ACX thread which used an archaic word that was new to me. Supposedly, the word meant "the crime of obeying a foreign sovereign/monarch". Seems fitting for this post. Can't remember it though. Google and reversedictionary have failed so far.
Well you could gather in front of FBI hq and yell fuck the cops and then break into the building. You know, maybe with a bunch of wrist ties and the odd sharp object.
The interesting thing about failed armed rebellions is they are almost always categorized as a riot that failed. And successful ones almost always start with a riot that succeeds.
I believe Dan L complained about the word "treason", not the word "traitor". (This was muddied by him calling it "the T-word" after quoting you using both, his subsequent explanation only said "treason.")
Those seem at least potentially different to me. (If for no other reason than Dan L's argument is about a legalistic interpretation of the constitution, and the constitution uses one of those words but not the other.)
What made Russia an enemy power, pray? I don't recall hearing of a declaration of war. At the time of the 2016 election, Russia still enjoyed "Most Favored Nation" status with the United States.
The United States is not in a declared war with the Russian Federation, therefore they are not an enemy power.
Note that the constitutional definition is very narrow: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." and that the last convictions were all for American citizens working with Germany or Japan during WWII.
Note that Soviet spies that were executed (e.g. the Rosenbergs) were executed for espionage, not for treason, because the Soviet Union was not an "enemy" in constitutional terms. If the USSR at the height of the Cold War wasn't an enemy, then the Russian Federation certainly isn't.
There's "treason" in its technical sense defined in American law by the US constitution which is very narrowly defined in terms of being actively at war and "treason" in its lay sense to mean egregiously betraying one's country. People just mean the latter.
If they're caught December 4th, tried December 5th, and we're discussing this December 6th, I wouldn't call it treason. If the trial and discussion are delayed a week, I would. This is one of those edge cases, but I don't have a problem with the judgement of the acts depending on the circumstance.
But see also Johnson's blanket pardon after the Civil War. There's certainly a lot to unpack there, but I support a principle that prosecuting treason after hostilities have ceased is rife with complexity, and we should consistently choose to err in favor of not slinging accusations of capital crimes unless we really do want there to be blood spilled.
In the book The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould makes the interesting argument that bias correlates with margin of error. That might neatly explain why some people have wilder ideas about issues that are important (so they're more encouraged to form an opinion) but are less experienced with, with more opportunity to be selective in their sources.
* The book was plagued with certain serious issues related to Gould's intellectual dishonesty, where he misinterprets data to favor his thesis. I still think the particular idea he presents in the text about bias correlating to margin of error is interesting.
Let me quote some Feynman Talking about Millikan's attempt to measure the charge of an electron:
"We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ..."
This tendency to fudge the statistics in the direction of a preconceived 'correct' answer arguably correlated and correlates with the margin of error for the experiment. So the larger the experimental margin of error, (i.e. the more potential uncertainty in our experimental results), the more that things get fudged in the direction of the expected result. Reducing margin of error, in contrast, reduces this kind of bias as well. The more precise we are in our calculations, the less able we are to fool ourselves. And, consequently, the less biased our observations will be.
Phrased another way; faced with uncertainty, we fill in the details with our biases. The more compelling the evidence, the less we do this.
A tendency for precision correlates with various other types of beliefs.
Edit:
Hmmm... counter-argument. Conscientiousness doesn't seem to impact conspiracy theory belief as I would have predicted. Though I just pulled up this publication on a very quick search and skimmed it so I could have missed all kinds of issues.
It seems to me like you could just as easily draw the opposite conclusion from that story. The proposed mechanism is that if the data seems too surprising, then people look for a reason to exclude it. If we get a surprising answer with narrow error bars, then that requires an explanation, so we'd expect it to elicit this reaction. On the other hand, if the surprising answer has very wide error bars, then that's much less surprising; it's easily explained as a random fluke and doesn't require us to go looking for an additional explanation.
I think Gould's claim may be a little stronger than your paraphrase, though, or at least less intuitive. Gould's claim is that if the error bars are wide the claimed experimental result will have a greater potential for bias, not just people's interpretation of that result. That is, you're more likely to get a claimed result which does not include the true value if your error bars are wider (assuming some strongly held preconceptions.)
I think what you're describing might *also* occur, but it describes a fundamentally different effect. i.e. it addresses interpretation of a particular result, not the results themselves.
It is possible for both these things to be true:
"if the data seems too surprising, then people look for a reason to exclude it."
(your mechanism of bias)
"If people believe that they are supposed to get a particular result then they may find a way to bias their results. The degree to which their results can be skewed tends to correlate with the margin of error."
(Gould's mechanism of bias)
Gould's mechanism may be a bit more tenuous, but is also a bit more of an interesting and novel proposition whereas wanting to exclude conclusions we disagree with is well within most people's existing theory of mind.
The passage you quoted in your earlier comment sounded to me like my mechanism:
"When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ..."
Okay, so what if an experimental result becomes more *difficult* to fudge, slightly, and still think of oneself as intellectually honest? What do you predict will happen as a consequence?
I'm reminded of a series of experiments, the institution, date, and PI of which I have completely forgotten, but which I think was stashed away in Eliot Aronson's 1980s textbook on social psychology. Paraphrasing this mightily, since it's been 40 years since I read about it, if I recall correctly in this clever series of experiments the canonical college student volunteers received an injection of a small amount of epinephrine, and then were asked to complete a long boring survey.
During the survey, a confederate would act in one of two ways: (1) angry. He would mutter and shift around sharply, complain about the form and low pay, and eventually wad the form up into a ball and throw it away, stalking angrily from the room. (2) delighted. He would hum cheerfully, chortle at things he pretended to find amusing in the survey, smile and chat with the (real) experimental subject.
The subjects were debriefed afterward, but first they were asked a simple question: how are you feeling? Not surprisingly, the epinephrine-hyped subjects that had been in the room with the "angry" confederate reported feeling annoyed, even angry. Those with the "happy" confederate reported feeling pleased and happy. More interesting, both sets of subjects gave *reasons* why they felt this way. The angry ones had a list of very rational reasons why they were angry, and the happy ones had a list of very rational reasons why they were excited.
And of course, it was all invented out of thin air, because the physiological symptoms were merely the result of the epinephrine. Neither set of subjects was genuinely angry or happy at all -- they were just suffering from a set of ambiguous physical symptoms induced by the drug, and then they used the cues of the confederate to interpret their symptoms as the result of rage or excitement, and then went further on to rationalizing their "emotional response" as the logical response to some plausible chain of cause 'n' effect.
Was it not also Heinlein who acidly observed that Aristotle was wrong, man is not the rational animal, he is the rationalizing animal.
Thanks very much, but I'm underwhelmed. The replication attempt had a significantly different experimental protocol, it found results in the correct direction but insufficiently statistically significant -- which could readily mean the experiment simply lacked sufficient statistical power -- and there is no serious exploration, at least in that narrative, of why the 2nd experiment should be more reliable than the 1st.
So at this point my conclusion is more towards agnosticism, as always more work should be done to draw more firm conclusions, but I reject the conclusion that the original work has been clearly demonstrated to be wrong. If you want to argue its conclusions may have been overstated as to their reliability, I have no quarrel with that.
It looks to me as though there were substantial flaws in the original paper even without the replication, which is why I made my comment about that. I don't think you can validly use this paper for anything meaningful given the flaws.
And even agnosticism about the paper means "you shouldn't use this paper". If the paper doesn't show your claim to be false, but doesn't show it to be true either--it just shows *nothing*, you can't use it.
Well, you didn't mention those flaws, so I have no idea whether they would change my opinion. Also I would say your view here is too rigid and inconsistent with how at least the science I know works. There are rarely bright lines that let us say X is true or X is false. I said that the argument in the 2nd paper that the statistical power was too small -- remember the measured effect was still in the predicted direction -- increased my tendency to be agnostic, or in Bayesian terms reduced my assessment of the probability of they hypothesis being true. But it was never 100% if the first place, and it did not get reduced to 0%. I don't live in that black 'n' white world. No scientist I know does.
One effective thing about Trump smears was that they knew the guy wouldn't effectively rebut them.
Also, rather than believing in conspiracy theories, I just try to articulate why the people running my country are stealing from me and why we should call it stealing and theft and crime. Doesn't seem to be working. The "black pill" view is probably correct.
There are a few things which need to brought up when trying to analyse conspiracy theories.
One of the first and most important lessons one has to learn, is that the system of power itself is the source of numerous conspiracy theories, the tactic is called poisoning the well, which is used in tandem with the limited hangout.
If for instance we take the government child trafficking rings. The entire Epstein affair amounts to a limited hang out, one which connects in interesting ways to plenty of interesting things, vit those ties are not a part of the hang out. So we have some definitive dark shit going on but we only get to see a glimpse of that, which of course leads to speculation.
Here comes the other leg, the poisoning of the well with the adrenochrome business, pushed through the Qanon psyop which in turn was perfomed by military intelligence, the ONI to be specific.
Now this narrative is dessiminated into the "pizzagate" story specifically to 1: pull in the crazies, the gullible and the black pilled, and thus repulse all sceptical normies from doing their own research.
And yes, pizzagate is the epstein affair. Tht pizzeria owner tagged those photos of unknown children #carisjames, which is the name of epsteins island. So the question for the serious researcher (who are swamped by the manufactured hysteria and astroturfing of crazy voices), becomes why do we have child trafficking rings connected to power? The Franklin scandal being one of the most important pieces to add.
And the answer becomes, because power is a blackmail operation, so all powerful faces are beholden to masters who control them through blackmail and leverage like any other criminal organisation. A child fucker front beholden to drug running intelligence services with videotapes and assassins on payroll.
So who killed JFK? The CIA did, Bush ran the op, then iran-contra and presided over the Franklin scandal, and hisnson took control over the Afghanistan poppy fields. Epstein is just another generation of the same power.
I agree with your main point but feel that this is becoming a bit of a technique at this point -- make a fairly small point but illustrate it with culture warry examples that are likely to divide/annoy people enough to engage and come back for more skirmishes in the comments.
Scott has a habit of writing blogposts that seem to be about something innocuous, but are actually about a culture war example that he only mentions three paragraphs down after getting you to agree with the innocuous version. This article *starts* with the Kennedy and Great Pyramid examples, and *ends* with the culture war example. Going by Scott's pattern, the point of this post is the culture war example.
(And here, the example is "well, I trusted what the liberal media said about Trump, and it was wrong. My mistake was falling into bad emotional patterns! What? You say that *trusting the media* and *trusting the left* was my real mistake and that the media and the left lie to me all the time? Perish the thought.")
What I have known intuitively since my early years of my teens is that there is a 'griefter' anomaly that is very common in today's world. They misdirect the audience's attention and are given much acclaimed fame/wealth, when independent researchers or scholars are ostrachized for having the same findings earlier. L vs R, anti vs pro.
1. Deny X
2. Say X is possible, but implausible
3. Say X is happening but it's good for you
4. Say new metric of X should happen
5. Non-X is bad
or
1. X is bad, Opposite-X is bad
2. Opposite-X is good, X is bad, but omit the technicalities of X
Usually they have large followings. Much funding has been developed to propaganda nowadays. Anything that goes through the internet or media is likely to possess some semblance of trying to direct your attention towards something that is non-hostile. You will know when you reach 'hostility' that you are touching the truth because it undermines the possession and objects of such power.
A common heuristic I use nowadays is, is this very politicized? If so, there is likely to be more scrutiny needed, half-truths and half-lies, lies of omissions need to be investigated carefully. An understanding of the premises and the models behind those premises are needed to infer causality, Unfortunately, griefers tend to say authority of X claims can never be not trusted sources or they say only non-X is bad but not non-Y non-Z or anything else, or they promote an alternative to X that is just as bad. I react by disassociation emotion from claims and carefully evaluate those premises.
Is it true that there are never X instances of this?
When do such X instances occur?
Should we only be focusing on X metrics? Is there more to X?
Does doing X actually increase Z which Z is assumed to be good?
This is the only method of deriving some firm ability of ground truth or state of reality.
A third category, or maybe a variant of the second, is taking arguments-as-soldiers and "cui prodest" reasoning to their most extreme. E.g. a school shooting helps the cause of gun control activists, therefore it wasn't real and it was staged by them (or at least we want to say so).
Holocaust denial fits into this too: the holocaust is used to argue that nazi-adjacent people are bad, and it got Jews sympathy, therefore nazi-adjacent people say it didn't happen.
Right, I’ve never gotten into the minutiae of bullet trajectory and brain splatter and all that, but the body of evidence that the assassination was orchestrated and covered up by powerful elements within the security state is pretty convincing. See, e.g., JFK and the Unspeakable.
Not to mention the fact they’re still withholding 4000 documents about the assassination and investigation they’re legally obligated to produce. There can be no national security rationale for not producing those documents. Hiding institutional crimes is the most plausible explanation.
But why? The argument for conspiracy rests on the idea that JFK was some kind of threat to the security state when in fact he was a pretty enthusiastic Cold Warrior. The idea that JFK was about to make a turn and start de-escalating the Cold War sounds like something from professional wrestling or a mediocre movie. I can't think of many historical precedents for it.
If I were going to believe a JFK assassination theory, I'd go with it being the mob who felt betrayed after RFK started going after them even after they delivered the votes in Chicago.
According to JFK's public speeches, he was attempting to make a turn and start de-escalating the Cold War. Behind the scenes evidence also suggests he was fighting the MIC to minimize or eliminate involvement in Vietnam, and getting considerable flak for it.
Here's JFK in his own words, directly challenging the ideology of the MIC/security state, months before his death:
"What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.
Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles--which can only destroy and never create--is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.
I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war--and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task."
"Second: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims--such as the allegation that "American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of wars . . . that there is a very real threat of a preventive war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union . . . [and that] the political aims of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries . . . [and] to achieve world domination . . . by means of aggressive wars."
Truly, as it was written long ago: "The wicked flee when no man pursueth." Yet it is sad to read these Soviet statements--to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also a warning--a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.
No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements--in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.
Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland--a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.
Today, should total war ever break out again--no matter how--our two countries would become the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours. And even in the cold war, which brings burdens and dangers to so many nations, including this Nation's closest allies--our two countries bear the heaviest burdens. For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.
In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours--and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.
So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.
Third: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the cold war, remembering that we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points. We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment. We must deal with the world as it is, and not as it might have been had the history of the last 18 years been different.
We must, therefore, persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists' interest to agree on a genuine peace. Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy--or of a collective death-wish for the world.
To secure these ends, America's weapons are nonprovocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self- restraint. Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.
For we can seek a relaxation of tension without relaxing our guard. And, for our part, we do not need to use threats to prove that we are resolute. We do not need to jam foreign broadcasts out of fear our faith will be eroded. We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people--but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth.
Meanwhile, we seek to strengthen the United Nations, to help solve its financial problems, to make it a more effective instrument for peace, to develop it into a genuine world security system--a system capable of resolving disputes on the basis of law, of insuring the security of the large and the small, and of creating conditions under which arms can finally be abolished."
"I am taking this opportunity, therefore, to announce two important decisions in this regard.
First: Chairman Khrushchev, Prime Minister Macmillan, and I have agreed that high-level discussions will shortly begin in Moscow looking toward early agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty. Our hopes must be tempered with the caution of history--but with our hopes go the hopes of all mankind.
Second: To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on the matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it."
According to JFK's public speeches, he was attempting to make a turn and start de-escalating the Cold War. "
And according to George HW Bush's public speeches, there would be no new taxes. And Obama said that if you like your health insurance, you can keep it.
Obviously, I can't prove a negative, but it just seems far more likely that JFK's death was a big metaphorical watershed event that led some people to positing some alternate timeline in which he delivered the nation from going down the wrong path.
I'm not saying he would have been successful. I'm not saying he would have "delivered the nation from going down the wrong path." But it is indisputable he was espousing an ideology and pursuing policies at odds with those favored by the MIC/security state leading up to his death. There was motive. There was opportunity. There was a coverup, that incredibly continues to this day. Oswald had extensive ties to the security state. There's also propensity - we know the security state assassinates and attempts to assassinate world leaders it doesn't like. It's hardly "flawed evidence processing" to carry the belief that security state elements perpetrated this particular assassination and coverup. It's a reasonable inference from the totality of the circumstances, bullet trajectories aside.
>And according to George HW Bush's public speeches, there would be no new taxes. And Obama said that if you like your health insurance, you can keep it.
And their ideological/political opponent believed them, talked against them, and campaigned against them for that. *If* the CIA felt threatened by Kennedy proclamations, it's irrelevant that these proclamations may not have been followed by actions. What matters is the scare it produced, and that it would get acted on.
I think taking political speeches at face value is risky. This is one of the things with Russiagate that interested me: was Trump good for Russia? Many of the Trump administration's policies weakened Russian influence. (I'm not willing to give Trump too much credit here. I think he had a few good people in the administration in among the scoundrels.)
The same question should be asked of Kennedy. Did he really want de-escalation? His actions up until his death were often very destabilizing. Bay of Pigs, Tibet, Vietnam, etc. Kennedy increased military spending, enlarged the nuclear arsenal, etc. Kennedy also sold a lot of weapons to Israel, ending the arms embargo, which I think was probably right, but that was definitely a major proxy front in the Cold War.
Trump? Missiles in Poland, moving US forces out of Germany and into bases further east, arms deals with almost every country in Eastern Europe. Trump was definitely Team Poroshenko/Yanukovych rather than Team Zelensky, but everyone who touched Ukraine before the war seems a little dirty (Hunter Biden, for instance.)
Basically, what you say is a lot less important than what you do.
The mob theory is compelling and fun. But how about this random ass take: The CIA killed Kennedy specifically BECAUSE kennedy wouldve ended the Cold War. He was too charismatic and badass. The CIA wants the problem more than the solution. If you took this theory you could also say thats why the CIA attempted to kill Reagan, bc he was also going to end the Cold War. But reagan survived and did win the Cold War with his badass charisma. I have no evidence for this but its still intriguing
Hands down, my absolute favorite take on Oswald is: he wasn't even trying to kill Kennedy at all. He was TRYING to kill the governor of Texas, and wasn't a very good shot.
Evidence: He had an established beef with the governor.
Uh, after the Bay of Pigs, JFK said he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds”. The State Department even advised him to remove CIA’s covert action capacity, which is something he wasn’t able to follow through on for obvious reasons.
Right, I don’t think there’re grounds for a serious dispute regarding motive. There’s no question that the CIA and JFK had an antagonistic relationship leading up to his murder. That alone obviously isn’t proof, but it is relevant.
I'm afraid I don't understand what "Trump-Russiagate" is. I'm aware of various claims having been made regarding Trump and Russia, some of which are laughable and others of which are plausible. I don't understand what conspiracy is or was being alleged. It would be very helpful if you, Scott, could state the claim you assumed was probably true but now know to be false. I assume it isn't, "Trump was secretly an agent in the pay of Vladimir Putin, sent to destroy democracy."
I think you're being uncharitable towards Russiagate here--it's much closer to a "Type 1" conspiracy theory than theories like the Elders of Zion or QAnon or NWO or what not, in the sense that it is grounded in real factual discrepancies that are interpreted through faulty reasoning. There's some sense in which accusations of Trump-Russia collusion are obviously true--there was clearly some illicit connections between some figures in the Trump campaign and figures associated with the Russian government. Russiagate is a conspiracy theory when people take these real facts and exaggerate them into an accusation that Trump committed treason and was directly an agent of the Kremlin, usually because they have an incorrect understanding of what legally constitutes "treason" and/or because they believe in the veracity of certain pieces of weak evidence like the Steele dossier. There's more motivated reasoning and less "merely" poor evidence-processing here than in other Type 1 conspiracy theories because of the political context, but the actual content of the belief is just that the facts about a specific issue which the mainstream interprets one way should actually be interpreted a different way.
The central quality of "evil global cabal" conspiracy theories like QAnon or the Elders of Zion can't just be that they're an attempt at rationalizing their followers' emotional dislike of the elite--there are plenty of people who loathe the elite without believing anything like these theories, and that doesn't explain why one of those people would become a conspiracist and not, say, a communist. Moreover, just saying that the global elite actively colludes to undermine democracy and maintain poverty alone would be enough to create a clean, simple reason to justify hating them that almost everyone would buy--so why all the truly bizarre obsessions with pedophilia and satanism and subliminal messages and what not?
These sorts of theories are probably best thought of as a sort of hamartiology. Moishe Postone's Antisemitism and National Socialism is a good read here, albeit one where a lot of people will probably have to read past the Marxism of the original text (thankfully, this isn't hard since Postone is one of those critical theorists that conflates capitalism with all of industrial and technological modernity rather than merely the system of a private market economy, and is famously a rather poor interpreter of what Marx actually said). To generalize his observations about antisemitism a bit, one might say that "evil cabal" theories are a sort of revolutionary conservatism (in the small-c sense of being averse to change, but often also in the political sense) created by a failure to come to a systemic understanding of modernity.
People arrive at these theories because they have deep anxieties about the modern world and reject mainstream institutions, but don't recognize how the problems they're worried about are created by the underlying economic/technological/social/etc. foundation of society; doing so would imply that fixing these problems would require broad and radical changes (Postone specifically means socialism here but you can equally apply this to any other belief system) and that we can't just have "the world like it is now, but without all the bad stuff", which they either don't want to accept or aren't intellectually curious enough to realize. And so instead, because one neither thinks that these problems can be solved within the current system nor is willing to accept a different one, the only recourse left is to offload all the problems onto the deliberate malfeasance of some set of people and imagine that the problems can be made to go away if those people are gone.
Even then, there's nothing *innate* about the above that should make you believe that the evil cabal is not only immiserating people but also doing human sacrifices to Satan, but I think that's best explained by the fact that this sort of theory tends to snowball as it absorbs more and more separate anxieties from different people, especially since the people that they attract are the sorts who are already primed to see spurious connections between unrelated misfortunes. Once such a incoherent jumble of bad things are all attributed to the same evil cabal, the original wrong but at least semi-rational (in the sense that you can see why a normal person who is part of the cabal might want to do these things) explanation like "the Jews want to control the economy" or "the Clintons are murdering opponents for political advantage" will no longer be sufficient--the only real way you can explain why the cabal is doing *all* these things, trafficking child prostitutes and putting satanic messages in rock music and making the frogs gay and so forth, is that they're just evil people who want to make you suffer.
You do not need a convoluted theory of mind or theory of political philosophy to make such claims. All you need is cost-benefit analysis and evolutionary game theory. Groups of people have similar genes and dispositions. Some have better strategies like subversion and high verbal acuity which lends to political and economic dominance. Hence over representation of such individuals. Same with psychopathy. If there’s someone that enjoys loving people then there can be people who enjoy killing people like people who play call of duty or operate drones in the Middle East. Lots of non sequiturs made here. Natural variation and genetic self interests are enough to account for the product of all human behaviour. A dolphin nor a primate needs a rational reason to rape, it just feels good because it rewards them with the same underlying neurotransmitters responsible for propagation of the species. There’s more higher order complex controls for more longer term oriented species because of the confluence of multi environmental pressures at differential time frames on sexual selection and adaptive as well as reproductive fitness. Centralization of power gives more control. Intelligent people seek order and structure to control their environment. Humans are one form of social environment. Understanding human behaviour, human genetics is the key to amassing control over human society. It is as simple as that. Start with first order principles and work your way downward. Not some convoluted psycho social babble about people. I went to an elite private school, I share certain elite beliefs and getting rid of certain people like the gullible docile public is something that fits my Darwinian viewpoint perfectly. Given that intelligence, truth and power are the most esteemed virtues of my peerage it makes little sense whatever quibbles you are dribbling. If I possessed more wealth and power, I would certainly instrument controls over the lives of people to do my bidding because it is advantageous to do so. If you had a system that could generate infinitesimal amounts of energy, would you not exploit it? It’s the same analogy.
Technical quibble: "Flammable" and "inflammable" mean approximately the same thing, but "infinitesimal" and "infinite" are opposites. A system whose only noteworthy output was infinitesimal amounts of energy would be within rounding error of completely useless.
“I feel like conspiracy theorism is just a flaw in evidence processing.” That’s quite a generalization. There are conspiracy theories that arise from flawed evidence processing and conspiracy theories that arise from reasonable inferences from the evidence. Conspiracies are a real thing. History (and the present) is full of powerful people colluding to do bad things. If your model of the world is “powerful people don’t collude to do bad things, and theories claiming otherwise are based on flawed evidence processing,” your model of the world is dead wrong. Iran-Contra, Operation Mockingbird, Tonkin Gulf, NSA mass surveillance, overseas assassinations and coups, JFK, WMD, tobacco, the Ford Pinto, Vioxx, Perdue Pharma, Enron, FTX, all kinds of PsyOps, etc., etc. Conspiracies are a major part of how the world works. Categorically discounting them offhand is a pretty ridiculous heuristic.
There isn't much evidence for actual *conspiracies* there though as opposed to individual abusers of children being protected for a variety of reasons.
Not sure what your definition of conspiracy is, but an institution shuffling abusers around the world to connect them with new child victims while concealing their crimes readily meets my definition:
con·spir·a·cies.
the act of conspiring.
an unlawful, harmful, or evil plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot.
a combination of persons for such an unlawful, harmful, or evil purpose:
He joined the conspiracy to overthrow the government.
Law. an agreement by two or more persons to commit a crime, fraud, or other wrongful act.
"an institution shuffling abusers around the world, understanding that this would only connect them with new child victims, while concealing their crimes"
I think you are absolutely correct that conspiracies are extremely common. People collude all the time. The thing about conspiracy “theories” though, is that people tend to think that everyone (meaning people in power) are all in on the same one.
Recognising that emotion comes before - and therefore colours - reasoning is an under-appreciated insight.
I was once a tiny 'name' in the 'disinformation' exposure field. But I came to believe that treating supposed disinformation as a supply-side problem was exactly the wrong way to approach it. It's a demand-side phenomenon.
This makes cognitive hygiene a question of personal responsibility. Which is why efforts to censor, suppress or silence ridiculous stuff are pointless.
Yes, this makes it an insoluble problem. If you think it's a problem.
Well put. With this post and the previous series of posts about the media not lying, I think an alternative analysis would start with the question of what would make writers feel good and validated and included in a community, and what they think will make their readers feel good and validated and included in a community. What people will believe falls largely out of this analysis. Being confronted with confounding truths or insights will eventually force many people to give up these emotionally rewarding world views (being right feels good too, especially about things that are actually part of your life and where correct beliefs will generate rewarding predictions, as opposed to things happening way over there in DC or the ancient alient past, where false beliefs tend to be cost-free).
But it seems to me that, with conspiracy theories, the truth is a secondary part of the story that merely exerts a contradictory pressure on what is most rewarding to believe.
At the same time, shouldn't people have some level of personal responsibility to not add to, or to attempt to stop the flow of, the supply of disinformation?
One thing I find strange about the more emotive conspiracy theories is that people seem surprisingly chill in response to them. If you sincerely believe there is a literal cabal of baby eating pedophile satanists running the country, you'd feel like that would affect your actions in some concrete way. As we observe with people who are dissidents in actual authoritarian regimes who do their best to leave for somewhere safer, or work against the government in some way. They certainly don't spend all their time loudly complaining about it because that's what gets you disappeared.
Correct. Fighting within any system or playing by the rules of the game that is not tilted in your favour is unintelligible behaviour. To secure the security of your progeny by moving and building your alliances/fort house elsewhere is a product of intelligible behaviour. Likewise with preparations. The majority expend little to no energy on comprehending the nature of the world or the systems that direct the modus operandi of the world, hence they will insufferably be at the whims of whatever environmental pressures and/or processes enacted by the architects of such systems whether it be ideological indoctrination or being an addicted gacha smart phone gamer. It is the middlemen that have the most to lose by not following in the locksteps because they are either censored or have their livelihoods stolen. Inversely, those with wealth are free to discuss the truth with their peerage because they are inconsequential to the judgements of society at large and maintain no need for fissure of facade. There are many snakes men in the world who will say oppositional things to convince you of the certainty of a thing, such deluge will not be advantageous to your mind.
If you steelman the Trump-Russiagate thing instead of strawmanning it, not only is it plausible, not only is it definitely true, but it's actually almost boring.
Motte and bailey has to be executed by the same person who notionally takes each position. Steelmanning and strawmanning are about characterizing other people's views.
The motte and bailey around this is when people say that Russiagate is very unlikely. "I'm just saying he's not a paid agent working to undermine the U.S." But then that slips into suggesting he was totally exonerated of, like, knowing that Russia was committing crimes on his behalf and covering it up or trying to help rather than reporting it.
It was never plausible that Trump would win the election to anybody else, this makes the Russians blackmailing him and getting him elected far from almost boring.
>If we built an AI, what kind of mistakes might make it believe conspiracy theories, and how might we correct them?
I find it interesting that we are reaching the point where we justify our interest in human psychology with "we might learn something about AI".
>For these conspiracies, maybe the evidence that people are trying to explain isn’t weird bullet trajectories or pyramid-related coincidences, it’s their own emotions.
We have a word for this and it's rationalisation. "Trying to explain their emotions" sounds a bit like predictive processing where they say that we eat when we are hungry in order to "fulfil our prediction of satedness".
Imo all thinking works this way, i.e. any thought is an expression of more or less subtle emotions/feelings/sensations many of which go unnoticed.
Yes all thought is rooted in emotions. Goal directed sentient entities possess them as a means to assess the threat level and ally potential of foreign entities. It also acts as a kinesis factor in engaging behaviour that is either exploratory-exploitative, conservative-expending. The only differential with systemizers is more of their emotions are offloaded into the outcomes achieved. Social proof is one method used in propaganda. Our brains are primed for intelligently navigating the social landscape. So it is bemusing to think that people having negative inclinations about groups of people being disadvantageous or just cognitive machinations that are misguided through intellectualization of such processes. No matter how much you will try to intellectualize it away, you are dependent on it to categorize what is essential to your wellbeing in everyday life. Seeing many coincidental actions in succession but not making a conjecture about it is unintelligible behaviour. Our brains might be dispositionally primed for spurious correlations at times but it’s unlikely to be the case always. Separating emotional processes from the factual information we perceive is nice but that will still not get you to the root of any problem without a coherent understanding of the nature of such problems. Hence the directive emotional stimuli is a necessity to pursue further action in investigation as a motive affair, else if you are convinced there is no threat in the world you would never notice anything. Just like an invasive species that finds new food where the old species has no predators, they are eaten alive because they have no a priori concept of such predation nor such ingrained instincts. People lacking in both or more congruently said lacking control in maintaining the integrity or coherence of both modulating psychoactive processes are a predominant majority of our population.
I've heard it proposed that people share articles without carefully checking them (or even without reading past the headline) as a way of expressing their group affiliation. i.e. this headline is favorable to the XYZ group, so I'll retweet it to show that I'm aligned with the XYZ group.
This seems kind of similar to your "finally there's a way to show the bad thing is bad!" feeling, except that your thing seems like it has an extra layer of actually-caring-about-underlying-reality piled on top.
>But also, some conspiracy theorists don’t really seem to hate their subjects this much. A lot of Illuminati believers tend to be kind of chill hippies who _believe_ without really _worrying_. Maybe these people are more akin to the Kennedy and Pyramid believers in Part 1?
This rings true to me. I'm reminded of Jer Clifton's research on "primal world beliefs"; perhaps 'a single web of elites controls society' is just what you get when your perception of the universe's interconnectedness or intentionality is at a certain point between 'everything is an emergent phenomenon of mechanistic processes' and 'the cosmos itself speaks to me personally'. (And to stereotype broadly about chill hippies, dabbling in psychedelics definitely seems related to perceptions of interconnection.)
I would like to slightly update Scott's theory. Yes, an emotional conspiracy theory is a way to make one's anger legible. But the connection between the anger and the theory is not random (I am angry at someone because of X, so I accuse him of a completely unrelated Y), but rather an exaggeration of the real thing that made me angry (I accuse someone of doing X every day, when in reality it only happened once; or I accuse their friends of doing X too, instead of not doing X but merely trying to protect their friend from the legal consequences of having done X).
It's not like all politicians bond over raping children. That indeed would be crazy. Instead, it is just *some* politicians raping children... and the general rule that the law mostly applies to muggles.
People in positions of power help each other -- that's one of the currencies of power. If you can't help your friends avoid the consequences of their actions, you are not a part of the elite. However, one does not need to be a pedophile in order to protect a pedophile. The pedophile can reciprocate by a completely different kind of favor. The important thing is that now he owes you. The more people owe you a favor, the more power you have, and politicians in general enjoy having more power.
What I am trying to say is that "the beliefs of my opponents are merely manifestations of emotions they cannot process rationally" is a convenient and tempting hypothesis.
Conservatives are afraid of new things. Progressives are angry at their parents. Christians need a sky daddy. Atheists are afraid of responsibility for their actions. Trump voters hate women and minorities. Clinton voters hate white men. Conspiracy theorists are afraid of a rapidly changing world and hate the elites.
If all of them admitted their problems and took psychotherapy instead of spreading their silly beliefs, they would quickly see the folly of their ways, and would agree that my opinions have been the correct ones all the time.
Do we have actual data showing that the anger of an average conspiracy theorist towards the elites is greater than e.g. the anger of Greta Thunberg towards corporations?
Or is it more like all people with strong political beliefs are transforming their anger, but if we agree with them, we say that the anger is a result of lived experience and justifies their beliefs, and if we disagree with them, we say that the proper way to handle their anger is therapy.
> What I am trying to say is that "the beliefs of my opponents are merely manifestations of emotions they cannot process rationally" is a convenient and tempting hypothesis.
That’s also true. And another distortion of thinking if that’s all one brings to the discussion.
It’s akin to a conspiracy theorist, defending the conspiracy simply by saying you’re too stupid or sheepish to understand. Conspiracy theorists I have met have a strong tendency to blame things that are not right in their lives on powerful forces that keep them down, or an attitude of “why bother I’m only going to get f*cked over anyway.” (As I said, in my first post, in my experience. I haven’t done a study.)
> Or is it more like all people with strong political beliefs are transforming their anger
There are people with strong political beliefs who don’t express it through anger or resentment. Not enough, but some.
And of course, it all depends on the conspiracy theory we’re talking about.
9/11
Sandy Hook
Moon landing.
All these require that the entire apparatus of government is deceitful and complicit, and anyone that doesn’t get it is a “sheeple.”
I will admit to having a strong prior about this, because I have a very close relative who is down the rabbit hole on all of these things. And what I really see this person doing is using all of these things as a reason not to bother. he just stews in his own impotent rage. My more casual interactions over the years with people who ascribe to any of the ones I’ve named or others seems to lean in the same direction. It almost always comes down to the idea that all of these things are related to them not being able to find an affordable apartment or a decent job. I have met a few people who copmpartmentalize (?) this well though; their life is perfectly ok, and they like being in the know, but it doesn’t seem to enrage them. But I’ve met a lot less of this type than I have the former.
"But there’s a second type of conspiracy theory. Consider the Elders of Zion, or the Global Adrenochrome Pedophile Cabal. These conspiracies weren’t invented to explain away any facts. Usually believers are more invested in the exact nature of the conspiracy than in any of the facts they supposedly explain; often they’re very angry about the whole situation."
I'm not sure that I accept the cognitive v emotional classification, and I actually find this second type of conspiracy to be way more understandable and sympathetic than I do the first type (from an epistemological point of view, not an ethical one). As others have pointed out, what you're calling conspiracies of cognition involve people concocting fantastic explanations explanations for fairly straightforward but boring stories. There's not much cognitively challenging about the Great Pyramid of Giza once you've realized that it was the end result of hundreds of years of evolving design that began with burial mounds then ziggurats then mastabas and finally pyramids. Aliens is just a way more exciting story than incremental engineering improvements.
On the other hand, what you're describing as conspiracies of emotion tend to be the result of fairly complex and somewhat shrouded happenings. Take Jeffrey Epstein for example. Here's guy who's reportedly a billionaire, but no one in finance really knows what he does. He flies around the world with powerful, influential people like Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew. He's got a private island in the USVI that the locals know as pedophile island, and oh yeah, there's a weird structure on it that looks like a temple. And when he's arrested, he ends up killing himself while the guards are shirking and the cameras are out. Even when you tidy it all up with a fairly mundane story about blackmailing rich men, you still have to explain things like how he got hired to teach math at an elite prep school even though he didn't have a college degree and it just so happens that the guy who hired him was Bill Barr's father, or that his right hand woman is the daughter of a billionaire publishing tycoon who dies under mysterious circumstances and had reported ties to the Mossad. Even the mundane story implicates rich and powerful people in high crimes.
Or what about Andrew Tate? A year ago, I had never heard that guy's name. Then one day he was all over my socials and then he was banned from socials and then he gets into a Twitter spat with Greta Thunberg and then he's arrested in Rumania for human trafficking. It just reads like it's been scripted.
If anything, I would swap the categories. The latter seem like attempts to construct a coherent narrative in the absence of a clear story, while the former cases seem like people filling an emotional need to be the ones who "know what really happened" or who aren't naïve enough to believe the official story.
Spoken like one who has never gotten into a cognitive conspiracy theory. The JFK assassination is the canonical example, so lets start there.
The official story is that the presidential motorcade broke at least three secret service security policies in order to parade JFK in a manner that exposed him to extraordinary assassination risk. Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, camped out in a window that had a view of the presidential motorcade that was completely obscured by bushes. He then fired three shots into the president faster than anyone has ever been able to replicate. One of those bullets passed through bone and was later discovered in pristine condition. Another shattered into so many fragments that the total weight of those fragments exceeded the weight of the original bullet. He then fled, was captured, was paraded around in front of Jack Ruby, was moved, was paraded around in front of Jack Ruby again, and was shot by said Ruby. And the next day a bunch of contractors dug up the crime scene and removed the bushes.
I find this story implausible relative to the story that someone in the government planned his assassination and then executed a cover-up. You can call this a "fantastic explanation for a fairly straightforward but boring story", but I don't think that's a particularly enlightening label.
Or take 9/11. Suffice it to say that building 7 absolutely did not collapse into itself at free-fall acceleration for a dozen stories because it was damaged by debris from the collapse of buildings 1 and 2. I don't know exactly what happened there, but the official narrative is manifest bullshit. Call it a straightforward but boring story if you want, but don't act like 'the Andrew Tate saga is a psy-op' is more plausible (in a cognitive sense) than any of this.
> He then fired three shots into the president faster than anyone has ever been able to replicate.
This is not true. There was a documentary made where they put a tower up at the same height as the window Oswald fired from and had a car towed by it at the same distance and speed as the presidential car and a Marksman of reasonably good quality duplicated the shooting. I saw it (I believe) on Discovery.
Fine post. Not much new for long-time readers of SSC/ACX - as in the recent post x and x+1 about bounded distrust in the media. But then: nihil sub sole novum / אֵין כָּל חָדָשׁ תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ (en kol chadásh táchat hashámesh) “there is nothing new under the sun” - nothing is said that has not been said before.
We shouldn't be calling the idea that aliens built the Great Pyramid a "conspiracy theory." A CONSPIRACY theory must involve a CONSPIRACY, and landing from the stars in the middle of Egypt is not a conspiracy. but a waste of time and effort. Let's call that an "unsupported claim." For example, the "Black Athena" theory about Egyptians being (Sub-Saharan) Black is also not a conspiracy theory, but an unsupported claim. We dedicated conspiracy theorists like to keep our field clean from intrusions, please. Thank you.
The conspiracy theory tends to be that knowledge of these facts is being suppressed by the powers that be. That's not technically a necessary component, but it's almost always a component.
That's too wide a definition. Also, not sure that any proponent of the "alien built the pyramids" theory also simultaneously alleges that the Iluminati and Rothschild know all about it and work actively to suppress that precious knowledge. Pyramid guys tend to be wannabe scientists and scholars, rather than politically inclined
Take Graham Hancock here: he absolutely believes that the powers that be are suppressing knowledge of pre-ice-age civilizations, and he gets real pissy about it. Also, I've never heard him mention either the Iluminati or the Rothschilds - he's much more likely to blame, say, the Egyptology community. Conspiracy theories come in all shapes and sizes, and they're not all dialed up to 11.
My point is that we need to narrow the definition of what a "conspiracy theory" is, or the risk is that every disagreement (particularly scholarly disagreements) is reframed as a conspiracy theory: so, for example, since I hold that Minoan Cretans made money out of piracy, and the scholarly consensus disagrees, I can reframe that as a "conspiracy theory" by other historians
You're right. It's not that it's an incorrect view strictly speaking, it's that such a low bar makes the expression "conspiracy theory" not very useful for argumentation.
“Global Adrenochrome Pedophile Cabal”. Doesn’t exist but Hollywood has a problem with child abuse and Epstein’s island was hardly a holiday camp for the trafficked.
Which is something that’s missing here, conspiracies do happen.
Do you think Hollywood's problem with child abuse is worse than e.g. Catholic Church's? (IIRC there was a paper claiming that the actual percentage of pedophile priests was something like 4% and more or less the same as that of pedophiles among males in general, which is still bad for people who claim moral authority but not South Park-bad.)
As for conspiracies, the post is more about conspiracy theories as a cognitive error. If you happen to believe in something strongly without much evidence, you probably still have some of the same errors even if the claim happens to be true.
I think that dismissing conspiracy theories as having as a cause only an emotional or cognitive error is a problem. A conspiracy theory is just a theory about a conspiracy.
(I agree that the Catholic Church is possibly over attacked but it was still conspiring to hide the abuse)
I'm interested in your opinion/data about Hollywood. I know there was a number of allegations, some reaching court, but I have no idea how widespread it is, or whether there is a significant effort to conceal it outside of perpetrators using their power.
The more grounded in facts a conspiracy theory is, the less it is a "conspiracy theory" in the usual sense. You may not know the details of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in October 1939, but believing they had agreed on some cooperation in invading Poland would hardly earn you a "conspiracy theorist" label.
a conspiracy is a conspiracy, a conspiracy theory is a theory about a conspiracy. Your definition of a conspiracy theory seems to be anything that isn’t true, and while the phrase is trending that way we should resist it. 
There are numerous accounts of child abuse in Hollywood. I can’t offhand think of a child star that wasn’t abused.
The problem people have with the Catholic church is that they actively protected pedophiles and ensured further victimization at an institutional level. Not that there were necessarily "more" pedophiles than the general population.
Conspiracies do happen. but Conspiracy *Theories* are almost always bunk. As commonly used, the phrase "Conspiracy Theory" refers to a narrow subset of possible conspiracies, characterized among other things by implausibility. But more importantly, it requires that the conspiracy be a *theory*. An effectively concealed or unnoticed conspiracy is not a theory at all. And a broadly known conspiracy, or even one little-known due to disinterest but acknowledged by everyone concerned, is just a Conspiracy Fact. The Conspiracy Theory, requires that the alleged conspiracy be so poorly concealed that the Conspiracy Theorists all "know" about it and usually in great detail, but e.g. every policeman and reporter on the relevant beat is either truly ignorant or involved in a massive cover-up.
That's not a stable equilibrium, and claims that such a situation persists should be treated with utmost skepticism. Meaning not "we must investigate this carefully", but "it would be a waste of our time to investigate this at all unless new and substantial evidence emerges".
> . Meaning not "we must investigate this carefully", but "it would be a waste of our time to investigate this at all unless new and substantial evidence emerges".
This was at the heart of the 9/11 controlled demolition theory; all the iron beams were sent out to be melted down and were never “carefully examined “ for signs of sabotage. Of course there was no indication that such an effort would be necessary. 100s of experienced construction workers were cleaning up the site and it seems likely to me that an extensive demolition of the buildings would have left all sorts of clues for them to find. “They were all in on it” is the response.
I'm not sure how wrong the Russiagate is. I believe in the following (didn't really dig deep into any of this issues, so feel free to correct me):
0. Russia was capable of influencing elections in various "unfair" ways (e.g. via fake social network accounts spreading lies in a loose sense of the word, releasing the information they obtained illegally)
0a. Russia's influence could increase by coordinating it with the candidate they chose to support.
1. Russia was favoring Trump in 2016.
2. Russia did, in fact, attempt to influence the elections in Trump's favor.
(2a, weak: Russia was also favoring Brexit and did attempt to influence it.)
3. People who are most likely Russian emissaries did contact Trump's campaign.
4 (weaker). There is nothing in Trump's character to show he would refuse a mutually beneficial deal with the Russians, if they didn't ask too much. Maybe if he thought he couldn't get away with it, but he tends to get away with a lot, and is rather sloppy.
So I don't think it's hard to believe if Trump actually made a deal and maybe promised a favor or two in return for Russian help. Not "destroy America" kind of favors (that would be a different conspiracy theory: that he came to stay, and was receiving Russian help for that. I like it, but I don't think there's much evidence for it besides "It seems like Trump would like to be a dictator and Putin is helping his allied dictators to stay in power"), but something he wouldn't feel strong about. He wouldn't be seriously bound by that promise unless Russia has some kind of hold over him (financial aid? blackmail?) which I find unlikely. But if Russia was capable of giving him more favors, he'd have incentive to return them.
To put numbers on it:
Trump receiving orders from Putin: <1%
Trump receiving "suggestions" from Putin he could be seriously inconvenienced to ignore (e.g. by releasing something Putin has on him, or cutting financial help): <10%
Trump signalling to Russia his agreement to receive their help in the 2016 elections, regardless of him actually using presidential powers to return the favor: 25-75%
Russian actions actually changing the result of the election: 20%.
Some of it is just that Trump seems to view the Putin-esque mode of governance favorably and wouldn't be inclined to act against it. And might be inclined to act in ways that are mutually beneficial to Russian government/crime interests and Trump's personal interests. The bits about explicit quid pro quos are conjecture for sure, but also unnecessary for this sort of coordination.
I don't think you need to go far out on a limb to notice that there was something unusual about the Trump campaign's attitude (including public attitude) towards and degree of entanglement with Russia's effort, including specifically criminal elements of that effort. That was not normal for a major-party Presidential candidate in the US. Furthermore, if you elide over the criminal element and just say "unfair", that's underselling it.
It's pretty hard to reconcile "Russiagate was nothing" with not just Muller's indictments of Russian state actors for specific related crimes, but also the specific guilty pleas and/or convictions of people deeply involved at high levels of the Trump campaign/administration like Manafort and Flynn (and Trump's nakedly self-interested pardons of same).
It's pretty cheeky to "Put numbers" on an evaluation you freely admit is based entirely on casual speculation. And that's a problem. Our politics (life-and-death stuff) are now driven by fierce opinions expressed over social media and entertainment "news" by totally unserious people, unwilling to do the actual research, to read the Mueller report, to read well-sourced accounts of T's desire to abolish NATO, his jealousy over Hitler's obedient generals, etc. I.e., people uninterested in seeking the most true picture possible about the deepest aspects of our society.
This ecosystem, combined with today's fetish for disrupting or destroying all institutions, leads us to an extremely precarious culture where shallow thought is instantly rewarded, as Kanye urges us to ignore history and just keep hugging our inner-child ubermensch.
My last substack post explored our natural need for scapegoats and monsters. I think it's related to your post above about the attraction of conspiracy theories and biases.
Five minute read. Apologies in advance to Seahawks fans.
There he says "People Who Are Worried That The Russians Hacked The Democrats To Influence The Elections" "may not 100% deserve our eternal scorn". Normally "Russiagate" refers to Trump's own involvement with Russia, not Russia acting independently. I don't think Scott has apologized for the latter.
Conspiracy theorists often seem to be people finding out that when you look at something closely then the generally accepted explanation for it has lots of grey areas and uncertainties that aren't evident when it's looked at from a distance - and then these people go on to assume that this is more meaningful than it actually is. I wonder if you're more likely to be susceptible to conspiracy theories if your education is mostly being told what the truth is and rewarded for regurgitating it. Then you find out a lot of things about a certain specific area, and realise that that's not actually the reality of that area (experts disagree, crucial facts are disputed, the consensus has changed over time, different cultures/countries/academic disciplines may have very different consensus views of the same thing, etc) and assume that this is something that is unusual and interesting, rather than just being how things work. Then you get pushback by acknowledged experts defending their turf, the experts make mistakes in doing so because they're fallible, those mistakes are uncovered, and you become even more convinced that you've found something important.
Yes, we don't know the truth about [x], experts have claimed wrongly to know the truth about [x], people have been misled about [x], lots of people assume that the truth about [x] is clear and they're wrong, and the more you find out about [x] the more you realise that there are lots of things we don't know about [x]. But that applies to nearly everything! Including your proposed solution [y]!
That might explain some of the intellectual attraction of conspiracy theories, but it doesn't explain the emotional attraction. I might be wrong, but I get the impression that this emotional attraction tends to be specifically linked to loss. Having something taken away from you that you rely on emotionally makes you vulnerable and scared, and when people are afraid they will do strange and terrible things. Fear is the most powerful emotion.
The anger is there on the surface, but it's the fear and loss that really matters.
It seems to me like the post is largely correct but mentioning the Russia stuff as an example may have been a rhetorically bad call. Most of the comments are now discussing whether your version of Russiagate is a weakman and whether such and such object-level claims are true. I don't think it undermines the core point of the post too seriously, but there have certainly been other conspiracy theories regarding Trump, occasionally involving Epstein and occasionally some level of underage rape and other gruesome stuff. I realize you wanted to choose something you yourself believed but I wonder whether this personal connection actually drove the point home.
Of course my main takeaway is that it is a small blessing that Russia has decided to just slaughter their way through Ukraine. I have no need for conspiracy theories, I can just relax and enjoy hating Russia and Little Putin!
Is it really a conspiracy theory to think that a known associate of a child trafficker might have been involved in or partaken of said child trafficking?
Was he ever on the island? Also do you apply that to Clinton? Who was on the island. My feeling is that the entire US ruling class is culpable here, if anybody is.
It is a conspiracy theory to assert without additional evidence that a known associate of a child trafficker has been involved in child trafficking. And "I'm just asking *questions*, it *might* be true", is almost always just a weasel-worded accusation. Don't do that.
Almost all "child traffickers" keep that fact secret from most of their acquaintances for the obvious reason that they'll go to jail if they don't. And almost all of the acquaintances that do in some sense "know" about it, are playing the three-monkeys game to avoid knowing for sure about it without any social awkwardness, rather than active participants. The idea that there are large communities where "everybody knows" that the elite are trafficking children for sex and everybody is OK with that but everybody is careful to never talk about it where the sheeple can hear, is itself a conspiracy theory.
Donald Trump was charged with raping a child by someone who was presumably bought off or intimidated into shutting up. Donald Trump is a known associate of a convicted child trafficker.
It's not a conspiracy theory to connect those two dots.
I think some conspiracy theories are down to humans being, amongst other things, explanation-producing machines.
What was that rustling in the bushes? Was it the wind? Or was it a lion?
Well, Jim went out on a windy day, and got eaten by a lion because he thought the rustling in the bushes was just the wind, so it could be a lion. We better check to make sure.
Okay, there's no sign of a lion, so it was just the wind. Probably. Because there are lions in this area, so we should always be careful just in case.
Except some people then jump on that "probably" and use it as a rationale for why they are right about "it's *always* lions, it's *never* 'just the wind'" theories. It may be very wearisome to constantly be vigilant about lurking lions, but the one time it really is a lion, you'll be prepared and will have the last laugh.
We look at the world and we see a lot of things that upset us and we say "This isn't right, someone should fix it". Except nobody knows how to fix it, or when someone tries, the explanation is that it's too big and complex and a lot of things are involved and yes, it's terrible but no, there's nothing we can do.
And we know about cause and effect, so for this thing to be happened, it *must* have a cause. So that means *somebody* must have caused it. In a way, it's a relief to think that there are a bunch of bad (possibly lizard) people out there pulling the strings and making bad things happen, because that's awful but at least if we find that bunch we can stop them.
If it's just Moloch in action, what do we do? We're helpless and we're going to get ground into dust but that's just the way things are so here, have this cheap smartphone and don't think about the millstones getting closer and closer to the top of your head.
And some theories *are* just fun if you don't take them seriously. Maybe it *was* aliens, tell me more about the Pyramid inch. Maybe it *is* the Illuminati, why yes "Weishaupt" and "Washington" are suspiciously similar!
I'm from Russia. I extremely dislike both Trump and the Russian government (especially since last year). But the idea that Trump is a Russian puppet looked like absolute bullshit to me from the very beginning. I was disappointed to see in one of Scott's longtime posts a hint that he believes in this. Now I'm happy!
"Trump is a Russian puppet" is a claim that has very little evidence and is not true for any reasonable definition of puppet.
"Russia attempted to influence the election in Trump's favour and made contact with his campaign to coordinate efforts, and their efforts coordinated with the campaign in suspicious ways" is established fact.
The full Mueller Report is the best overview we have so far, and it's quite damning on many many levels -- even with all the massive interference that blocked a more complete view (as well as a coordinated effort to belittle the findings, aided by Barr's lying about it for weeks before releasing it).
Before "believing in" one cartoonish headline or another people simply need to read the report. Otherwise they're revealing they are more interested in choosing a side than striving to know the sweeping, ugly truth. You can be sure that anyone who says the report proves the whole exercise was a nothing-burger hasn't even cracked its pages.
I'm surprised Scott's example of a group he considers evil in a way that's difficult to express convincingly is just "woke people shutting down schools for the gifted because they dislike meritocracy", that seems really innocuous to me (maybe even neutral to potentially good-ish).
That doesn't seem like it should be enough of a emotional provocation to be any kind of threat to his characteristic rationalism (which means it illustrated his point, I guess).
I'm not sure if he just used that example because it's unlikely to aliennate us readers, or if he really is so closely aligned with mainstream morality that there isn't a more salient example. What about all the potentially extremely immoral things, factory farms etc.? the CIA? big Finance?
I'd be interested in a longer list of things he thinks are evil without needing to provide an objective reason for.
Throwing myself in as another person who thinks that wokies shutting down gifted programs in the name of non-discrimination is somewhere between bad and civilization-ending. It's absolutely a mind-killer.
Wild, coming from the UK where grammar schools have been all but abolished in the name of social cohesion and not writing off kids at young ages. I can totally get disagreeing with such a policy, but to describe it as evil without needing to give a reason as Scott did makes me feel like we are coming from very different places!
It's just the most palpable example of 'everyone must be equal, so we'll beat down the heights until they're all the same'. It ends with the Holodomor.
Not an exaggeration of my view, btw, although I can't speak for Scott.
As another data point, I live in Germany, and I also feel somewhat alarmed when I read about stuff like "woke people shutting down schools for the gifted because they dislike meritocracy." There's definitely a strong emotional component. If my social environment is any indication, though, my stance is pretty unusual over here.
But I've worried a lot about social and political trends in this space, to the point where certain kinds of triggers much like the quoted one can make me sit around effectively 'disabled' (introspective and distracted by it approximately beyond help) for an hour or two, trying to untangle my feelings about it in a way that isn't destructive to me or my environment. (I've managed each time, and it hasn't happened often. But it does require work.)
Sounds stupid, probably is stupid, but the "emotional provocation" is definitely there and strong.
Thanks for sharing your view, though! Honestly prefer reading comments like yours that don't reenforce the emotional spiral but help break it up a bit. "Come on, it's not actually that bad," is a sentence I could use to hear more often. :)
“Here the “conspiracy” part of the conspiracy theory is secondary. Some believers in the ancient-aliens theory might not think there’s a conspiracy at all; maybe mainstream archaeologists just made an honest mistake. Others might think there’s a minor, almost sympathetic conspiracy - the reality of alien influence is so mind-blowing that archaeologists gibber in horror and repress the evidence for the sake of their own sanity. Most ancient-alien believers don’t have a strong commitment to believe in any particular conspiracy. They might not be especially angry at the conspiracy. It’s just a useful hack for supporting their weird evidence processing style.”
These are both explanations I was given when growing up for why well-meaning scientists consistently got the wrong answer about evolution vs creationism.
This post made me remember about reading a piece about differences between "old-school conspiracy theories" where people would go to great length and elaborate explanations to convince you of something, versus "new conspiracies", related to fake news and post-truth, where there are no real explanations involved (e.g. Pizzagate, IIRC). Would have loved to retrieve it and share it but I can't seem to find it anywhere. Could as well have been a preceding post here for all I remember.
If the pizzagators haven't gone to great lengths to elaborate their explanations in order to convince you of something, that's just because you're hanging out on the wrong parts of the internet.
You're right, although indeed I personally avoided these "elaborate explanations" givers, my wording should have been more specific. From what I recall, the difference was explained as following: old-school conspiracies have some factual "evidence" (using Scott's words), e.g. anomalies in the bullet angle, anomalies in the moon landing, etc. These are statements that you can actually "debunk", if willing to. new conspiracies have no real bases on falsifiable proofs and therefore are complete speculations. Hope this has clarified the distinction the article was trying to make.
Nice essay. I suggest you look more into the group aspects of this. David McRaney's book "How Minds Change" talks about how people stop believing in conspiracies, and IIRC it has a lot to do with finding a replacement for the emotional support that they were getting from being part of the cult that believed the conspiracy. Also I recommend Randall Collins on "Interaction Ritual Chains" on how social interactions raise or lower emotional energy. I suspect that trying to tie conspiracy theory in with anger is not the right path. I think it is more the gain in emotional energy from being part of a tight-knit group that is "onto something." Like being an early adopter of a scientific breakthrough or a new technology or a cool music or a social movement, but in the case of a conspiracy theory you've made a bad choice.
A Randall Collins type theory does seem to apply well here. Every time a little new info is found that can be made to break favourably for the conspiratorially minded group, the energy is raised just a little, and the group gets excited at their discovery... It's addictive and a system for building participation, versus mundane explanations which are deadening and end the chain of excitement in its tracks.
I think this is part of the story. I think another part of the story is vibe warfare. People want to influence the emotional valence of a concept in someone else's mind, so they adopt beliefs (or at least make factual arguments) without regard for truth.
They (if I'm being honest, we) don't necessarily notice this dynamic, in part because there is no incentive to notice. The social consensus about vibes is a big deal. Surely the ends justify the means?
I think Scott has basically written about this before, but the posts about media lies, plus this post, make me suspect that this is sometimes a blind spot. Or else he's just trying to emphasize a different part of the story without getting distracted.
All the conspiracy theorists I personally know find their research stimulating and gratifying. Conspiracy theories seem like a fun hobby, and the feeling of tapping into forbidden or concealed knowledge adds to the excitement.
Above all else though, very engaged conspiracy theorists (who create and propagate most content) can find vibrant communities of like-minded believers over the internet. Membership in these communities provides immense value (social support, genuine care and affection, validation, etc), contingent on continued belief in the founding creed.
I would suspect that social isolation, rather than any particular cognitive model, is the key determinant of strongly adhering to conspiracy theories.
Random aside regarding the Kennedy assassination, but my favourite conspiracy theory about it is one where the Secret Service killed him... by accident. Basically, the theory postulates that one of the Secret Service personnel in the car behind Kennedy had very poor trigger discipline and when he was startled by Oswald's shot, accidentally fired his own rifle. This second shot was the one that actually hit and killed the President, leading to a panicked attempt by the Secret Service to cover up their own incompetence.
I like this on multiple levels because it explains away a lot of the weirdness involved in the case in a way that is salacious enough to count as a conspiracy theory, but one that is fundamentally unsatisfying to conspiracy theorists. After all, what's more banal than an honest mistake and a frantic attempt to hide it after the fact?
Another point about conspiracies is that they are insight porn. They cheaply make a person feel like they have seen through the illusions of the masses into a deeper reality. This is enjoyable for a few reasons (other than the emotional content of the belief system):
(a) an insight moment (a-ha moment) is a coming together of information in a way that feels like it fits the world better. This is a fundamental function of cognition that probably involves large regions of the brain and has a spiritual, almost religious dimension (an epiphany). "I was wrong about everything before, but now I understand."
(b) Having seen through the delusions of the masses into this "more real" world, you are one of a select few. You have special knowledge; knowledge that no one else has. In a way, this makes you part of an elite few, and it may even be your job to save everyone else.
If rationality is the inheritor of Platonism -- truly seeing through illusions and delusions in a way that connects us more deeply with the world in a more real way --- then conspiracy theories are the inheritors of Gnosticism -- the decadent, twisted version of Platonism, which takes the whole real world to be a delusion and illusion.
'Gnostic' cultural patterns have been baked into American culture since at least the sixties, and probably beyond, all the way back to Puritans. There's an addiction for the feeling that the mainstream narrative is wrong, for the reasons listed above.
It's no coincidence that the current myths of the culture war, the red pill on one side and being 'woke' on the other follow this self-same structure. The Matrix films, which the red pill meme is based on, explore these patterns of Platonism and Gnosticism: the idea of waking up and realising that what you took to be reality was wrong. Whereas in Plato this is a spiritual process of anagoge, as you ascend towards a more real world; in Gnosticism this is a horrific process, as you realise the world is far darker than you realised, and you've been controlled and manipulated. The Matrix is more of a Gnostic story for this reason.
People are addicted to the feeling of waking up to a "truer" reality. In many ways it's a parody of rationality because it relies on much of the same machinery of fascination and belief change.
It seems a bit of a coincidence that the moon subtends exactly the Sun's diameter during a total solar eclipse. This hasn't always been the case: When the Earth first formed, the moon was much closer to the Earth, and would have loomed overhead, occupying a quarter of the sky, causing literally mountainous tides! Over the aeons since it has spiralled away, rapidly at first but now at around 1.5" per year. So in a few million years the alignment will be less exact, and the Sun will blaze round the circumference of the moon's shadow even during a total eclipse.
It also seems a coincidence that the stars of orion seem to resemble so much a figure with four outstretched limbs and a belt of three collinear stars with a sword hilt or some clobber attached to the belt. But even if aliens with a sense of humour nudged the moon so that descendents of the apes they had observed would see impressive eclipses, I imagine they would draw the line at moving whole stars considerable distances to achieve at best a marginal effect as viewed from Earth. Also, with around 4000 stars visible to the naked eye, presumably there is considerable scope for chance alignments, such as some of the other constellations. (I still think Orion is by far the easiest to spot and the most impressive.)
Those last few paragraphs remind me of this quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
I love this distinction which seems super clear to me, and I also am ABSOLUTELY certain that a lot (maybe even most, possibly even all) Type 2 Conspiracy Beliefs are rooted in some form of anxiety/misery/unsatisfied or badly regulated emotion. My experience of T2CB in the wild (ie NOT online) suggests that fear/anxiety/generalized threat perception is at the root in more cases that anger/outrage/hate, but that might be due to my own bias in seeing hate/anger as pretty much always driven by fear or frustration.
The one aspect I wanted to add, which I've not seen covered in any studies, relates to the "general model of the world" that conspiracy (actual conspiracy) thinking supports. It's a model of the world that makes sense, and in which someone (even if evil, malicious or at least self serving) can both predict and effectively control the events.
This, however scary, is likely to be SIGNIFICANTLY less scary for a person who finds the randomness and chaos of the actual world, it's fundamental unfairness and the fact that we (the humans) can neither make effective predictions nor control what's happening. If the idea of a morally neutral universe that doesn't "care" makes you feel very very scared (for example because you're anxious or depressed or feel a need to be parented/cared for or [insert any other reason]) or if you feel a need to explain horrific occurrences, conspiracy theories fill that hole. So do some types religion, I suppose, on some level.
A thought that sticks in my craw is how much of what is at the heart of conspiracy theories is correct. There’s usually some boring reality involved that removes a lot of the glitz and glamor, but Epstein for instance does seem like the social irritant that makes people believe in global elite satanic pedophile cabals. Ghislaine Maxwell is currently in prison for sex trafficking minors to no one.
I do believe in a sort of “decentralized self-interest” that causes things to look like conspiracies but not actually involve anyone meeting in blood red robes in secret rooms that you can only get through by pulling the right book off a shelf in a giant library.
Pedophilia for instance is a fundamental biological urge for sex. It exists in all social classes. So if there are places where pedophiles could go to abuse children, I tend to believe that it happens. If there’s a place where it becomes structurally hard to oversee and protect children, I’m of the opinion a structured abuse system will just evolve itself there, the same way that dandelion spores will find a lawn to grow in. Do I believe Hillary Clinton a Seventh Level Illuminatus Warlock who eats children to keep her power? No. Do I believe that there are probably some very shady travel companies in places like Thailand? Yes.
It’s the same kind of thinking financial institutions use to try to spot employee fraud, and it’s usually prudent. Lay out of a pool of water, simply know that thirst exists, and someone will eventually show up to take a drink. Now replace that water with some kind of vice and the same reasoning applies.
Isn't "Russiagate" a pejorative term people have developed to describe the belief that there was some collusive relationship between the Trump campaign/admin and Russian government, of which there is in fact a boatlaod of evidence? Usually the rhetorical move is to take the fact that the Mueller report, while having its investigation actively obstructed by Trump's inner circle and being limited in scope, did not find evidence to charge criminal conspiracy and equivocate that with a lay sense of the term "collusion" even though these are naturally quite different things. Trump's "Russia if you're listening" is, unto itself, collusive.
The term seems to be used in an effort to win the narrative of the past where people who believed there likely was collusion in some meaningful way are taken to be conspiracy theorists, but that's all undergirded by having a much more stringent idea of what said cooperation might've looked like. But then people turn around and use that to argue something to the effect of, "People thought there was something to a Trump/Russia connection, but it turns out there wasn't. That's been proven to be false." Only, that's not true at all.
I don't think so. I think it started out referring to the Steele Dossier "Trump is literally taking orders from Putin because the Russians have kompenkrat on him" accusations, these got blurred with the lesser-but-Russia-related stuff by media headlines, and *then* the Republicans started crowing that since the first sort we disproven it all was.
The "Trump is literally a Russian agent" stuff was very popular!
FWIW, I did think there was a non-negligible probability of the Steele Dossier stuff literally being true for a while in 2017. And I think I *hoped* it was true for the reasons Scott described.
It is frustrating though how Republicans have successfully transmuted "Trump wasn't literally a Russian agent" into "everyone who ever said anything about Russia is a shrill conspiracy theorist, hahaha" and even gotten people like Scott to unthinkingly go along with it.
Suspicion that there was a connection between Trump and Russia predates wide public knowledge of the Steele dossier and was a major theme in the 2016 election.
It was grounded in the fact that there was a lot of discussion in public of possible Russian interference into the election on the Trump campaign's behalf and Trump's odd deference to, extreme defensiveness of, and lying around the subject of Vladimir Putin.
Here is Hillary Clinton herself articulating that view in one of the presidential debates:
Formal investigation into Trump was initiated by members of Trump's own campaign team boasting of a connection. What I'd suggest is the period of interest in the Steel dossier has been leveraged in an argument that goes something like, "All those suspicion around Trump was started by and grounded in the Steele dossier, but we know that is all false; therefore we know all this was baseless." But that's not really true at any point. The suspicion came a more complex web of facts and the reason to believe that there was some level of back and forth cooperation is quite robust.
What there isn't is a basis to charge a criminal conspiracy, though I cannot stress enough that was based on an investigation that was deliberately limited in scope and was obstructed in a way that normally would be criminal. There is also no evidence of the easiest to refute, strongest claim that Trump is some sort of Manchurian candidate. That Trump and Russia had some sort of mutually beneficial relationship involving illicit behavior that undermines US interests is a weaker claim that is much more defensible.
"If only they were literally raping children and then eating their body parts, then everyone would have to admit they were bad."
This is an easily overlooked sentiment that can lead people towards accelerationism, another 'black pill' . (We need to hyper-charge the current unjust, capitalist system, so the flaws become evident to everyone and only then true change can happen. Reforms just strengthen the system)
I think this logic permeates more debates than we think.
For example, in *Right to Sex* Srinivasan describes the rift between feminists who are pro and anti prostitution legalization:
"Proponents of decriminalization like Smith and Mac argue that strengthening the labour power of sex workers wouldn't just make their lives more livable; it would give them more power to demand a restructuring of economic and social relations such that they will no longer have to sell sex to live. [...] As anti-prostitution feminists might see it, thought, decriminalization is at best a reformist measure, which marginally improves the lives of sex workers, while shoring up both patriarchal and neoliberal commodification of sex." (158)
From that viewpoint, it could actually be "good" if prostitution stay illegal, with zero regulation and therefore a worse life for prostitutes. Only this way it reveals how evil prostitution is, and accelerates a future where prostitution does not exist. The same can be seen in other activist movements like animal rights.
Applied to conspiracy theories, a similar logic applies: it's actually 'good' if children are raped/eaten/harvested as that makes efforts to dethrone 'the elite' actionable.
> it could actually be "good" if prostitution stay illegal, with zero regulation and therefore a worse life for prostitutes. Only this way it reveals how evil prostitution is, and accelerates a future where prostitution does not exist.
This has been the status quo in much of the world for a long time and it hasn’t worked. And the idea that we will re-educate men such that none of them are willing to pay for sex is preposterous don’t you think?
No doubt, making life miserable for the women who engage in it is a great way to make it look evil. It has nasty consequences that way, but cause-and-effect are reversed here. The biggest advantage to making it legal is that one can really address sex slavery that way.
I might propose that the biggest driver of conspiracy theory is the acute discomfort a lot of us feel about things that are out of our control and we don’t understand.
That gets back to Scott’s proposal that the emotional content is the one that needs to have the most attention paid to it.
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.”
Sure, the government has been violating the Constitution's strictures while the ink was still drying. Were the treason charges legitimate? Nope: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. " ONLY.
"Trump was secretly an agent in the pay of Vladimir Putin, sent to destroy democracy" matches well to "adhering to their [i.e. the United States'] Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort".
I don't think the quoted text implies that a declaration of war is necessary. "Levying War against [the US]" seems to refer to rebellion (otherwise it would not need to be listed separately from "adhering to their Enemies"), and a government does not typically declare formal war on rebels. Trying to overthrow the Republic, at Putin's instigation or otherwise, could reasonably be considered an act of rebellion.
Also, it's not clear to me that "enemies" means only "enemies in a declared war." So a hostile state at peace might arguably be an enemy.
The word "enemy" is not defined in law as constituting only the list of nations with which the United States is formally at war with. This is perhaps unfortunate, in that it makes it ambiguous who is and is not guilty of treason under the law. But it is so, and so we cannot simply point to e.g. a US citizen actually serving as a Russian agent and say "this person is clearly *not* a traitor, and to prosecute him for treason would be unconstitutional".
One also can be angry about, for instance, the QAnon conspiracy theory, because there are clear good guys and bad guys, clearly defined victims ("the children!") and a clear injustice supposedly involved.
I don't think this post really does a good job of dismantling JFK conspiracy theories. Here's an entirely down-to-earth theory (which I don't believe and just made up on the spot) that is in line with all the evidence presented in this post.
Oswald was working with an accomplice. They positioned themselves in separate places to improve the chances that one of them would get a clear shot. The accomplice succeeded in this first, and then got away and only Oswald got caught. There was no conspiracy larger than the two of them, and investigators simply screwed up and missed this.
Interest in pseudoscience fields like ufology, cryptozoology, and most pseudoarcheaology often overlaps with interest in conspiracy theory, but these fields would be considered "conspiracy candy" where the objective is to titilate the reader rather than investigate how the ruling class manipulates the masses.
I also think it is highly unhelpful to throw up your hands and say that the ruling class will do what it wants and get away with it. The ruling class must offer concessions proportional to the amount of pushback in the population, which would be reduced by accepting your interpretation. People globally rightfully hate the ruling class, but based on some as yet unpublished research of mine the adrenochrome conspiracy theory is linked to the conspiracy candy subjects above, being a titilating (fallacious) narrative.
I think there are two major emotional drivers of conspiratorial thinking that aren't touched on here:
* In-group belonging--for most of the pizzagate/qanon folks, their beliefs grant them acceptance in a very supportive online community. Where We Go 1 We Go All, etc. Many of these people don't explicitly hate the elite--most would call themselves capitalists and actively engage in hero worship (e.g. Trump)
* Feeling smarter than other people, or being in on a secret--for the intelligent people analyzing bullet trajectories and such, this is a bigger driver of their beliefs than any logical error. The feeling is wildly gratifying and addictive.
You could argue there are people who start looking at the evidence dispassionately and are actually convinced by bullet trajectory evidence. But the second you start to entertain the conspiracy belief as maybe true, you feel this surge of ego. You've discovered a secret. You've taken the red pill, escaped the matrix, achieved enlightenment. You pity your former self, and all your friends and family who can't see the truth.
And the effect only gets stronger with time: every time you're confronted with evidence against the conspiracy, you can either accept that you've been duped by magical thinking and are considerably less smart than you thought--dumber than all the people you've spent the last X years feeling superior too--or you can go on believing you're better than everyone else. I think this describes Graham Hancock well.
I can't imagine getting caught up in a heterodox narrative and *not* feeling superior to all the normies.
This, IMO, is the biggest driver of conspiratorial thinking.
Analogously, if it turns out that Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign manager was actually killing children in the basement of a pizza restaurant, but there was no evidence that Clinton was in on it, my reaction would be less "that dumb qanon conspiracy theory about Clinton killing children in the basement of a pizza restaurant was wrong after all" and more "wow those qanon believers were onto something big".
> I want to say something like: if you hate (let’s say) the global elite enough, then you become very very biased towards believing any bad thing you hear about them. And maybe there’s some level of hatred at which you become amenable to believing that they rape children and eat their organs.
You know, Scott, this would be a much more persuasive argument if we did not know of one existing, global, elite, pedophile conspiracy - I'm speaking, of course, of the Roman Catholic Church.
Now, granted, it would be very wrong to say that the RCC was (much less is) a pedophile conspiracy first and foremost. However, what we already know points to a widespread problem with priests abusing minors, but also - much more damningly - the Church hierarchy and officials taking great pains to hush the matter up for decades, whilst extracting, essentially, no penalties against the abusers (those came later, when the matter broke into public perception).
So, while in the strictest sense the RCC isn't a global pedophile cabal, in another - more practical sense - we'd be hard pressed to tell the difference, given a history of enabling pedophiles and shielding them from the public.
Given that we have one example of a global pedophile cabal, is the existence of another such a big stretch of the imagination?
I mean, Epstein was hosting those island parties for *someone*, as other commenters have pointed out.
Great article overall, but I would point out that in my experience the people interested in the Kennedy assassination actually do tend to be very worked up and emotional/angry about it. I have seen adult marines crying about it, and other adult people yelling. This was like 10-15 years ago. Long after the fact.
Q: What’s the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth?
A: About six months, these days.
Which I mention to point out how “conspiracy theory” is also one phase in the dialectical process by which a dominant culture absorbs information contrary to its unifying narrative.
I think it's weird one of the things you labeled the global elite as being responsible for as being "a woke takeover" instead of the much more obvious political corruption and bribery they engage in. They do not undermine society by perpetrating wokeness, they do so by perpetrating corruption. I didn't realize you had such a strong bias against wokeness which to me seems unwarranted.
Before continuing to advertise your intuitive mood swings about politics -- a clumsy subject for you, since you are naturally more curious about other things -- I suggest you tackle your research responsibly. For instance, read the Mueller Report in its entirety, Volume One and Two, before proclaiming to know the truth about anything referred to as "Russiagate." How do I know you haven't read it? Because your understanding of the subject matter has never been anything more than shallow.
It's an important question. Such a response would not have been necessary if the report had not been so effectively whitewashed, buried, mischaracterized, and lied about. It is simply a well-documented piece of history. It is the furthest thing from "propaganda." It speaks for itself, transparent about all its limits and holes that were the result of non-cooperation from the administration. It speaks soberly and quietly about steady, coordinated obstruction, yet still paints an utterly damning picture, despite all the self-righteous cries of "No collusion!" Mueller was a conservative, Republican, institutionalist, and so, no showboat, he deferred to norms and policies prohibiting him from making charging recommendations, which so many here have carelessly (or maliciously) interpreted as vindication.
In short, anyone who still believes the report was a nothing-burger has been willingly duped by a corrupt admin, a conman president, a pliant media ecosystem (Fox, etc), and crucially, endless individuals like yourself joining the bandwagon with uninformed comments. I certainly would not urge anyone to read such a detailed report unless they were participating in the political sphere (e.g. voting, blogging) without questioning the con job. If I sound conspiratorial, then read the report. That's the best picture we have so far.
If a majority of people in the 1950s were convinced the Nuremberg trials vindicated the Nazi project, I would be begging everyone to watch the proceedings instead of just listening to their friend spouting off at the end of the bar. But that's not a good example, because the Nazis were not in charge of their own trial, so it was much easier for Barr, etc to bury the Mueller report. Don't be a willing dupe. This message is for your own benefit. But if you're going to act politically based on acceptance of a fraud, this actually puts our shared project of democracy in peril, which is why some of us are pulling our hair out over the flippant unwillingness to look into the matter for yourself.
Scott could do something really useful by reviewing the report honestly and fully. Not that I trust his political analyses, but I do somewhat trust his fidelity to data-driven texts, so the real question is whether his interest is sincere enough that he's willing to revisit his facile assumptions about "Russiagate" (as if that word could possibly sum up the whole ugly matter).
I think any attempt to understand conspiracy theories needs to look at the social aspect. Believing a conspiracy theory makes you part of a group. It provides kinship and emotional support. The flat Earth documentary from a few years back makes this very clear.
What makes a group organized around a conspiracy theory more attractive than mainstream social groups? Part of it might be the biases you mention. Part of it might be the ego boost that comes with thinking that you have access to a special truth that most other people discount or are ignorant of. Or maybe conspiracy theories attract people with similar personalities along other dimensions and they just have a lot of fun together. You don't necessarily have to start off hating elites to believe in Qanon -- you just have to meet some people who believe in Qanon, get along with them, and then start hating elites.
This latter explanation appeals to me because it seems true in other contexts. People that are *really* into sci-fi and fantasy often hew towards certain stereotypes that aren't directly related to genres of fiction (or at least don't seem to be). Similarly for sports fans and outdoor enthusiasts. I'm sure you can come up with other examples.
I broadly agree with the two categories of conspiracy theories. But I think the first type is the primary factor in conspiracy theories, and without it the second type wouldn't get off the ground. There must be more going on in the first type than just a bunch of people with flaws in their evidence balancing analysis.
As some other people have suggested on the comments here, there's some drive pushing people to believe/give some weight to conspiracies. Just read through the comments here and you see people getting caught up in Epstein, JFK, Pizzagate and whatnot. These conspiracy theories draw our attention.
I think there's two natural urges behind this. First, we have a natural urge to uncover mysteries. Second, we generally have some feeling that there is a deeper truth behind things. So when we see a thread to pull, some facts that seem intriguing, we are pushed to tug on that thread. And the more the answer seems to reveal a deeper truth, on some level we'll find it more acceptable.
I think there's a deep truth behind that, but you'll probably say I'm a conspiracy theist :)
> I think this is even true of more classical conspiracy theories like the Kennedy assassination. If you talk to a Kennedy conspiracist, they’re most interested in talking about anomalies like how the bullet angles don’t work out. These tend to sound a lot like the Pyramid-reflects-the-speed-of-light fact - attention-grabbing, inexplicable, easy to quantify how unlikely they are, and the only problem is a lot of vague holistic arguments that it can’t be true (Oswald seemed pretty assassin-y, it would be crazy for two people to be shooting the President at the exact same time, lots of government agencies say they investigated and didn’t find anything else). So in order to keep their favored fact (about the bullet angles) they propose a conspiracy that explains away why Oswald looked so guilty, why all the official investigations said it was just Oswald, and so on.
I was thinking about this distinction recently, but I came to the exact opposite conclusion on JFK. Isn't the whole point that some shadowy forces wanted Kennedy dead, possibly orchestrated by LBJ to take power, or by the military-industrial complex to keep us in Vietnam? It might have been weird anomalies that kicked off said theories, but I think the biggest catalyst was Jack Ruby killing Oswald (allegedly to silence him).
Not much discussion about the election of 2020 and the perceived conspiracy on the right that “the fix was in”. I would say that this view is obviously emotional, but at the same time, I do feel some empathy, as I feel they had evidence. Bad evidence, but still... when you really want to believe something, and you think you see “proof”, and then later on your “proof” is bunk, but then you say the refutation of that “proof” is the real bunk, isn’t that a third type of conspiracy? I remember election night in 2022 vividly. I live in California, which is on a later time zone than most of the US. In the evening, I was actively watching the online map of who had won which state, and said to myself “oh no he is going to win again.” It seemed very evident at that time that Trump was going to win. Now, later on the evening, when I woke myself up at midnight because I was a little distressed by this and was having trouble sleeping, I woke up , checked the map, and felt relieved. I believed the new “evidence”. As the all the mail in votes were counted, the votes swung the other way. I believe that this is the main reason that voters for Trump thought that the fix was in. The oversimplified maps of which state was going to what party, which were all over the internet that night, gave a very false impression of how the election was going on the night of the election. It doesn’t matter that later on that we can explain why the shift happened. If I wanted Trump to win, I would have thought that the fix was in. It makes me think of that famous picture of Truman holding the paper with the headline “Dewey defeats Truman” on the day after that election. I am sure there were many dissatisfied and conspiracy minded voters at that time when Truman beat Dewey. I think rather than hating on those who believe in conspiracies, or worse yet , trying to “convert them to the truth”, we need to find ways to make the situations less fraught. Obviously better counting and processing of mail in ballots would help in this. And yes I know many states made it deliberately difficult to count the ballots... Probably because a few cynical smart people realized they even if they lost, they could sow distrust, but that is an entirely different conversation.
Conspiracy theories are fun. That's reason enough for plenty of people like my uncle who has zero desire to find out if the zany things he reads on the internet are true. He get lots of excitement from these theories which he rarely gets from real news. I'm not sure if he actually believes this stuff or it just kayfabe from him.
I am extremely interested in what people actually mean when they say they "believe" something. It's clearly more complex than a simple statement of literal fact. It might be that literal fact is irrelevant but I think there's symbolic or emotional truth that people are endorsing that beats literal fact. I very much agree that it's a simplifying maneuver - instead of having to express a difficult-to-defend but obviously correct (at least to you) milieu of evidence, it's easier to have a silver bullet.
But if you're going to hold the belief no matter the literal evidence, and you're very certain in the milieu of emotional evidence, what's the point of defending it? That's what strikes me about the conspiracy epidemic. It's an attempt to mentally defend a belief against a hypothetical other. Not a real other, because they don't believe your conspiracy theory. But the beauty of a conspiracy theory is that you can tell yourself that you understand better than them, that you're smarter than them, and that if they were more intelligent, they *would* agree with you.
All of this assumes that the goal in all things is to justify yourself to other people - it feels like the point is to crowdsource your own critical faculties to the internet, and in doing so absolve yourself of doubt.
I would challenge anyone -- but especially the chief influencer here (Scott) -- to read the entire Mueller report (Volumes One and Two, plus footnotes) before making further comments on the trump/russia nexus.
Scott would perform a close reading and then publicly review his findings if he really wanted to treat this momentous chapter in the history of our fragile democracy seriously. But he won't do this, because he's simply not interested enough, so he convinces himself he has all the info he needs to proclaim his facile opinions and assumptions -- as if he's being more rational than those concerned enough to actually do the deep diving.
The Mueller report is not a credible source. It is an elaborate exercise in assembling circumstantial facts to make them appear "greater than the sum of the parts." One could do exactly the same with Hunter Biden's dealing in Ukraine, with similar import (cf. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/11/us/politics/hunter-biden-investigations.html).
Because your descriptions of the document do not remotely coincide with its reality. All these flippancies around truth, facts, history, and fascistic appetite, which were unleashed by the former guy, are quite dangerous to our shared, fragile democracy -- so I hope you're at least amusing yourself.
I won't interact further with you, but I do challenge Scott to do a close reading of the entire report, and then review it thoroughly here. Maybe that would pique the interest of a few more readers who have been casual in their dismissals, unwilling to entertain the fact that the last decade was terrific practice for the Bannons, Putins, Flynns, and Trumps of the world.
What's seemingly different this time 'round is that conspiracists don't care that the evidence refutes their position. For example, when I asked a friend what evidence she has that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election for president, or that the Center for Disease Control is misrepresenting mortality statistics from Covid-19, she shrugs and says none is needed.
This Santos gentleman (?) who somehow goofed his way into Congress with an entirely fabricated identity is just taking Unreality to a new level. In winning, trust or character seem acceptable casualties; the important thing is to win.
Can someone give me a succinct explanation for why the belief that trump was inadvisably influenced or beholden to russian interests was indefensible *at the time*? or was that reasonable? I remember never thinking he was an actual russian plant, but idea that his indisputably secretive business couldn't have problems with foreign leverage never seemed crazy to me.
I think the belief wasn’t indeed single for random citizen when they were constantly hearing it from the intelligence world, democrats, and the MSM. The problem is those people were mostly lying their asses off bridges they hated Trump and were wishcasting all sorts of nonsense, some of which they invested themselves or knew was false.
I'm not sure this is a real distinction, although it may be a useful spectrum.
Just to throw out some examples:
- Qanon (which heavily overlaps with the adrenachrome stuff) is extremely evidence-focused. They're all about Q's Nostradamus-esque prophecies and elaborate numerical proofs. The core idea is "this guy has inside info, and he's repeatedly proven it by predicting things".
- Pizzagate, which also heavily overlaps with the adrenachrome stuff, is/was also very focused on evidence - long lists of emails that seemed confusing normally (large or unusual pizza orders) but made sense if they were in code (cheese pizza = children), alleged photos of pedophilic artwork on display, a guy went to "shoot up" the pizza place but only destroyed their hard drive, etc.
- Conversely, I've been hate-watching Netflix's recent much-derided Ancient Apocalypse show, starring Graham Hancock, and the guy *absolutely cannot shut up* about how close-minded, dogmatic, and fearful mainstream experts are and how much they hate him. While I kind of appreciate that he's at least honest that no-one takes him seriously, it's clear that he and his team think "look how much this pisses off the mainstream, you can't trust them" is their most compelling argument.
I will again suggest as a starting point Eco's Serendipities
Language and Lunacy (1998). The first essay is "The force of falsity".
Secondly, as part of rationalist program and because you are psychologist, you should present your thoughts in the context of a review of the literature. It's not like you're the first person to think about this.
Lastly, conspiracy theory is a type of myth-making. Myth-making is not just a personal process, it is social process. So thinking about a personal motivation (or pathology) will be insufficient. As a myth-making process it is a shared process of attempting to explain and shape and participate in reality. Voegelin might provide some insights for serious investigation.
Every conspiracy theorist will point out that some conspiracies are actually true. Indeed, with recent revelations from the Twitter Files, it looks like a lot of the "We're being targeted by the government and our speech is being secretly shut down" was true. People complained about being shadow banned, but then Jack Dorsey came out and testified before Congress that they don't shadow ban. Anyone claiming that their speech was being shadow banned became a conspiracy theorist. They would point to very specific screenshots of account activity, "I usually get [X] number of reactions to my post, but they're now down >90%!"
"No, that's just because people stopped engaging with you for some other reason. I may not have an explanation for this specific instance, but coincidences happen and you're looking at one. You're asking me to hyper-focus on this very specific and not-signal-boosted piece of evidence over the Twitter CEO's Congressional testimony? In order to believe your conspiracy theory, we'd have to prioritize this one piece of evidence while also believing that:
1.) Twitter is shadow banning thousands of people
2.) Their CEO was willing to lie to congress
3.) A bunch of people at Twitter know about 1+2
4.) Nobody is coming forward as a whistle-blower."
This is the standard argument against conspiracy theories: the larger the conspiracy, the more difficult it is to keep it a secret. Someone will spill the beans. Sometimes conspiracy theorists will reply that, "maybe the CIA or the FBI planted people high up in the company to intercept this kind of thing." But then they just look like stark-raving loons, willing to make up excuses for why there are no whistleblowers.
Yet with the Twitter Files, we're seeing that - absent Musk's multi-billion-dollar over payment for his favorite apptivity and a strangely-inconsistent-but-probably-sincere commitment to free speech - there were multiple ongoing conspiracies with exactly this kind of fact pattern. They even included the FBI plant!
The two big questions are "doesn't this count as a whistle-blower event?" and the more difficult to answer, "was this a one-off event, or is it representative?" Let's start with the first question. I think there are multiple reasons to believe that but-for Musk we wouldn't see another whistle-blower:
1. If the criteria for whistle-blower starts with a person actually going through with a $44 billion purchase of a failing company, the bar is high enough we should not expect to detect conspiracies this way.
2. We've seen other whistle-blowers pay a high price for their activities, like Manning (convicted under Espionage Act) and Snowden (threatened to be tried in secret courts if he ever steps foot in a country with extradition to the US). It's certainly not the case that there ARE no whistleblowers, but it's also clear that conspirators are willing to set a high price on whistleblowers to keep them from talking (life-changing non-monetary prices, not just $44B). We should expect fewer whistleblowers depending on the potential costs of coming forward.
3. Multiple other social media companies were implicated in the Twitter Files, including Reddit, Wikipedia, Apple, Meta, and Alphabet. I'll admit that the hypothesis, "lots of people know about this thing, so it will make its way into the public domain" is compelling. I've believed it for years, and made that argument countless times to my Illuminati/Bildaberg/global conspiracy-believing friend. I'm as surprised as anyone to discover that this explanation doesn't match the evidence. Indeed, now that some of the Twitter Files have been out for a while, where are the shocking revelations from these other companies, even years after the conspiracy started?
This brings us to the second question, "is this representative of a larger ability to conceal conspiracies?" We appear to have some evidence that the USG was involved with many other social media/tech companies in the same way they were with Twitter. All that seems to be coming from the Twitter revelations, though. Where are all the whistleblowers from Meta? Why hasn't some intrepid news outlet reported about this from Wikipedia? We're literally talking about yesterday's conspiracy "theory" confirmed as today's news story, and yet we're not seeing leaks.
Or are we? Is there some small-town paper somewhere that reported Reddit's story, but the national and social media haven't picked it up? We know at this point that such stories can be suppressed. That they are suppressed. If the conspirators have the ability to make sure any story is suppressed, and the Wikipedia page edits out attempts to signal boost by people motivated enough to use DuckDuckGo or get around the censorship, can we really rely on the argument that it's too difficult to cover up a conspiracy?
"These are new tools." Maybe, but they've had a name for a long time: gatekeepers. Meet the new gatekeepers, same as the old gatekeepers.
Finally, I don't think all (or even most) conspiracy theories are true. Indeed, Twitter Files #14 outline a situation where Twitter was being accused of allowing Russian bot farms to run rampant on their system. They did an internal review and concluded that wasn't happening (for that specific case, not that this never happened). Despite this, a bunch of conspiracy theorists - including people in Congress! - kept pestering them about it and the conspiracy theory became a story.
I'm not familiar with Zvi or their writing, though I know Scott mentions them occasionally. I'd like to point out that this specific analysis is only looking at the COVID-19 edition from David Zweig. After reading Zvi's take, I was not impressed. I'll just say that they seemed very hostile, made a number of statements that don't seem to be a careful reading of the story itself, and twisted logic in circles in order to conclude this was all a nothingburger(TM).
If that's an example of a 'good argument' on the con side of this subject, it suggests these dismissals of the Twitter Files are biased and unfounded. If you've got a better example, I'd love to see it, but I've been following/reading each of these as they come out and been surprised at exactly how much that was once 'conspiracy theory' has been solidly confirmed. Putting aside Zvi's odd take on the COVID edition, there's a lot in the Twitter Files.
Take, for example, the edition where Twitter was told by the USIC that they had a bunch of paid Russian accounts directing the conversation. Twitter did an internal review and found that wasn't true. They said as much to the government, assuming good faith. Then the government 'leaked' stories making claims Twitter had already disproved and got Congress to threaten legislation if Twitter didn't 'clean up' their act: meaning comply with whatever 'requests' the government made. Eventually, Twitter concluded they would publicly retain the façade that they were reviewing tweets per their policy, but privately they accepted the de facto situation the government had forced on them of accepting USIC 'requests' uncritically. That's an incredible subversion of a public information-sharing company by the US government, taking over moderation of the platform and using it wholesale to guide public debate. I'm not sure how you can conclude that there's "nothing there".
If even Zvi disagrees with you, I think that's a strong sign that you're the one who is mistaken (or rather, stuck in a bubble of motivated reasoning and partisan groupthink).
I'm sure I, like everyone else, am subject to partisan groupthink. However, I've asked for an actual argument to support the hypothesis you've put forward. The link you gave me does not stand on its own merit. If you'd like, we can go through point-by-point and I can demonstrate where the arguments aren't sufficient to convince me. I'd just ask for a precommitment to a good-faith discussion, because I'd hate to devote a lot of time and words to mirroring-by-accusation of partisan groupthink.
I'm sorry I don't accept Zvi as authoritative? I accept evidence and reasoned arguments, but not appeals to authority. If we're appealing to authority, I have a PhD in Immunology and I work in clinical research, so this isn't an area where I'm just some guy off the street, but I wouldn't ask anyone to defer to my authority. I'd only ask them to defer to evidence and solid reasoning.
Based on your confidence, it sounds like there's a lot of good evidence and reasoned arguments Zvi makes elsewhere, but this is not a good example of either of those things. After reading the piece, the overall impression I'm left with is that Zvi absolutely agrees with the official government policy as a utilitarian good for society that should be supported. That many of the tweets militate against that policy and would take ACTUAL REASONED DEBATE to return a person who becomes skeptical of the official policy to the Right Way of Thinking, and may even lead many people to die as a result.
Thus, Zvi's analysis isn't "this is a nothingburger(TM) because I looked carefully and couldn't find anything there", but rather, "I choose not to see anything there, and I think it is Right that the government should ensure others do not get to choose whether to see anything as well."
No matter how careful we are, or how much we try to avoid it, we all struggle with biases. Zvi is mortal, just like the rest of us.
Zvi has been extremely critical of public health authorities as well as the media. He's exactly the kind of person you'd expect to hype up the "Twitter Files", which is why I was so surprised by his posts.
*sigh* You've given me three solid appeals to authority on Zvi, but no actual support for your position. I'll be charitable and provide you with three examples of concerning logic from the post you linked to, but if you're not willing to engage in actual defense of your position other than an appeal to Zvi's unassailable perfection in this area I'm going to bow out.
1. We'll start off easy. There's a great comment from "Glenn Raphael" at the link you gave me. Glen is more charitable about Zvi's misinterpretation of the exchange than I think is warranted, but it's a clear example of poor reasoning on Zvi's end. The headline, "Twitter non-experts censored actual medical experts by inappropriately identifying it as false information" stands.
2. Then there's the quibble about KellyKga and the sharing of 'misleading' data from the CDC. I struggle to understand why Zvi takes issue in the ways they do, seemingly uninterested in engaging with the actual content of the claims and evidence. One of the points made repeatedly in the Twitter Files is that government agencies and social media companies were not just targeting bigshots. They were targeting small time people, experts, and everyone else; and they were using people with no expertise to 'fact check' those people. They cast a broad net. These points come home in the KellyKga case, but Zvi refuses to allow Zweig to make that point because Zvi thinks he should be making a different point.
Meanwhile, Zvi completely ignores the point Zweig actually makes: "Tellingly, the Tweet by @KellyKga that was labeled "Misleading" was a reply to a tweet that contained actual misinformation. Covid has never been the leading cause of death from disease in children. Yet that tweet remains on the platform, and without a "misleading" label."
The point, "this tweet is misleading, and I'm telling you why it's misleading with the CDC's own data" is entirely valid, and nothing Zvi says disputes that point. Indeed, large numbers of people somehow came to the conclusion that COVID-19 is dangerous to children. Why? Could it be that thousands of small accounts trying to share the accurate observation that it's not all that dangerous to children were silenced? Well, it seems we have proof of exactly that happening - no matter how small the tweet or how small the reach.
Instead of taking that in good faith, though, Zvi makes the pedantic point that the original tweet was technically factually accurate. Okay? KellyKga never disputed that. What they - and Zweig - claimed was that taking this cherry-picked data out of context could easily mislead people into believing that:
1.) A major cause of death for children is disease, and is therefore interesting/important; but ... it's not. Here's some data from 2019, before COVID hit: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/causes-of-death-in-5-14-year-olds?country=~USA Now, if you have to start by breaking down "cause of death from infectious disease" and that's already <<10% of the causes of death, you're definitely entering misleading territory
2.) Within that disease subset, COVID is the leading cause of death disease in children. This is not true. Zvi weakly attempts to 'refute' it by making the lame argument that "the start date is cherry-picked, sure, but the end-date was 'today' at the time" - which negates the cherry-picking because ... ? No, it doesn't. It's still cherry-picking.
Zvi makes the false claim that Zweig and KellyKga "give the impression that the person in question is lying to us." No, they did not! They clearly stated that the tweet in question was "misleading". It was. This is beyond dispute - even by Zvi. Zvi sets up a straw man of what is not claimed ("lying") and handily defeats it. Then cries crocodile tears for the censored contents, claiming it's okay because they weren't actively kicked off the platform.
As an aside, this argument that shadow banning isn't as bad as kicking people off the platform seems exactly backward. Say tomorrow Musk asks you to take his job as Twitter CEO. You're tasked with the problem of people violating terms of service. "Kick 'em off," you reply. "We do, but they just make another free account." It's the same problem as robocallers getting new numbers every time you block them. It works for a nanosecond and just creates more work for you. What if, instead, you never kick them off, though? You quarantine everything they say by dropping it to the bottom of an infinite scroll, so they never know that the reason people aren't engaging with them is because they can't see them. Since they can still tweet, they're not creating a new account - unless you made the mistake of telling them about the shadow ban - and you've effectively eliminated their ability to speak. Yet Zvi uncritically assesses that this is BETTER than kicking someone off outright, because at least they can still tweet into the ether at nobody. This is bizarre reasoning.
Zvi cryptically supports censorship of tweets based on 'judgement calls' of people who are not qualified to levy those judgements, but lets this pass? It's clearly misinformation that will lead people to make incorrect decisions. Zvi's reasoning for why it's okay for Power to err on the side of caution comes back again and again to, "but people might die if they get it wrong one way, so we should give them a pass". Indeed, this seems to be the whole argument - not that the content of the Twitter Files is incorrect, but that the censorship is acceptable to Zvi. Nothing about the KellyKga instance does anything but obfuscate this otherwise clear case: Twitter moderation took a real and good attempt to dispel misinformation, incorrectly labeled it as misinformation, and left that misinformation up. Twitter moderation spread misinformation. That's ... not a nothingburger(TM), it's a headline.
3. Next, I struggled to understand how Zvi could so heavily misread the tweet by ID_ethics as "misleading" because ... it repeated the results of a scientific paper and nothing else? Zvi complains that "the person being censored is trying to tell people not to vaccinate", but that claim is not supported by the plain text of the tweet itself, which is literally just a repeat of safety information in a Nature publication. It's unclear why Zvi makes this inaccurate claim. Maybe ID_ethics was doing that in other tweets? But Zvi isn't making the case that those other tweets should be censored or labeled 'misleading'. Zvi makes the case that a straightforward retweet of clinical data is 'misleading'. But the statements Zvi makes to support their claim about ID_ethics's tweets are not correct.
Once again, we get to the real reason Zvi is giving Twitter a pass: because a person reading the tweet might conceivably interpret it as misleading it was therefore perfectly fine for Twitter to label it as such, regardless of the facts. "Is this Tweet misleading in practice, giving the impression the vaccines are going to kill young people?" With what? Data alone? This is straining at a gnat, as with most of the other objections. Somehow Zvi isn't concerned about censorship of directly tweeted safety concerns from scientific papers, but is concerned that the government might not be able to control OTHERS from misleading the public if provided with that true information. I'm not sure how they avoid being misled themselves, though, given they're hiding the scientific results they disagree with from public discussion. Zvi seems to imply that it's okay because all it got was a "misleading" label. But ID_ethics claims they were shadowbanned for >1 year over this. https://twitter.com/ID_ethics/status/1607473119555641345 Either way, the headline, "Twitter censors sharing of scientific data contrary to government-supported narrative" seems like a big headline. I'd be very skeptical of anyone who dismisses it, not because it isn't TRUE, but because it's inconvenient.
This is the fundamental problem, as I see it: At the heart of scientific knowledge/discovery is the process of distinguishing something that was previously overlooked because it didn't fit into the broad categories we put it into, or because we'd missed some very specific piece of evidence.
Before Watson and Crick published their groundbreaking structure of DNA, Linus Pauling published his own. He had the same 'B-form' X-ray crystallography data W&C got from Franklin, which is the rationale he gave for making his structure helical. But he put the hydrophobic bases pointing outward and even had some small Van Der Walls overlaps. Why make such monumental mistakes? Pauling explains in his original paper: the bases wouldn't pair. He tried, but it didn't work. He figured some not-yet-identified structural molecules were keeping the whole thing together. After all, usually in biology we find it's more complicated than it appears at first.
But base pairing WAS the simple answer. Why did it work for W&C, but not for Pauling? Because a chemist in their department noticed Crick working (unsuccessfully) on getting the bases to pair and asked why he was using the less-stable Enol form and not the Keto form (cf Enol-Keto tautaumerization in your o-chem textbook). Crick didn't know about this. Pauling had overlooked it (despite making Nobel-winning discoveries in other aspects of Chemistry).
The idea that discovery of a deeper truth hinges on "a very specific detail" is how a lot of scientific discoveries have been made. Minor mutation in HBG gene causing sickle-cell anemia? Minor measurement deviation in the orbit of a moon of Jupiter? Got some mold growing on your agar plate?
What's the difference between an eccentric scientist and a loony conspiracy nut? (Maybe there isn't always a difference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Views_on_HIV/AIDS_and_climate_change) If we define the same method of hyper-focus as a flaw in evidence processing, do we lose more than just a few people pursuing outlandish ideas? Is there a way to dismiss details that don't matter without dismissing the kind of details that change the world?
> But if Trump was secretly an agent in the pay of Vladimir Putin, sent to destroy democracy, then that’s literal treason. There are no gray areas. You could explain in a single, objectively true sentence why he was one of the greatest villains in American history. There is a sense in which Trump being a literal traitor compresses information elegantly; instead of a mountain of vague cues suggesting that he is evil, there is a single fact that sums up his evilness perfectly.
This seems like the sort of model that would be reinforced based on the free energy principle/predictive processing. Simple, salient, and easy to shoehorn observations into supporting. In your second class of conspiracy theories, there might be a little rim around the low energy states but it seems like all it takes is a little push for some people to go up and over that hill
Conspiracy theories in the energy landscape seem a bit like black holes in spacetime: point-like attractor states. It's weird though that defending the conspiracy often involves what seems like a lot of complexity and epicycles of conspiracy (e.g. pizzagate). Maybe the hole is too deep to get out of by that point, or too intertwined with the person's identity?
If more than a few people get really worked up about a given belief, I start thinking it’s probably false. Nobody gets really passionate about the law of gravity, but people spend massive amounts of emotional energy trying to convince themselves and others that various scams, superstitions, quacks, and political agendas are super-awesome. It’s like they know, somewhere in the back of their minds, that it’s all bs, but they really wish it were true and are desperately trying not to notice
> I remember things about how conspiracy theories are linked to schizotypy, schizotypy is linked to schizophrenia, and schizophrenia is a condition of aberrant salience, ie your brain getting confused about how much different facts matter in relation to each other. All of this seems to fit together and I feel like I’m on the verge of understanding the whole phenomenon.
I've been circling around the same thing. You should read about Vervaeke's work on relevance realization and Klein's Data-frame theory of sensemaking. It seems to me that arbitrary relevance realization is indistinguishable from schizophrenia. If your body kept telling you over and over again that the buzzing in your ears was relevant, you too might conclude that the government put something in your brain.
Though buzzing in the ears may be a bad example because salience is primarily a visual phenomena in humans. And isn't it interesting the lack of overlap between schizophrenics and the blind? My abnormal psych teacher used to say that schizophrenia was primarily a perceptual issue. I never understood that till I thought about it this way.
Infowars is also arbitrary relevance realization. They include irrelevant context (eg FBI death numbers) and exclude relevant context. This makes them basically indistinguishable from a schizophrenic.
This group that prides themselves on their intelligence so, still believes the Warren Commission report, and seems to be unaware that, just for example the House Committee on Assassinations and every other post-Warren report has concluded that Oswald did not act alone. That's bizarre. Not as bizarre as JKF, Oswald, Jack Ruby, and Robert Kennedy all being killed by lone nuts, and the Trump and Buden administration's both refusing to release the last of the files.
How many coincidences does it take to pique your curiosity?
There is quite a bit of controversy about Ruby's death but the proximal cause was a pulmonary embolism. 'Something' caused a blockage in an artery in his lungs. He did have cancer at the time of the embolism. I should not have included Ruby in the list in the way that I did. Perhaps I should have indicated that he died shortly before he was to receive a retrial, which had the potential to be substantially less biased towards him and perhaps free him from custody. It should be noted that while in custody he had, shall we say 'gone nuts' to a remarkable and unusual degree in a way that had never been noticed while he was a free man. Unfortunately, I can only find a single page letter about his autopsy without anything really useful on it. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/lee-harvey-oswalds-killer-jack-9577093 Still 3 out of 4 ain't bad.
Also, I referenced the House Committee on Assassinations which should have been the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
So: Ruby being shot by a lone nut would be evidence for your point of view.
Ruby NOT being shot, but dying while having lung cancer, is also suspicious.
Meanwhile. Sirhan Sirhan is alive 55 years after his crime, but I guess that's not any indication that there's nothing more to his case than the motivation he has explained in great detail.
So, reading a link to a major mainstream media source to find out what I was talking about would be too much work so you instead resort to simple sarcasm. That explains why you are so attached to simplistic positions which can't be believed by anyone who examines the evidence.
I BTW have only advocated the position that there is a high number of coincidences, and that only one official investigation supported the 'lone nut' theory, more comprehensive investigations do not.
If you were better at the snide dismissal without looking at evidence I would suggest you stick with it, but you might be better served by another tack.
A thought occured to me, and I need to type it down in order to force my brain to form it clearly, and to implant it in my memory by associating it with the context of this post, the process of typing it, etc.
Anyways, here goes postmodernist drivel:
Empathizing with "conspiracy theorists" and describing their thought processes in terms of universal modes of human reasoning goes a long way, but it still unfairly singles them out. The very same universals of reasoning that lead people to mistakenly believe a false alternative theory can lead them to mistakenly believe a false established one, yet we don't speak derisively of "status quo theorists". Or rather, some people do speak derisively of "sheeple" and "NPCs" and so on, and we'd rightly recognize those as pure insults, emotionally-loaded and self-serving, so maybe it's time to relegate "conspiracy theorists" and other terms for people holding views outside of mainstream to the same status.
We're all trying to make sense of the world with limited knowledge and even more limited first-hand experience, and we're all bound to make mistakes, so the least we can do is to recognize that and stop shaming other people for making theirs. Not just because they're ultimately just like us, just working with different inputs and brain tuning. Also because, every once in a while, one of them will be on to something. We need individuals who differ, who strain from conventional wisdom and investigate alternative theories, in order to generate new hypotheses, and to be able to ever collectively change our mind.
If we need to call some of them out, let's not call them out for differing from status quo (many people who moved human knowledge forward did) or for believing in conspiracies (conspiracies do exist). If they're factually wrong, illogical and/or close-minded, there should be plenty of that to point out. If they're neither, but still sound weird, it's perfectly possible to remain unconvinced and respectfully differ.
PS: I am not sure that "your enemies are fundamentally just people like you, trying to balance their universal human selfish and pro-social instincts in a way that best matches their circumstances" isn't a bigger blackpill. On one hand, it allows you to trust other people (if not never to harm you, then at least to act within some comprehensible bounds) and retain your hope for humanity. On the other, where do we even go from there? You can defeat other people, but how do you defeat Moloch?
I think you're confusing a lot of things here. First, what is happening with a conspiracy theory.
All conspiracy theories are primarily a failure of contextualising information. As such, conspiracy theories do not explain away evidence or facts, at least not in the way that normal theories do. Conspiracy theories incorporate evidence. To explain away something is to say that it is not true or relevant. To incorporate it is to say it is true/relevant, but the broader context points to the same or similar conclusion. Hence the "conspiracy" part of the theory.
To expand on this , consider normal reactions to conspiracy theories. The normal response tends to reject them completely and immediately. If you hear that the moon landing is fake and somehow never heard this before, the first response is to say that isn't true and move on, without knowing a single extra fact about the moon landing. No extra facts will change this, because you're just so certain about your prior that you're never going to change it. On the face of it, it sounds similar to a conspiracy theorist, their prior being "there is a conspiracy". But actually, conspiracy theorists don't start that way, and they change their theories all the time. The conspiracy follows from the fact pattern they see. The problem is an inability to understand which facts are relevant.
Second, emotions don't have anything to do with this. The evidence for the illuminati isn't a gut feeling of hatred of elites, it's things like "Why do twelve supposedly separate news agencies seem to publish the same article at the same time without openly talking to each other?" or "Why does the government lie to us?" or "Why is seemingly basic information kept hidden?". In other words, the evidence for the Illuminati is the noticed gaps in the narrative. The gaps need to be explained, and are filled with conspiracy.
Third, I think you may not understand the difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. Conspiracies happen. Conspiracy theories don't. MKUltra happened. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was propaganda. ECHELON was confirmed in 2015. But we have yet to uncover the fake moon landing. The Illuminati hasn't been revealed. Nobody has found a single lizard person. The difference between these is conspiracies get found out, and conspiracy theories keep updating to new evidence forever. Conspiracy theorising is rationality turned towards nothing.
My point here is that Trump-Russiagate wasn't you and everyone believing in a conspiracy theory. It was more or less falling to a conspiracy. It was a psy-op. Political warfare. Propaganda. These are synonyms. Like other conspiracies, it was found out. And since it is different, believing in Trump-Russiagate is not the same thing as believing the Illuminati control everything. It's a failure, but the opposite failure. Conspiracy theorists are extremely critical of consensus, because conspiracy theorists are constantly taking in new evidence which they can't contextualise properly. They end up noticing say, certain IQ and wealth distributions and notice that the average person doesn't know or care about it, and then *that* gets thrown in as further evidence for a conspiracy about the Elders of Zion or whatever. People like you who fell for Trump-Russiagate, as you said, "...didn’t believe in an active way, so much as hear that lots of other people believed it, assume it was probably true, and not bother looking into it."
One final thing that isn't quite here or there, but I found it kind of irritating. Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and died from a suicide nobody believes, while Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of trafficking children... to a clientele list which has been and is still deliberately kept secret from us. Is this evidence to a conspiracy theory, or a partially uncovered conspiracy?
Insightful comment. I agree with much of it. But I think I would draw the boundaries around what constitutes a conspiracy theory slightly differently.
You say, "All conspiracy theories are primarily a failure of contextualising information." Which I pretty much agree with except that later you suggest that conspiracy theories that are originated by psy-ops, political warfare or propaganda are not 'real' conspiracy theories.
Another thing that bothers me about this is that it seems like your position would imply that every conspiracy that is only suspected is merely a "conspiracy theory" until such time as it may be confirmed that it was an actual conspiracy at which point it is retroactively declared that it was never a 'real' conspiracy theory at all.
I do agree that Scott thinking, "Huh, I guess Putin probably has Kompromat on Trump." is a far cry from him being a conspiracy theorist but probably there were other people who fell harder for it than he did.
Apologies if I misunderstood or misconstrued you. Understanding is hard.
Let me try to elaborate then on a few things. Hopefully this clears things up some instead of making it worse.
I suppose the first thing to say is that my thought here is that the defining trait of a conspiracy theory is the reasoning used to reach the conclusion, rather than the conclusion itself. All the major conspiracy theories we can think of have been poured over endlessly, and yet they haven't concluded. That is, it is neither the case that they have been shown true, or that they have been proven false to those who believe them. This is because you can't prove what isn't true, and because the defining feature of the conspiracy theorist's thinking is that they will always incorporate new information and change the theory to suit it. So for example, if somehow it came out that the moon landing was in fact fake, I wouldn't say that it was never a conspiracy theory because the only way this is possible is if true fact pattern did not match the fact pattern of the conspiracy theorists OR the moon landing believers.
Trump-Russiagate, it's not a conspiracy theory in the sense that nobody honestly followed a train of logic from an excessively broad range of evidence and then never let go of it. It was an active psy-op handled by active participants. Those not involved in its "active" propagation but who believed it and passively propagated it also did not do so on the basis of faulty reasoning. They did so because they trusted a false consensus. Said false consensus being manufactured.
There is I suppose something to be said about there being real conspiracy theory thinking involved with the broader ideas that some conservatives call "blue-anon". I'm however not convinced this would count either, because it seems like just a sort of run-away affect of Trump-Russiagate. That is, some people are in fact adding epicycles to suggest that various crimes are constantly piling, but actually this seems to be because Trump, or "Trumpism" is still active in politics, so there are still non-conspiracy-theory reasons to perpetuate political warfare against him.
Didn't Sam Harris say that he if he found out that Joe Biden had literal dead babies in his basement (and presumably Biden was the one who killed them) he would still vote for Biden of Trump?
On the pyramid thing. What are the odds that the aliens would have adopted our systems for measuring either latitude or the speed of light? To me the 1:1m coincidence is proof that we live in a simulation. It's the only way this could have happened. So, aliens!
Apologies if someone has already made this point, but 1) chill hippies often aren't really chill, they've just developed a convincing affect; and 2) it's hard to talk about conspiratorial (or any) beliefs if we can't say exactly what a "belief" is.
It could just be that certain ideas are worthwhile to hold. They make you feel exalted over others bc you are wise (you know a secret truth), or calm or reassured (God loves you), or free and invincible (COVID is just a government manipulation of public fear), or categorically superior (that other group of humans is vastly less good/deserving than mine).
But I'm not convinced holding an idea in your head, or even arguing vociferously in its favor, is always the same thing as *believing* it. And in fact I think a lot of conspiracists spend a great deal of energy thinking and talking about conspiratorial notions in order to convince themselves that they believe something they don't necessarily believe.
So I have a test I put certain arguments to (albeit, for obvious reasons, only mentally). It's called The Meatgrinder of Truth.
The MOT determines whether the person arguing, say, that the Democrats are a front for alien lizard people, genuinely believes that narrative or has simply convinced himself that he does (or wants to believe it and hopes that by persuading others, he will himself feel more justified in truly believing it, or whatever). Because we are all more careful when something personal is at stake, and because belief tends to be cheap (ht to Pascal), what the MOT does is erase the value of fake belief.
The test is simple: Would the conspiracist place himself in the maw of a giant meat grinder whose gears are activated by the recitation of a falsehood the reciter knows to be false or unlikely--and then utter the thing he "believes"?
The MOT obviously is unquestionable and unchallengeable itself: it can't be accused of bias or corruption because it is, essentially, God as Fleischhacker. And the subject of its test, confronted with the possibility of being reduced to hamburger, should become motivated very quickly to learn to identify his own capacity for self examination and self-preserving doubt.
I think the part of my brain that makes other people believe in conspiracies is broken. (Hi, other Asperger's/HFA people!) In 11th grade English class, we were asked "Who really killed Jay Gatsby?" I was literally the only person in the class who answered "George Wilson," i.e., the guy who was found dead with a gun next to Gatsby's body, and who believed that Gatsby had killed his wife. Every other kid latched on to one conspiracy theory or another. I believe that in my case, that mental module is instead devoted to cataloguing Star Wars lore. (Star Wars never hurt anyone!)
This is why we need to engage in black magic to ressurect Hitler twice, once as an adult and once as a child, and convince the adult Hitler to rape and eat the child Hitler so that we can unequivocally have legitimate fully justified hate. If we automate this process and add in recliners with robot arms that feed us grapes whioe in space then we will have fully automated luxury space justified hatred.
(This is not serious, do not ressurect Hitler. Do not take this post seriously. It is a joke).
There was a question in the survey that I have been thinking about; it nags at me.
It was to do with internal dialogues and asked what grammatical person they took place in.
I have forgotten what I answered but I have been trying to pay attention to it whenever I wander off by myself. (I cycle between you I and we (never they).
YOU was the front runner, and what I realized was that whenever it was something vaguely negative or judgmental at issue YOU ruled. When I was pleased with myself "I" was the preferred form of address. "We" is very special. I would like it to show up more often.
You just spent 1500 words reinventing the concept of motivated reasoning. Yes, people come up with reasons to justify their emotional stances. This isn't news.
I think you're right to examine the motivating emotion, but I propose a different one. Everyone I know who fell down the conspiracy rabbit hole derive great entertainment value from it. They especially enjoy saying, "man, you won't believe what's really going on," in a spooky, aloof way, and they love hearing people talk that way to them. It's just very fun to get the kinda of special "insights" your second kind of conspiracy theory offers.
A second motivation is group identity. Pinker points out that people process evidence differently when their paycheque or survival depends on it. Conspiracy theories are likely processed by a different part of the brain, the one that handles mythology and group identity, not eating and surviving bear attacks. It makes sense, from an evolutionary perspective, to believe in wacky conspiracies if it helps make you part of a group.
Related to Russia: A new study of Russia-based Twitter posts by New York University researchers buries the canard that Russian bots played any significant role in swinging the 2016 election for Donald Trump.
I never thought the idea that Russia had kompromat on Trump made any sense and it still doesn't. And the Steele dossier was pretty obviously just a collection of wild rumors.
On the other hand I find both the Senate Intelligence Committee's and Mueller's investigative conclusions regarding the 2016 election -- that Russia actively tried to help Trump and hurt Clinton, that multiple Trump campaign staffers including the campaign chair actively tried to coordinate with Russia's efforts, and that Trump was negotiating business deals with the Russian government while running for president -- to be solidly sourced and credible.
Apparently, based on the conversation here, the above means that I have "fallen for Russiagate"? Heh....that's ridiculous but also a bit saddening somehow.
> For these conspiracies, maybe the evidence that people are trying to explain isn’t weird bullet trajectories or pyramid-related coincidences, it’s their own emotions.
I think there's more to this than you're letting on.
1. Many years ago I was in a not-very-good romantic relationship with someone who had a tendency to make me feel very self-conscious. One day I found myself feeling worse about the whole thing than ever, and ended up dumping a bunch of my insecurities out on her. The following day, I was still feeling awful, assuming it was from the relationship issues. I left work early, got home… and threw up everything I'd eaten.
And then shortly afterwards I realized I felt a lot better. Much more relaxed. Turns out for the past two days, I'd been eating leftovers of some food that had given me indigestion, but I didn't notice the physical symptoms, or misinterpreted them as the general sort of upset stomach that sometimes comes with anxiety. It was the opposite: being sick had made me anxious. The relationship problems were still there and did end up (much later) leading to us breaking up, but they weren't the only explanation for why I felt especially like shit that day.
2. People going through a manic or hypomanic episode often deny that they have a problem, instead explaining their emotions by saying they've experienced a spiritual awakening of some kind, or fallen desperately in love, or something else like that. I'm sure you've probably seen this in your psychiatry work.
If you're a man, and a pretty lady chats you up on a wobbly suspension bridge, you might subconsciously assume that the excitement you're feeling, those butterflies in your stomach and your pounding heart, are because of her rather than the bridge, and be more responsive when she asks you for your number.
The point I'm trying to make is that I think there is something to the idea that people have to create explanations for their own emotions, and that they sometimes get it wrong. Given that, it would make sense that simpler, clearer, and less-embarrassing explanations would be more attractive.
Not only is the latitude of the great pyramid equal to the speed of light, but PI squared equals the speed of gravitational acceleration on earth (9.8m/s)! Another conspiracy, centuries in the making, by the illuminati, in the setting of measurement units.
I feel like the strong undercurrent for those crazier ones is importantly undergirded by racism and anti-semitism. Like, people receive all of this hatred against Jews and POC from their environment and parents and such, but find when they encounter normies there's no convincing way to explain why they hate them so much, so they come up with QAnon and George Soros related conspiracy theories and such. The key point being that the emotions they feel so strongly are received when they're very young and don't care about evidence and logical arguments and such, and the conspiracy theory is the post-hoc Zamboni explanation.
It's worth pausing on your description of archaeologists aligning loosely with a bit of suppression of evidence of aliens, because archaeologists have a common experience that doesn't require deliberate, intentional coordination.
Of course, I don't think aliens built the pyramids. But I do think Donald Trump was, in some sense, a Russian agent, even if he and those around him didn't specifically think that. I I think he was cultivated and promoted and indirectly funded and aided through a specific Kremlin-run operation. When his campaign was approached by someone credibly claiming to be a conduit to the Kremlin, offering to coordinate the release of illegally obtained documents, his campaign eagerly instructed them on when to release these. (The source of this information is his campaign itself, which publicly released the email exchange.)
Do I think Donald Trump was trained as an FSB agent, and as a mission to destroy America? No, but I do think he was secretly allied with the Kremlin, in a you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours way that he has used throughout his career.
I posted something in another thread that seems to be relevant here. My definition of anxiety is knowing something to be true but refusing to believe it. I use this framing to guide my internal inquiries. If i am feeling anxiety, then what am I missing?
This all seems speculative (nothing wrong with that at the hypothesis stage) and it’s a field that has actually been studied a fair bit so I’m just going to inject some peer-reviewed research. This is literally just the first link I got from Google, so I have no special knowledge here.
Your antepenultimate Graf, "if only" echos a line from Gulag Archipelago:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
I've always found this observation powerful, as is yours.
I am eternally thankful to you for regularly injecting thoughfulness and clarity into my life, and those of thousands others.
The whole post was wonderful. But this paragraph, tangetial though to the central point, hit something deep -
" (the biggest blackpill of all is that your enemies are just as bad as you think, but careful to only do evil in illegible boring ways that just barely avoid crossing any bright lines - not only will they ruin your life, they won’t even grant you the satisfaction of moral clarity when you’re hating them) "
I was interested in your account of having fallen for the Trump-Russiagate conspiracy theory - and also your characterization of it as binary (either Trump was in the pay of the Russians or he wasn't). I wouldn't view it as binary in that sense - there are a lot of ways to coordinate and accept influence that don't include literal suitcases of cash.
I think there is a good amount of confusion around the concept of a conspiracy theory. Calling every outlandish theory a conspiracy theory keeps us from understanding what a conspiracy theory is and the psychology behind such theories.
For a theory to be a "conspiracy theory", there has to be some conspiring in it. Alien stories made up about how pyramids are built are not conspiracy theories because they are just poor explanations for something that looks otherwise inexplicable--aliens are not conspiring against anyone. Also, belief in them can heavily involve beliefs about "knowing what others do not know", which I feel are connected to narcissistic feelings that are typical among believers in bullshit.
What you call "conspiracies of emotion", on the other hand, are actual conspiracy theories because they involve, for example, Trump conspiring against the US or the global elite conspiring against ordinary citizens. They can also be driven by a lack of good or easy explanations for some phenomena: For example, many Turks do not understand why the US keeps supporting PKK-ally Kurdish militia in Syria. Given the difficulty of digging deeper into the intricacies of international relations to understand the reasons, Turks often swiftly reach the seemingly easiest conclusion: The US is conspiring against Turkey because a stable Turkey would pose a threat to Israel (a considerable amount of Turks believe Israel rules the US) or some other US interests in the region. The real explanation is perhaps much more complex than just the US being mean to Turkey--I assume it involves keeping the power balances in the region, keeping a NATO ally away from facing Russia and Iran on the battlefield, logistical solutions etc.
In conclusion, I think the overarching category here should be "bullshit theories" rather than conspiracy theories. Every bullshit theory may have some cognitive and affective background, and a specific subset of those bullshit theories are conspiracy theories. Of course, I also need to add that some conspiracy theories are built on a well-established evidential basis and true.
PS: I recommend everyone to read "van Prooijen, J. W., & Van Vugt, M. (2018). Conspiracy theories: Evolved functions and psychological mechanisms. Perspectives on psychological science, 13(6), 770-788." It is an excellent paper on the psychology of conspiracy theories.
yeesh
I disagree with this assertion to some extent. A large majority do like to blame their problems on an unknown entity or group of individuals. However enacted macroeconomic policies and geopolitical interests have repercussions that affect my day to day life hence why I do try to investigate the sources of claims, the interchange findings between related entities, the suspected motive interests and more to determine my course of action in life. I don’t do it for hot rage or demonization. If I was interested in selling a service or product and was a little more psychopathic and I was in a position of CEO, there wouldn’t be any reason why I could not make endorsements of them to every individual or industry if I obtained more wealth. The amount of promised claims of resources you can offer to other people dictates your utility to other people, possessing an infinite amount or superlative quantities means I can buy influence. So yes, if you are not intelligent you might be unable to observe human behaviour and understand the principles behind behavioural control and hence have a disadvantaged life as so to speak because you are swept up in the whimsical affairs of other entities. No farmer cares enough about the aristocratic desires of hegemony to go send themselves to the frontlines for a milieu of no gain.
I think it's just more fun to imagine a conspiracy of sinister rich people doing obviously terrible things for malign motives, rather than a conspiracy of overpromoted mediocrities making terrible decisions from a mix of boring corruption (the senator's wife is on the board of a company that cares a lot about the outcome of this bill) and honest incompetence (everyone involved in the decision didn't really understand its implications but thought everyone else did).
Covid lockdowns as a conspiracy by the global elite to reset everything and impose their rule on mankind >> covid lockdowns as a bunch of scientifically illiterate midwits trying to act sensibly while also doing whatever virtue signaling was best for their political future.
"But also, some conspiracy theorists don’t really seem to hate their subjects this much. A lot of Illuminati believers tend to be kind of chill hippies who believe without really worrying. Maybe these people are more akin to the Kennedy and Pyramid believers in Part 1?"
It seems worthwhile to think about belief, and belief of belief. Someone may think that they believe something, but not exhibit any of the characteristics that we (or likely even they) would think ought to correspond to such a belief.
For convenience, we can refer to this as belief of belief. The believer thinks that they believe it, but do not actually believe it in the sense that they believe in other things.
A common example of such a belief is religion. If many religions are true, they would imply a radically different model of the world than if they were not true. This can either lead to believers of these religions having entirely different models of how the world works than nonbelievers (which we could call true belief) or very similar models to nonbelievers (which we could call belief of belief). Both categories seem common when it comes to religion.
Coming back to conspiracy theories, it seems likely that some people nominally believe them (i.e. a hypothetical perfect lie detector would detect no lies in these people were they to say that they believe them), but in truth, only believe that they believe them, rather than actually believing them.
They may think that they believe that the Illuminati are real bad dudes, but that nominal belief is completely divorced from any model they have of the world. If they hear a bump in the night, for example, they won't for a moment consider that it may be Illuminati.
> For convenience, we can refer to this as belief of belief. The believer thinks that they believe it, but do not actually believe it in the sense that they believe in other things.
This strikes me as turtles all the way down.
We can Taboo belief to make their comment a bit clearer. There are two things that are usually in accord, but not always:
Someone says "I believe X" or "I don't believe X".
Someone acts as though X is true, or acts as though X is false.
Belief in belief is when they have the first, but not the second.
A fun instance of this comes from a study on someone with anterograde amnesia (the inability to form long term memories). I'm going from memory, so the details here are fabricated. So there's this doctor taking care of a patient with amnesia and the doctor loses all sense of morality and decides to play a prank that will give them just as much sadistic glee every time they pull it off (or it was an important experiment or whatever). The doctor puts a little zapper in the palm of his hand so when he shakes hands with the patient he gets a nasty shock! The doctor has a good laugh, then they continue on with their experiments. Since the patient cannot form memories, he falls for the same prank the next day, and the day after that, and so on.
Eventually, when the doctor comes in, the patient is hesitant to shake his hand. When asked why, the patient will make things up, saying things like they need to wash their hands, or getting up to do something else, or express a hello by patting the doctor on the shoulder, or just saying that the doctor is a jerk and he doesn't have to shake his hand. The patient acts as if the doctor has a zapper in his hand *despite not knowing* that it's the case.
Usually, belief in belief is used to describe the opposite case, where someone will say something like "the doctor has a zapper in his hand" but then go on to happily shake hands anyways.
The process you describe, Procrustes, relates to the "explainer" function of the left hemisphere, which is revealed in patients who have undergone a "split-brain" procedure, where the corpus collosum connecting the hemispheres is severed (typically to relieve severe epilepsy). The right brain's activities become a black box for the left, but the left brain (where verbal skills chiefly reside) observes and explains them, often in a parodically rational (and inaccurate) way. The research is associated with Michael Gazzaniga, who has described it in non-technical writings. Here's an online interview that provides an overview:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/15/532920899/the-roots-of-consciousness-were-of-two-minds#:~:text=In%20the%201960s%2C%20a%20young,of%20the%20human%20brain%20forever.
I've myself observed that the type of learning you describe can occur in people who are severely disabled in memory creation. I think the basic thing to bear in mind is that we generally overstress the role of the prefrontal cortex's executive function in the ongoing maintenance state of a person interacting with the world. There are many areas of the brain with memory functions, and those functions operate independent of the executive function. (A pianist who tries to play a complex piece by "consciously" remembering every finger motion will be unable to play even a few bars in at tempo.)
Whenever someone says that they’re going to ‘taboo’ a particular word it never fails that what you get is a circuitous, verbose rediscovery of a common concept, often articulated simplistically and at least one level below where the conversation could have gone on.
Yes, you’ve correctly identified that some people who believe things often don’t act in accord with their beliefs. No, you don’t need a redundant and obtuse new term, “belief in belief” to get hold of this—it’s called hypocrisy, and it’s common with all kinds of beliefs, for all kinds of different reasons, at different times, which is the important bit: it’s not characteristic of certain beliefs, it’s characteristic of the circumstances under which you espouse them.
Thus a Christian in a country where Christians are persecuted and killed may continue to evangelize knowing that he is under threat of death; may hypocritically apostasize when actually arrested for his evangelism, despite his belief that says his martyrdom would lead to Heaven; may then be released, evangelize once more, and this time be condemned and happily sing hymns as he is lit on fire rather than apostasize.
People are weak; they don’t always follow their deeply-held beliefs under pressure, but that doesn’t mean that particular belief is special. The same goes for many stories of ideological spying, or those who want to do away with capitalism all their lives and yet happily go to their 9-5. Hypocrisy doesn’t mean disbelief necessarily, and you need more nuance to understand this that the rather cavalier frame you’re using now.
You've described hypocrisy accurately, and that isn't what was being discussed. What's being discussed is where the conscious mind says to itself that it believes something, but the actions don't correspond to what that belief would engender.
Or, maybe that *is* a kind of hypocrisy, but it's not a version where the person notices that their actions don't correspond to their claimed beliefs, or if they do they explain it away even to themselves.
But hypocrisy as used usually involved lying in the sense of full conscious awareness and participation, and that isn't what is being discussed.
I disagree for two reasons.
One, we shouldn’t act as if we have full awareness of the internal mental phenomena of others. We don’t. When we see someone behaving hypocritically we don’t actually know if they are completely unaware of their hypocrisy or merely pretending unawareness. People are often self-contradictory and absent a miraculous machine which doesn’t exist that can probe their exact mental states and report their beliefs during confession and action, we have no standing to make the claims you are making.
Two, your definition of hypocrisy is just plain inaccurate to the concept. It doesn’t require conscious practice, even if much hypocrisy is conscious dissimulation (and I would argue that most hypocrisy is not conscious, or at least not fully conscious: many are the very rich who despise the greed of billionaires without feeling even a twinge about their own lack of charity). I checked a few dictionaries and none of them require self-awareness, although some have conscious lying as a secondary definition (though never to the exclusion of the more basic act of not practicing what you preach).
"If they hear a bump in the night, for example, they won't for a moment consider that it may be Illuminati."
I think we enjoy such 'beliefs' the same way we enjoy thriller and horror movies. We don't really believe in vampires or global secret societies, but it's entertainment and fun. The same way I like messing around with astrology in a very, very amateur fashion but I don't really believe it - I'll read up all about Mars in Leo and the influence of the Houses but I don't take that as a way to live my daily life. It's fun, it's fun to discuss all the finer points. The same way we get into debates about sports teams and TV shows and fantasy novels.
Do Balrogs have wings? In the real world this has zero effect one way or the other, even if it were true that Balrogs do indeed have wings. But it's fun to argue over it. That kind of "conspiracy theory" belief is the same level.
FWIW, when I was just out of college I spent a couple of years investigating whether astrology was valid. I was taught by someone who exchanged lessons in astrology for lessons in programming. (He wanted to accurately calculate certain astrological relationships, and this required Bessel functions.) The result was that I could accurately calculate a horoscope from first principles, and he stopped being an astrologer and became a programmer. But he *did* believe in astrology in the full sense. (I'm not sure about later.) I found that astrology really could explain just about anything after it happened, but I couldn't use it for useful predictions.
That said, my personal horoscope really does predict lots of things that are true of me, and I haven't noticed that it made any real errors. E.g. one of the meanings of Capricorn rising is "this person is/will be a structure freak". And even among programmers, that is one of my notable characteristics.
Explanation after something has happened is generally a result of hindsight bias. Funny bit from Googling https://www.instagram.com/p/ClJ4YYKja5V/?hl=en
>explain just about anything after it happened, but I couldn't use it for useful predictions.
What other "accepted" branch of knowledge or field of endeavour that has the same property ?
The 2 things that immediately come to my mind is History and Economics. Every "Explanation" in history is like "XXX said in 1920 that maybe the Empire fell because money wasn't enough for all the conquests, then YYY came in 1940 and said XXX is obviously a dumbass and the true reason the Empire fell was because they relied too much/little on slaves, and then ZZZelina came in 1960 and said all those before her were dumb toxic males and the *true* reason the Empire fell was because they oppressed their women too much".
I don't want to send a wrong message with this, I absolutely love History. But its explanations are stories, they don't have any obvious utility besides tying loose ends, a satisfying curve to be imposed on raw data points but can't be extended beyond.
Economics are similar, with the additional pain that the speculative just-so ramblings have real world consequences, and sometimes they use impenetrable math and made up statistics so making fun of them is harder.
I think astrology is actually more like Tarot cards. I did a study of them, too. Properly understood they are always correct. (Well, except possibly for the court cards, I never did properly understand them.) This is because they are predicting things that are always true. (Or almost always true.) The value of Tarot is that it can cause you to examine choices you would have overlooked. (I don't find that a big enough value to continue investing time in it, but it really is present.) It's sort of like the I Ching in that way, but the real meaning is a bit less accessible. So if the sun is square Mars, something is going to happen involving action that will have a lot of friction. But this is nearly always true. However, it *can* be valuable to look over the situation and see how you can minimize that.
I could go into a lot more detail, but that's the basic idea. The systems can be useful, but you've got to understand what they do. (My teacher didn't understand that, and was hung up on accurate calculations.)
Honestly, shadowy elites pulling strings behind the curtains just doesn't sound that bad to me, given how well democracy is working out.
I have a quasi-conspiracy theory that I'm not sure how much I really believe: Politicians are actually pretty smart, and are just playing dumb to pander to the median voter. They're engaged in a delicate balancing act where they try to give voters just enough of what they ask for to get enough goodwill to keep getting reelected, while endlessly delaying giving into the masses on the stuff that really matters, in order to minimize the damage done.
If I knew for a fact that this were true, I'd have a lot more respect and and goodwill towards them than if I knew for a fact that they were playing it straight.
It's not at all unusual for politicians to develop an outward appearance, including different mannerisms, ways of speaking, *accents*, and level of intelligence that's different than their actual attributes. In many cases this is obvious and almost silly to elaborate on, like how Nixon swore like a sailor on the Nixon tapes, but not at public events. Of course politicians avoid being actively offensive to their voters! But then sometimes Hillary Clinton has a southern accent when speaking in South Carolina, or George Bush plays up acting dumb and "mis-speaking" to appear more folksy.
Unfortunately, my best guess is that reality is a mix of the two options. Most politicians are probably at least a little bit more canny than they appear, but some are really just idiots - including some idiots that seem to generate a lot of publicity, like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Though I think that she's a lot more capable than most people give her credit for, it's just that she really does use those skills to promote some really dumb ideas that she seems to genuinely find persuasive. I think Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are both incredibly intelligent and amazingly good at pursuing their goals. For Nancy my guess is that her goals are aligned with personal financial gain, and for Mitch power and control. The other stuff they do appears to be sometimes a smokescreen or something to get future votes. They do at least both seem very good at identifying things that "the people" want that would be bad (and silently killing those things) and also things that are needed no matter who is in charge (and those things miraculously fly through Congress on a voice vote after weeks of other bills being "just couldn't get the votes from [the other party]."
Based on the real politicians (local level) I've met, I'd say it's a mix. You get the smart cookies who fancy themselves statesmen (or women) who are just putting in the tedious time until they reach the real level they're going for, where they will bestride the world stage. They tend to go for the "pander to the masses but not too much" line and often it works, though equally often as well the voters know this is what they're doing and so they can turn on the smart cookies.
Then you get the dumb but earnest lot who really are playing it straight.
The ones who manage to thread the needle of being smart but also coming across as "one of you guys" are rare but do well. Bill Clinton versus Hillary Clinton is a great example of this; Bill was convincing as "ordinary guy who likes a beer and playing sax" while Hillary was excoriated for trying to do the same - see the hot sauce thing where even if she genuinely did like hot sauce, the way she did it was criticised as "does she think us black people are dumb enough to fall for this?"
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/hillary-clinton-hot-sauce
Bush and Trump in their ways also managed to pull it off; the media in general and a lot of the public liked to present Dubya as a buffoon who couldn't tie his own shoelaces and only got where he was on Daddy's coat tails. That this was the public image of a scion of East Coast elite who went to Yale - a bumpkin if you disliked him, folksy if you liked him - was interesting and showed that the crafted image of the Texan down-home guy *worked*. (Apparently he and John Kerry had similar grades while at Yale, but Bush was Chimpy McHitler while Kerry was the smart guy smeared by right wingers).
Kerry always struck me as a guy who had spent his life around people who were sharper than he was, and he was desperate to keep them from figuring it out. He sounded good when speaking, but if you listened to the actual content, there was no there there.
I tend to think it's the opposite: the real terrifying truth is that the global elites aren't much smarter than the rest of us and are frantically making it up as they go along. The world is shitty and cruel a lot of the time; it's easier to believe this is due to some horrible evil Bad People out there being evilly evil than to believe, Moloch-style, that most people are genuinely doing their best with internally consistent moral frameworks and this is what we've ended up with. If the organ harvesting pedophiles are in charge than you can hate them while being simultaneously powerless against such devilish puppet masters. If everyone's just muddling along you're stuck instead debating a bunch of ambiguous political points without even being sure you're on the right side.
"The rest of us" is doing a lot of work here. Smarter than the median citizen? Almost certainly. Smarter than the median ACX poster? Maybe not.
You could still question how much they are smarter than the average person in functional ways. For instance perfectly free global trade is fantastic in itself and smart to believe and promote. But rapid offshoring causes a large shock to the working class that is a pillar of support for Trump and causes human suffering. And it turns out trusting that trade would align democratic nations with Russia and China was smart but untrue and strategic things should be protected and the question asked whether trade with China irrespective of their politics is a good idea at all
“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.
The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.
The world is rudderless.”
Alan Moore
I worked for about 4 years for a trade association in DC that did lots of lobbying for a sometimes vilified industry (Nuclear Power). When I started the job I thought politicians were dumb. But after my time there I came away with the impression that no all of them are pretty smart but the voters are dumb. Later reading the myth of the rational voter I came to the conclusion that the voters aren't dumb but they just have near zero incentive to become smart about politics.
So that leaves us with a situation where the number one qualification for the job is to appeal to a majority of voters that are not very well informed and pretty dumb about politics/government/economics etc. The only saving grace is that voters do tend to punish bad outcomes and high profile things that they don't like. So the intelligent politician needs to straddle the line of playing to dumb voters but not doing something so dumb that it causes really visible bad outcomes.
Of course at the fringes there are true believers in both parties with crazy views. But they usually come from very safe districts and are not the swing voter when it comes to legislating. I don't think even those folks are dumb. They certainly have IQs above average. Its just that even smart people can be crazy and because their districts are safe they don't face any feedback to limit the craziness.
If I recall correctly, George W Bush lost his first election for Texas governor by coming off as an educated elite (which he was), and won subsequent elections by playing up his Texas accent and moving his vocabulary and image downmarket.
I think the median high-level politician is quite a bit smarter than the median citizen, but maybe not so impressive compared to scientists or software developers or investment bankers or the like.
In 1958, George Wallace ran for governor of Alabama. He spoke out against the KKK and was endorsed by the NAACP. He lost the primary to a candidate endorsed by the KKK.
Thereafter, Wallace adopted a stance as a strong segregationist.
Can someone once again link that philosophical dialogue with the scientist with a machine that can prove someone's beliefs are different than they think? Google fails me.
Search for "the experimental epistemologist raymond smullyan pdf".
Thank you! Here's the extremely relevant link: https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/epistemologicalNightmare.html
That said, I probably do tend to agree with OP that people can be mistaken about their own beliefs. But...
You're welcome!
FWIW, I've heard (friend of a friend) of a genuine paranoid who was convinced of multiple conspiracies, but decided that since he was still alive one of the stronger conspiracies wanted him to stay alive. OTOH, he HAD been committed to an asylum.
Why invent a new meta category like belief of belief ?
A much simpler model is the "Belief Network", I call it the spreadsheet model for reasons that will become clear.
1- Your beliefs are nodes in a graph in the Computer Science sense (a network of nodes interlinked by edges), an edge exists between 2 beliefs if they are related in some way (implication, falsification, contradiction, support, instance-of,etc...).
2- The correct way to update this graph is recursively : you update a single belief, then for each belief that was linked to it, you update it accordingly, and for each belief *those beliefs* link to, you update it accordingly, and so on and so forth till the whole thing stabilizes to a fixed point or you timeout.
3- But sometimes, people do a "truncated" or a "depth-limited" update. They update a single belief and forget to update all the beliefs that link to it, or they update those but forget to update the second level of linking, etc... In short, they don't "propagate" the belief all the way, the rest of the belief graph doesn't know a belief has been updated, only a small local part around the updated belief.
The spreadsheet analogy comes from the property of spreadsheets to recalculate all the formulas on each single-cell change, this is ideally what humans should also do : recompute the entire worldview on each new fact or realization, or at least periodically, but they don't for a variety of reasons. (Maybe Biology is just too crufty and inexact, maybe recomputing worldviews is intractable in general, maybe the true edges for the belief graph are unavailable and have to be inferred and sometimes we do a bad job and don't infer an edge for beliefs that should be linked, etc...)
Religions and Conspiracies that don't radically change other beliefs are just a failure of propagation in this model. Their believers don't propagate the massive update up the network.
Belief-propagation is computationally intensive. If your beliefs are statements in propositional logic, then seeing if all your beliefs are consistent with each other is an NP-complete problem that takes exponentially longer with each belief you add. So brains compartmentalize because not compartmentalizing is basically impossible.
What would you consider a “proper” response, given the things they believe? Maybe you think because nobody’s calling for the guillotine, that’s evidence of their “true” beliefs revealed. Alternatively, maybe it’s just evidence you misjudged their character.
Thanks for writing this so I didn't have to. However, I don't think the best way to describe this is just that they 'belive they believe' nor hypocrisy (tho it may also qualify as that).
It's just that their mental state shares some aspects with what we call belief and not others. It's like asking if ChatGPT believes some fact. Well maybe it regularly reports that the claim is true when prompted some ways but not when prompted in others. It may seem to reasons as if it is assuming that fact with some kinds of prompts but not others. Does it believe that fact is, ultimately, ill-defined (well maybe for chatGPT the and is no but make it a bit more capable in that case). Same thing here.
As an aside, this illuminates an important issue in AI safety. You can be very intelligent in one sense (able to reason generally etc) and still not transfer what you assert in a house of worship to other parts of your life and the same may we'll be true of AIs. So we can't assume that they'll act as if they are optimizing a single simple function across all kinds of interactions.
This is an excellent point. I'm frequently surprised how many Christians are perfectly happy to fervently believe in Jesus their whole lives, without ever inquiring as to what Jesus's name was.
Thanks for the compliment. Of all the examples of cognitive dissonance, though, I'm not sure this is the one I would choose.
Most Christians don't speak Ancient Hebrew or Greek, so they'll be dealing with imperfect transliterations regardless. Would their Christian experience obviously be enriched considering ישוע => Ἰησοῦ => Iesus => Jesus?
Learning Jesus's name would be kinda silly but that's just a poor example.
A better one is they don't act like they really believe in the afterlife or that the bible contains the secrets to a good life either. Most of my church growing up would go to church on Sunday but even though they said they believed in eternal reward for being good they never worried about that the way they would a promotion or a chance of cancer. If their relative moved across the world for a great life back when that meant little/no contaxt (even if it involved substantial risk) they'd miss them but be happy for them. I've yet to see a parent happy at a funeral.
If you take catholicism seriously probably the best thing you could possibly hope for is for your children to die right after their first confession. No one actually acts like that.
Maybe you think that's all just about the uncertainty? But then you can't explain why they rarely study theology or read the Bible for the insights they claim it contains. Why would you be reading self-help books before looking to the book you claim is written by god to guide you?
Sorry, this is a big part of why I became an atheist. When I believed I took the shit seriously. I learned that not only don't other ppl take it seriously but they also don't want to deal with someone who does.
Now that I've had enough friends become priests I realize many of them do really believe in something but what that thing is bears very little resemblance to the beliefs of your average catholic.
I'm just saying, if I literally believed that the most important thing in the history of the universe involved this one guy who was literally God, and people told me they refer to him as something or other, in like the first 5 minutes I would ask what his name is, and if people didn't know I'd try to find that out like probably before the next time I eat any food
Really? The whole time I was growing up religious I took it very seriously (indeed my problem was mostly that no one else did) and that seemed like the least important thing.
You believe these are events of deep metaphysical and moral significance involving a being beyond our comprehension and the thing you'd focus on is what arbitrary sound the people back then used to distinguish him from the other villagers?
That's like finding out David Bowie wants to pay you a bunch of money to jam with him onstage and asking what his real name is before asking how he heard of you, why he wants to jam with a musical nobody, what songs does he expect you to play and how/why he either faked his death or was resurrected. That's just a trivia question and there are alot more important matters to consider.
Tangential point but there’s a history podcast called MartyrMade which has a 3-episode series on Epstein, and somewhere in there the host spends 40 minutes going over the evidence for, but stopping short of endorsing, Pizzagate. It was an interesting listen and while I still find these conspiracy theories to be lunacy, I do think the world is weirder than I realized and I became a bit more sympathetic to its believers.
Not an easy listen since it goes into the gruesome details of child abuse rings, but I recommend it for those interested.
If you take out the very specific idea that rich elites were abusing children using a *pizza shop* then we already know that the allegations otherwise were true! Epstein was running a program where he took rich elites to a private island to have sex with underage girls. This is known, including lists of people who went to this island - if not proof that they actually raped the children who were there to be [statutorily] raped by the rich elites visiting.
If anything, it appears that those implicated wanted the theory to get as much press as possible in a misdirection about the pizza shop, making the pizza shop central instead of some weird detail that could be cut out as trivial.
Pizzagate predates the Epstein case, though. The original reason the pizza shop came to people's attention was because Hillary Clinton's emails mentioned a local pizza place and the crazies assumed that stuff like "taking the kids to get pizza" was code word for bringing kids to be trafficked. (Or something like that, I don't have the time to look up the exact emails they used as evidence). So Pizzagate had been circulating for almost 3 years before Epstein got arrested. If he's part of Pizzagate now, then that was a retcon, trying to give it some credibility by connecting it to a real sex criminal.
"This conspiracy was invented by the conspirators to distract from the real conspiracy" is a popular idea because it seems really clever, but trust me, conspiracy nuts don't need any help filling the air with crazy theories that sound more interesting than the real thing.
Minor detail here, but this conspiracy theory initially spread via online forums where "cheese pizza" was used as a cheeky code word for "child porn." It naturally made more sense to them that there'd be a coded conspiracy where talking about pizza somehow referred to child exploitation than it would to a person not immersed in that very specific Internet argot.
It's a bit like how there were bizarre news stories and police investigations over ritual satanic sexual abuse of children at daycares, which were plainly nuts, at the same time that there really was a decades-long conspiracy of silence and indifference over sexual abuse by priests in the Catholic church.
Yeah, kinda like the decades-long conspiracy of silence and indifference over sexual abuse by teachers in the public education system.
Pizzagate predated Epstein's most famous arrest, yes, but not Epstein's criminal behavior. It had been going on for years prior. Lots of people were nominally aware of it (I myself had read stories about Epstein being shady years before his eventual arrest). He was first investigated for similar charges in 2004. Pizzagate surfaced in 2016.
The second part is not that the conspirators *created* the conspiracy theory, but that once the heat was ramping up, amplified a very silly version of the conspiracy to distract from and discredit a more accurate version.
No, major outlets were occasionally writing about Epstein for a decade before society took action on it. For some reason (conspiracy!) it never gained traction ... until it did.
If you take out the pizza shop, and the specific participants allegedly involved, and the exact times and dates the crimes were supposed to have happened--in other words, all the central elements of the theory--then yes, it is true that some elites have abused some children. That claim is so banal that it's hardly worth affirming or denying, Epstein or not. It's like claiming that it's basically true that you're a serial killer of Swedish children, except it wasn't you who killed the children and the "Swedish children" were actually American gangbangers.
Scott, please, I'm begging you -- stop posting the good articles at 12AM Eastern, it drives me crazy. I see the post in my RSS feed, I click the post, then I'm too tired to read and go to bed and I don't read it in the morning when I'm fresh.
Reading Scottposts fresh makes it worth moving to the West Coast, don't you agree?
Europe calling. lol. Somehow I share your pain, but let us all just try to read ACX post when we are fresh. If that is not manageable, what is?
Yep, "tired" is how he and the rest of The Committee _want_ you to first read it....
> For these conspiracies, maybe the evidence that people are trying to explain isn’t weird bullet trajectories or pyramid-related coincidences, it’s their own emotions.
I am very sympathetic to this line of inquiry.
I think another layer here, is why does asking for change have to hinge on a moral argument? It seems to be a human instinct to reach for arguments that are bigger than ourselves. For the global elite, it isn't enough for most other people to say, hey we don't prefer this arrangement, so we are going to work for change. We'd like to not have a global elite. Our preference doesn't feel like it matters, so we feel like we need to argue with big universal moral arguments to get at them.
"So the evidence in favor of “aliens who knew the speed of light built the Great Pyramid” is that it would explain this otherwise baffling coincidence."
But it wouldn't explain why aliens used metric measurements at a time when they had not been invented. Hence, any theory for aliens doing so would imply either:
a) the aliens were time travellers; or
b) the aliens instigated the adoption of metric measurements.
Note: I am generally wary of any claims relating to measurements, as measures are inherently arbitrary. (Does the speed of light theory also work for cubits and whatever time measure they used back then? (did they have a standard measurement of time like seconds?))
Wouldn't it work for any units of length? But they'd still need to predict what a "second" would be.
The comparison is of a velocity (speed of light) to a distance.
If:
x m/s = x m
and
1 m/s = 2 c/s (where c is some arbitrary unit of distance)
then
x m/s = 2x c/s = x m = 2x c
So yes, if only the unit for distance changes then it works. But it still arbitrarily defines the second, without which it will not work. e.g. if you state the speed of light as mph and measure the latitude of the pyramids as miles (though latitude is normally measured in degrees isn't it?), then it won't work.
Duh, I should read better. It's latitude, not length, so, yeah, it wouldn't work with different units of latitude. Thanks for the catch.
Nope. The coincidence is in the numerical values *only* when they are expressed in certain units. If you make the measurements in any other units, the numerical values are different.
Concomitantly, if you allow yourself perfect freedom to choose your units, you can always find (or newly define) a set of units in which the numerical value of any distance measurement has the first 7, or 12, or 10,000 digits of the speed of light.
See discussion of this on the linked post.
The SI adoption of universal weights and measures is based on:
"Since 2019, the magnitudes of all SI units have been defined by declaring that seven defining constants have certain exact numerical values when expressed in terms of their SI units. These defining constants are the speed of light in vacuum c, the hyperfine transition frequency of caesium ΔνCs, the Planck constant h, the elementary charge e, the Boltzmann constant k, the Avogadro constant NA, and the luminous efficacy Kcd."
And the Voyager golden disc uses binary numbers and depiction of hydrogen atoms to let aliens convert our measures into theirs:
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/golden-record-cover/
"In the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0,70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom."
So for the aliens to construct the pyramid using a standard set of measures that were then taught to the natives as the metric system, so that in future they could translate the records left for them by the aliens, is congruent with the theory.
Aliens might reasonably infer the future definition of the meter, since its (original) definition was 1/10000 of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator passing through Paris. That's the kind of fixed natural standard Vulcans would imagine. But the second is trickier. How would they infer what the definition of the second would be? (And they have to get it right to within 1 part per million for the trick to work.) Google suggests to me that the ancient Egyptians did not measure time down to the second. They did use 24 hours apparently, but our hypothetical smart aliens would've had to guess that in the future we would divide each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds.
One might argue that division into 60 is pretty natural, on account of the many useful ways 60 can be divided evenly by small integers (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15...). But then why would we choose division by 10 in our future length units? Why stick with the number of our fingers in the one case, but in the other favor the ease of division (factors of 10 have unusually few even divisors)? The aliens have to accurately predict our inconsistency, so they need to be awesome human social psychologists.
"our hypothetical smart aliens would've had to guess that in the future we would divide each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds."
We get our 60 time unit divisions from the Babylonians - clearly this means that ziggurats were actually rocket launch pads! 😁
Or maybe the Babylonians were interstellar refugees, who alll submitted to surgery to reduce their number of fingers and toes from 60 to 20 in order to blend in. But learning base-10 math for keeping time was too difficult for the older generation, fixed in their starborn ways, and we owe our watchfaces to cranky Kids These Days intergenerational scorn among the Babylonian BEMs from Betelgeuse...
If they did it in natural units (or even better, dimensionless quantities!), that would be more convincing. And if most weird coincidences of this sort were in natural units, I'd believe there's something freaky going on. Maybe God, maybe aliens, time travellers, I don't know.
The angular size of the moon in the sky being basically the same as the angular size of the sun in the sky is the most convincing ones of these. The only possible explanation is that aliens waited until the moon had drifted to precisely this distance from the Earth before they sent down the monolith that made us conscious. (And/or, they built the moon to be big enough for this to be possible.)
What I know about physics can fit in a thimble, but if aliens could travel faster than the speed of light (I'm assuming that's a base requirement for being able to get from Zybrag Gamma to Earth in less than 200b years, but maybe I have that wrong too), then wouldn't they also necessarily have the ability to time travel? Or is this not correct?
I know (or have 'heard', to be more accurate) that time travel would first require one to have the ability to travel FTTSOL, so maybe I have this wrong and just because it's a 'requirement' doesn't mean that time travel 'necessarily follows' from having that ability.
If you have FTL travel and you have special relativity, you also have time travel. I don't know if the reverse is true.
I tuned out Trump-Russiagate after it faded from the news, without ever updating to "oh, that's false." Is there a good summary of what people thought and how it turned out not to be true?
> how it turned out not to be true?
That's kind of the point, the question to ask is the opposite. This is a classic JFK/Oswald case.
There were so many reasons why it is not true (just compare him with known Soviet/Russian assets' in the US and the UK uncovered years or decades later), that there is a lot of evidence on the "not" side and very little on the "yes" side (Trump overtly likes Putin... and too dumb to hide it well).
Strong version of Russia gate: Trump is an active agent for Russia via either inclination or blackmail.
(Not much evidence to support this beyond the circumstantial. He likes Putin and his policies weakened the US.)
Weak version: Russia helped Trump's campaign to win. Some people in Trump's campaign knew about it. The most consequential help was the Russians hacking the emails of a Clinton staffer and then turning them over to Wikileaks. Wikileaks then released them into the news cycle right after the Trump access Hollywood tape came out and then drip fed the emails in 2500 mail batches over the next two weeks in order to keep "Clinton emails" in the headlines.
The strong version has never had any strong evidence while the weak version has been proven true.
I'm still deeply unconvinced that it has been "proven true" that the Democrat email hacks/leaks had anything to do with Russia.
The findings of the Muller report were pretty explicit that the Russian government deliberately released the information to help Trump's campaign. And that members of Trump's campaign were in touch with them.
First (some of whom later confessed and were convicted).
The issue was a) whether there was an explicit quid pro quo or the Russians were just helping Trump win because they preferred him, and the Trump campaign were happy to passively accept the help. And b) whether Trump was aware of members of the campaign communicating with the Russian government or they were freelancing.
(See findings section
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report)
If the burden of proof hadn't been set at "literally an employee of Putin" I feel like this would be considered kinda a big deal
The problem of quid pro quo was always the central issue with the strong version, to my mind. What exactly would the Russians be trying to get from the Trump campaign? They didn't have anything to offer. Indeed, the only thing they could have gotten from it is caught in the act, thereby discrediting the whole effort. If you're Russian intelligence, and you want to ensure Clinton isn't elected, your best approach is to NOT collude outright, but rather to help Trump in a deliberately disconnected way, like releasing the DNC emails (which they did). Indeed, this kind of statecraft is common. Everyone does it, including and especially US intelligence agencies. "I don't want this guy elected, so I'm going to do oppo research the other side can't do." But you don't want to be SEEN doing it, or you hand the other side the argument, "my opponent is a puppet of the CIA!"
This fact should have been a strong prior against the collusion hypothesis. Are there any arguments in favor of collusion being a net-benefit to the Russians? Or to the Trump campaign for that matter? Collusion seems like a lose-lose proposition. Indeed, in a world where Russian interference is discovered by members of the Trump campaign, the Machiavellian move would be to do nothing about it.
(I'm not saying this is the most ethical move, because if later it's found out that they probably knew about the Russian election interference, it might end up in a government report and they look bad.)
I guess you could claim, "Russia fed the Trump campaign secret intelligence about the Clinton campaign". This would imply the Russians offering the services of the FSB to Trump to help him defeat the Clinton campaign. But that was never asserted, to my knowledge. Maybe I just never gave Russiagate enough credulity to understand why people thought it was plausible. Can anyone enlighten me on this? What material gains were claimed/expected from direct collusion as opposed to standard election interference?
1. Collusion weakens people's belief in democracy as a whole. Communism has been the main alternative to democracy for the last seventy years. Thus collusion helps bring the US closer to becoming communist.
2. Potentially they're counting on partisam politics being so bad that exposing Russian collusion just makes half the country support Russian collusion.
3. Putin invaded Ukraine in a fit of nonsense, so Russia doesn't need a logical motive for the accusation to be true.
#1 only works if people find out. Except if they do find out the results become highly unpredictable that maybe Russia ends up undermining their own efforts. It's a one-off with a weird candidate and the result is probably that people don't vote for Trump the Puppet, he loses, and the whole effort is wasted.
I'm not sure Putin is interested in exporting communism to the US. He has expressed a strong desire to weaken the US, but not export communism, to my knowledge. I don't think he has even expressed a desire to reinstitute communism in Russia.
Collusion with the Trump campaign is a really bad strategy for making either communism happen, or for weakening the US.
All this reasoning feels post hoc, not like a plan that could actually work or that a rational actor might reasonably set out to do ahead of time, thinking it was a good strategy for achieving a defined objective.
Is Putin completely irrational? Does his war in Ukraine prove that? I don't think so. Putin invaded Ukraine because he thought he'd be able to roll through Kiev in a week and end the war before summer. Most pundits at the time believed this, too. That invasion was a miscalculation, not a fit of nonsense. Regardless, the collusion narrative predates the war.
If your conspiracy were, "Russian bot farms fuel unfounded conspiracy theories already in place, to weaken the US be stoke division" I'd be inclined to agree that's something they'd do. It fits the logic, and their pattern of behavior. It's the same kind of goose/gander payback for old cold war tricks Putin loves. The US used operation splinter factor - where we 'leaked' false information that we had a bunch of spies in Russia who were never US assets - to fuel Stalin's paranoia and make the purges worse. It was like kicking them when they were down and laughing about it. That's the kind of thing I could see the Russians doing back at us.
Putin's Russia has many faults.
But it's got very little to do with Communism, other than the historical background.
Actually the Mueller report found that the 'hack' was almost certainly faked, the FBI lied egregiously to the FISA courts on multiple occasions, and none of Christopher Steele's subsources had anything but rumor. Mueller chose not to report this but look at his own documents which were entered into court record by Durham. It's pretty clear.
right. partisans have always used the refutation of the strong version as an implicit refutation of the weak version. a motte/bailey or something similar. I am surprised that Scott both (1) ever assumed the strong version as probably true, and (2) dismisses the weak version as a consequence of the strong being false.
The strong evidence that Trump is not a Russian puppet is that his only military action was a missile strike in Syria killing 200 of Putin's 'Wagner Group' mercenaries. Puppets don't do that.
Speaking of conspiracy theories, is there a chance the Iranian government gave him the nod on that?
That's unlikely, given subsequent events. Iran retaliated to the strike with its own missile attacks on Americans stationed in Iraq, and it was paranoid enough about further escalation that it shot down Ukraine International Airlines flight 752 with air defenses.
An endorsed assassination attempt would had either pro forma or stage-managed retaliation, not leaving domestic air defense so paranoid that they get twitchy at a civilian flight on its usual route.
I thought it had been established that Russian agencies had also hacked the GOP but the Democrats were easier to overcome, hence why all their dirty laundry got aired in public?
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/russia-hacked-older-republican-emails-fbi-director-says/
"SINCE HACKERS STOLE emails from the Democratic National Committee and dispersed them across the internet last summer, the world has waited for a parallel leak of Republican secrets. Now on the other side of the election, that second reveal still hasn't materialized. But FBI director James Comey has now told Congress new details of the Republican prong of those political intrusions, which US intelligence now believe were carried out by the Russian government: The attackers penetrated GOP organizations, and also stole Republican National Committee emails, albeit ones less current than those stolen from the DNC."
But of course, equal opportunity attacks don't fit the partisan mongering of "Trump and the Russians worked together to cheat Hillary out of It's Her Turn Now".
That is more damning.
If I steal nude pictures from two people, person A and person B, but I only make person B's photos public, it stands to reason that I want to hurt person B much more than person A.
Nor can you say that person A and person B suffered equal injury.
Yeah, I definitely agree that Putin hates Clinton far more than he hates Trump. I suspect that he sees Clinton as this decades-old family enemy who has been inimicably hostile to him and basically one of the parties responsible for America's general hostility to the Russian state
But I do think it's important to notice that none of this reflects badly on Trump, nor is it any reason not to vote for him
If I try stealing nude pictures from A and B, but the only photos of A I can find are ones where they're in a bikini, but the ones of B are in the same vein as those of the Duchess of Argyll*, and you are looking to maximise scandal - which ones are you going to make public?
In that case, if you publicise both A's and B's photos, people will be more inclined to mock you for thinking a beach photo of someone in a bikini is the same as a photo of a sex act.
*"The evidence discovered resulted in the 1963 divorce case, in which the Duke accused his wife of infidelity and included a set of Polaroid photographs of the Duchess naked, save for her signature three-strand pearl necklace, in the company of another man. There were also photographs of the Duchess fellating a naked man whose face was not shown. It was speculated that this "headless man" was the Minister of Defence Duncan Sandys (later Lord Duncan-Sandys, son-in-law of Winston Churchill), who offered to resign from the cabinet.
...Lord Denning, who was called upon by the government to track down the "headless man", compared the handwriting of the five leading "suspects", (Duncan Sandys; Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; John Cohane, an American businessman; Peter Combe, a former press officer at the Savoy Hotel; and Sigismund von Braun, brother of the German scientist Wernher von Braun) with the captions written on the photographs. It is claimed that this analysis proved that the man in question was Fairbanks, then long married to his second wife, but this was not made public.
...The Duchess never revealed the identity of the "headless man", and Fairbanks always denied the allegation. Long afterwards, it was claimed that there were actually two "headless men" in the photographs, Fairbanks and Sandys, the latter identified on the basis of the Duchess's statement that "the only Polaroid camera in the country at that time had been lent to the Ministry of Defence". In 2013, the daughter-in-law of the 11th Duke, Lady Colin Campbell, stated that the "headless man" was an American executive named Bill Lyons."
But we also can't say that you meant person A to benefit, even if in fact they do benefit from person B's suffering. And we certainly can't say that you and person A are co-conspirators or in any way "colluding". Not even if we have evidence that you talked to person A at some point.
Really, there's not much we can say against person A at all in this hypothetical. Unless we're so intent on damning A that we disregard both reason and decency.
Pardon, but to my last recollection, it has not been proven that the Wikileaks docs came from Russia. It has been asserted by a number of US intelligence agencies but Julian Assange and Wikileaks have always maintained that the source was not Russia. Did I miss an update to the story.
Because otherwise the source of the Wikileaks files depends on who you trust, because we have two groups asserting clearly different factual events and pretty clearly accusing each other of lying. And I get why someone would trust the US intelligence services over Wikileaks but hopefully you would get why people, upon reviewing the activities and statements of US intelligence from Vietnam to Iraq might have reservations.
But again, genuinely, was there ever a clear factual resolution here?
They also tried to hack the RNC. I don’t think they were pro Trump as much as pro chaos. And the bottom line is even in the “weak” version, the left and MSM blew the case wildly out of proportion with any evidence they ever had.
They hated Trump (as I do), and uses that as an excuse to believe silly shit and make up lies.
I mean, there's good reasons for them to have been pro-Trump, since Trump had well-documented favorable connections (business and otherwise) with Russia, which bias him in their favor. And if I were Putin, I would be more confident in my ability to manipulate Trump appealing to his narcissism compared to any other candidate. Also, it's not unreasonable to assume that Putin overestimated the degree to which he could puppeteer Trump, since *everyone's* probably estimates regarding Trump were off.
Sure there are good reasons, there are also good reasons to not want him (he could be unstable/unpredictable). I think the evidence we have from there behavior is that they were playing both sides and mostly just trying to increase rancor and partisan divide.
Right. The Senate Intelligence Committee (of which the majority was Republicans as was the committee chairman) investigated that "weak version" and in August 2018 published their report. While the public version of the report is partially redacted due to classified content, you can read it here:
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf
"The Committee found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election...."
The committee spelled out how the Russian government worked with Trump campaign people to try to help Trump's campaign, notably Paul Manafort while he was campaign chairman.
The committee also concluded that "Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow's intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign...." And then "While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump's electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following the release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort...."
The closest that the Senate Intelligence Committee got to documenting personal participation by Donald Trump in this stuff is, "During the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle, Donald Trump and the Trump Organization pursued a business deal in Russia. Michael Cohen, then an executive vice president at the Trump Organization and personal attorney to Trump, primarily handled and advanced these efforts. In September 2015, Trump authorized Cohen to pursue a deal in Russia through Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of Trump. By early November 2015, Trump and a Russia-based developer signed a Letter of Intent laying out the main terms of a licensing deal that promised to provide the Trump Organization millions of dollars upon the signing of a deal, and hundreds of millions of dollars if the project advanced to completion. Cohen kept Trump updated on the progress of the deal. While these negotiations were ongoing, Trump made positive public comments about Putin in connection with his presidential campaign...."
All of that was put onto the record -- by a committee controlled by Republicans -- 9 months before Robert Mueller issued his investigation report. But in terms of public consciousness and media attention it sank without a trace, I guess because the "strong version" of Russiagate had so captured public discourse on this topic.
I'm sure the evidence implicating Russian influence is as solid as the evidence the government had implicating Russian accounts on Twitter, which Twitter refuted time and time again, according to the Twitter files released. Maybe be a little more skeptical of people who have a vested interest in antagonizing Russia, or at least spreading propaganda among the public establishing Russia as an enemy we simply must defeat.
How does the evidence for the weak version prove anything beyond "Someone important at wikileaks likes trump and\or is annoyed when people focus too much on the craziness of one politician and forget the others" ?
If Russia truly wanted to help Trump, wouldn't the best course of action be to leak the emails directly via social media or whatever other means countries leak things with ? Why go through the unreliable middle man of wikileaks ? for all they know, they could have never released it or released it too late to matter.
> He likes Putin and his policies weakened the US
Last I checked, Trump was both soft and hawkish on Russia. I think concluding he was soft is being very selective with the evidence.
> The strong version has never had any strong evidence while the weak version has been proven true.
This too is overstating the case. The evidence for the weak version is also a bit flimsy.
How it turned out to be not true was the Barr investigations. Every bit of the Steele dossier fails when the sources were interviewed. Igor Danchenko--the Russian source, is a Russian national working for The Brookings Institute, which is a liberal think tank. His testimony is that he and friends made up the pee-tape story over beers. The internet traffic was invented by Joffee who paid researchers to create bank accounts at Russian bank Alfa-Bank, using Trump's email address, sent phishing emails to Trump's computers with faked Alfa-Bank return addresses. The researchers recorded the resulting internet traffic and presented this as evidence of secret communication, to the FBI. Trump associate Carter Page was a regular information source for the CIA, having helped uncover and prosecute Russian spies. But when the FISA court asked CIA if Page was a CIA source, an FBI attorney intercepted the email to FISA court and added the word 'not' thus falsifying documents to the FISA court.
John Brennan, then head of the CIA received a briefly that the Hillary Clinton campaign was going to create the Russia Collusion story, then went on TV and supported the story, even though he knew it was false.
Peter Strozk sent a text to his girlfriend that Trump won't be president, we'll stop him. Strozk was the head of counterintelligence investigations for the FBI, laid a trap, and arrested General Flynn on his first day in office.
My conspiracy theory proves your conspiracy theory isn't true.
I hear there was a conspiracy on 9/11/2001 to bring down the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon. The conspirators sweet talked their way into the US, hacked a series of planes, and then flew them into the buildings. If you think there was no such conspiracy, you're a conspiracy theorist.
Sometimes people conspire. Maybe Trump et al conspired on behalf of Putin et al, or Putin et al conspired on behalf of Trump et al, or a bunch of lefty political types conspired against Trump et al, or... You get the point. If you have a theory for Russiagate that involves no shadowy dealings on anyone's part, I'd be interested to hear it, but I've yet to encounter that argument.
In August 2019, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet gave a speech to the NYT newsroom, which Slate.com published, in which he admitted that the NYT's Plan A conspiracy to dump Trump by promoting the RussiaGate conspiracy theory had flopped due to Mueller's testimony being a nothingburger. So now, Baquet announced, the NYT was switching to their Plan B conspiracy to dump Trump by promoting the 1619 conspiracy theory that America is built on racism and that blacks are the most important Americans.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-editor-after-failure-of-our-russia-mania-plan-a-weve-launched-our-racism-mania-plan-b/
Or at least that's how I interpret the transcript. Baquet is not all that articulate. Nobody else seems terribly struck by Baquet's speech, but it sure looks to me as if it explains a lot of the bizarre events of 2017 to, especially, 2020.
I think Russiagate is a great fit for Scott's "it's based around emotions" theory of conspiracy theories.
Here's Hillary, it's her turn now, she is going to be the First Female Ever, all the media and the pundits are predicting that she's going to win in a landslide. Her campaign is so sure of victory that they engage in internal back-stabbing to get close to the Empress in order to ensure the plum jobs in her court once the coronation is held, instead of working on winning the damn election.
I keep referring to this video, but see all the pundits and all the talk show heads going on about "delicious irony" and "tomorrow night when Hillary Clinton wins" and how preliminary polls show Hillary leading by a mile:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT0AjmeJ_sg
And then the night of the shock results, leaving a lot of people "literally shaking and crying". Nobody can believe it. It wasn't supposed to happen. Everyone is flailing around blaming everyone else. Not enough voters turned out! It was the fault of white women! Someone must be to blame! It was the sexists who hated the idea of a woman in power! It was the racists! It was the Russians! It was the Electoral College, that relict of the slave holders! It was the FBI and Comey and the emails, off with his head!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHG0ezLiVGc
So Russiagate is a perfect fit for angry, shocked, disappointed people who can't accept that not enough voters wanted Hillary as the next president. It can't have been that simple, it must be down to a conspiracy.
Remember Jane back on SSC, the otherwise reasonable lady, who was firmly and unshakeably convinced the Russians had hacked the voting machines and fudged the results? Same reaction: emotionally this is impossible to accept, but a conspiracy makes sense of the unacceptable. Now there are Bad Guys to blame, not the faults of your own candidate and the myriad ways the entire thing went off the rails.
American elites (and many normal people) hated and feared Donald Trump for decades before he was elected president. There's a reason The Simpsons had an episode in the year 2000 with a dark joke about Donald Trump being POTUS twenty years in the future. Hillary Clinton had very little to do with any of the Trump hate.
I completely disagree with that. Trump has been regarded as a buffoon by certain people for decades, but hate and fear? Nope. The reason the Simpson's joke works at all is *because* it was comic exaggeration, like saying a yellow dog gets elected President. If a large numbe of people generally thought he was evil and generally thought it was possible he could have become President, nobody would make jokes about it, any more than they (outside of 4chan) would make jokes about Jeffrey Dahmer becoming President or OJ Simpson becoming dean at a women's college.
On the other hand, I find Deiseach's argument quite consistent with what I remember at the time. Indeed it was not shock that Trump had won the election so much as that Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton, icon and woman of destiny. Had Trump beaten Walter Mondale (or Joe Biden for that matter) the shock and outrage would not have been present.
To be fair, if I were conspiracy theory minded, finding out that the people investigating a Presidential candidate were texting each other about how afraid they were that the guy were going to be President and one of the investigators said, Don't worry, we have an insurance policy - that's something that could launch a few theories.
Instead, CW seems to have shifted the other way, that because there isn't conclusive evidence that affected their investigation, we can confidently conclude that it didn't. People are weird.
Noting that the evidence regarding collusion was not limited to the Steele dossier.
However, in defense of the dossier itself- according to podcasts I found from early in the reporting, by people who seemed knowledgeable about intelligence gathering, the dossier was recognizable at the time as a type of intel that a) is very valuable, and b) mostly consists of factually incorrect assertions.
Specifically, someone convinced a bunch of people (mostly Russians) to share rumors. Most rumors are false. However if it's likely to contain a couple true claims, it is very valuable to intelligence officers, much like a pile of turds with diamonds hidden in it is a very valuable pile of turds. Fishing for these diamonds is a messy but worthwhile process for intelligence agencies (or anyone else who benefits from non-public info), even if the raw turd pile comes from a process that's shittier than their usual.
When intel leaks to the media it is mostly diamonds, however this time Buzzfeed posted the raw turd pile. Most of us did not know to expect 90% turds.
Anyone whose case against Trump relied on uncritically accepting the dossier's claims- or uncritically assuming half of them were true- deserves to look bad. However to reject the whole thing based on the existence of the turds, or based on the existence of people who believed the turds, is the genetic fallacy.
You still don't know to expect 100% turds. The normal state of a turd-pile is not any percentage whatsoever of hidden diamonds, and it would take extraordinary evidence for it to be worth your while to either pay real money for a pile of turds or even to dig into one deposited on your doorstep, hoping to find diamonds.
The Steele Dossier appears to have been a standard-issue pile of turd and nothing but. And reasoning "there were a *lot* of accusations, so if even 10% of them are true than Trump is a Very Bad Man", makes you a fool to be manipulated at will by anyone willing to lie to you. And, not even type-7 lying, because they'll be saying that they heard this from some guy and they truly did hear it from some guy.
Seems like the obvious reason you can think that Hillary Clinton, who you hate, rapes babies and eats their organs, but you can't think the same thing about your wife, who you also hate, is that you actually know your wife and have a pretty realistic idea about what she's capable of. As far as most people are concerned Hillary Clinton or Trump or other conspiracy targets might as well be fictional characters.
I think something a lot of popular conspiracy theories have in common is that the specific theories address subjects that are way outside of the theorists' actual experience, where anything could be true as far as they know.
That's kind of the point. Conspiracy theories about people you actually know are no fun, because Debbie Downer common sense keeps interrupting to point out tedious deflating things like "well George couldn't actually hit the side of a barn with a rilfe" or "Elaine has to go sit down when she sees the tiny amount of blood that a finger cut brings."
For Clinton and other partisan figures, I suspect belief-as-attire plays a role. Once a negative belief about her becomes generally accepted among whatever group of conservatives you associate with, then denying it or expressing doubt can look like a sign that you're defecting from the group. Inversely, affirming more hostile claims (up to a point) signals more intense commitment to the group.
Well bear in mind she actually comes across as a shrill cold-hearted fake, as an individual human being. She could not have been elected county dogcatcher were she not married to the magnetic Bill Clinton, which is terribly ironic given her I Am Woman Hear Me Roar shtick[1]. By contrast even the most partisan righties acknowledged that Bill Clinton really seemed to feel your pain (unless you were a slightly chubby starry-eyed intern), and even the most committed lefties acknowledged that you had to really focus to hate "Teflon" Reagan personally, genial and gentle soul that he seemed to be.
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[1] And of course we all know it was her Lady Macbeth ambition that kept her married to the old rapey bastard, when any woman of spirit or conviction would have heaved his ass-groping ass out of the homestead as far back as Arkansas days. That did her no good either, although admittedly she was kind of damned if she did, damned if she didn't there.
I think it's a combination of this with the difference in scale. Around famous people there is always a thermal noise of rumors and speculations. If they aren't particularly hated, the rumors usually die down quickly, but if they are, then every rumor has a high chance to explode.
It's kinda like how whenever there is a protest the police hates, it can often find some incidence of violence as a pretext for escalation, since the larger the crowd is, the more statistically likely it is.
This reminds me I recently came across an astounding example of “bitch eating crackers” syndrome. Some politician had a pet pig and had to give it away when they moved. A long time later, that person then gave the pig to a third owner, then the pig got injured, the politician reached out to the place that was taking care of the pig to express his thanks, and this proved he was a terrible pet owner who never cared about the pig, somehow.
This was a viral tweet with thousands of likes.
I think this is about Logan Paul, a popular Youtuber? He's been recently exposed as the organiser of a (yet another) crypto scam, and the pig thing was initially misrepresented as him apparently having directly abandoned it.
Ah, I think I had assumed people would only get that upset at a politician. My mistake, I should have known better.
I think you're talking about Logan Paul – he's a YouTube personality rather than a politician.
Story here: https://kotaku.com/logan-paul-pearl-pig-crypto-animal-rescue-youtube-1849970003
I agree with your take but I think it's a little more nuanced. The animal sanctuary that rescued the pig said essentially (a) we found this pig that Logan Paul owned, (b) it's in terrible condition and looks to have been abandoned, (c) isn't it terrible how people buy vanity pets and then abandon them. The implication was that Logan Paul had bought and then abandoned the pig himself.
Internet media outlets then reported this fairly uncritically. Subsequently, Paul gave a statement saying he had rehomed the pig, and unbeknownst to him it had then been rehomed again. This wasn't public knowledge before, and mostly new and existing articles took it into account and became more balanced.
The internet definitely dislikes Logan Paul (e.g. he was implicated in a recent NFT scam, although again his side of the story is that he didn't intend for it to be a scam and was mislead by bad faith counterparties) so people were definitely ready to believe this. The outlets reporting on the story also didn't get his take before publishing on the pig story, which they should have. I don't think it's quite "bitch eating crackers" because the facts as presented were quite unpleasant – it just turned out they weren't the whole story. It's more a case of, as Scott says,enthusiastically sharing 'proof' that someone you hate really is as bad as you say.
If I had a nickel for every time media outlets posted stories uncritically....
Coffeezilla is the Youtuber who exposed Logan Paul's "Cryptozoo" scam. I haven't watched the videos in their entirety, but one thing for sure: it's quite difficult to have any amount of sympathy/charity towards Logan after watching. He still bears responsibility for his fans having lost millions of dollars. Paul's defense in a rebuttal video (that is now deleted) assigns responsibility onto "conmen" developers that tricked him, but it doesn't justify his behavior in staying silent about the whole ordeal for months (assumedly hoping people will move on, no retribution would occur) until it was exposed to mainstream audiences via Coffeezilla. Yesterday, Logan did announce a "$1.3 million rewards program for disappointed players" where he claims he was unintentional and "I was defensive because I never scammed anyone with this project." I can't fully fault the man; some do have a genuine dislike for him after all the apology videos & the Japan suicide video incident. His reputation is already fragile enough. Maybe he was panicking in the background or so uncertain about what to do that he decided to keep quiet on the whole situation as it unfolded into disaster and fans lost money. People would've been slightly more forgiving if he just came out earlier and admitted he ****ed up, big time.
Donald Kingsbury's 'Psychohistorical Crisis' ends with a numerate, sensible argument that the units of measurement used in the Great Pryamid and later in ancient Rome were derived from an ancient version of Foucault's Pendulum. Kingsbury gets this from Livio Stecchini, who was a real expert on ancient metrology, but according to Wikipedia's passive voice was also considered wrong.
I don't foster any hate or resentment towards individuals in positions in power, The matter-of-fact is, people have aligned interests, and they coordinate together in real life to get to certain objectives. There is no objective reason to presume everyone in the world has the same interests as you, it is more of an advantage to assume a cynical position that people have interests that are counter to your own (i.e. stranger) and hence our levels of trust are variable/decreased relative to people whom we do know and encounter.
Just because individuals spend a majority of their lives working and ignorant of the things that occur around the world (i.e. men who enjoy blowing up people's bodies like ragdolls as shown in WikiLeaks videos of military officers commanding others, or the funding of bio-warfare labs amongst the Russian border) does not mean people don't act in concerted ways that may be deemed as 'evil'. There are many such quotes made by people in positions of power, the question is why do we possess a normalcy bias that just because everything in our every day life seems 'normal' and that there are no people who enjoy doing 'evil' or 'harming' people, why that applies to every individual in position of power, given the fact that there are many geopolitical interests of the elite that are not necessarily in the same lieu of interests as the general public.
There is also a notable vestige of available play-books and operation books by various think-tanks and well-funded conglomerates online which anyone can read, which also coincidentally aligns with many of the various narratives pushed out by the media.
The main question is, if you are in possession of the ability to instrument credit in any form without repercussion, why would it not lead to the concentration of power in the long-term if you pass an intergenerational dynasty of similar natures (i.e. being the best propogandists)? There are liability exclusion clauses, there are special interest groups, there is regulatory capture, there are groups with conflicts-of-interests -- if I gave you X amount of money and resources and ensured you the safety of your family and friends just to tell a modest lie, or to look the other way, why would it not be conceivable to do it for large entities of people who possess large influence, whether it be the media, the intelligence agencies, technocratic enterprises, etc? Is there a similiar 'trust' bias that people seem to possess or something?
There is often a tactic used in politics, ''poisoning the well' and 'limited hangout' where individuals make associations between the opposition strawman and the purported reality, with obfuscation of truths through half-truths/delayed-truths to make it more amenable/disagreeable to the general public, or co-opting. Not to mention the fact that behavioural scientists are employed to change the opinions, attitudes and behaviours of people. I find it difficult to reconcile why people believe it's hard to coordinate large factions of people who possess aligned interests. If I'm a CEO I would lobby for X if I know my ROR exceeded my costs. If I owned the ability to generate credit, I could tie it to explicit policies with vague criterions to further any ideological pursuit I wanted. If anything, the greater you ascent to power, the more likely you will be to abuse and use it. There are more self-interested and selfish people in the world than there are altruists, and high-trust individuals. From a game-theoretical point of view, groups are superior to individuals at a resource level. And groups that are highly 'kinship' oriented outperform humanitarian altruists because of their ability to use a strategy similiar to psychopaths (negative-frequency dependency) because they are able to mimic positive perceptions of themselves as cooperators while in reality they are defectors. While tit-for-tat with forgiveness/contrition might be the predominant solution, the reality is incrementalist policies with imperceptible changes that are seemingly innocuous is an intelligent method to subdue any population, because they increasingly become conditioned and accepted to a general prevailing environment -- in the same way we artificially select for domesticated dogs that best 'respond' to us, the 'elites' can do the same methods to the general public in the name of greater social good or social collectivism.
If I loudly preclaim ''I prefer the existence of X individuals over Y'' 50 years in the past and my descendants still live on, and the general public has not accepted ''X over Y" it does not mean I would not be working towards my political goals, it would just mean I would be more discrete about it. There is a scientific method towards anything, including political change and acceptance. The fact that people can't understand this and still think ''it can only happen in the past, it will never happen'' is a testament to the fact that the general population is becoming increasingly docile and self-domesticated, in a belief that there is an authority figure or some consolation of appointed experts that can dictate what is deemed to be truth or consensus when in reality, only independent self-investigation can affirm those notions or reject them on the precipice of merit (i.e. similar to geniuses outcast by the orthodoxy) simply because humans are social/herd animals that have a disposition to conform to those with similar views and have a hard time rejecting counter-evidence without a change in association of emotion with those beliefs.
It is not just X entity of people whom control everything, it is a network of networks of individuals who possess various modalities of power. In the similar way that the net used to be structured as an organic sphere of many nodes has consolidated, in the same way that our media companies, our banks, our food companies are all owned by the same supranational organizations (i.e. you can look it up, there is an illusion of choice with all these sub-brands of X entities). Just as network theory would predict.
We know age correlates with wealth, because people had more time to accumulate wealth. In the same way, dynasties with people who live and continue to share those values of preserving, maintaining and growing their wealth should see similar outcomes in reality. I am lambasted by the idea that people are incapable of imagining people planning to harm others, because I am one of those individuals who do possess said capacities to think so without such conscience, and I share certain inclinations and beliefs to those held by the elite. There are more than eight billion humans with various genetic configurations and environments, some must undoubtably have the ability a greater capacity for influence than others, whether by social control or not; to suggest the opposite, the orthodox view that humans are mostly equal, humans are not capable of organizing in large collectives (i.e. like corporations), humans are not interested in harming other humans for their own self-gain, humans cannot get away with large crimes (i.e. like FTX) seems to me like the largest ideological fallacy that anyone can possess, but I digress, I suppose if you lots believe that most people are nice and innocuous and that people are simply misguided or emotionally biased then I will give you the doubt of doing so as a post-ad hoc rationalization.
Here is a clip of what I am demonstrating; https://vimeo.com/788900508#t=0 https://vimeo.com/788903031#t=0
https://i.imgur.com/c0CeJ0d.jpg
Personally I believe many people are lacking in the knowledge of area of political sciences, economics, biology and other fields which might be way higher-intelligence individuals are more susceptible to propaganda because they possess a higher aptitude for being capable of holding more complex belief structures. Usually you guys are given simplified models of the universe to operate on which are not-full descriptors of reality (i.e. lies of omission); e.g. it is not just the adaptive+innate immune system, but also includes the interferon, siRNA, virome, biome -- it is not just one form of gaseous mixture of radiative effect but a cumulation of solar flux densities, intergenerational cyclicities of distance/tilt/dynamic equilibras between interlinked processes within the environment, and the disposition to focus on metrics over a comprehensive understanding of the underlying assumptions of those metrics (i.e. efficacy in measures of purported test rates of various success rates vs mechanism-of-action explanations) which leads to an overabundance of above-intelligence individuals not engaging in the pursuit of truth, but some abstracted model/projected rooted not in ground truth.
https://isgp-studies.com/intro#box-model-of-politics https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2021-05/1-20-cv-11889-MLW%20-%2011.06.20%20-%20Plaintiff%20Amended%20Complaint%20Against%20Defendants.pdf
My biggest problem with people-who-think-others-who-hold-the-belief-that-people-have-collective-self-interests-and-the-capability-to-enact-them-can't-possibly-do-so-because-it's-too-big is the fact that there can be incontrovertible lines of concordant circumstantial evidence that there is an established effort to enact something, but that the nature of such behaviour is too-out-of-normality to be propositionally testable.
https://i.imgur.com/Sx3OUV1.png
(i.e. metrics of mentions of A, B, C in media going up; the associations of those editorials/authors being similar descendancy, many such articles/videos/media published directly by such individuals) and yet there is a post-ad hoc rationalization/justification that it is immiscibly impossible to have such preconscious thoughts.
This was an interesting post that summarized a lot of my thoughts. I think each point you make needs to be discussed in more detail, but there is a severe lack of dialogue between "non-conspiracy theorists" (like Scott and other rationalists in general) and "conspiracy theorists" (not exactly sure who I should include here, got any suggestion?).
Either way I think you should copy paste your comment and make a post out of it. It's far too long and far too hidden in the comment field for people to read and appreciate.
Speaking based on some of the people I know who've gotten into various conspiracy theories (several friends got into the weeds around the GameStop stock mess), a common factor I observe is wanting an explanation that gives order to the world as they perceive it.
Politics is horribly complicated, extremely contingent, and yet intrudes in people's lives in myriad ways, sometimes quite horribly so. "The illuminati control everything and the bad stuff is their fault" is a much simpler concept than any real causal explanation for most things. Do the details work? No, but that isn't the point, which is why they're often vague about the details. The point is there's a simple concept that explains their reality.
Beyond being bothered/offended by Trump, I think a lot of people are simply baffled by him. He doesn't make sense to them. Russiagate provided a coherent story for why he was the way he was. It didn't matter if that story made sense in detail (i.e. explained any particular of why Trump did X), so long as it gave them a nominally sensible narrative to fit him into their world.
This need for order is especially necessary for humans in a time where we are bombarded by more information than our brains could ever process. It's not possible for humans to spend all our cognitive power on trying to figure out every single thing, so humans would rather take shortcuts. It's a neurological explanation of Occam's Razor-esque thinking. Conspiracy theories make people's worldviews simpler instead of having to deal with tedious critical thinking and overcoming cognitive dissonance.
I call this the "big bad" kind of conspiracy. Life is full of gray areas, moral dilemmas, problems without clear solutions, misfortunes that don't make sense, etc. If suddenly everyone is suffering because there's COVID, it's hard to accept that that's just how life is sometimes. It's much more convenient to accept if you find the "big bad" who is to blame for this.
So people go looking for it, and spend unneccesary amount of energy arguing about whether it could have been an intentional lab leak or not, etc. So for this reason, I try to have a bias *against* any big bad theories. It's not that they can't ever be true, but there's going to be people every time who push these theories just for their own piece of mind. But, unfortunately, life is often far from simple.
You're going to want to do a clarifying post about "Russia gate".
"Trump is an active Russian agent either due to malice or blackmail" is the strong version and I don't think many people believed that.
Then you get to other things that may be called part of "Russia gate"
1. Russia actively helped Trump's election.
2.Trump's campaign knew about this and had some degree of collaboration.
3. The hacking of podesta's emails was done by a Russian agency
4. The leak from wikieaks was timed to bury the access Hollywood tape.
5. Some people in Trump's campaign knew about the wiki leaks dump before the release. "
These have all been proven to be true. And I think the debunking of "Trump is an active Russian agent" has been used to motte and bailey the other questionable things he did.
The fact that the podesta emails with banal info info were treated as scandalous by a credulous US media ecosystem is not the fault of trump or the Russians.
I would love to see a reasoned, researched deep dive on this.
I too would appreciate a deep dive on RussiaGate, since I have no idea how seriously to take the Greenwald/Taibbi types on it.
I certainly would not have my hat on Taibbi. I read a lot of his articles on this subject. One thing that threw me was his idea of debunking the Manafort/Klimnik connection . He says he asked Klimnik if he was a Russian spy and the man laughed and said no of course not. Case closed.
Taibbi is too contrarian on this topic. He loved saying how nothing in Russiagate was true even when people still believed it. Now I think he's too committed to defend that position rather than tell me which claims are likely true and which are not.
Thank you.
When it comes to Russiagate, I am surprised at how vehemently a lot of people can now claim it was a giant hoax and/or nothing burger, when so much of it happened out in the open or is otherwise well documented.
It’s as though everyone who thinks there was anything inappropriate about the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia, is lumped in with Rachel Maddow’s hair-on-fire version of Russiagate. But I don’t think I ever believed that. (Hanlon’s razor, and all…)
OTOH, maybe I’m just fooling myself, and that I, and more of the liberal mainstream, was far less reasonable and much more conspiratorial at the time than I remember.
So, yes, I would welcome a good analysis, too.
Can you elaborate on “some degree of collaboration”?
The campaign manager passing polling data and campaign strategy to an FSB officer.
Thanks. Does this appear in the Mueller report? https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download I couldn’t find it in the introduction, and my phone browser crashes if I try to search the whole thing for “FSB”.
Konstantin Kilimnik is the person in question. He worked closely with Paul Manafort as part of his efforts to keep the Yanukovich regime in power. It's not like we have a copy of his FSB employee ID but given the nature of the evidence it's not reasonable to doubt that he is a Russian intelligence officer, and people who worked with the two said it was essentially an open secret at the time.
"1. Russia actively helped Trump's election."
I get the sense that this is a true statement, but not true in the way it might be implied. What I mean is that the Russians were actively interfering in the U.S. election, both through their security agencies and through the use of hacker groups. But if I had to guess, I would say that their goal was to sew division and cast doubt on the election outcome, weakening a probable HRC administration. That Trump won was probably a happy accident for them. And it's not even clear that anything they did actually mattered to the outcome.
Hopefully you are not under any naive impression that the Russians (and before 1991 the Soviets) have ever *failed* to attempt to interfere with an American Presidential election, from approximately the time they first recruited agents here (the 1930s) to the present. They will certainly do whatever they can to influence the 2024 election in the direction they prefer, or at least to sow discord and disunion.
I mean, if they *hadn't* ever tried, the premier would be quite justified in having the entire KGB apparatus sent to the gulag for gross incompetence and lack of initiative.
The word "interfere" is doing a lot of work there. Me, I'd tend to assume *every* country does multiple things that would be likely to help *either* side of any major US election. Which means if you arbitrarily pick a country and a team you should be able to find a few things that country did which help that team...and if you looked harder you should also be able to find things that country did which hurt that team. But "interfere" is the wrong word - it implies the goal and effect is to unilaterally change the outcome from what it would have been to something different, rendering the vote moot. Which isn't so. Assuming the end outcome is the result of having Americans VOTE and tallying up the total according to the standard mechanisms, the election itself has NOT been "interfered" with, it happened exactly as intended.
"Influence" is the better word for what's actually being alleged. People both foreign and domestic constantly do things likely to *influence* our election results; this is something we should expect and not be particularly surprised by.
Regardless, those who run around hair-on-fire screaming that presidential candidate A was "helped" by country X and therefore is BEHOLDEN to that country...are being very silly and we should laugh at them.
I'd be interested to see some evidence of, say, France, or Canada, or Mexico using its intelligence or security services to "influence" American elections in a similar way (i.e. secretly, using illegal means, propaganda, troll farms, etc).
Every country is "influencing" American elections (presumably implying "in a similar way"), not just like, Macron saying "I like candidate X", is a hell of a claim.
Look up the British propaganda effort in the U.S. in the 1940s for sheer quality of propagandists, such as Larry Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Roald Dahl, C.S. Forrester, David Ogilvy, Errol Flynn, etc.
Israel is adept at representing their interests in this fashion.
Russia likes to capitalize on fault lines in US public opinion; they stir the pot. They strike me as more mischievous than some.
That wasn’t for a specific candidate, it was for a country’s interests, so it can’t really be called a bribe to one candidate. Also, it was paying public intellectuals to support their country. I sort of assume that any time an intellectual supports China strongly enough on Australian TV, there’s a 50% chance they’d lose their job if they were too harsh on China. I used not to apply the same scepticism to Facebook groups by people I hadn’t heard of.
Yes, I agree with you on all points. I was just using the same portentous word ("interfere") that the partisans use. But you add considerable value with your observation that even using that word is silly, as what we are talking about is "influence" and *every* country on the face of the Earth does their best to influence American elections, since those elections are deeply consequential for the world. Being shocked, shocked, to find that Russia is among them is naive (or cynical) to a pretty high degree.
There's also the fact that the US "influences" the elections of other countries *all the time*. Including those of our allies, eg the CIA infiltrated all major French parties in the 7 months leading up to their 2012 election. We have ongoing spying efforts against the French government and French industrial concerns which make it possible the information we've illicitly obtained could potentially be leaked or managed to help firms and groups we like and hurt ones we don't as appropriate...whether or not the option is exercised in any particular case. We do that to all sorts of countries and sometimes they do it back to us. Meanwhile a successful political campaign involves meeting *everyone who could potentially help your candidate win* and a *winning* campaign is attractive to influence-seekers. Some of the people that a campaign, or friends of the campaign, or friends-of-friends of the campaign meet will undoubtedly turn out to be spies or spy-adjacent - that realistically can't be helped. Because spies are among those most able to throw resources around and most incentivized to make high-level connections that might leak information. So when I look at these alleged Russia connections I don't compare it to some perfect world where there's NO spying, I compare it to the actual world in which everybody who has the resources to spy does *some* amount of spying...most of which has little practical effect on outcomes and much of which is never noticed.
https://wikileaks.org/cia-france-elections-2012/
https://wikileaks.org/nsa-france/spyorder/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention
Twitter apparently contacted 1.4 million people who’d heard from the Russian Twitter farm in the ten weeks before the election. I don’t think they’d ever had anywhere near that much direct, covert reach before. And yes, Twitter is great at exaggerating people’s impact, but also the mainstream media picked a lot of these stories up and ran with them.
Well, I think that's naive. Being able to reach a mere 0.5-1% of potential voters with an advertising message tuned to Russian interests is so marginal and quotidian an accomplishment it would be shocking if it didn't happen biannually, or even continuously. As I said above, if the KGB couldn't even bestir itself *that* far they hardly deserve the title of "intelligence" agency. (And by the way hopefully nobody is under the impression that the CIA doesn't similarly exert itself to influence elections in other countries, even -- shock! dismay! -- those of our allies. Politics ain't beanbag, not even or especially not international politics.)
I said “covertly”. You can say “shocking”, but can you point to a time when it happened? I claim doing something on this scale covertly was much easier because of social media, and that the difference in impact on Russia in 2016 was larger than the difference in 2008 or 2012.
In countries not allied with the US, it counted against politicians in those countries if they were US figureheads (offset against the aid those politicians attracted, but Russia didn’t give the US any foreign aid to support Trump). Can you describe how the US covertly interferes with its allies’ elections? I’m guessing it didn’t involve contacting anywhere near 0.5% of voters.
Ha ha, well you have a lot more faith in social media having a real influence on human beings than I do. I mean, I can't think of a single human being I know in real life -- we're not counting Internet randos -- who appears to be seriously influenced by what gets said on Twitter. Indeed, most of them don't even use it at all. I get that journalists and talking heads absolutely live there 24/7, so they might have gotten some grossly exaggerated view of what people were hearing. And maybe they stayed up all night or were stoned, so it didn't occur to them that a fraction of tweets pales into complete insignificance compared to the wall-to-wall political ad buys saturating every media market. $6 billion was spent domestically on the 2016 election in a strenuous effort by very smart operatives in both parties to influence the election. What did the Russians spend? A million or two? They must've had some real powerful mind-control rays to actually have a measureable impact. Might as well throw a glass of water at someone standing in a pouring rain.
No, sorry, I have neither the patience nor the interest in going over 20th century history for you. I'm sure you can dig into it yourself if you're genuinely interested.
My skepticism is based on finding the proposition, even taking the assertions of Russian Twiitter bots at full face value, that this is some remarkable unique event to be ludicrous. I'm expected to find it even remotely plausible that never ever in the entire history of the Cold War, for example, did the Soviets attempt to use their many agents to influence US elections? Or never ever did some political ad buys using front organizations? They went to strenuous lengths to infiltrate American command apparatus but it never occured to them to just try nudging voters to choose a more congenial Commander in Chief? I'd have to believe the Soviets were complete morons to find this a hypothesis sufficiently plausible that I would care to take the time to demonstrate its inanity, as you are asking.
> “These have all been proven to be true.”
Citations needed. Once you step outside the orbit of the true believers even these “lesser” assertions sound pretty ridiculous.
Hmm... the Mueller report? I'm not from the USA, have no horse in this race, and I have no idea to what exactly "Russia gate" refers to in the media over there.
I have, though, read Mueller's report, and was utterly shocked by its content. To me, the fact that afterwards Trump didn't end up in jail but instead kept his position as President is a clear indication that USA's institutes are a complete failure.
The 4-page Justice Department summary of the Muller report says: "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."
Thus, I take the Muller report as explicitly finding Mathew's item #2 to be false. Or at least explicitly *failing* to find it true - it's hard to prove a negative.
(quote source: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/24/706351394/read-the-justice-departments-summary-of-the-mueller-report )
This summary is misleading without explicitly lying in all the ways Scott just discussed in his previous post. Do yourself a favour, and read the report itself.
(Mueller himself wrote to Barr: "The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office's work and conclusions". This is, I will add, an understatement).
I read the report itself at the time and was unimpressed. Not gonna read the entire thing again now but if you think there's something there that *does* establish Mathew's #2, feel free to tell us what it is!
ALL summaries "do not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of the thing being summarized - if they did you wouldn't need the full report!
The story the report establishes easily dwarfs any scandal I can remember from any democratic country in the last few decades, including the original Watergate scandal. if you really read it and was unimpressed - then I am truly impressed by your unimpressedness, and I doubt there's a point to continue this conversation.
Yeah, there's a lot of space between "we can't prove this happened" and "this didn't happen."
The Senate Intelligence Committee, controlled by Republicans and chaired by a Republican, published its investigative report in August 2018.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf
They concluded unambiguously that "Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian
effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak
information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow's intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process. WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian influence campaign...."
"While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump's electoral prospects...."
Etc.
That Republican-controlled committee's findings of fact related to Paul Manafort alone, while he was chairman of the Trump campaign, were more than enough to validate the "weak version" of Russiagate. Never mind whatever else they found which isn't yet public because it involved classified sources or information (hence is redacted in the public report).
People also have a delusional idea of what intelligence assets actually look like. It's much more like the mob than it is like James Bond. Assets usually don't even know that they are assets, because that protects the agent who recruited them. You don't sit them down and say hey let's agree, you will do a treason for money LOL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen
Yes, sometimes asset is "this guy's emails," where this guy is someone who doesn't even know his emails have been tapped.
And if the standard of evidence for "is an asset" is "we could convict them of it in a court of law", then yeah, not too surprising you would find that to be "false". The intelligence agency will be working hard to cover its tracks and muddy the waters.
Okay, but if I'm claiming you were an agent of a foreign country and thus were engaged in some kind of treason, it's hard to make sense of that if what I mean is that you're a dupe who occasionally leaks some useful information to a Russian agent whom you think is just some nice dude who works next door and is a good listener over chess games at lunch.
We should split what Trump did or intended from what Paul Manafort did and admitted to. Paul Manafort was up to his ass in dirty Russian money and was playing his own game. The extent to which Trump knew or cared is unknown and at this point unknowable, although he did pardon Manafort in exchange for his loyalty (compare with Michael Cohen).
Please. In the US treason is defined in the Constitution. I don't think I've ever heard anyone make a serious claim that that applied to Trump, or any of his election committee. It's a *very* high bar.
That matches my understanding. I continue to be shocked that people point to "RussiaGate" as a "conspiracy theory", as my understanding is that what you call the "weak version" was essentially established fact.
And the weak version is a huge deal.
I think the term "Russiagate" is kind of designed to obscure the differences there. The strong version that almost no one believed is not true so we can feel OK about ignoring the true and damning stuff.
It's an interesting motte and bailey, but almost a reverse one. We have an expansive version that we can deny, and then move on to denying the tight one too whenever no one is paying attention.
I think the usual term for such "reverse motte and bailey" is weakmanning or nutpicking.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
>"Trump is an active Russian agent either due to malice or blackmail" is the strong version and I don't think many people believed that.
I think I recall a great many people expressing that belief, whether sincerely or performatively.
I also seem to recall quite a few people expressing the belief that Russia had actively interfered in the casting or counting of votes in the 2016 election.
In both cases usually hedged with enough careful weasel-wording that we probably can't accuse them of Type 7 Lying; I think I've already made it clear that I really don't care.
That was the bailey. The motte, yes, that was "Russia hacked Podesta's emails and timed the release for maximum electoral impact". The bailey needs to be burned to the ground and the ground sowed with salt; if there was ever anything of value there it was long gone by 2017. And the motte, was never of any value without the bailey and its defenders were naive at best. If all you can say is that the intelligence service of a foreign power spied on American politicians and/or released information into the public discourse in a manner calculated to affect an election, then yes, of course - also, the Pope is still Catholic and bears still do their business in the woods.
The reality is substantially different than what you describe. You present it as if Russia operated on its own, almost just accidentally helping Trump by the way.
In reality, Trump's campaign and administrators were neck-deep in communication, coordination and negotiation with the Russians on these regards. They were active agents, not passive beneficiaries.
in reality, Trump illegally obstructed and sabotaged the investigation into the details of the communication between his people (and himself) with the Russian, which is a severe crime on its own.
in reality, due to this successful blunt obstruction, what we surely know about the negotiation with the Russian (which is seriously damning in itself) is just a conservative lower-bound on how bad things are, not an upper-bound as you seem to imply. Moreover, since the obstruction was a risky crime, it should push anyone's priors regarding the graveness of the more likely scenarios that actually occurred.
The "motte" (i.e. the Mueller report and the following) is extremely serious scandal, and saying it was "never of any value" is absolutely ridicules. I have no doubt that future historians, after Trump will be long gone and the political relevance of this affairs fades, will strongly disagree with you.
"Quite a few," sure. It's a big country. That wasn't a mainstream view even among hardcore Democrats, and I doubt very much that was what Scott was referring to (remember the context here is that Scott says he fell for the conspiracy theory). Similarly, claims about interference with vote counting were out there but weren't mainstream and are unlikely to be what he was referring to.
Also, what we know goes a bit further than you say. In addition to the quoted statement, the campaign knew about the efforts, provided private data to help Russia execute the efforts, met with Russian representatives to discuss possible trades, and covered up what they knew rather than reporting it or even just being honest when asked. We also know that Trump obstructed the investigation that followed. Also, you suggest that that's all normal, but I'm genuinely not aware of any other times something like it has happened. A counter example (didn't involve a foreign power, IIRC) was in 2000, when the Gore campaign was sent Bush's debate prep material and they immediately reported it to the FBI. I think a more-normal, less-corrupt president would have been sunk by the facts we are aware of. Or his survival could just be a result of increased polarization, which makes it harder for one faction to give the other a win.
DSF, meet Omer. Omer, meet DSF. Sounds like you two have a lot to talk about.
What do you mean?
I'm sure it's their own emotions. Emotions are powerful things.
The thesis that Elders of Zion style conspiracies and Trump-Russia conspiracies are driven by a desire to justify a preexisting hatred by simplifying and amplifying alleged wrongdoing, seems ad hoc, short of evidence, and dubious.
"Most people, deep down, are not fans of the global elite. Probably they’re screwing the rest of us over somehow. But realistically they’ll keep getting away with it, because you can’t exactly prove that they’re evil."
Really? Is the average conspiracist bothered by the global powers that be specifically because he thinks that he can't personally stop them?
And does the average conspiracist think that he can't stop the global powers that be *specifically because* he can't prove their wrongdoing?
And does amplifying the magnitude of their alleged crimes really make it easier to "prove" that they're evil? Are worse crimes necessarily easier to prove than less severe ones? Surely their crimes of globalism, "globohomo" (sic), free-trade, promotion of immigration, etc. are sufficient in the minds of those predisposed to believe in such conspiracies.
"Sure, they have billions of dollars while other people starve, but capitalism has lots of advantages and all the alternatives seem worse."
Do average conspiracists have a firm a priori model of optimal economic policy? And if they do, are they typically overtly market-oriented?
"Sure, they’re complicit in climate change and moral decay and so on. But so are the rest of us..."
Does the average such conspiracist even believe in (anthropogenic) climate change (that should be mitigated)?
I realize I'm picking on what are meant to be vague subconscious musings of conspiracists, but I think that their complete implausibility is reflective of a difficulty articulating the thinking speaks poorly for the theory as a whole.
If anything, it seems like the theory is more useful for someone like Trump, than for "global elite" conspiracies.
In the case of the former, it does indeed seem likely that people would have strong feelings about him from the outset, and it is therefore conceivable that they would then try to justify them more simply (as per the theory).
But in the case of the "global elite", why would anyone have such strong opinions about them a priori? Even the very existence of the group seems a posteriori to the sentiments. Who is the global elite? Is Hillary Clinton part of the elite? Donald Trump? Carlos Slim? Klaus Schwab? Sean Hannity?
Membership in the mental category seems to depend on the conspiracist already feeling negatively about them.
It seems relatively likely, that the simpler explanation - that when a person dislikes a group or person that he is apt to see the worst in them, is correct.
The supposed evidence against this theory (the “bitch eating crackers” theory) is that people (presumably even conspiracists) don't tend to believe that their spouses are cannibalistic pedophiles.
However, this counterevidence seems underwhelming. After all, the alternative hypothesis would seem to suffer the same weakness. If someone disliking someone intensely and not being able to sufficiently and succinctly explain why, leads to coming up with conspiracies about them, then again, why would this too not apply to spouses?
[After all, it seems likely that the intensely negative feelings that a person may feel for a spouse would be even more apt to lead to the proposed phenomenon than the Trump example for a couple of reasons, one of which is that a person will have a much greater number of exposures to their spouse, than to Trump. If someone forms a negative feeling for a spouse, it could more easily be based on a larger number of potentially smaller factors, that ought to be smaller, and therefore more difficult to articulate, that should make the desire for simple dramatic conspiracies more acute.]
I suspect that the reason that many believers in the global cabals of pedophile cannibals don't project such beliefs onto spouses, is due to the phenomenon I mentioned in my other comment [https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/conspiracies-of-cognition-conspiracies/comment/11861497] of true beliefs and beliefs of beliefs.
I suspect that many nominal believers in such conspiracies believe these things in a vacuum, mostly without integrating such beliefs systematically into the rest of their thoughts and behaviors.
It is easier to maintain belief in such a belief about distant figures than about one's spouse.
If one's spouse were really a cannibalistic pedophile, one couldn't go on acting normally.
Therefore, even conspiracists are much less likely to believe that they believe that their spouses are cannibalistic pedophiles.
However, as with other religions, believers in QAnon come in both varieties - actual believers, and believer-believers. The former *do* sometimes integrate the beliefs into practice, leading to acts of violence, including against family members.
A lot of conspiracy theorists do talk about "redpilling" people or "dropping breadcrumbs" or otherwise hoping that, if they can circulate their ideas widely enough, this will make people finally rise up and overthrow the evil elites. So I do think "we can't stop the elites or prove that they're evil" is a significant component of how conspiracy theories start. A conspiracy theory is a personification of the problems in your life you can't fix - the reason the world is a mess is because of specific evil people doing specific evil things, and all we have to do is stop them from doing that and everything will be fine. It's much more hopeful and solution-oriented than "sorry, running a global economy is complicated, we haven't found anything better than capitalism, and overthrowing the elites won't change the fact that your coal mining job is obsolete."
(QAnon in particular is very messianic in its thinking, not only promising that there are elites you can blame, but also promising that Any Day Now, the good guys working behind the scenes will succeed in overthrowing them and solve all the world's problems and also cure your cancer.)
This personification also explains why specific elites get drawn into it - "We just need to kill George Soros" promises more of a solution than "Unfortunately, killing a specific wealthy capitalist won't change the incentive structures that cause wealthy capitalists to act against your interests."
Amplifying the elites' crimes serves to make the real policies they're complaining about sound worse. "Gay marriage is just the start, next they'll push us to accept pedophilia" or "Environmental regulations are just a smokescreen, the government is going to lock you in a pod and make you eat bugs." It enables you to use a conspiracy to argue against even things that are pretty innocuous - "If I call people by different pronouns I'm basically enabling child abuse!"
These forces don't apply to a spouse you hate because there's already a specific person to blame - your spouse. I don't think many people feel like they're trapped in their marriage by impersonal economic forces.
The biases you describe are mostly distinct from the particular one described by Scott in the paragraph starting "But second."
I don't doubt that some conspiracies, QAnon in particular, hold eschatological promise to their believers.
I was specifically questioning Scott's thesis that a primary driver of these conspiracies is the attempt by conspiracists to justify their own preexisting negative emotions about given parties.
The bias you describe is almost the opposite. Rather than starting with negative feelings towards someone that may have resulted from many impressions which are hard to collate into a single coherent explanation, and then coming up with dramatic, and therefore simple reasons to hate them, you describe a process where the subjects of the conspiracy are selected *because* conspiracies about them in particular allow for an eschatological future once their schemes are defeated.
In other words, someone may indeed have built up a very negative impression of Trump, based on exposure to him, and then try to justify those feelings, but presumably nobody is starting with any sort of strong feelings - positive or negative - about someone like Klaus Schwab. The only reason anyone has even heard of him is because of conspiracies.
The reason for these conspiracies may well be, as you suggest, that it allows for an eschatological future once he has been defeated, but that was not Scott's second proposed conspiracy of emotion.
This feels right to me. It's not that they want their to be a literal pedophile cabal (or for Trump to be a Russian spy) per se, but they want a clear fact that justifies their own emotions. That's easy to relate to.
It's also important to understand that it is hard to let go of those emotions, and to understand that trying to convince them that the conspiracy is wrong won't fix the underlying emotional issues.
I would say the emotions people are trying to explain are their sense of alienation from too many of their fellow countrymen. The shock with which people of a certain type were struggling to come to terms was not the existence of Donald Trump, even in his most evil avatar -- most people have no problem at all believing that such people exist -- but that 63 million regular American citizens would vote to make him President, and he would defeat Hillary Clinton, the Historic First Woman President who was just a natural shoo-in. How the fuck does *this* happen? The mind just boggles at the concept that I can be so incredibly wrong about what half my fellow citizens are like[1], and so I recoil from the notion. Nobody likes to feel like he so grossly misunderstands everybody else. Therefore, it must be due to some fiendishly clever mind-control rays that diabolic bastard Trump sent out[2].
---------------------------
[1] Of course, the even more boggling concept that I myself might be wrong, that half my fellow citizens might understand something to which I am blind, is even further off the mental table.
[2] I'm sure most normal people could readily comprehend Trump getting a million or even 10 million votes. We all know there are crazies around. It's the fact that he *won the election* that is inconceivable.
I don't know if it really requires anything other than Trump having the wrong letter after his name.
People believe(d) crazy theories about Hilary Clinton as well, and George W. Bush, and they (unlike Trump) are both perfectly ordinary representatives of their respective parties. I don't like Hillary (or Bush) but I'm not shocked that tens of millions voted for them.
Well, that doesn't contradict what I said, it only means the problem of finding a route to comforting denial is general. But I also think the level of hysteria about Trump was much higher than for, say, GWB or Bush Senior. Also than for Reagan, now I think about it, but that might be because Reagan actually tried to get along with people on a personal level and avoid yanking their chain -- even if he had no intention of conforming to their wishes -- while Trump had this reality TV habit of enjoying making people foam at the mouth.
Trump certainly was an unusual candidate from a major party, who played up his anti-establishment cred, but of course he managed to get to that point in no small part due to the general intensification of polarization/culture war.
You seem very preoccupied with personalities, as your entire post was about comparing Trump with Clinton. But to many people that is shallow, and it is the policies which matter far more, and the politicians are almost irrelevant.
For example, most of those people you claim boggle your mind didn't give a flying f*ck if Hilary Clinton would have been the "Historic First Woman President". What difference would that make to their lives?
If anything the idea would repel many, especially men, as yet another example of trendy feminism and "women taking over". (c.f. almost every Hollywood film for the last 20 years, where the hero is a woman and the men, as often as not, are portrayed as hopeless ineffectual cucks and nincompoops!)
But if in a parallel universe Hilary had expoused Trump's policies and vice versa, then I am sure she would have won!
Trump's appeal to so many was that he declared a determination to "put America first" in various ways, including especially suppressing mass illegal immigration (which undoubtedly pushes low-skill wages down and property prices up).
Of course some people found his crass outbursts and erratic impulsive behaviour somewhat offputting, and I believe he has been known to tell the occasional fib (like any politician), and he wasn't able to achieve all his goals (partly due to his own shortcomings, and in part owing to passive aggressive resistance from "the establishment")
All the same, I think Trump Derangement Syndrome (an affliction of most Democrats and, it must be said, some Republicans!) stems largely from snobbery, as as if some loud-mouthed maverick new unknown artist wearing a garish checked suit turned up at a fancy New York art gallery during a viewing. One can imagine all the appalled guests whispering to each other. "My dear, _who_ is _that_? What _is_ he _wearing_? He's not one of _us_!" etc etc
Please don't think I am trying to defend Trump necessarily (though I applaud his aims - Why shouldn't a country's leader seek to put its own citizens first, instead of self-aggrandisizingly presuming to put the world to rights at its citizens expense?). I am merely trying to sketch how those Trump voters who so mystify you think, putting myself in their shoes as it were.
Wait, are you responding to what I said? If so, I think you completely misunderstood me, and it would be helpful if you said a word about what you think I said, so I could say it better.
I mean, for one thing, it certainly didn't boggle *my* mind that Trump beat Clinton. I was speaking of the geese weeping as if their mother died at the aborted Clinton "victory" party on Election Night.
Ah, OK. I took your post at face value, i.e. you expressing bafflement that so many people voted for Trump, meaning their world view was so far at odds from yours. But re-reading your post, I see now it could and presumably should be construed as you putting yourself in the shoes of people who were mystified, with those not including you necessarily. It was all the "I's" toward the end that misled me!
Right you are. Thanks for explaining.
It feels right to you, huh?
Indeed ;)
I think there is something to be said for this taxonomy but I think that even the "conspiracies of cognition" are based on conspiracies of emotion.
People didn't start believing weird things about JFK because they analysed the footage frame by frame and thought something was weird. They started out from the point of view of not wanting to think that this huge event had the prosaic cause of one unconnected communist loony, and then they started analysing footage until they found something that looked weird. Same deal with 9/11 conspiracies or pizza gate or Obama's birth certificate -- you start with the desire to believe something and then go find something you can fool yourself into thinking is evidence.
"People didn't start" is ambiguous between the first person to invent the theory, and later people who came across it.
I remember reading a conspiracy theory 5-10 years ago that Shakespeare was someone else, maybe Ben Johnson, I can't remember. I found it really convincing at the time. I could not care less about this and I have no reason to want Shakespeare to be any particular person, but the weird website I stumbled across laid out a bunch of weird suggestive evidence that I didn't have good answers for. I since overcome my believe in that conspiracy theory through the amazing rational process of losing the website and forgetting what was on it (something about a poem and an epitaph, but all the specifics are lost).
One difference between me and big-time conspiracy believers is that I shrugged and didn't really care that much. Maybe it takes some kind of emotional connection to go from "this website has lots of stuff I can't explain" to "I care a lot about this". But I think there's an alternate world where, for example, I posted about that approvingly on my blog, lots of people dunked on me and told me I was an idiot for believing it (without having good counterarguments), and then I got angry and made it my life goal to prove Ben Johnson was Shakespeare from then on.
Yes, I think that Shakespeare theories might be a better example of a purely cognitive conspiracy theory than the JFK example.
There's still an emotional core of course, but it's just about the thrill of discovery, the fun of being right about something that other people are wrong about, and maybe a little bit of revenge on those English teachers who made you read As You Like It in ninth grade.
I've heard there was also some snobbishness involved at some point, Shakespeare was too low-class to have been so brilliant, but I don't think that's a big motivating factor these days.
There was a deal of snobbishness - Shakespeare was thought to be uneducated (the son of a draper), he'd never travelled much (Stratford to London and back was about as far as he ever got) and, aside from writing his plays, lived a relatively ordinary life.
People expect someone with extraordinary talent to be an extraordinary person (which is one reason why talented artists get away with so much) and Shakespeare was relentlessly ordinary and normal.
But some of the evidence is obvious nonsense, like the arguments that the actual author must have travelled to Italy because look at all the plays set there (Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Othello, etc). Of course, travelling to Italy was the sign of a gentleman ("the Grand Tour" and so on).
But the plays get the geography wrong in ways that anyone who'd travelled there would not (anyone who'd looked at a map, for that matter, but maps were rarer and more expensive in the 1580s than now); placing cities on the coast that are inland and vice versa and so on.
Shakespeare did not even get the geography of much-closer Scandinavia right. In Hamlet, he apparently thought Fortinbras, the King of Norway, could march to Denmark through Poland. I mean, travel from Norway to Denmark without ships - and with a stopover in Poland, of all places? He'd have to march all the way up the Gulf of Bothnia, just for starters! Text here:
Hamlet:
As th'art a man,
Give me the cup. Let go! By heaven, I'll ha't.
O good Horatio, what a wounded name
(Things standing thus unknown) shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.
[March afar off, and shot within.]
What warlike noise is this?
Osric:
Young Fortinbras, with conquest come from Poland,
To the ambassadors of England gives
This warlike volley.
Hamlet:
O, I die, Horatio!
The potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit.
I cannot live to hear the news from England,
But I do prophesy th' election lights
On Fortinbras. He has my dying voice.
So tell him, with th' occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited- the rest is silence. [Dies.]
Horatio:
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
[March within.]
Why does the drum come hither?
[Enter Fortinbras and English Ambassadors, with Drum, Colours, and Attendants.]
Fortinbras:
Where is this sight?
Horatio:
What is it you will see?
If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search.
Fortinbras:
This quarry cries on havoc. O proud Death,
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast struck.
Ambassador:
The sight is dismal;
And our affairs from England come too late.
The ears are senseless that should give us hearing
To tell him his commandment is fulfill'd
That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
Where should we have our thanks?
Horatio:
Not from his mouth,
Had it th' ability of life to thank you.
He never gave commandment for their death.
But since, so jump upon this bloody question,
You from the Polack wars, and you from England,
Are here arriv'd, give order that these bodies
High on a stage be placed to the view;
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts;
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters;
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause;
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on th' inventors' heads. All this can I
Truly deliver.
Fortinbras:
Let us haste to hear it,
And call the noblest to the audience.
For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune.
I have some rights of memory in this kingdom
Which now, to claim my vantage doth invite me.
Horatio:
Of that I shall have also cause to speak,
And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more.
But let this same be presently perform'd,
Even while men's minds are wild, lest more mischance
On plots and errors happen.
Fortinbras:
Let four captains
Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have prov'd most royally; and for his passage
The soldiers' music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this
Becomes the field but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.
[Exeunt marching; after the which a peal of ordnance are shot off.]
THE END
Shakespeare's history is as rocky as his geography; the play was written in 1601 but is set in some vague period anywhere from the 14th century onwards. Internal consistency is not something he's aiming for - Hamlet says he has come home from studying in Wittenberg but that university wasn't founded until 1502.
So generally the time period that the contemporary play-goers would have accepted uncritically was "some time back in the past". As to Poland, there were wars between the Swedes (on one hand) and a combination of the Danish-Norwegians and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on the other (I've had to look all this up since you raised the question):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Seven_Years%27_War
"The Northern Seven Years' War (also known as the Nordic Seven Years' War, the First Northern War or the Seven Years War in Scandinavia) was fought between the Kingdom of Sweden and a coalition of Denmark–Norway, Lübeck, and Poland–Lithuania between 1563 and 1570. The war was motivated by the dissatisfaction of King Frederick II of Denmark with the dissolution of the Kalmar Union, and the will of King Eric XIV of Sweden to break Denmark's dominating position. The fighting continued until both armies had been exhausted, and many men died. The resulting Treaty of Stettin was a stalemate, with neither party gaining any new territory."
Briefly, Denmark and Norway and Sweden had all been part of a unit under a single monarch. Sweden pulled out of this eventually and set up as a separate kingdom (it's kind of messy, since the various monarchs involved could be kings of Sweden, or of Norway and/or Denmark). The Danish-Norwegian element disliked this, hence the wars.
So Shakespeare had some idea that at some time in the past, Denmark and Norway were united under a single king (hence his explanation as to how Fortinbras, king of Norway, becomes king of Denmark as well) and that there had been a war involving Norway-Denmark and Poland-Lithuania, he just got mixed up on who was fighting whom where. And at the time (1601), there was a war going on between Poland and Sweden (the Polish-Swedish War of 1600-1611) so it would have been hot recent relevant news to have someone "with conquest come from Poland" in the play.
I can't blame him, even after reading three different Wikipedia articles I'm still not sure who fought whom where over what and what the difference was between being King of Norway and King of the Kalmar Union, especially when it was the Danes who held all the real power anyway.
Besides, there was always some war going on involving Poland, anyway 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Poland#Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_Commonwealth
Denmark-Norway was not only united in Shakespeare's past, but also in Shakespeare's present; that union was only broken in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. It was Sweden that separated and became a rival power.
True, you can always count on a war in Poland in the distant past. Shakespeare was on safe ground there. As a Polish friend once told me: I curse the mythical Polish kings who led their people, of all places, to this land where there are no natural borders either against our eastern neighbour or our western neighbour. What were they thinking?
I actually think he got things wrong that anyone at the time could see were wrong. But that didn't matter, because the plays were really about England in sufficient disguise that he could safely write them. For that matter, Macbeth was taken from Scots history. Of course the original events played out over a period of about 20 years, and it was distorted in various other ways to make it more dramatic. And LOTS of people probably knew that. And it didn't matter. Think of "West Side Story", the distortions don't matter, and if they help the plot, they're good.
I think there's also an alternate world where you (not actually you) visited a few websites and discussion boards on the topic, remembered something you'd read that was semi-relevant and posted it, got a ton of likes and comments, and then really set out in earnest to find more evidence. It seems to me that a lot of people get a community from participating in conspiracy theories. I'm on the board of a scholarly journal, and we regularly get submissions of conspiracy theory articles -- but they're not just on random topics, they're mostly on Shakespearean authorship (it's mostly the Earl of Oxford these days) and the Voynich manuscript, as well as a handful of others. And the people who submit them are typically well-known figures within a kind of small, para-academic online universe devoted to the study of these questions. You can participate in this community without any of the barriers to entry in mainstream academia / scholarship, which naturally makes it attractive.
In terms of the "where people start" aspect, Scott, I submit two additional items for your consideration: looks compounded by fame.
It's an old joke that Washington DC is Hollywood for ugly people, but appearance matters a great deal for human bias. If we really look closely at the members of congress on either side of the aisle, they 'look' evil -- they look like men and women who have grown old being accustomed to power and dishonesty, and they all look a bit like each other (the way married couples come to resemble one another). Now, most voters already know they're voting for their own team, and don't spend much time scrutinizing their team's members. But if you were to talk a random somewhat-politics-naive person and show him a picture of an unknown politician from his own side and say "look at this monster the opposition wants to elevate to majority leader" or whatever, he'd look at the photo and be appalled at what he saw.
In the case of famous people, the fame magnifies whatever we see in them. Consider Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson, for instance: they look like what we think they are, but their faces 'look' far more like what we think they are than they would if we saw ordinary people with identical features.
This meets conspiracy theory in the following way: someone 'good' and handsome like JFK gets shot by a nobody doesn't work cognitively. He is huge and good, so what takes him down must be huge and bad. Or with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: really look at these people and they're unsettlingly unpleasant to look at: and they're hugely important. What things might such oversized ugly creatures be capable of? Obviously anything an ogre could do: that's what ogres are. They're ugly in an evil-looking way and they're too big, bigger than anybody has a right to be.
Even knowing how impressionable I am as a human to charisma and attractiveness, I can't deny that none of the available information about JFK and LBJ (and their personal private character as human beings) can prevent me from seeing in pictures of one a handsome good person and in the other an ugly troll (especially in the photos from Air Force One before and after Albert Thomas is supposedly winking at him, where he looks kinda happy that JFK is dead).
Thus I'm not starting from emotion alone, exactly -- I'm starting in the middle of a feedback loop involving visual bias, emotion, dominance hierarchy, etc.
People tend to think that the powerful can't die randomly, irrespective of how they look.
> I remember reading a conspiracy theory 5-10 years ago that Shakespeare was someone else,
The most popular candidate used to be the philosopher Sir Francis Bacon. To me it always seemed completely ludicrous, as their prose styles were opposites. Bacon, in his Essays for example, was laconic and spare, whereas Shakespeare was exuberant and expansive.
If it was Ben Jonson, that's a new one to me. He's usually assumed "of course he can't be the real author of Shakespeare's plays" to the extent that stylometric analysis and machine learning clustering studies often use Jonson as a control to show how much of the similarity between Shakespeare's works and various candidates is just the inherent characteristics of being an Englishman writing plays in unrhymed iambic pentameter around 1600 AD.
The ones I'm familiar with, in roughly declining order of historical popularity are Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere (17th Earl of Oxford), Christopher Marlowe, and William Stanley (6th Earl of Derby). Of these, Bacon seems to have gone out of fashion in recent decades, with Oxford supplanting him as the main candidate.
But the Marlowe theory is the one I've found most intriguing. The idea being that Marlowe's recorded death in 1593 was actually faked (several motives have been proposed), with M continuing to write while in hiding and using William Shakespeare as a frontman and producer to get the plays performed and make money from them without risking exposure. The main evidence cited for this is the coincidence that Shakespeare's writing career starts up almost immediately after Marlowe's leaves off, and that some stylometric analyses show a very strong resemblance between Shakespeare's plays (especially his early ones) and Marlowe's, with Shakespeare's early works a bit closer to Marlowe's than to Shakespeare's own later ones, but both very different from known works by Jonson, Oxford, or Bacon. Also, of the proposed candidates (unless you count Jonson as a candidate), Marlowe is the only one who's known to be a great playwright and poet in his own right.
The arguments against Marlowe, apart from the affirmative evidence for William Shakespeare writing his own plays (his name's on the title page, his troupe is known to have been the main performers of the plays, all known contemporary attributions of the plays point to Shakespeare, and his known life and career align with the time period when the plays were likely written and first performed in a way that doesn't line up for any of the other candidates), are that the evidence for Marlowe's death being faked doesn't hold up well under critical scrutiny, that AI clustering analysis shows Shakespeare similar to buy distinct from Marlowe even if we separate Shakespeare's early plays from his later ones, Marlowe was a great tragedian but showed little or no gift for comedy, and that the similarities between Shakespeare's and Marlowe's works can be sufficiently explained by 1) Shakespeare in his early career consciously imitating Marlowe's style, and 2) the possibility that one or two of Shakespeare's early plays were posthumous collaborations with Marlowe, with Shakespeare picking up an unfinished Marlowe play and using it as the basis for his own work.
AFAIK, #1 is a commonplace idea in mainstream Shakespearean scholarship and #2 is a hypothesis that's taken seriously as a possibility.
Great summary! Yeah, in my experience, it's basically all Oxfordians (as they call themselves) these days. Although there was that bizarre thing about Amelia Lanyer in The Atlantic, if you caught that?
I can't say for sure it was Jonson rather than Marlowe - this Marlowe site ( https://www.oocities.org/chr_marlowe/shakespeare_epitaphs.html ) seems pretty similar to how I remember the argument, although it doesn't seem so convincing now. I don't know if that's because it's a different argument than the one I read before, or I'm just older and wiser.
The thesis of Samuel Crowell's "William Fortyhands" is that Shakespeare's place were not written by any one person, and instead Shakespeare was the most successful producer of his day who bought plays from lowly scribblers and then had them be revised to the "bad" versions that audiences of the time actually enjoyed:
https://www.ninebandedbooks.com/shop/book/william-fortyhands-disintegration-and-reinvention-of-the-shakespeare-canon/
Don't forget the desire to believe that I, and I alone, have discovered something so profound that it will rock the councils of the wise. It's exciting to believe you are the first archaeologist to open the tomb and discover the shocking truth.
Umberto Eco wrote a whole marvelous book about the seductivity of conspiracy theories, "Foucault's Pendulum," in which a group of friends comes to believe deeply in a massive century-spanning conspiracy with enormous implications, starting from the portentous clues about the conspiracy found in deciphering a 13th century scrap of Templar writing one of them finds. Late in the book, the protaganist's girlfriend talks him down from his adrenaline psychosis by pointing out that the scrap can also be interpreted equally plausibly as a discarded shopping list.
I love that book, it goes so deeply into how conspiracy theories can be created as a joke or a hoax or for ulterior motives, then they come to be believed sincerely, and how it's human nature that we get bored with the surface-level explanation because that's too dull and simple, so conspiracy theories will always thrive since the draw of "secret, hidden, world-changing knowledge that only an elite few are party to" (and now you are one of the elite few who know) is irresistable.
Yes. But he also shows how the obsession can start off harmless and then...evolve, take over like some malignant mental cancer, that there are sometimes good reasons why we put up certain No Thoroughfare signs in front of certain grassy paths that twist into the dark shrubbery...oh, it wouldn't harm to just...walk down a little and take a peek... It was a tour de force, and I sometimes wonder from what strange internal well he drew it.
What did you think of "The Name Of The Rose," then? And did you think the Sean Connery movie did a good job with it?
Many people joined the 9/11 truth movement because they learned about WTC-7 and realized that the official narrative was deliberately leaving out important evidence and was engaging in dishonest argumentation. They did not start out wanting to believe it; they wished it wasn't true but couldn't otherwise explain the evidence they were seeing. It is often very psychologically challenging when people "wake up" in this way and there are countless testimonials online to that effect, as well as sociological analyses saying the same thing. Conspiracy theory is properly conceptualized as a branch of elite theory: https://overduerevolutions.wordpress.com/2022/12/27/elite-theory-as-the-intellectual-basis-of-conspiracy-theory/
Well, that the government likes lies is nothing that should surprise anyone. And I am rather convinced that they knew ahead of time that *something* was going to happen about then, and that the either knew, or had reason to know, that it involved airplanes. And that they had legislation already written, just needing a few touches, ready to be passed.
But this is a lot different from believing that they knew the details in advance. Or planted explosives in the skyscraper. Both of those would take a lot more evidence than I've seen. (Though if you look there's enough to raise questions.)
But it was pretty clear from the beginning that he government wasn't going to come clean, even of the parts where they were innocent, because that would reveal them as incompetent.
Also "the government" is the wrong abstraction here. It should be more "some people within the government". And it's not clear how many those were, or what their positions were. And just who knew just what. I can easily believe some folks in the FBI though the reports of activity were a foolish waste of time to check out, and others thought they could surely catch the guys before they did anything and....and a whole cascade of errors. And perhaps that legislation had been sitting around for a decade just waiting for a good chance to get passed. So it was the combined result of an idiot bureaucracy, and over ambitious agents and patient schemers...and they weren't working together, they just collided. And then the government lied about it to save face.
The correct abstraction is the ruling class, which includes people in government, business, finance, etc. The ruling class in every society has used lies in order to exploit and control the masses. Conspiracy theory is simply studying that, as I wrote.
There is a conspiracy theory on the left that Russia/Putin helped Trump win in 2016. One needs to believe a number of extremely low-probability contradictory statements at the same time:
- the balance of power in the US is very precarious and easily tipped over.
- at the same time neither the US left nor right can tip it over, despite being well-versed in the politics, very well financed and with few scruples, and not for the lack of trying.
- and yet a foreign power spending less than 0.1% of that in the US, with little presence in the US politics beyond an army of twitter bots, and not nearly as familiar with the intricate details of the US politics, and not nearly as technologically sophisticated can still tip it over.
This strikes me almost as likely as 9/11 truthers and moon fakers being right.
Not sure if it fits the first or the second type in the OP's classification.
Why don’t you and Matthew fight? He’s got a bunch of specific claims he thinks are true, which don’t necessarily imply the claims you’re disbelieving in.
I disagree with you on a definitional point and on a point of fact. The “Trump-gate” claim is that Trump colluded with Russia, not that he achieved anything by doing so. That would be clear evidence of “evil”, if “it” was “true”. Even if he would have got into power anyway, it would have put him in Russia’s debt, and possibly also exposed him to Russian blackmail. In turn, accepting such a debt to a foreign power would mean he wasn’t putting America first, in an unambiguous way.
But also, I don’t understand your model of the major parties’ agency over the election results. I imagine it like a chess game (or some asymmetric variant). Each side tries lots of strategies, and in the end one side wins. A blunder can easily cause a swing of 5% in polls, and politicians have lots of blunders. If the election margin is less than 5%, then each blunder avoided is responsible for the election result, because the result would be reversed if the blunder had happened. I can easily imagine Russia’s influence being at least that large.
Edit: as to which type of conspiracy caused that view, it’s all about the “evidence”. Mine is emotional (I’m personally aggrieved by some capitulations by some politicians to interest groups which they thought could affect their elections), I suspect Matthew’s above is fact-based (I think he thinks he saw some document which he thinks would be really weird unless Trump’s campaign knew of Russian involvement and said nothing).
First to address the strangest of objections:
> he wasn’t putting America first, in an unambiguous way
This ship sailed and sunk long ago. Almost no one in the congress does that. It is all about political maneuvering and sticking it to the other side. One can also frame it as anti-maskers against anti-Muskers. Or choice vs life. Or whatever. "Putting America first" is nowhere on the map.
> The “Trump-gate” claim is that Trump colluded with Russia, not that he achieved anything by doing so.
I... don't think this is the claim? The left would say that Russian interference put him in the White House in 2016 but was not enough to do so in 2020. The right would probably waffle on the topic right now, saying how the election was won despite Dems' interference in 2016 and stolen by them in 2020, and then switch to talking about Hunter Biden's laptop or something.
> I imagine it like a chess game (or some asymmetric variant). Each side tries lots of strategies, and in the end one side wins. [...] each blunder avoided is responsible for the election result, because the result would be reversed if the blunder had happened. I can easily imagine Russia’s influence being at least that large.
That does not make a lot of sense. In this model when two equally strong giants fight it out, and the decision is basically random because of all the swings and hacks, hits and misses (I am not saying I agree with this model, but that seems to be what you are proposing), then the odds of some tiny influence way below the noise level intentionally affecting the outcome is extremely unlikely, given all the other influences in play. Barring some unfathomable conspiracy where Putin knows the playing field better than anyone else and either secretly spends untold hundreds of millions or knows exactly which lever to push even though neither side does.
Sure, Putin wanted Trump to win, that is no secret. Sure, Russans were happy he won in 2016 and unhappy he lost in 2020. Sure, they launched plenty of low-budget but coordinated twitter bot attacks. But assuming that that particular genius move, and not TV ads, rallies, robocalls swayed the outcome is... just silly. Unless you think that Putin is way smarter than everyone in the West and found a magic outsized lever no one else could. Which does not seem to match reality, given how the war in Ukraine is going.
My understanding was that the mechanism by which the Russians are alleged to have affected the 2016 election outcome is by the hack and leak of the DNC emails.
Right, good point, another bit of "evidence" that boils down to "Putin is so much smarter and more resourceful than both Republicans and Democrats, despite spending almost zero cash or resources".
If the Republicans had hacked the DNC emails, they'd have gotten in a lot of troubles, because it's illegal. Watergate brought down Nixon.
Hard to see how the exposure of plain true facts qualifies as evil manipulation. One might just as reasonably argue if the Russians did this they did the American voter a big favor, by exposing information they ought to know before voting.
I mean, people hold up Woodward and Bernstein as big heroes because they exposed stuff about the 1972 Nixon re-election campaign that turned out to be so damaging that Nixon had to resign. Are they heroes and the putative Russian operatives evil just because of their nationality? ("It's heroic when Americans do it, but evil when Russians do the same thing.") Or because the outcome pleases one tribe more than the other?
Interesting question. I hadn’t thought about Watergate as a privacy issue. The boring answer is that for Watergate, the media mostly reported based on anonymous sources, not on their own spying. I’m much more okay with using interviews than I am with spying on people. But I didn’t know that until I checked, so it’s not my real answer.
My main answer is that if the Watergate investigation had involved spying, it would have been looking for evidence about a known story, and it hypothetically would’ve only involved publishing evidence for that story. The big legal question justifies some invasion of privacy to investigate it. The email hack was more “Let’s see what’s out there”. There was no prior justification other than general suspicion.
But you’re right, part of my answer is partisan. My immediate gut reaction is that I wouldn’t have been so upset if Wikileaks had published the Republicans’ emails after someone left their computer logged in. Yet I would have been upset if a Democrat staffer had published the Republicans’ emails. If the data is obtained because of politics, it feels like a hit job to me. My second gut reaction is that I feel like people deserve privacy unless they’ve done something wrong. (I always felt less pro-Wikileaks as I thought about it more, although I think I mostly supported them.) Maybe in that sense, my gut reaction is left-right partisan, in that my threshold for “something wrong” is stricter on the right than on the left (I have no idea how to measure that). But I think I would still see all the other emails that got published despite having nothing incriminating in them, and be upset. That could have been me, even if it’s the wrong side of the aisle. Watergate couldn’t have been me because I haven’t done anything that illegal. And maybe if the actual email dump contained only emails that the journalists specifically thought were bad, I would have minded less.
What about this, then? The Obama (Senate) campaign coordinated with the press to get a friendly (California) judge to unseal divorce records. This contained no political information whatsoever, of course. Just squalid personal details, enough to sink Jack Ryan's chances and propel Obama to his Senate seat.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-0406180364jun18-story.html
Don't people involved in a divorce with children have an even greater expectation of privacy then a Secretary fo State e-mailing her staff, or a President consulting with his Oval Office advisors?
I'm not, by the way, suggesting the Obama campaign (or the Chicago Trib) did anything unusually wicked. Quite the contrary. This is how the game is played, among our species. Politics is a knife fight with not much rules. I can understand anyone wanting to reduce the general level of barroom brawl with broken bottles aspects of the game -- but thinking Candidate X from Party We Dislike is the very first ever to cut a few ethical corners is either naive or disingenuous, and that I find tedious[1]
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[1] Indeed I believe Nixon himself was surprised that the Watergate story had the legs it did. He was 100% correct that what he did, modestly illegal that it was, was nothing much by historical standards. Certainly the Kennedy campaign against him in 1960 did as much, or worse, and let us not even get into the machines in the Truman era. Nixon just didn't get that the Zeitgeist was different, or perhaps that he was too personally unlikeable to laugh it off.
I don't think I quite agree. Suppose the FBI selectively leaks information they have on politicians. They only leak true information, but also they only leak embarrassing or incriminating information about politicians who oppose increased FBI funding or power. If that happened, I'd consider it to be a serious and worrying instance of the FBI influencing elections in an illegitimate way, even though they never made anything up.
Yeah, and if the KGB were hacking Russian elections I imagine Russian voters might complain like that[1]. Anyway, the way to proof yourself against the leak of embarassing information about how you handled official secrets is to not be an arrogant idiot about how you handle official secrets -- to adhere to the same principles your staff demands of the lowliest intern.
And as I said, a decent argument can be made that the public deserved to know in advance of voting for her all about Clinton's issues with this, pretty much for the same reason it was suggested the public deserved to know in advance of voting for him (in 2020) just how much or little the Trump 2016 campaign collaborated with the KGB. Expectations of privacy for private actions in private lives are one thing, but they should rarely exist for actions that elected officials take that bear directly on their jobs.
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[1] I mean, hypothetical Russians who aren't relieved to find that the apparat has restrained itself to merely releasing juicy gossip, instead of breaking legs or shooting people to get their point across.
I don’t recall the DNC hack, exposing any really serious, important information that brought it anywhere close to what happened in Watergate. As I recollect, it was just embarrassing. Oh the thing that got the most play was that the DNC was doing everything they could to cut Sanders off at the knees and make sure Clinton got the nomination. So back room politicking exposed for all to see which is always embarrassing. Maybe I missed something.
> Sure, Putin wanted Trump to win, that is no secret. Sure, Russans were happy he won in 2016 and unhappy he lost in 2020. Sure, they launched plenty of low-budget but coordinated twitter bot attacks. But assuming that that particular genius move, and not TV ads, rallies, robocalls swayed the outcome is... just silly.
Isn't the argument that all of those things swayed the outcome in different directions, leading to the verdict we had? I don't think we could ever quantify how much any of them actually work. Maybe we are working with different definitions of 'sway'? I am not too sure you can ever pinpoint one thing and say that was the one that caused candidate X to win. It's always a messy jumble.
In reverse order:
> “…TV ads, rallies robocalls, …”:
My claim is that the misinformation spreading, Facebook-group-against-vaccines and similar things had an impact on a similar scale to robocalls etc. They weren’t just one-offs, they went on over a long time and got a lot of media attention.
> “…Knows exactly what lever to push…”:
My claim is that both sides know what levers to push. They both run TV ads and rallies and robocalls (and TV interviews and debates, support from friendly media etc.). If any one of those strategies got blocked (and wasn’t compensated for), it would swing the election. I’m not claiming Russia’s influence was bigger than that of the TV ads. I am claiming that even if Russia affected the election less than TV ads, it might still have affected the election enough to reverse the result.
> “…The left would say…”:
Okay, you might be right here. The stories I saw in the Australian media focused more on the undue influence side, but that might be because that was a hot topic here at the time.
> “…Putting America first…”:
The difference is how defensible it is, to one’s own supporters. In all the debates you mentioned, politicians can claim they are doing the right thing, and many of their supporters will believe them. If Trump had clearly asked for support from Russia, it would be unambiguously bad for the country. Maybe Trump could have prevented it sticking, but most politicians would have to apologise for it, and lose face.
> Sure, they launched plenty of low-budget but coordinated twitter bot attacks
Actually there's little evidence of this. The Facebook ads that were tied to Russia were all financially motivated, which is a much simpler explanation, and nearly all of the people who saw that content were already staunch Republicans. Just another big nothingburger.
"The balance of power in the US is very precarious" is true in the technical sense that we sometimes have close elections where various random events could be the tie breaker.
When an election is close, there are many causes that count as "deciding the election." A spectacular version of this was the 2000 presidential election where you could say that Ralph Nader's candidacy or butterfly ballots or a Supreme Court decision decided the election. They're all causes.
The 2016 election wasn't as close, but there were multiple news events leading up to it that were arguably causal.
People don't want to believe that important decisions like that can be decided randomly, but that's always going to be possible when you compare two large numbers to see which one is bigger, and they're close enough to each other.
Yeah, I agree with all that. Which makes pointing to Putin as having an outsized effect rather dubious, given much larger in magnitude warring influences.
Why does it require Putin having an outsized effect on the election? If Trump lost, and then evidence surfaced of Putin having influenced the outcome with the Trump campaign's knowledge, would that not be equally damning?
I guess there are several separate points here.
- Did Russia work to help Trump's side? That is obviously accurate.
- Did Trump passively accept it? Yes, of course, any politician would.
- Was Trump easy on Putin because of it? Yes, Trump rewards support and loyalty.
- Did it materially affect the outcome? Highly implausible, given all other more powerful actors whose livelihood was on the line.
- Was Trump a paid Russian asset? Super duper unlikely.
- Did Trump financially benefit from Putin's tacit support? Possibly, though I have no specific example in mind.
- Did Trump later reach out to Putin the way he did try to get kompromat on Hunter Biden from Zelenskyy (if I recall correctly) by making financial aid conditional on this? Who knows, would not be out of character for him.
- Was some of what Trump did likely illegal? Muller hints that it probably was and would definitely have been for someone other than the sitting president.
The left conflates all of the above into one big blob of conspiracies and collusion between Trump and Putin.
"- Did Trump passively accept it ? Yes, of course, any politician would"
Actually, no. There are in fact lots of examples of politicians explicitly rejected help from illegal sources. This isn't as one sided as you'd believe. Gore handed over the stolen Bush debate prep to the FBI.
Even if you want to maintain "most candidates do this" its also very clear that what most candidates don't do is publicly and openly welcome it and explicitly ask the foreign government source of the illegally obtained material *provide more of it* as Trump did.
Accepting a windfall that came your way is one thing, inviting the Russian ambassador to a public speech, sitting him in the front row, and then explicitly stating "Russia if you are listening, America would greatly reward anyone who provides more of this material" is something else.
The advantage Russia has over US actors is that it can do things that are illegal in the US without threat of law enforcement.
Sure, but PR/propaganda/trolling on Twitter are all legal in the US, and that's most of what Russia is accused of doing. You can write all the misleading propaganda you like and publish it as widely as you can manage, and you're not going to be arrested for it.
I agree with Sergei's reasoning for why those things aren't very concerning. People are right to care about the illegal stuff.
Very close elections can be decisively influenced by small events. The ballot design choices of a single county in Florida determined whether George W. Bush or Al Gore won in 2000. That election was, in fact, so close that incredibly incidental factors may have been decisive. The odd makeup choices of the Gore team in one debate potentially cost him that election.
With that in mind, it is entirely possible that the Wikileaks drops' effect on media coverage was such that it shifted just enough votes in a very narrow election to cost Clinton the race. This does not mean that Russia has an all powerful influence over American elections, but rather that close events can turn on modest factors.
The Russian espionage hack and release efforts on behalf of the Trump campaign had two important effects. The first is the they were timed, within a matter of hours, right after the Access Hollywood tapes dropped and to some extent blunted the impact of that story as it divided media coverage. The second was that they added a secondary malaise of scandal around Clinton associated with the word "emails." While there was nothing to them, the US media coverage tone was scandalous and it may have contributed to low info voters sense that something untoward was going on with Clinton and email secrecy. Was this enough to flip the election in Trump's direction? It's almost impossible to say, but it is plausible that these factors moved a little less than a point of voters in 3 Midwestern states.
The thing is, the closer the election, the more things can be said to have influenced its outcome. Trump/Clinton and Trump/Biden were both *very* close elections, so all kinds of not-that-big stuff might have influenced their outcome. Did Russian troll farms, leaked DNC emails, and the perfectly-timed reopening of the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server scandal change the election outcome? Quite possibly. Did the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the delay of the good news on covid vaccine effectiveness till after the election, and biased moderation on social media change the election outcome? Quite possibly. Get the election close enough, and bad weather on election day might change the outcome.
How much leverage you have doesn't just depend on your knowledge and resources , it depends on the rules you are playing under. If illegal things didn't give you an advantage, there would be no need to make them illegal. Parties within the U.S. don't want to do anything too illegal ,parties outside the US are already playing outside the rules.
Hmm, I don't think I buy the argument that Putin's influence was significantly leveraged by him doing something illegal that the US parties would love to do but cannot. For example gerrymandering is (sadly) legal and has an effect that is many orders of magnitude larger. Robocalls, TV ads and news coverage in general are very much legal and way more effective than some twitter bots. Which are also legal, as far as I can tell. Additionally, US forces never shied away from shady tactics, like delaying the release of hostages in 1980 until after the election. Whether it would have helped Carter to win the second term is doubtful, but who knows.
Wiretapping is illegal. Why shouldnt tapping private emails be?
Hacking the emails is illegal, but publishing newsworthy leaked documents is a common thing done by media outlets all the time.
Yes. So the leverage that foreign actors have is on the hacking.
Sure, but they could leak hacked documents without ever coming inside the US. I mean, all kinds of leaked documents are published by news outlets.
How much leverage would that be? I can recall maybe one or two cases in the past decades in which a hacker was identified, caught, prosecuted, and served some kind of real punishment. Most of the time, even identifying who hacked into some half-assedly protected database can't be done. I'm having a hard time seeing how US Black Hat finds it preferable to pay Russians to do a hack (which would also be illegal) rather than do it himself, or hire out to domestic thugs. Or for that matter, just find some insider he can bribe to provide him with the juicy stuff.
> the balance of power in the US is very precarious and easily tipped over
What it comes to presidential elections there is a lot of truth in this. You can get a lot of electoral college votes by shifting maybe 10 or 20,000 people in the popular vote.
The Trump campaign had very granular polling data based on regions, which was entirely proprietary (it wasn’t publicly available information.)
Paul Manafort met with Klimnik somewhere in New York City, and gave him paper copies of it . Just for fun, you know, for something to talk about I guess. The Russian bots were very regional, specific and targeted. They didn’t need to spend a lot of money.
“ Of the more than 120 million votes cast in the 2016 election, 107,000 votes in three states effectively decided the election.” - Washington Post
Clinton won the popular vote nationwide in the election.
Yes, the theory that Trump is a puppet of Putin and is being blackmailed by him, etc. is nonsense but that’s not really the issue. The fire breathing, Wizard of Oz does not exist but the man behind the curtain certainly does.
> But if Trump was secretly an agent in the pay of Vladimir Putin, sent to destroy democracy, then that’s literal treason. There are no gray areas. You could explain in a single, objectively true sentence why he was one of the greatest villains in American history. There is a sense in which Trump being a literal traitor compresses information elegantly; instead of a mountain of vague cues suggesting that he is evil, there is a single fact that sums up his evilness perfectly.
I don't like the T-word. It's almost exclusively used as a rhetorical slap, which is still an *upgrade* from being used as a catch-all reason to execute dissidents. There is a reason it is the only crime expressly spelled out in the Constitution.
If Trump was explicitly on Putin's payroll and was actively working the interests of the United States with every scrap of power he legitimately was elected to hold *and* criminally acquired, that *still* would not be treason. "Enemy" does not mean "people we are mad at". There is a decided difference between cold and hot wars.
I don't like Trump, but I dislike accusations of capital offenses being thrown around for political expedience even less. Maybe this is nitpicky, maybe not. But even if it is, I feel like it's invited after such a tripling down.
It is not legally treason-as-narrowly-defined-by-the-US-constitution, but it would unquestionably be treason in the more colloquial sense, i.e. the act of betraying ones country.
Allow me to be more blunt: that "colloquial sense" can fuck right off into the sun. That narrowness exists for a reason.
There is a very good reason the set of actions the legal system can charge you with as treason is narrow, that does not in fact mean the legal system gets to decide how language works generally.
That's the same colloquial definition that led to people saying Obama committed treason by "bowing to Saudi leadership" or "promoting Marxism." He was literally giving "comfort" or "aid" to [some subset of the country's definition of] our enemies. It's also hogwash meant to elicit an emotional response.
A definition broad enough to include someone who is "secretly an agent in the pay of Vladimir Putin, sent to destroy democracy" as a traitor does not need to be broad enough to include everyone who ever takes a conciliatory attitude to Saudi Arabia or ... whatever the hell Obama is supposed to have done that counts as "promoting Marxism".
The precise legal definition of "treason" in the US (and likely in other jurisdictions) may be narrow enough to exclude a hypothetical version of Donald Trump who is on a foreign nation's payroll and given the explicit mission of becoming president in order to destroy Democracy in the USA. But my opinion is slightly different from Dan L's: for any purpose other than the law, any sense of "treason" or "traitor" that _wouldn't_ include someone doing that can fuck right off into the sun.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I do not in fact think that Donald Trump was or is in the pay of Vladimir Putin, or "sent to destroy democracy", and I don't think any of the things _credibly_ alleged about him make him "a literal traitor". Nor, so far as I can tell, does Scott.)
Sorry, maybe I am ignorant on this. If plotting alongside an enemy power to cripple your own country doesn't make you a traitor, what does?
The nitpicky technical point is that if we're not at war with a nation, 'enemy power' is not the applicable name for the kind of adversary they are.
We do not sanction our enemies. We kill them. As quickly and efficiently as possible. For all our mutual hostility and conflicting interests, Russia is not an enemy of the United States.
In general: it is theoretically possible but extremely difficult to be guilty of treason in the absence of either actual armed rebellion or a formal declaration of war. The war in Ukraine does not rise to that level, not even close. Plenty of people were convicted of capital crimes during the Cold War, but it is not a coincidence that the last treason case dates back to WWII.
Actual armed rebellion like, say, an angry mob breaking into the building where the legislature is assembled, while erecting a gallows on the lawn out front and chanting about it's intended use?
No.
Actual armed rebellion, yes, that would be treason. A riot at the Capitol, no, but you can get arrested for rioting and vandalism and such, as several 1/6 defendants have discovered. Erecting a gallows on the front lawn and chanting about its intended use is first-amendment protected speech, and similar stuff happens at tons of political protests and rallies. Like saying "Fuck the cops" or bringing a guillotine to a protest against Wall Street types.
The crime in this case is insurrection, not treason.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-1999-title18-section2383&num=0&edition=1999
I remember reading a recent ACX thread which used an archaic word that was new to me. Supposedly, the word meant "the crime of obeying a foreign sovereign/monarch". Seems fitting for this post. Can't remember it though. Google and reversedictionary have failed so far.
Maybe someone else knows? It started with a "p".
> Fuck the cops
Well you could gather in front of FBI hq and yell fuck the cops and then break into the building. You know, maybe with a bunch of wrist ties and the odd sharp object.
People who break into the FBI building are guilty of a crime, but the people who stand outside chanting offensive slogans are not.
The interesting thing about failed armed rebellions is they are almost always categorized as a riot that failed. And successful ones almost always start with a riot that succeeds.
With what were they armed?
I believe Dan L complained about the word "treason", not the word "traitor". (This was muddied by him calling it "the T-word" after quoting you using both, his subsequent explanation only said "treason.")
Those seem at least potentially different to me. (If for no other reason than Dan L's argument is about a legalistic interpretation of the constitution, and the constitution uses one of those words but not the other.)
What made Russia an enemy power, pray? I don't recall hearing of a declaration of war. At the time of the 2016 election, Russia still enjoyed "Most Favored Nation" status with the United States.
The United States is not in a declared war with the Russian Federation, therefore they are not an enemy power.
Note that the constitutional definition is very narrow: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." and that the last convictions were all for American citizens working with Germany or Japan during WWII.
Note that Soviet spies that were executed (e.g. the Rosenbergs) were executed for espionage, not for treason, because the Soviet Union was not an "enemy" in constitutional terms. If the USSR at the height of the Cold War wasn't an enemy, then the Russian Federation certainly isn't.
There's "treason" in its technical sense defined in American law by the US constitution which is very narrowly defined in terms of being actively at war and "treason" in its lay sense to mean egregiously betraying one's country. People just mean the latter.
It's possible for the narrow definition to be too narrow, and the broad definition to be too broad.
I f someone in the U S spied f or the Germans or Japanese the week before Pearl HArbour, would not be treason in your view?
If they're caught December 4th, tried December 5th, and we're discussing this December 6th, I wouldn't call it treason. If the trial and discussion are delayed a week, I would. This is one of those edge cases, but I don't have a problem with the judgement of the acts depending on the circumstance.
But see also Johnson's blanket pardon after the Civil War. There's certainly a lot to unpack there, but I support a principle that prosecuting treason after hostilities have ceased is rife with complexity, and we should consistently choose to err in favor of not slinging accusations of capital crimes unless we really do want there to be blood spilled.
Once again, Scott posts an article proving that my deep-seated convictions have been correct all along ....
I'd better go reblog this to all my friends!
In the book The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould makes the interesting argument that bias correlates with margin of error. That might neatly explain why some people have wilder ideas about issues that are important (so they're more encouraged to form an opinion) but are less experienced with, with more opportunity to be selective in their sources.
* The book was plagued with certain serious issues related to Gould's intellectual dishonesty, where he misinterprets data to favor his thesis. I still think the particular idea he presents in the text about bias correlating to margin of error is interesting.
Can you explain more of what you mean by "bias correlates with margin of error"?
Let me quote some Feynman Talking about Millikan's attempt to measure the charge of an electron:
"We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Fraud_allegations
This tendency to fudge the statistics in the direction of a preconceived 'correct' answer arguably correlated and correlates with the margin of error for the experiment. So the larger the experimental margin of error, (i.e. the more potential uncertainty in our experimental results), the more that things get fudged in the direction of the expected result. Reducing margin of error, in contrast, reduces this kind of bias as well. The more precise we are in our calculations, the less able we are to fool ourselves. And, consequently, the less biased our observations will be.
Phrased another way; faced with uncertainty, we fill in the details with our biases. The more compelling the evidence, the less we do this.
A tendency for precision correlates with various other types of beliefs.
Edit:
Hmmm... counter-argument. Conscientiousness doesn't seem to impact conspiracy theory belief as I would have predicted. Though I just pulled up this publication on a very quick search and skimmed it so I could have missed all kinds of issues.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjIgdPujsT8AhV8LkQIHVlVA_QQFnoECBAQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fosf.io%2Fqmfp5%2Fdownload&usg=AOvVaw2TS42nc8joGZ9ka4Hi50Na
It seems to me like you could just as easily draw the opposite conclusion from that story. The proposed mechanism is that if the data seems too surprising, then people look for a reason to exclude it. If we get a surprising answer with narrow error bars, then that requires an explanation, so we'd expect it to elicit this reaction. On the other hand, if the surprising answer has very wide error bars, then that's much less surprising; it's easily explained as a random fluke and doesn't require us to go looking for an additional explanation.
I think Gould's claim may be a little stronger than your paraphrase, though, or at least less intuitive. Gould's claim is that if the error bars are wide the claimed experimental result will have a greater potential for bias, not just people's interpretation of that result. That is, you're more likely to get a claimed result which does not include the true value if your error bars are wider (assuming some strongly held preconceptions.)
I think what you're describing might *also* occur, but it describes a fundamentally different effect. i.e. it addresses interpretation of a particular result, not the results themselves.
It is possible for both these things to be true:
"if the data seems too surprising, then people look for a reason to exclude it."
(your mechanism of bias)
"If people believe that they are supposed to get a particular result then they may find a way to bias their results. The degree to which their results can be skewed tends to correlate with the margin of error."
(Gould's mechanism of bias)
Gould's mechanism may be a bit more tenuous, but is also a bit more of an interesting and novel proposition whereas wanting to exclude conclusions we disagree with is well within most people's existing theory of mind.
The passage you quoted in your earlier comment sounded to me like my mechanism:
"When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ..."
Okay, so what if an experimental result becomes more *difficult* to fudge, slightly, and still think of oneself as intellectually honest? What do you predict will happen as a consequence?
I'm reminded of a series of experiments, the institution, date, and PI of which I have completely forgotten, but which I think was stashed away in Eliot Aronson's 1980s textbook on social psychology. Paraphrasing this mightily, since it's been 40 years since I read about it, if I recall correctly in this clever series of experiments the canonical college student volunteers received an injection of a small amount of epinephrine, and then were asked to complete a long boring survey.
During the survey, a confederate would act in one of two ways: (1) angry. He would mutter and shift around sharply, complain about the form and low pay, and eventually wad the form up into a ball and throw it away, stalking angrily from the room. (2) delighted. He would hum cheerfully, chortle at things he pretended to find amusing in the survey, smile and chat with the (real) experimental subject.
The subjects were debriefed afterward, but first they were asked a simple question: how are you feeling? Not surprisingly, the epinephrine-hyped subjects that had been in the room with the "angry" confederate reported feeling annoyed, even angry. Those with the "happy" confederate reported feeling pleased and happy. More interesting, both sets of subjects gave *reasons* why they felt this way. The angry ones had a list of very rational reasons why they were angry, and the happy ones had a list of very rational reasons why they were excited.
And of course, it was all invented out of thin air, because the physiological symptoms were merely the result of the epinephrine. Neither set of subjects was genuinely angry or happy at all -- they were just suffering from a set of ambiguous physical symptoms induced by the drug, and then they used the cues of the confederate to interpret their symptoms as the result of rage or excitement, and then went further on to rationalizing their "emotional response" as the logical response to some plausible chain of cause 'n' effect.
Was it not also Heinlein who acidly observed that Aristotle was wrong, man is not the rational animal, he is the rationalizing animal.
Your example falls to the replication crisis. https://replicationindex.com/2019/02/24/schachter-and-singer-1962-the-experiment-that-never-happened/ (Although this is not so much failed replication, as it is misleading use of the paper.)
At this point, whenever you think "I remember a psychology experiment that supports my idea that..." you should stop right there.
Thanks very much, but I'm underwhelmed. The replication attempt had a significantly different experimental protocol, it found results in the correct direction but insufficiently statistically significant -- which could readily mean the experiment simply lacked sufficient statistical power -- and there is no serious exploration, at least in that narrative, of why the 2nd experiment should be more reliable than the 1st.
So at this point my conclusion is more towards agnosticism, as always more work should be done to draw more firm conclusions, but I reject the conclusion that the original work has been clearly demonstrated to be wrong. If you want to argue its conclusions may have been overstated as to their reliability, I have no quarrel with that.
It looks to me as though there were substantial flaws in the original paper even without the replication, which is why I made my comment about that. I don't think you can validly use this paper for anything meaningful given the flaws.
And even agnosticism about the paper means "you shouldn't use this paper". If the paper doesn't show your claim to be false, but doesn't show it to be true either--it just shows *nothing*, you can't use it.
Well, you didn't mention those flaws, so I have no idea whether they would change my opinion. Also I would say your view here is too rigid and inconsistent with how at least the science I know works. There are rarely bright lines that let us say X is true or X is false. I said that the argument in the 2nd paper that the statistical power was too small -- remember the measured effect was still in the predicted direction -- increased my tendency to be agnostic, or in Bayesian terms reduced my assessment of the probability of they hypothesis being true. But it was never 100% if the first place, and it did not get reduced to 0%. I don't live in that black 'n' white world. No scientist I know does.
One effective thing about Trump smears was that they knew the guy wouldn't effectively rebut them.
Also, rather than believing in conspiracy theories, I just try to articulate why the people running my country are stealing from me and why we should call it stealing and theft and crime. Doesn't seem to be working. The "black pill" view is probably correct.
Yes, "conspiracy theory" when done properly is just analysing the criminal behaviour of the elite (and especially how they use deception to enable their criminality). See my essay here: https://overduerevolutions.wordpress.com/2022/12/27/elite-theory-as-the-intellectual-basis-of-conspiracy-theory/
There are a few things which need to brought up when trying to analyse conspiracy theories.
One of the first and most important lessons one has to learn, is that the system of power itself is the source of numerous conspiracy theories, the tactic is called poisoning the well, which is used in tandem with the limited hangout.
If for instance we take the government child trafficking rings. The entire Epstein affair amounts to a limited hang out, one which connects in interesting ways to plenty of interesting things, vit those ties are not a part of the hang out. So we have some definitive dark shit going on but we only get to see a glimpse of that, which of course leads to speculation.
Here comes the other leg, the poisoning of the well with the adrenochrome business, pushed through the Qanon psyop which in turn was perfomed by military intelligence, the ONI to be specific.
Now this narrative is dessiminated into the "pizzagate" story specifically to 1: pull in the crazies, the gullible and the black pilled, and thus repulse all sceptical normies from doing their own research.
And yes, pizzagate is the epstein affair. Tht pizzeria owner tagged those photos of unknown children #carisjames, which is the name of epsteins island. So the question for the serious researcher (who are swamped by the manufactured hysteria and astroturfing of crazy voices), becomes why do we have child trafficking rings connected to power? The Franklin scandal being one of the most important pieces to add.
And the answer becomes, because power is a blackmail operation, so all powerful faces are beholden to masters who control them through blackmail and leverage like any other criminal organisation. A child fucker front beholden to drug running intelligence services with videotapes and assassins on payroll.
So who killed JFK? The CIA did, Bush ran the op, then iran-contra and presided over the Franklin scandal, and hisnson took control over the Afghanistan poppy fields. Epstein is just another generation of the same power.
😇
I agree with your main point but feel that this is becoming a bit of a technique at this point -- make a fairly small point but illustrate it with culture warry examples that are likely to divide/annoy people enough to engage and come back for more skirmishes in the comments.
😉
Scott has a habit of writing blogposts that seem to be about something innocuous, but are actually about a culture war example that he only mentions three paragraphs down after getting you to agree with the innocuous version. This article *starts* with the Kennedy and Great Pyramid examples, and *ends* with the culture war example. Going by Scott's pattern, the point of this post is the culture war example.
(And here, the example is "well, I trusted what the liberal media said about Trump, and it was wrong. My mistake was falling into bad emotional patterns! What? You say that *trusting the media* and *trusting the left* was my real mistake and that the media and the left lie to me all the time? Perish the thought.")
What I have known intuitively since my early years of my teens is that there is a 'griefter' anomaly that is very common in today's world. They misdirect the audience's attention and are given much acclaimed fame/wealth, when independent researchers or scholars are ostrachized for having the same findings earlier. L vs R, anti vs pro.
1. Deny X
2. Say X is possible, but implausible
3. Say X is happening but it's good for you
4. Say new metric of X should happen
5. Non-X is bad
or
1. X is bad, Opposite-X is bad
2. Opposite-X is good, X is bad, but omit the technicalities of X
Usually they have large followings. Much funding has been developed to propaganda nowadays. Anything that goes through the internet or media is likely to possess some semblance of trying to direct your attention towards something that is non-hostile. You will know when you reach 'hostility' that you are touching the truth because it undermines the possession and objects of such power.
A common heuristic I use nowadays is, is this very politicized? If so, there is likely to be more scrutiny needed, half-truths and half-lies, lies of omissions need to be investigated carefully. An understanding of the premises and the models behind those premises are needed to infer causality, Unfortunately, griefers tend to say authority of X claims can never be not trusted sources or they say only non-X is bad but not non-Y non-Z or anything else, or they promote an alternative to X that is just as bad. I react by disassociation emotion from claims and carefully evaluate those premises.
Is it true that there are never X instances of this?
When do such X instances occur?
Should we only be focusing on X metrics? Is there more to X?
Does doing X actually increase Z which Z is assumed to be good?
This is the only method of deriving some firm ability of ground truth or state of reality.
Absolutely agree
A third category, or maybe a variant of the second, is taking arguments-as-soldiers and "cui prodest" reasoning to their most extreme. E.g. a school shooting helps the cause of gun control activists, therefore it wasn't real and it was staged by them (or at least we want to say so).
Holocaust denial fits into this too: the holocaust is used to argue that nazi-adjacent people are bad, and it got Jews sympathy, therefore nazi-adjacent people say it didn't happen.
Lee Harvey Oswald was definitely a CIA agent, though.
Right, I’ve never gotten into the minutiae of bullet trajectory and brain splatter and all that, but the body of evidence that the assassination was orchestrated and covered up by powerful elements within the security state is pretty convincing. See, e.g., JFK and the Unspeakable.
Not to mention the fact they’re still withholding 4000 documents about the assassination and investigation they’re legally obligated to produce. There can be no national security rationale for not producing those documents. Hiding institutional crimes is the most plausible explanation.
But why? The argument for conspiracy rests on the idea that JFK was some kind of threat to the security state when in fact he was a pretty enthusiastic Cold Warrior. The idea that JFK was about to make a turn and start de-escalating the Cold War sounds like something from professional wrestling or a mediocre movie. I can't think of many historical precedents for it.
If I were going to believe a JFK assassination theory, I'd go with it being the mob who felt betrayed after RFK started going after them even after they delivered the votes in Chicago.
According to JFK's public speeches, he was attempting to make a turn and start de-escalating the Cold War. Behind the scenes evidence also suggests he was fighting the MIC to minimize or eliminate involvement in Vietnam, and getting considerable flak for it.
Here's JFK in his own words, directly challenging the ideology of the MIC/security state, months before his death:
"What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.
Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles--which can only destroy and never create--is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.
I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war--and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task."
"Second: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims--such as the allegation that "American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of wars . . . that there is a very real threat of a preventive war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union . . . [and that] the political aims of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries . . . [and] to achieve world domination . . . by means of aggressive wars."
Truly, as it was written long ago: "The wicked flee when no man pursueth." Yet it is sad to read these Soviet statements--to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also a warning--a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.
No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements--in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.
Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland--a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.
Today, should total war ever break out again--no matter how--our two countries would become the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours. And even in the cold war, which brings burdens and dangers to so many nations, including this Nation's closest allies--our two countries bear the heaviest burdens. For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.
In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours--and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.
So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.
Third: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the cold war, remembering that we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points. We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment. We must deal with the world as it is, and not as it might have been had the history of the last 18 years been different.
We must, therefore, persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists' interest to agree on a genuine peace. Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy--or of a collective death-wish for the world.
To secure these ends, America's weapons are nonprovocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self- restraint. Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.
For we can seek a relaxation of tension without relaxing our guard. And, for our part, we do not need to use threats to prove that we are resolute. We do not need to jam foreign broadcasts out of fear our faith will be eroded. We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people--but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth.
Meanwhile, we seek to strengthen the United Nations, to help solve its financial problems, to make it a more effective instrument for peace, to develop it into a genuine world security system--a system capable of resolving disputes on the basis of law, of insuring the security of the large and the small, and of creating conditions under which arms can finally be abolished."
"I am taking this opportunity, therefore, to announce two important decisions in this regard.
First: Chairman Khrushchev, Prime Minister Macmillan, and I have agreed that high-level discussions will shortly begin in Moscow looking toward early agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty. Our hopes must be tempered with the caution of history--but with our hopes go the hopes of all mankind.
Second: To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on the matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it."
https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/american-university-19630610
According to JFK's public speeches, he was attempting to make a turn and start de-escalating the Cold War. "
And according to George HW Bush's public speeches, there would be no new taxes. And Obama said that if you like your health insurance, you can keep it.
Obviously, I can't prove a negative, but it just seems far more likely that JFK's death was a big metaphorical watershed event that led some people to positing some alternate timeline in which he delivered the nation from going down the wrong path.
I'm not saying he would have been successful. I'm not saying he would have "delivered the nation from going down the wrong path." But it is indisputable he was espousing an ideology and pursuing policies at odds with those favored by the MIC/security state leading up to his death. There was motive. There was opportunity. There was a coverup, that incredibly continues to this day. Oswald had extensive ties to the security state. There's also propensity - we know the security state assassinates and attempts to assassinate world leaders it doesn't like. It's hardly "flawed evidence processing" to carry the belief that security state elements perpetrated this particular assassination and coverup. It's a reasonable inference from the totality of the circumstances, bullet trajectories aside.
>And according to George HW Bush's public speeches, there would be no new taxes. And Obama said that if you like your health insurance, you can keep it.
And their ideological/political opponent believed them, talked against them, and campaigned against them for that. *If* the CIA felt threatened by Kennedy proclamations, it's irrelevant that these proclamations may not have been followed by actions. What matters is the scare it produced, and that it would get acted on.
I think taking political speeches at face value is risky. This is one of the things with Russiagate that interested me: was Trump good for Russia? Many of the Trump administration's policies weakened Russian influence. (I'm not willing to give Trump too much credit here. I think he had a few good people in the administration in among the scoundrels.)
The same question should be asked of Kennedy. Did he really want de-escalation? His actions up until his death were often very destabilizing. Bay of Pigs, Tibet, Vietnam, etc. Kennedy increased military spending, enlarged the nuclear arsenal, etc. Kennedy also sold a lot of weapons to Israel, ending the arms embargo, which I think was probably right, but that was definitely a major proxy front in the Cold War.
Trump? Missiles in Poland, moving US forces out of Germany and into bases further east, arms deals with almost every country in Eastern Europe. Trump was definitely Team Poroshenko/Yanukovych rather than Team Zelensky, but everyone who touched Ukraine before the war seems a little dirty (Hunter Biden, for instance.)
Basically, what you say is a lot less important than what you do.
The mob theory is compelling and fun. But how about this random ass take: The CIA killed Kennedy specifically BECAUSE kennedy wouldve ended the Cold War. He was too charismatic and badass. The CIA wants the problem more than the solution. If you took this theory you could also say thats why the CIA attempted to kill Reagan, bc he was also going to end the Cold War. But reagan survived and did win the Cold War with his badass charisma. I have no evidence for this but its still intriguing
Hands down, my absolute favorite take on Oswald is: he wasn't even trying to kill Kennedy at all. He was TRYING to kill the governor of Texas, and wasn't a very good shot.
Evidence: He had an established beef with the governor.
There's also a joke about a good ol' boy with a serially unfaithful wife who killed both JFK & MLK for cuckolding him.
How would Kennedy have ended the Cold War?
Uh, after the Bay of Pigs, JFK said he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds”. The State Department even advised him to remove CIA’s covert action capacity, which is something he wasn’t able to follow through on for obvious reasons.
Right, I don’t think there’re grounds for a serious dispute regarding motive. There’s no question that the CIA and JFK had an antagonistic relationship leading up to his murder. That alone obviously isn’t proof, but it is relevant.
I'm afraid I don't understand what "Trump-Russiagate" is. I'm aware of various claims having been made regarding Trump and Russia, some of which are laughable and others of which are plausible. I don't understand what conspiracy is or was being alleged. It would be very helpful if you, Scott, could state the claim you assumed was probably true but now know to be false. I assume it isn't, "Trump was secretly an agent in the pay of Vladimir Putin, sent to destroy democracy."
Seems unlikely that Scott would have ever believed that, but it's hard to imagine what he did previously believe about it that he no longer does.
I think you're being uncharitable towards Russiagate here--it's much closer to a "Type 1" conspiracy theory than theories like the Elders of Zion or QAnon or NWO or what not, in the sense that it is grounded in real factual discrepancies that are interpreted through faulty reasoning. There's some sense in which accusations of Trump-Russia collusion are obviously true--there was clearly some illicit connections between some figures in the Trump campaign and figures associated with the Russian government. Russiagate is a conspiracy theory when people take these real facts and exaggerate them into an accusation that Trump committed treason and was directly an agent of the Kremlin, usually because they have an incorrect understanding of what legally constitutes "treason" and/or because they believe in the veracity of certain pieces of weak evidence like the Steele dossier. There's more motivated reasoning and less "merely" poor evidence-processing here than in other Type 1 conspiracy theories because of the political context, but the actual content of the belief is just that the facts about a specific issue which the mainstream interprets one way should actually be interpreted a different way.
The central quality of "evil global cabal" conspiracy theories like QAnon or the Elders of Zion can't just be that they're an attempt at rationalizing their followers' emotional dislike of the elite--there are plenty of people who loathe the elite without believing anything like these theories, and that doesn't explain why one of those people would become a conspiracist and not, say, a communist. Moreover, just saying that the global elite actively colludes to undermine democracy and maintain poverty alone would be enough to create a clean, simple reason to justify hating them that almost everyone would buy--so why all the truly bizarre obsessions with pedophilia and satanism and subliminal messages and what not?
These sorts of theories are probably best thought of as a sort of hamartiology. Moishe Postone's Antisemitism and National Socialism is a good read here, albeit one where a lot of people will probably have to read past the Marxism of the original text (thankfully, this isn't hard since Postone is one of those critical theorists that conflates capitalism with all of industrial and technological modernity rather than merely the system of a private market economy, and is famously a rather poor interpreter of what Marx actually said). To generalize his observations about antisemitism a bit, one might say that "evil cabal" theories are a sort of revolutionary conservatism (in the small-c sense of being averse to change, but often also in the political sense) created by a failure to come to a systemic understanding of modernity.
People arrive at these theories because they have deep anxieties about the modern world and reject mainstream institutions, but don't recognize how the problems they're worried about are created by the underlying economic/technological/social/etc. foundation of society; doing so would imply that fixing these problems would require broad and radical changes (Postone specifically means socialism here but you can equally apply this to any other belief system) and that we can't just have "the world like it is now, but without all the bad stuff", which they either don't want to accept or aren't intellectually curious enough to realize. And so instead, because one neither thinks that these problems can be solved within the current system nor is willing to accept a different one, the only recourse left is to offload all the problems onto the deliberate malfeasance of some set of people and imagine that the problems can be made to go away if those people are gone.
Even then, there's nothing *innate* about the above that should make you believe that the evil cabal is not only immiserating people but also doing human sacrifices to Satan, but I think that's best explained by the fact that this sort of theory tends to snowball as it absorbs more and more separate anxieties from different people, especially since the people that they attract are the sorts who are already primed to see spurious connections between unrelated misfortunes. Once such a incoherent jumble of bad things are all attributed to the same evil cabal, the original wrong but at least semi-rational (in the sense that you can see why a normal person who is part of the cabal might want to do these things) explanation like "the Jews want to control the economy" or "the Clintons are murdering opponents for political advantage" will no longer be sufficient--the only real way you can explain why the cabal is doing *all* these things, trafficking child prostitutes and putting satanic messages in rock music and making the frogs gay and so forth, is that they're just evil people who want to make you suffer.
You do not need a convoluted theory of mind or theory of political philosophy to make such claims. All you need is cost-benefit analysis and evolutionary game theory. Groups of people have similar genes and dispositions. Some have better strategies like subversion and high verbal acuity which lends to political and economic dominance. Hence over representation of such individuals. Same with psychopathy. If there’s someone that enjoys loving people then there can be people who enjoy killing people like people who play call of duty or operate drones in the Middle East. Lots of non sequiturs made here. Natural variation and genetic self interests are enough to account for the product of all human behaviour. A dolphin nor a primate needs a rational reason to rape, it just feels good because it rewards them with the same underlying neurotransmitters responsible for propagation of the species. There’s more higher order complex controls for more longer term oriented species because of the confluence of multi environmental pressures at differential time frames on sexual selection and adaptive as well as reproductive fitness. Centralization of power gives more control. Intelligent people seek order and structure to control their environment. Humans are one form of social environment. Understanding human behaviour, human genetics is the key to amassing control over human society. It is as simple as that. Start with first order principles and work your way downward. Not some convoluted psycho social babble about people. I went to an elite private school, I share certain elite beliefs and getting rid of certain people like the gullible docile public is something that fits my Darwinian viewpoint perfectly. Given that intelligence, truth and power are the most esteemed virtues of my peerage it makes little sense whatever quibbles you are dribbling. If I possessed more wealth and power, I would certainly instrument controls over the lives of people to do my bidding because it is advantageous to do so. If you had a system that could generate infinitesimal amounts of energy, would you not exploit it? It’s the same analogy.
Technical quibble: "Flammable" and "inflammable" mean approximately the same thing, but "infinitesimal" and "infinite" are opposites. A system whose only noteworthy output was infinitesimal amounts of energy would be within rounding error of completely useless.
“I feel like conspiracy theorism is just a flaw in evidence processing.” That’s quite a generalization. There are conspiracy theories that arise from flawed evidence processing and conspiracy theories that arise from reasonable inferences from the evidence. Conspiracies are a real thing. History (and the present) is full of powerful people colluding to do bad things. If your model of the world is “powerful people don’t collude to do bad things, and theories claiming otherwise are based on flawed evidence processing,” your model of the world is dead wrong. Iran-Contra, Operation Mockingbird, Tonkin Gulf, NSA mass surveillance, overseas assassinations and coups, JFK, WMD, tobacco, the Ford Pinto, Vioxx, Perdue Pharma, Enron, FTX, all kinds of PsyOps, etc., etc. Conspiracies are a major part of how the world works. Categorically discounting them offhand is a pretty ridiculous heuristic.
Catholic Church pedophile conspiracies which would have sounded crazy as they happen.
Yup, another good example. Not to mention everything about Epstein, up to and including his death.
There isn't much evidence for actual *conspiracies* there though as opposed to individual abusers of children being protected for a variety of reasons.
A conspiracy is just something hidden, and the idea is that the decision to hide the actions went to the top.
Not sure what your definition of conspiracy is, but an institution shuffling abusers around the world to connect them with new child victims while concealing their crimes readily meets my definition:
con·spir·a·cies.
the act of conspiring.
an unlawful, harmful, or evil plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot.
a combination of persons for such an unlawful, harmful, or evil purpose:
He joined the conspiracy to overthrow the government.
Law. an agreement by two or more persons to commit a crime, fraud, or other wrongful act.
"to connect them with new child victims"
Exactly, that is the sort of thing that has never been proved.
Rewrite it as
"an institution shuffling abusers around the world, understanding that this would only connect them with new child victims, while concealing their crimes"
Again, hard proof that the Church believed someone was an abuser and gave them access to children anyway is very hard to find.
Yes, that’s a more accurate way of putting it.
I think you are absolutely correct that conspiracies are extremely common. People collude all the time. The thing about conspiracy “theories” though, is that people tend to think that everyone (meaning people in power) are all in on the same one.
Recognising that emotion comes before - and therefore colours - reasoning is an under-appreciated insight.
I was once a tiny 'name' in the 'disinformation' exposure field. But I came to believe that treating supposed disinformation as a supply-side problem was exactly the wrong way to approach it. It's a demand-side phenomenon.
This makes cognitive hygiene a question of personal responsibility. Which is why efforts to censor, suppress or silence ridiculous stuff are pointless.
Yes, this makes it an insoluble problem. If you think it's a problem.
Well put. With this post and the previous series of posts about the media not lying, I think an alternative analysis would start with the question of what would make writers feel good and validated and included in a community, and what they think will make their readers feel good and validated and included in a community. What people will believe falls largely out of this analysis. Being confronted with confounding truths or insights will eventually force many people to give up these emotionally rewarding world views (being right feels good too, especially about things that are actually part of your life and where correct beliefs will generate rewarding predictions, as opposed to things happening way over there in DC or the ancient alient past, where false beliefs tend to be cost-free).
But it seems to me that, with conspiracy theories, the truth is a secondary part of the story that merely exerts a contradictory pressure on what is most rewarding to believe.
Instinctively I think your truth/reward model is important here. Thanks for that
Great point.
At the same time, shouldn't people have some level of personal responsibility to not add to, or to attempt to stop the flow of, the supply of disinformation?
I certainly want personal responsibility to feature. But perhaps more in the way we consume information, rather than actively behaving as gatekeepers
Hear hear!!
One thing I find strange about the more emotive conspiracy theories is that people seem surprisingly chill in response to them. If you sincerely believe there is a literal cabal of baby eating pedophile satanists running the country, you'd feel like that would affect your actions in some concrete way. As we observe with people who are dissidents in actual authoritarian regimes who do their best to leave for somewhere safer, or work against the government in some way. They certainly don't spend all their time loudly complaining about it because that's what gets you disappeared.
Correct. Fighting within any system or playing by the rules of the game that is not tilted in your favour is unintelligible behaviour. To secure the security of your progeny by moving and building your alliances/fort house elsewhere is a product of intelligible behaviour. Likewise with preparations. The majority expend little to no energy on comprehending the nature of the world or the systems that direct the modus operandi of the world, hence they will insufferably be at the whims of whatever environmental pressures and/or processes enacted by the architects of such systems whether it be ideological indoctrination or being an addicted gacha smart phone gamer. It is the middlemen that have the most to lose by not following in the locksteps because they are either censored or have their livelihoods stolen. Inversely, those with wealth are free to discuss the truth with their peerage because they are inconsequential to the judgements of society at large and maintain no need for fissure of facade. There are many snakes men in the world who will say oppositional things to convince you of the certainty of a thing, such deluge will not be advantageous to your mind.
If you steelman the Trump-Russiagate thing instead of strawmanning it, not only is it plausible, not only is it definitely true, but it's actually almost boring.
One man's steelman-strawman is another man's motte-bailey.
Motte and bailey has to be executed by the same person who notionally takes each position. Steelmanning and strawmanning are about characterizing other people's views.
The motte and bailey around this is when people say that Russiagate is very unlikely. "I'm just saying he's not a paid agent working to undermine the U.S." But then that slips into suggesting he was totally exonerated of, like, knowing that Russia was committing crimes on his behalf and covering it up or trying to help rather than reporting it.
That's not what the word "exonerate" means.
OK.
It was never plausible that Trump would win the election to anybody else, this makes the Russians blackmailing him and getting him elected far from almost boring.
>If we built an AI, what kind of mistakes might make it believe conspiracy theories, and how might we correct them?
I find it interesting that we are reaching the point where we justify our interest in human psychology with "we might learn something about AI".
>For these conspiracies, maybe the evidence that people are trying to explain isn’t weird bullet trajectories or pyramid-related coincidences, it’s their own emotions.
We have a word for this and it's rationalisation. "Trying to explain their emotions" sounds a bit like predictive processing where they say that we eat when we are hungry in order to "fulfil our prediction of satedness".
Imo all thinking works this way, i.e. any thought is an expression of more or less subtle emotions/feelings/sensations many of which go unnoticed.
Yes all thought is rooted in emotions. Goal directed sentient entities possess them as a means to assess the threat level and ally potential of foreign entities. It also acts as a kinesis factor in engaging behaviour that is either exploratory-exploitative, conservative-expending. The only differential with systemizers is more of their emotions are offloaded into the outcomes achieved. Social proof is one method used in propaganda. Our brains are primed for intelligently navigating the social landscape. So it is bemusing to think that people having negative inclinations about groups of people being disadvantageous or just cognitive machinations that are misguided through intellectualization of such processes. No matter how much you will try to intellectualize it away, you are dependent on it to categorize what is essential to your wellbeing in everyday life. Seeing many coincidental actions in succession but not making a conjecture about it is unintelligible behaviour. Our brains might be dispositionally primed for spurious correlations at times but it’s unlikely to be the case always. Separating emotional processes from the factual information we perceive is nice but that will still not get you to the root of any problem without a coherent understanding of the nature of such problems. Hence the directive emotional stimuli is a necessity to pursue further action in investigation as a motive affair, else if you are convinced there is no threat in the world you would never notice anything. Just like an invasive species that finds new food where the old species has no predators, they are eaten alive because they have no a priori concept of such predation nor such ingrained instincts. People lacking in both or more congruently said lacking control in maintaining the integrity or coherence of both modulating psychoactive processes are a predominant majority of our population.
I've heard it proposed that people share articles without carefully checking them (or even without reading past the headline) as a way of expressing their group affiliation. i.e. this headline is favorable to the XYZ group, so I'll retweet it to show that I'm aligned with the XYZ group.
This seems kind of similar to your "finally there's a way to show the bad thing is bad!" feeling, except that your thing seems like it has an extra layer of actually-caring-about-underlying-reality piled on top.
>But also, some conspiracy theorists don’t really seem to hate their subjects this much. A lot of Illuminati believers tend to be kind of chill hippies who _believe_ without really _worrying_. Maybe these people are more akin to the Kennedy and Pyramid believers in Part 1?
This rings true to me. I'm reminded of Jer Clifton's research on "primal world beliefs"; perhaps 'a single web of elites controls society' is just what you get when your perception of the universe's interconnectedness or intentionality is at a certain point between 'everything is an emergent phenomenon of mechanistic processes' and 'the cosmos itself speaks to me personally'. (And to stereotype broadly about chill hippies, dabbling in psychedelics definitely seems related to perceptions of interconnection.)
>If only they were literally raping children
Jeffrey Epstein would like a word...?
This.
I would like to slightly update Scott's theory. Yes, an emotional conspiracy theory is a way to make one's anger legible. But the connection between the anger and the theory is not random (I am angry at someone because of X, so I accuse him of a completely unrelated Y), but rather an exaggeration of the real thing that made me angry (I accuse someone of doing X every day, when in reality it only happened once; or I accuse their friends of doing X too, instead of not doing X but merely trying to protect their friend from the legal consequences of having done X).
It's not like all politicians bond over raping children. That indeed would be crazy. Instead, it is just *some* politicians raping children... and the general rule that the law mostly applies to muggles.
People in positions of power help each other -- that's one of the currencies of power. If you can't help your friends avoid the consequences of their actions, you are not a part of the elite. However, one does not need to be a pedophile in order to protect a pedophile. The pedophile can reciprocate by a completely different kind of favor. The important thing is that now he owes you. The more people owe you a favor, the more power you have, and politicians in general enjoy having more power.
> Yes, an emotional conspiracy theory is a way to make one's anger legible. But the connection between the anger and the theory is not random
My experience with conspiracy theorists leads me to believe that the anger is displaced from some other far more personal source.
Isn't that true for most humans?
Displacing emotions? Yeah that’s a very human pitfall. It’s a matter of degree.
What I am trying to say is that "the beliefs of my opponents are merely manifestations of emotions they cannot process rationally" is a convenient and tempting hypothesis.
Conservatives are afraid of new things. Progressives are angry at their parents. Christians need a sky daddy. Atheists are afraid of responsibility for their actions. Trump voters hate women and minorities. Clinton voters hate white men. Conspiracy theorists are afraid of a rapidly changing world and hate the elites.
If all of them admitted their problems and took psychotherapy instead of spreading their silly beliefs, they would quickly see the folly of their ways, and would agree that my opinions have been the correct ones all the time.
Do we have actual data showing that the anger of an average conspiracy theorist towards the elites is greater than e.g. the anger of Greta Thunberg towards corporations?
Or is it more like all people with strong political beliefs are transforming their anger, but if we agree with them, we say that the anger is a result of lived experience and justifies their beliefs, and if we disagree with them, we say that the proper way to handle their anger is therapy.
> What I am trying to say is that "the beliefs of my opponents are merely manifestations of emotions they cannot process rationally" is a convenient and tempting hypothesis.
That’s also true. And another distortion of thinking if that’s all one brings to the discussion.
It’s akin to a conspiracy theorist, defending the conspiracy simply by saying you’re too stupid or sheepish to understand. Conspiracy theorists I have met have a strong tendency to blame things that are not right in their lives on powerful forces that keep them down, or an attitude of “why bother I’m only going to get f*cked over anyway.” (As I said, in my first post, in my experience. I haven’t done a study.)
> Or is it more like all people with strong political beliefs are transforming their anger
There are people with strong political beliefs who don’t express it through anger or resentment. Not enough, but some.
And of course, it all depends on the conspiracy theory we’re talking about.
9/11
Sandy Hook
Moon landing.
All these require that the entire apparatus of government is deceitful and complicit, and anyone that doesn’t get it is a “sheeple.”
I will admit to having a strong prior about this, because I have a very close relative who is down the rabbit hole on all of these things. And what I really see this person doing is using all of these things as a reason not to bother. he just stews in his own impotent rage. My more casual interactions over the years with people who ascribe to any of the ones I’ve named or others seems to lean in the same direction. It almost always comes down to the idea that all of these things are related to them not being able to find an affordable apartment or a decent job. I have met a few people who copmpartmentalize (?) this well though; their life is perfectly ok, and they like being in the know, but it doesn’t seem to enrage them. But I’ve met a lot less of this type than I have the former.
How did the notion of therapy creep into this? Im curious.
"But there’s a second type of conspiracy theory. Consider the Elders of Zion, or the Global Adrenochrome Pedophile Cabal. These conspiracies weren’t invented to explain away any facts. Usually believers are more invested in the exact nature of the conspiracy than in any of the facts they supposedly explain; often they’re very angry about the whole situation."
I'm not sure that I accept the cognitive v emotional classification, and I actually find this second type of conspiracy to be way more understandable and sympathetic than I do the first type (from an epistemological point of view, not an ethical one). As others have pointed out, what you're calling conspiracies of cognition involve people concocting fantastic explanations explanations for fairly straightforward but boring stories. There's not much cognitively challenging about the Great Pyramid of Giza once you've realized that it was the end result of hundreds of years of evolving design that began with burial mounds then ziggurats then mastabas and finally pyramids. Aliens is just a way more exciting story than incremental engineering improvements.
On the other hand, what you're describing as conspiracies of emotion tend to be the result of fairly complex and somewhat shrouded happenings. Take Jeffrey Epstein for example. Here's guy who's reportedly a billionaire, but no one in finance really knows what he does. He flies around the world with powerful, influential people like Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew. He's got a private island in the USVI that the locals know as pedophile island, and oh yeah, there's a weird structure on it that looks like a temple. And when he's arrested, he ends up killing himself while the guards are shirking and the cameras are out. Even when you tidy it all up with a fairly mundane story about blackmailing rich men, you still have to explain things like how he got hired to teach math at an elite prep school even though he didn't have a college degree and it just so happens that the guy who hired him was Bill Barr's father, or that his right hand woman is the daughter of a billionaire publishing tycoon who dies under mysterious circumstances and had reported ties to the Mossad. Even the mundane story implicates rich and powerful people in high crimes.
Or what about Andrew Tate? A year ago, I had never heard that guy's name. Then one day he was all over my socials and then he was banned from socials and then he gets into a Twitter spat with Greta Thunberg and then he's arrested in Rumania for human trafficking. It just reads like it's been scripted.
If anything, I would swap the categories. The latter seem like attempts to construct a coherent narrative in the absence of a clear story, while the former cases seem like people filling an emotional need to be the ones who "know what really happened" or who aren't naïve enough to believe the official story.
Spoken like one who has never gotten into a cognitive conspiracy theory. The JFK assassination is the canonical example, so lets start there.
The official story is that the presidential motorcade broke at least three secret service security policies in order to parade JFK in a manner that exposed him to extraordinary assassination risk. Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, camped out in a window that had a view of the presidential motorcade that was completely obscured by bushes. He then fired three shots into the president faster than anyone has ever been able to replicate. One of those bullets passed through bone and was later discovered in pristine condition. Another shattered into so many fragments that the total weight of those fragments exceeded the weight of the original bullet. He then fled, was captured, was paraded around in front of Jack Ruby, was moved, was paraded around in front of Jack Ruby again, and was shot by said Ruby. And the next day a bunch of contractors dug up the crime scene and removed the bushes.
I find this story implausible relative to the story that someone in the government planned his assassination and then executed a cover-up. You can call this a "fantastic explanation for a fairly straightforward but boring story", but I don't think that's a particularly enlightening label.
Or take 9/11. Suffice it to say that building 7 absolutely did not collapse into itself at free-fall acceleration for a dozen stories because it was damaged by debris from the collapse of buildings 1 and 2. I don't know exactly what happened there, but the official narrative is manifest bullshit. Call it a straightforward but boring story if you want, but don't act like 'the Andrew Tate saga is a psy-op' is more plausible (in a cognitive sense) than any of this.
> He then fired three shots into the president faster than anyone has ever been able to replicate.
This is not true. There was a documentary made where they put a tower up at the same height as the window Oswald fired from and had a car towed by it at the same distance and speed as the presidential car and a Marksman of reasonably good quality duplicated the shooting. I saw it (I believe) on Discovery.
Fine post. Not much new for long-time readers of SSC/ACX - as in the recent post x and x+1 about bounded distrust in the media. But then: nihil sub sole novum / אֵין כָּל חָדָשׁ תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ (en kol chadásh táchat hashámesh) “there is nothing new under the sun” - nothing is said that has not been said before.
We shouldn't be calling the idea that aliens built the Great Pyramid a "conspiracy theory." A CONSPIRACY theory must involve a CONSPIRACY, and landing from the stars in the middle of Egypt is not a conspiracy. but a waste of time and effort. Let's call that an "unsupported claim." For example, the "Black Athena" theory about Egyptians being (Sub-Saharan) Black is also not a conspiracy theory, but an unsupported claim. We dedicated conspiracy theorists like to keep our field clean from intrusions, please. Thank you.
The conspiracy theory tends to be that knowledge of these facts is being suppressed by the powers that be. That's not technically a necessary component, but it's almost always a component.
That's too wide a definition. Also, not sure that any proponent of the "alien built the pyramids" theory also simultaneously alleges that the Iluminati and Rothschild know all about it and work actively to suppress that precious knowledge. Pyramid guys tend to be wannabe scientists and scholars, rather than politically inclined
What's too wide a definition?
Take Graham Hancock here: he absolutely believes that the powers that be are suppressing knowledge of pre-ice-age civilizations, and he gets real pissy about it. Also, I've never heard him mention either the Iluminati or the Rothschilds - he's much more likely to blame, say, the Egyptology community. Conspiracy theories come in all shapes and sizes, and they're not all dialed up to 11.
My point is that we need to narrow the definition of what a "conspiracy theory" is, or the risk is that every disagreement (particularly scholarly disagreements) is reframed as a conspiracy theory: so, for example, since I hold that Minoan Cretans made money out of piracy, and the scholarly consensus disagrees, I can reframe that as a "conspiracy theory" by other historians
I mean, sure you could, but do you actually think they're conspiring? because Hancock thinks they're actually conspiring.
I think that theorizing about a conspiracy is sufficient to call something a conspiracy theory. YMMV.
You're right. It's not that it's an incorrect view strictly speaking, it's that such a low bar makes the expression "conspiracy theory" not very useful for argumentation.
“Global Adrenochrome Pedophile Cabal”. Doesn’t exist but Hollywood has a problem with child abuse and Epstein’s island was hardly a holiday camp for the trafficked.
Which is something that’s missing here, conspiracies do happen.
Do you think Hollywood's problem with child abuse is worse than e.g. Catholic Church's? (IIRC there was a paper claiming that the actual percentage of pedophile priests was something like 4% and more or less the same as that of pedophiles among males in general, which is still bad for people who claim moral authority but not South Park-bad.)
As for conspiracies, the post is more about conspiracy theories as a cognitive error. If you happen to believe in something strongly without much evidence, you probably still have some of the same errors even if the claim happens to be true.
I think that dismissing conspiracy theories as having as a cause only an emotional or cognitive error is a problem. A conspiracy theory is just a theory about a conspiracy.
(I agree that the Catholic Church is possibly over attacked but it was still conspiring to hide the abuse)
I'm interested in your opinion/data about Hollywood. I know there was a number of allegations, some reaching court, but I have no idea how widespread it is, or whether there is a significant effort to conceal it outside of perpetrators using their power.
The more grounded in facts a conspiracy theory is, the less it is a "conspiracy theory" in the usual sense. You may not know the details of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in October 1939, but believing they had agreed on some cooperation in invading Poland would hardly earn you a "conspiracy theorist" label.
a conspiracy is a conspiracy, a conspiracy theory is a theory about a conspiracy. Your definition of a conspiracy theory seems to be anything that isn’t true, and while the phrase is trending that way we should resist it. 
There are numerous accounts of child abuse in Hollywood. I can’t offhand think of a child star that wasn’t abused.
For instance.
https://amp.theguardian.com/film/2020/feb/06/corey-feldman-nobody-wants-to-go-after-the-bad-guys
Thanks for the link! It does name two people who "got through unscathed", but yeah, it does look bad, especially along with all defenders of Polanski.
The problem people have with the Catholic church is that they actively protected pedophiles and ensured further victimization at an institutional level. Not that there were necessarily "more" pedophiles than the general population.
Then I was wrong to use this comparison (unless Hollywood has *that* problem, too).
Don't worry, they do. Worse in some ways; if you ever want to lose faith in a celebrity, just look up what they said about Roman Polanski and the child he famously raped (one of, he freely admits, a pattern): https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/30/hollywood-reverence-child-rapist-roman-polanski-convicted-40-years-on-run
Thanks for the link!
I feel like “child” really needs to be defined in this discussion. And Pedophilia even more so. Is having sex with a 17-year-old person pedophilia?
Conspiracies do happen. but Conspiracy *Theories* are almost always bunk. As commonly used, the phrase "Conspiracy Theory" refers to a narrow subset of possible conspiracies, characterized among other things by implausibility. But more importantly, it requires that the conspiracy be a *theory*. An effectively concealed or unnoticed conspiracy is not a theory at all. And a broadly known conspiracy, or even one little-known due to disinterest but acknowledged by everyone concerned, is just a Conspiracy Fact. The Conspiracy Theory, requires that the alleged conspiracy be so poorly concealed that the Conspiracy Theorists all "know" about it and usually in great detail, but e.g. every policeman and reporter on the relevant beat is either truly ignorant or involved in a massive cover-up.
That's not a stable equilibrium, and claims that such a situation persists should be treated with utmost skepticism. Meaning not "we must investigate this carefully", but "it would be a waste of our time to investigate this at all unless new and substantial evidence emerges".
> . Meaning not "we must investigate this carefully", but "it would be a waste of our time to investigate this at all unless new and substantial evidence emerges".
This was at the heart of the 9/11 controlled demolition theory; all the iron beams were sent out to be melted down and were never “carefully examined “ for signs of sabotage. Of course there was no indication that such an effort would be necessary. 100s of experienced construction workers were cleaning up the site and it seems likely to me that an extensive demolition of the buildings would have left all sorts of clues for them to find. “They were all in on it” is the response.
The discussion is not worth it.
I'm not sure how wrong the Russiagate is. I believe in the following (didn't really dig deep into any of this issues, so feel free to correct me):
0. Russia was capable of influencing elections in various "unfair" ways (e.g. via fake social network accounts spreading lies in a loose sense of the word, releasing the information they obtained illegally)
0a. Russia's influence could increase by coordinating it with the candidate they chose to support.
1. Russia was favoring Trump in 2016.
2. Russia did, in fact, attempt to influence the elections in Trump's favor.
(2a, weak: Russia was also favoring Brexit and did attempt to influence it.)
3. People who are most likely Russian emissaries did contact Trump's campaign.
4 (weaker). There is nothing in Trump's character to show he would refuse a mutually beneficial deal with the Russians, if they didn't ask too much. Maybe if he thought he couldn't get away with it, but he tends to get away with a lot, and is rather sloppy.
So I don't think it's hard to believe if Trump actually made a deal and maybe promised a favor or two in return for Russian help. Not "destroy America" kind of favors (that would be a different conspiracy theory: that he came to stay, and was receiving Russian help for that. I like it, but I don't think there's much evidence for it besides "It seems like Trump would like to be a dictator and Putin is helping his allied dictators to stay in power"), but something he wouldn't feel strong about. He wouldn't be seriously bound by that promise unless Russia has some kind of hold over him (financial aid? blackmail?) which I find unlikely. But if Russia was capable of giving him more favors, he'd have incentive to return them.
To put numbers on it:
Trump receiving orders from Putin: <1%
Trump receiving "suggestions" from Putin he could be seriously inconvenienced to ignore (e.g. by releasing something Putin has on him, or cutting financial help): <10%
Trump signalling to Russia his agreement to receive their help in the 2016 elections, regardless of him actually using presidential powers to return the favor: 25-75%
Russian actions actually changing the result of the election: 20%.
Some of it is just that Trump seems to view the Putin-esque mode of governance favorably and wouldn't be inclined to act against it. And might be inclined to act in ways that are mutually beneficial to Russian government/crime interests and Trump's personal interests. The bits about explicit quid pro quos are conjecture for sure, but also unnecessary for this sort of coordination.
I don't think you need to go far out on a limb to notice that there was something unusual about the Trump campaign's attitude (including public attitude) towards and degree of entanglement with Russia's effort, including specifically criminal elements of that effort. That was not normal for a major-party Presidential candidate in the US. Furthermore, if you elide over the criminal element and just say "unfair", that's underselling it.
It's pretty hard to reconcile "Russiagate was nothing" with not just Muller's indictments of Russian state actors for specific related crimes, but also the specific guilty pleas and/or convictions of people deeply involved at high levels of the Trump campaign/administration like Manafort and Flynn (and Trump's nakedly self-interested pardons of same).
It's pretty cheeky to "Put numbers" on an evaluation you freely admit is based entirely on casual speculation. And that's a problem. Our politics (life-and-death stuff) are now driven by fierce opinions expressed over social media and entertainment "news" by totally unserious people, unwilling to do the actual research, to read the Mueller report, to read well-sourced accounts of T's desire to abolish NATO, his jealousy over Hitler's obedient generals, etc. I.e., people uninterested in seeking the most true picture possible about the deepest aspects of our society.
This ecosystem, combined with today's fetish for disrupting or destroying all institutions, leads us to an extremely precarious culture where shallow thought is instantly rewarded, as Kanye urges us to ignore history and just keep hugging our inner-child ubermensch.
My last substack post explored our natural need for scapegoats and monsters. I think it's related to your post above about the attraction of conspiracy theories and biases.
Five minute read. Apologies in advance to Seahawks fans.
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/pete-carroll-the-scapegoat-of-azazel
Major, MAJOR props to Scott for being the first person I know who has spread this "Russiagate" crap who has copped to it and apologised for it.
When did Scott spread it rather than just passively accepting what he heard?
Here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/23/some-groups-of-people-who-may-not-100-deserve-our-eternal-scorn/
There he says "People Who Are Worried That The Russians Hacked The Democrats To Influence The Elections" "may not 100% deserve our eternal scorn". Normally "Russiagate" refers to Trump's own involvement with Russia, not Russia acting independently. I don't think Scott has apologized for the latter.
I'm surprised that you haven't mentioned your previous related post, which describes a somewhat different emotional appeal: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/epistemic-minor-leagues
Conspiracy theorists often seem to be people finding out that when you look at something closely then the generally accepted explanation for it has lots of grey areas and uncertainties that aren't evident when it's looked at from a distance - and then these people go on to assume that this is more meaningful than it actually is. I wonder if you're more likely to be susceptible to conspiracy theories if your education is mostly being told what the truth is and rewarded for regurgitating it. Then you find out a lot of things about a certain specific area, and realise that that's not actually the reality of that area (experts disagree, crucial facts are disputed, the consensus has changed over time, different cultures/countries/academic disciplines may have very different consensus views of the same thing, etc) and assume that this is something that is unusual and interesting, rather than just being how things work. Then you get pushback by acknowledged experts defending their turf, the experts make mistakes in doing so because they're fallible, those mistakes are uncovered, and you become even more convinced that you've found something important.
Yes, we don't know the truth about [x], experts have claimed wrongly to know the truth about [x], people have been misled about [x], lots of people assume that the truth about [x] is clear and they're wrong, and the more you find out about [x] the more you realise that there are lots of things we don't know about [x]. But that applies to nearly everything! Including your proposed solution [y]!
That might explain some of the intellectual attraction of conspiracy theories, but it doesn't explain the emotional attraction. I might be wrong, but I get the impression that this emotional attraction tends to be specifically linked to loss. Having something taken away from you that you rely on emotionally makes you vulnerable and scared, and when people are afraid they will do strange and terrible things. Fear is the most powerful emotion.
The anger is there on the surface, but it's the fear and loss that really matters.
It seems to me like the post is largely correct but mentioning the Russia stuff as an example may have been a rhetorically bad call. Most of the comments are now discussing whether your version of Russiagate is a weakman and whether such and such object-level claims are true. I don't think it undermines the core point of the post too seriously, but there have certainly been other conspiracy theories regarding Trump, occasionally involving Epstein and occasionally some level of underage rape and other gruesome stuff. I realize you wanted to choose something you yourself believed but I wonder whether this personal connection actually drove the point home.
Of course my main takeaway is that it is a small blessing that Russia has decided to just slaughter their way through Ukraine. I have no need for conspiracy theories, I can just relax and enjoy hating Russia and Little Putin!
Is it really a conspiracy theory to think that a known associate of a child trafficker might have been involved in or partaken of said child trafficking?
Depends: are there any conspiracies theorized?
I guess it doesn't need to be! It fits the pattern of a theory to use when you hate someone and want to be able to explain your hatred though.
Was he ever on the island? Also do you apply that to Clinton? Who was on the island. My feeling is that the entire US ruling class is culpable here, if anybody is.
It is a conspiracy theory to assert without additional evidence that a known associate of a child trafficker has been involved in child trafficking. And "I'm just asking *questions*, it *might* be true", is almost always just a weasel-worded accusation. Don't do that.
Almost all "child traffickers" keep that fact secret from most of their acquaintances for the obvious reason that they'll go to jail if they don't. And almost all of the acquaintances that do in some sense "know" about it, are playing the three-monkeys game to avoid knowing for sure about it without any social awkwardness, rather than active participants. The idea that there are large communities where "everybody knows" that the elite are trafficking children for sex and everybody is OK with that but everybody is careful to never talk about it where the sheeple can hear, is itself a conspiracy theory.
Donald Trump was charged with raping a child by someone who was presumably bought off or intimidated into shutting up. Donald Trump is a known associate of a convicted child trafficker.
It's not a conspiracy theory to connect those two dots.
I think some conspiracy theories are down to humans being, amongst other things, explanation-producing machines.
What was that rustling in the bushes? Was it the wind? Or was it a lion?
Well, Jim went out on a windy day, and got eaten by a lion because he thought the rustling in the bushes was just the wind, so it could be a lion. We better check to make sure.
Okay, there's no sign of a lion, so it was just the wind. Probably. Because there are lions in this area, so we should always be careful just in case.
Except some people then jump on that "probably" and use it as a rationale for why they are right about "it's *always* lions, it's *never* 'just the wind'" theories. It may be very wearisome to constantly be vigilant about lurking lions, but the one time it really is a lion, you'll be prepared and will have the last laugh.
We look at the world and we see a lot of things that upset us and we say "This isn't right, someone should fix it". Except nobody knows how to fix it, or when someone tries, the explanation is that it's too big and complex and a lot of things are involved and yes, it's terrible but no, there's nothing we can do.
And we know about cause and effect, so for this thing to be happened, it *must* have a cause. So that means *somebody* must have caused it. In a way, it's a relief to think that there are a bunch of bad (possibly lizard) people out there pulling the strings and making bad things happen, because that's awful but at least if we find that bunch we can stop them.
If it's just Moloch in action, what do we do? We're helpless and we're going to get ground into dust but that's just the way things are so here, have this cheap smartphone and don't think about the millstones getting closer and closer to the top of your head.
And some theories *are* just fun if you don't take them seriously. Maybe it *was* aliens, tell me more about the Pyramid inch. Maybe it *is* the Illuminati, why yes "Weishaupt" and "Washington" are suspiciously similar!
I'm from Russia. I extremely dislike both Trump and the Russian government (especially since last year). But the idea that Trump is a Russian puppet looked like absolute bullshit to me from the very beginning. I was disappointed to see in one of Scott's longtime posts a hint that he believes in this. Now I'm happy!
"Trump is a Russian puppet" is a claim that has very little evidence and is not true for any reasonable definition of puppet.
"Russia attempted to influence the election in Trump's favour and made contact with his campaign to coordinate efforts, and their efforts coordinated with the campaign in suspicious ways" is established fact.
The full Mueller Report is the best overview we have so far, and it's quite damning on many many levels -- even with all the massive interference that blocked a more complete view (as well as a coordinated effort to belittle the findings, aided by Barr's lying about it for weeks before releasing it).
Before "believing in" one cartoonish headline or another people simply need to read the report. Otherwise they're revealing they are more interested in choosing a side than striving to know the sweeping, ugly truth. You can be sure that anyone who says the report proves the whole exercise was a nothing-burger hasn't even cracked its pages.
Please quote the exact crimes committed, and by which people, instead of telling people to read a lengthy piece of legalese propaganda.
I'm surprised Scott's example of a group he considers evil in a way that's difficult to express convincingly is just "woke people shutting down schools for the gifted because they dislike meritocracy", that seems really innocuous to me (maybe even neutral to potentially good-ish).
That doesn't seem like it should be enough of a emotional provocation to be any kind of threat to his characteristic rationalism (which means it illustrated his point, I guess).
I'm not sure if he just used that example because it's unlikely to aliennate us readers, or if he really is so closely aligned with mainstream morality that there isn't a more salient example. What about all the potentially extremely immoral things, factory farms etc.? the CIA? big Finance?
I'd be interested in a longer list of things he thinks are evil without needing to provide an objective reason for.
Throwing myself in as another person who thinks that wokies shutting down gifted programs in the name of non-discrimination is somewhere between bad and civilization-ending. It's absolutely a mind-killer.
Wild, coming from the UK where grammar schools have been all but abolished in the name of social cohesion and not writing off kids at young ages. I can totally get disagreeing with such a policy, but to describe it as evil without needing to give a reason as Scott did makes me feel like we are coming from very different places!
It's just the most palpable example of 'everyone must be equal, so we'll beat down the heights until they're all the same'. It ends with the Holodomor.
Not an exaggeration of my view, btw, although I can't speak for Scott.
As another data point, I live in Germany, and I also feel somewhat alarmed when I read about stuff like "woke people shutting down schools for the gifted because they dislike meritocracy." There's definitely a strong emotional component. If my social environment is any indication, though, my stance is pretty unusual over here.
But I've worried a lot about social and political trends in this space, to the point where certain kinds of triggers much like the quoted one can make me sit around effectively 'disabled' (introspective and distracted by it approximately beyond help) for an hour or two, trying to untangle my feelings about it in a way that isn't destructive to me or my environment. (I've managed each time, and it hasn't happened often. But it does require work.)
Sounds stupid, probably is stupid, but the "emotional provocation" is definitely there and strong.
Thanks for sharing your view, though! Honestly prefer reading comments like yours that don't reenforce the emotional spiral but help break it up a bit. "Come on, it's not actually that bad," is a sentence I could use to hear more often. :)
“Here the “conspiracy” part of the conspiracy theory is secondary. Some believers in the ancient-aliens theory might not think there’s a conspiracy at all; maybe mainstream archaeologists just made an honest mistake. Others might think there’s a minor, almost sympathetic conspiracy - the reality of alien influence is so mind-blowing that archaeologists gibber in horror and repress the evidence for the sake of their own sanity. Most ancient-alien believers don’t have a strong commitment to believe in any particular conspiracy. They might not be especially angry at the conspiracy. It’s just a useful hack for supporting their weird evidence processing style.”
These are both explanations I was given when growing up for why well-meaning scientists consistently got the wrong answer about evolution vs creationism.
This post made me remember about reading a piece about differences between "old-school conspiracy theories" where people would go to great length and elaborate explanations to convince you of something, versus "new conspiracies", related to fake news and post-truth, where there are no real explanations involved (e.g. Pizzagate, IIRC). Would have loved to retrieve it and share it but I can't seem to find it anywhere. Could as well have been a preceding post here for all I remember.
If the pizzagators haven't gone to great lengths to elaborate their explanations in order to convince you of something, that's just because you're hanging out on the wrong parts of the internet.
You're right, although indeed I personally avoided these "elaborate explanations" givers, my wording should have been more specific. From what I recall, the difference was explained as following: old-school conspiracies have some factual "evidence" (using Scott's words), e.g. anomalies in the bullet angle, anomalies in the moon landing, etc. These are statements that you can actually "debunk", if willing to. new conspiracies have no real bases on falsifiable proofs and therefore are complete speculations. Hope this has clarified the distinction the article was trying to make.
Nice essay. I suggest you look more into the group aspects of this. David McRaney's book "How Minds Change" talks about how people stop believing in conspiracies, and IIRC it has a lot to do with finding a replacement for the emotional support that they were getting from being part of the cult that believed the conspiracy. Also I recommend Randall Collins on "Interaction Ritual Chains" on how social interactions raise or lower emotional energy. I suspect that trying to tie conspiracy theory in with anger is not the right path. I think it is more the gain in emotional energy from being part of a tight-knit group that is "onto something." Like being an early adopter of a scientific breakthrough or a new technology or a cool music or a social movement, but in the case of a conspiracy theory you've made a bad choice.
A Randall Collins type theory does seem to apply well here. Every time a little new info is found that can be made to break favourably for the conspiratorially minded group, the energy is raised just a little, and the group gets excited at their discovery... It's addictive and a system for building participation, versus mundane explanations which are deadening and end the chain of excitement in its tracks.
+1
I think this is part of the story. I think another part of the story is vibe warfare. People want to influence the emotional valence of a concept in someone else's mind, so they adopt beliefs (or at least make factual arguments) without regard for truth.
They (if I'm being honest, we) don't necessarily notice this dynamic, in part because there is no incentive to notice. The social consensus about vibes is a big deal. Surely the ends justify the means?
I think Scott has basically written about this before, but the posts about media lies, plus this post, make me suspect that this is sometimes a blind spot. Or else he's just trying to emphasize a different part of the story without getting distracted.
All the conspiracy theorists I personally know find their research stimulating and gratifying. Conspiracy theories seem like a fun hobby, and the feeling of tapping into forbidden or concealed knowledge adds to the excitement.
Above all else though, very engaged conspiracy theorists (who create and propagate most content) can find vibrant communities of like-minded believers over the internet. Membership in these communities provides immense value (social support, genuine care and affection, validation, etc), contingent on continued belief in the founding creed.
I would suspect that social isolation, rather than any particular cognitive model, is the key determinant of strongly adhering to conspiracy theories.
Random aside regarding the Kennedy assassination, but my favourite conspiracy theory about it is one where the Secret Service killed him... by accident. Basically, the theory postulates that one of the Secret Service personnel in the car behind Kennedy had very poor trigger discipline and when he was startled by Oswald's shot, accidentally fired his own rifle. This second shot was the one that actually hit and killed the President, leading to a panicked attempt by the Secret Service to cover up their own incompetence.
I like this on multiple levels because it explains away a lot of the weirdness involved in the case in a way that is salacious enough to count as a conspiracy theory, but one that is fundamentally unsatisfying to conspiracy theorists. After all, what's more banal than an honest mistake and a frantic attempt to hide it after the fact?
Another point about conspiracies is that they are insight porn. They cheaply make a person feel like they have seen through the illusions of the masses into a deeper reality. This is enjoyable for a few reasons (other than the emotional content of the belief system):
(a) an insight moment (a-ha moment) is a coming together of information in a way that feels like it fits the world better. This is a fundamental function of cognition that probably involves large regions of the brain and has a spiritual, almost religious dimension (an epiphany). "I was wrong about everything before, but now I understand."
(b) Having seen through the delusions of the masses into this "more real" world, you are one of a select few. You have special knowledge; knowledge that no one else has. In a way, this makes you part of an elite few, and it may even be your job to save everyone else.
If rationality is the inheritor of Platonism -- truly seeing through illusions and delusions in a way that connects us more deeply with the world in a more real way --- then conspiracy theories are the inheritors of Gnosticism -- the decadent, twisted version of Platonism, which takes the whole real world to be a delusion and illusion.
'Gnostic' cultural patterns have been baked into American culture since at least the sixties, and probably beyond, all the way back to Puritans. There's an addiction for the feeling that the mainstream narrative is wrong, for the reasons listed above.
It's no coincidence that the current myths of the culture war, the red pill on one side and being 'woke' on the other follow this self-same structure. The Matrix films, which the red pill meme is based on, explore these patterns of Platonism and Gnosticism: the idea of waking up and realising that what you took to be reality was wrong. Whereas in Plato this is a spiritual process of anagoge, as you ascend towards a more real world; in Gnosticism this is a horrific process, as you realise the world is far darker than you realised, and you've been controlled and manipulated. The Matrix is more of a Gnostic story for this reason.
People are addicted to the feeling of waking up to a "truer" reality. In many ways it's a parody of rationality because it relies on much of the same machinery of fascination and belief change.
It seems a bit of a coincidence that the moon subtends exactly the Sun's diameter during a total solar eclipse. This hasn't always been the case: When the Earth first formed, the moon was much closer to the Earth, and would have loomed overhead, occupying a quarter of the sky, causing literally mountainous tides! Over the aeons since it has spiralled away, rapidly at first but now at around 1.5" per year. So in a few million years the alignment will be less exact, and the Sun will blaze round the circumference of the moon's shadow even during a total eclipse.
It also seems a coincidence that the stars of orion seem to resemble so much a figure with four outstretched limbs and a belt of three collinear stars with a sword hilt or some clobber attached to the belt. But even if aliens with a sense of humour nudged the moon so that descendents of the apes they had observed would see impressive eclipses, I imagine they would draw the line at moving whole stars considerable distances to achieve at best a marginal effect as viewed from Earth. Also, with around 4000 stars visible to the naked eye, presumably there is considerable scope for chance alignments, such as some of the other constellations. (I still think Orion is by far the easiest to spot and the most impressive.)
Those last few paragraphs remind me of this quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
I love this distinction which seems super clear to me, and I also am ABSOLUTELY certain that a lot (maybe even most, possibly even all) Type 2 Conspiracy Beliefs are rooted in some form of anxiety/misery/unsatisfied or badly regulated emotion. My experience of T2CB in the wild (ie NOT online) suggests that fear/anxiety/generalized threat perception is at the root in more cases that anger/outrage/hate, but that might be due to my own bias in seeing hate/anger as pretty much always driven by fear or frustration.
The one aspect I wanted to add, which I've not seen covered in any studies, relates to the "general model of the world" that conspiracy (actual conspiracy) thinking supports. It's a model of the world that makes sense, and in which someone (even if evil, malicious or at least self serving) can both predict and effectively control the events.
This, however scary, is likely to be SIGNIFICANTLY less scary for a person who finds the randomness and chaos of the actual world, it's fundamental unfairness and the fact that we (the humans) can neither make effective predictions nor control what's happening. If the idea of a morally neutral universe that doesn't "care" makes you feel very very scared (for example because you're anxious or depressed or feel a need to be parented/cared for or [insert any other reason]) or if you feel a need to explain horrific occurrences, conspiracy theories fill that hole. So do some types religion, I suppose, on some level.
A thought that sticks in my craw is how much of what is at the heart of conspiracy theories is correct. There’s usually some boring reality involved that removes a lot of the glitz and glamor, but Epstein for instance does seem like the social irritant that makes people believe in global elite satanic pedophile cabals. Ghislaine Maxwell is currently in prison for sex trafficking minors to no one.
I do believe in a sort of “decentralized self-interest” that causes things to look like conspiracies but not actually involve anyone meeting in blood red robes in secret rooms that you can only get through by pulling the right book off a shelf in a giant library.
Pedophilia for instance is a fundamental biological urge for sex. It exists in all social classes. So if there are places where pedophiles could go to abuse children, I tend to believe that it happens. If there’s a place where it becomes structurally hard to oversee and protect children, I’m of the opinion a structured abuse system will just evolve itself there, the same way that dandelion spores will find a lawn to grow in. Do I believe Hillary Clinton a Seventh Level Illuminatus Warlock who eats children to keep her power? No. Do I believe that there are probably some very shady travel companies in places like Thailand? Yes.
It’s the same kind of thinking financial institutions use to try to spot employee fraud, and it’s usually prudent. Lay out of a pool of water, simply know that thirst exists, and someone will eventually show up to take a drink. Now replace that water with some kind of vice and the same reasoning applies.
Isn't "Russiagate" a pejorative term people have developed to describe the belief that there was some collusive relationship between the Trump campaign/admin and Russian government, of which there is in fact a boatlaod of evidence? Usually the rhetorical move is to take the fact that the Mueller report, while having its investigation actively obstructed by Trump's inner circle and being limited in scope, did not find evidence to charge criminal conspiracy and equivocate that with a lay sense of the term "collusion" even though these are naturally quite different things. Trump's "Russia if you're listening" is, unto itself, collusive.
The term seems to be used in an effort to win the narrative of the past where people who believed there likely was collusion in some meaningful way are taken to be conspiracy theorists, but that's all undergirded by having a much more stringent idea of what said cooperation might've looked like. But then people turn around and use that to argue something to the effect of, "People thought there was something to a Trump/Russia connection, but it turns out there wasn't. That's been proven to be false." Only, that's not true at all.
I don't think so. I think it started out referring to the Steele Dossier "Trump is literally taking orders from Putin because the Russians have kompenkrat on him" accusations, these got blurred with the lesser-but-Russia-related stuff by media headlines, and *then* the Republicans started crowing that since the first sort we disproven it all was.
The "Trump is literally a Russian agent" stuff was very popular!
Looking at Google trends, it spikes as a search term in 2017 and remains high thereafter, although it does climb a little until peaking in 2020: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Russiagate
Here are a bunch of 2017 news headlines using it unironically, mostly positively: https://www.google.com/search?q=russiagatesxsrf=AJOqlzXg8VCxNBg3l7GMDovBy6YL3lQO5A%3A1673638255694&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2015%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F2017&tbm=nws
FWIW, I did think there was a non-negligible probability of the Steele Dossier stuff literally being true for a while in 2017. And I think I *hoped* it was true for the reasons Scott described.
It is frustrating though how Republicans have successfully transmuted "Trump wasn't literally a Russian agent" into "everyone who ever said anything about Russia is a shrill conspiracy theorist, hahaha" and even gotten people like Scott to unthinkingly go along with it.
Suspicion that there was a connection between Trump and Russia predates wide public knowledge of the Steele dossier and was a major theme in the 2016 election.
It was grounded in the fact that there was a lot of discussion in public of possible Russian interference into the election on the Trump campaign's behalf and Trump's odd deference to, extreme defensiveness of, and lying around the subject of Vladimir Putin.
Here is Hillary Clinton herself articulating that view in one of the presidential debates:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypl7hWhpfGs
Formal investigation into Trump was initiated by members of Trump's own campaign team boasting of a connection. What I'd suggest is the period of interest in the Steel dossier has been leveraged in an argument that goes something like, "All those suspicion around Trump was started by and grounded in the Steele dossier, but we know that is all false; therefore we know all this was baseless." But that's not really true at any point. The suspicion came a more complex web of facts and the reason to believe that there was some level of back and forth cooperation is quite robust.
What there isn't is a basis to charge a criminal conspiracy, though I cannot stress enough that was based on an investigation that was deliberately limited in scope and was obstructed in a way that normally would be criminal. There is also no evidence of the easiest to refute, strongest claim that Trump is some sort of Manchurian candidate. That Trump and Russia had some sort of mutually beneficial relationship involving illicit behavior that undermines US interests is a weaker claim that is much more defensible.
"If only they were literally raping children and then eating their body parts, then everyone would have to admit they were bad."
This is an easily overlooked sentiment that can lead people towards accelerationism, another 'black pill' . (We need to hyper-charge the current unjust, capitalist system, so the flaws become evident to everyone and only then true change can happen. Reforms just strengthen the system)
I think this logic permeates more debates than we think.
For example, in *Right to Sex* Srinivasan describes the rift between feminists who are pro and anti prostitution legalization:
"Proponents of decriminalization like Smith and Mac argue that strengthening the labour power of sex workers wouldn't just make their lives more livable; it would give them more power to demand a restructuring of economic and social relations such that they will no longer have to sell sex to live. [...] As anti-prostitution feminists might see it, thought, decriminalization is at best a reformist measure, which marginally improves the lives of sex workers, while shoring up both patriarchal and neoliberal commodification of sex." (158)
From that viewpoint, it could actually be "good" if prostitution stay illegal, with zero regulation and therefore a worse life for prostitutes. Only this way it reveals how evil prostitution is, and accelerates a future where prostitution does not exist. The same can be seen in other activist movements like animal rights.
Applied to conspiracy theories, a similar logic applies: it's actually 'good' if children are raped/eaten/harvested as that makes efforts to dethrone 'the elite' actionable.
> it could actually be "good" if prostitution stay illegal, with zero regulation and therefore a worse life for prostitutes. Only this way it reveals how evil prostitution is, and accelerates a future where prostitution does not exist.
This has been the status quo in much of the world for a long time and it hasn’t worked. And the idea that we will re-educate men such that none of them are willing to pay for sex is preposterous don’t you think?
No doubt, making life miserable for the women who engage in it is a great way to make it look evil. It has nasty consequences that way, but cause-and-effect are reversed here. The biggest advantage to making it legal is that one can really address sex slavery that way.
I might propose that the biggest driver of conspiracy theory is the acute discomfort a lot of us feel about things that are out of our control and we don’t understand.
That gets back to Scott’s proposal that the emotional content is the one that needs to have the most attention paid to it.
I agree, it is that impotence to change something that vicerally feels wrong which can lead down dark paths.
The world feels easier to understand and change if blatend evil is being commited.
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.”
Solzhenitsyn
" then that’s literal treason."
A charge of treason requires that the US be fighting a declared war. The last declared war was WWII. We've technically been at peace since then.
I don’t believe this is true - history is littered with random people charged with treason during non-war periods.
Sure, the government has been violating the Constitution's strictures while the ink was still drying. Were the treason charges legitimate? Nope: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. " ONLY.
"Trump was secretly an agent in the pay of Vladimir Putin, sent to destroy democracy" matches well to "adhering to their [i.e. the United States'] Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort".
I don't think the quoted text implies that a declaration of war is necessary. "Levying War against [the US]" seems to refer to rebellion (otherwise it would not need to be listed separately from "adhering to their Enemies"), and a government does not typically declare formal war on rebels. Trying to overthrow the Republic, at Putin's instigation or otherwise, could reasonably be considered an act of rebellion.
Also, it's not clear to me that "enemies" means only "enemies in a declared war." So a hostile state at peace might arguably be an enemy.
The word "enemy" is not defined in law as constituting only the list of nations with which the United States is formally at war with. This is perhaps unfortunate, in that it makes it ambiguous who is and is not guilty of treason under the law. But it is so, and so we cannot simply point to e.g. a US citizen actually serving as a Russian agent and say "this person is clearly *not* a traitor, and to prosecute him for treason would be unconstitutional".
One also can be angry about, for instance, the QAnon conspiracy theory, because there are clear good guys and bad guys, clearly defined victims ("the children!") and a clear injustice supposedly involved.
Rothschild banker Wilbur Ross saved Trump from bankruptcy: https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-wilbur-ross-commerce-20161208-story.html
But yes he's corrupt and ethically bankrupt.
Banned for high temperature low effort comment.
I don't think this post really does a good job of dismantling JFK conspiracy theories. Here's an entirely down-to-earth theory (which I don't believe and just made up on the spot) that is in line with all the evidence presented in this post.
Oswald was working with an accomplice. They positioned themselves in separate places to improve the chances that one of them would get a clear shot. The accomplice succeeded in this first, and then got away and only Oswald got caught. There was no conspiracy larger than the two of them, and investigators simply screwed up and missed this.
Conspiracy theory, when done properly, should be considered a branch of sociology related to elite theory, as I explain here: https://overduerevolutions.wordpress.com/2022/12/27/elite-theory-as-the-intellectual-basis-of-conspiracy-theory/
Interest in pseudoscience fields like ufology, cryptozoology, and most pseudoarcheaology often overlaps with interest in conspiracy theory, but these fields would be considered "conspiracy candy" where the objective is to titilate the reader rather than investigate how the ruling class manipulates the masses.
I also think it is highly unhelpful to throw up your hands and say that the ruling class will do what it wants and get away with it. The ruling class must offer concessions proportional to the amount of pushback in the population, which would be reduced by accepting your interpretation. People globally rightfully hate the ruling class, but based on some as yet unpublished research of mine the adrenochrome conspiracy theory is linked to the conspiracy candy subjects above, being a titilating (fallacious) narrative.
I think there are two major emotional drivers of conspiratorial thinking that aren't touched on here:
* In-group belonging--for most of the pizzagate/qanon folks, their beliefs grant them acceptance in a very supportive online community. Where We Go 1 We Go All, etc. Many of these people don't explicitly hate the elite--most would call themselves capitalists and actively engage in hero worship (e.g. Trump)
* Feeling smarter than other people, or being in on a secret--for the intelligent people analyzing bullet trajectories and such, this is a bigger driver of their beliefs than any logical error. The feeling is wildly gratifying and addictive.
You could argue there are people who start looking at the evidence dispassionately and are actually convinced by bullet trajectory evidence. But the second you start to entertain the conspiracy belief as maybe true, you feel this surge of ego. You've discovered a secret. You've taken the red pill, escaped the matrix, achieved enlightenment. You pity your former self, and all your friends and family who can't see the truth.
And the effect only gets stronger with time: every time you're confronted with evidence against the conspiracy, you can either accept that you've been duped by magical thinking and are considerably less smart than you thought--dumber than all the people you've spent the last X years feeling superior too--or you can go on believing you're better than everyone else. I think this describes Graham Hancock well.
I can't imagine getting caught up in a heterodox narrative and *not* feeling superior to all the normies.
This, IMO, is the biggest driver of conspiratorial thinking.
The thing about Trump-Russiagate is that there actually was a conspiracy and Trump's campaign chairman was in on it (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections#Paul_Manafort).
Analogously, if it turns out that Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign manager was actually killing children in the basement of a pizza restaurant, but there was no evidence that Clinton was in on it, my reaction would be less "that dumb qanon conspiracy theory about Clinton killing children in the basement of a pizza restaurant was wrong after all" and more "wow those qanon believers were onto something big".
> I want to say something like: if you hate (let’s say) the global elite enough, then you become very very biased towards believing any bad thing you hear about them. And maybe there’s some level of hatred at which you become amenable to believing that they rape children and eat their organs.
You know, Scott, this would be a much more persuasive argument if we did not know of one existing, global, elite, pedophile conspiracy - I'm speaking, of course, of the Roman Catholic Church.
Now, granted, it would be very wrong to say that the RCC was (much less is) a pedophile conspiracy first and foremost. However, what we already know points to a widespread problem with priests abusing minors, but also - much more damningly - the Church hierarchy and officials taking great pains to hush the matter up for decades, whilst extracting, essentially, no penalties against the abusers (those came later, when the matter broke into public perception).
So, while in the strictest sense the RCC isn't a global pedophile cabal, in another - more practical sense - we'd be hard pressed to tell the difference, given a history of enabling pedophiles and shielding them from the public.
Given that we have one example of a global pedophile cabal, is the existence of another such a big stretch of the imagination?
I mean, Epstein was hosting those island parties for *someone*, as other commenters have pointed out.
Great article overall, but I would point out that in my experience the people interested in the Kennedy assassination actually do tend to be very worked up and emotional/angry about it. I have seen adult marines crying about it, and other adult people yelling. This was like 10-15 years ago. Long after the fact.
Did you hear the one going around last year?
Q: What’s the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth?
A: About six months, these days.
Which I mention to point out how “conspiracy theory” is also one phase in the dialectical process by which a dominant culture absorbs information contrary to its unifying narrative.
I think it's weird one of the things you labeled the global elite as being responsible for as being "a woke takeover" instead of the much more obvious political corruption and bribery they engage in. They do not undermine society by perpetrating wokeness, they do so by perpetrating corruption. I didn't realize you had such a strong bias against wokeness which to me seems unwarranted.
Before continuing to advertise your intuitive mood swings about politics -- a clumsy subject for you, since you are naturally more curious about other things -- I suggest you tackle your research responsibly. For instance, read the Mueller Report in its entirety, Volume One and Two, before proclaiming to know the truth about anything referred to as "Russiagate." How do I know you haven't read it? Because your understanding of the subject matter has never been anything more than shallow.
Why are so many people in this thread saying to read the entire insanely long Mueller report instead of quoting the relevant parts?
It's an important question. Such a response would not have been necessary if the report had not been so effectively whitewashed, buried, mischaracterized, and lied about. It is simply a well-documented piece of history. It is the furthest thing from "propaganda." It speaks for itself, transparent about all its limits and holes that were the result of non-cooperation from the administration. It speaks soberly and quietly about steady, coordinated obstruction, yet still paints an utterly damning picture, despite all the self-righteous cries of "No collusion!" Mueller was a conservative, Republican, institutionalist, and so, no showboat, he deferred to norms and policies prohibiting him from making charging recommendations, which so many here have carelessly (or maliciously) interpreted as vindication.
In short, anyone who still believes the report was a nothing-burger has been willingly duped by a corrupt admin, a conman president, a pliant media ecosystem (Fox, etc), and crucially, endless individuals like yourself joining the bandwagon with uninformed comments. I certainly would not urge anyone to read such a detailed report unless they were participating in the political sphere (e.g. voting, blogging) without questioning the con job. If I sound conspiratorial, then read the report. That's the best picture we have so far.
If a majority of people in the 1950s were convinced the Nuremberg trials vindicated the Nazi project, I would be begging everyone to watch the proceedings instead of just listening to their friend spouting off at the end of the bar. But that's not a good example, because the Nazis were not in charge of their own trial, so it was much easier for Barr, etc to bury the Mueller report. Don't be a willing dupe. This message is for your own benefit. But if you're going to act politically based on acceptance of a fraud, this actually puts our shared project of democracy in peril, which is why some of us are pulling our hair out over the flippant unwillingness to look into the matter for yourself.
Scott could do something really useful by reviewing the report honestly and fully. Not that I trust his political analyses, but I do somewhat trust his fidelity to data-driven texts, so the real question is whether his interest is sincere enough that he's willing to revisit his facile assumptions about "Russiagate" (as if that word could possibly sum up the whole ugly matter).
I think any attempt to understand conspiracy theories needs to look at the social aspect. Believing a conspiracy theory makes you part of a group. It provides kinship and emotional support. The flat Earth documentary from a few years back makes this very clear.
What makes a group organized around a conspiracy theory more attractive than mainstream social groups? Part of it might be the biases you mention. Part of it might be the ego boost that comes with thinking that you have access to a special truth that most other people discount or are ignorant of. Or maybe conspiracy theories attract people with similar personalities along other dimensions and they just have a lot of fun together. You don't necessarily have to start off hating elites to believe in Qanon -- you just have to meet some people who believe in Qanon, get along with them, and then start hating elites.
This latter explanation appeals to me because it seems true in other contexts. People that are *really* into sci-fi and fantasy often hew towards certain stereotypes that aren't directly related to genres of fiction (or at least don't seem to be). Similarly for sports fans and outdoor enthusiasts. I'm sure you can come up with other examples.
I broadly agree with the two categories of conspiracy theories. But I think the first type is the primary factor in conspiracy theories, and without it the second type wouldn't get off the ground. There must be more going on in the first type than just a bunch of people with flaws in their evidence balancing analysis.
As some other people have suggested on the comments here, there's some drive pushing people to believe/give some weight to conspiracies. Just read through the comments here and you see people getting caught up in Epstein, JFK, Pizzagate and whatnot. These conspiracy theories draw our attention.
I think there's two natural urges behind this. First, we have a natural urge to uncover mysteries. Second, we generally have some feeling that there is a deeper truth behind things. So when we see a thread to pull, some facts that seem intriguing, we are pushed to tug on that thread. And the more the answer seems to reveal a deeper truth, on some level we'll find it more acceptable.
I think there's a deep truth behind that, but you'll probably say I'm a conspiracy theist :)
> I think this is even true of more classical conspiracy theories like the Kennedy assassination. If you talk to a Kennedy conspiracist, they’re most interested in talking about anomalies like how the bullet angles don’t work out. These tend to sound a lot like the Pyramid-reflects-the-speed-of-light fact - attention-grabbing, inexplicable, easy to quantify how unlikely they are, and the only problem is a lot of vague holistic arguments that it can’t be true (Oswald seemed pretty assassin-y, it would be crazy for two people to be shooting the President at the exact same time, lots of government agencies say they investigated and didn’t find anything else). So in order to keep their favored fact (about the bullet angles) they propose a conspiracy that explains away why Oswald looked so guilty, why all the official investigations said it was just Oswald, and so on.
I was thinking about this distinction recently, but I came to the exact opposite conclusion on JFK. Isn't the whole point that some shadowy forces wanted Kennedy dead, possibly orchestrated by LBJ to take power, or by the military-industrial complex to keep us in Vietnam? It might have been weird anomalies that kicked off said theories, but I think the biggest catalyst was Jack Ruby killing Oswald (allegedly to silence him).
Not much discussion about the election of 2020 and the perceived conspiracy on the right that “the fix was in”. I would say that this view is obviously emotional, but at the same time, I do feel some empathy, as I feel they had evidence. Bad evidence, but still... when you really want to believe something, and you think you see “proof”, and then later on your “proof” is bunk, but then you say the refutation of that “proof” is the real bunk, isn’t that a third type of conspiracy? I remember election night in 2022 vividly. I live in California, which is on a later time zone than most of the US. In the evening, I was actively watching the online map of who had won which state, and said to myself “oh no he is going to win again.” It seemed very evident at that time that Trump was going to win. Now, later on the evening, when I woke myself up at midnight because I was a little distressed by this and was having trouble sleeping, I woke up , checked the map, and felt relieved. I believed the new “evidence”. As the all the mail in votes were counted, the votes swung the other way. I believe that this is the main reason that voters for Trump thought that the fix was in. The oversimplified maps of which state was going to what party, which were all over the internet that night, gave a very false impression of how the election was going on the night of the election. It doesn’t matter that later on that we can explain why the shift happened. If I wanted Trump to win, I would have thought that the fix was in. It makes me think of that famous picture of Truman holding the paper with the headline “Dewey defeats Truman” on the day after that election. I am sure there were many dissatisfied and conspiracy minded voters at that time when Truman beat Dewey. I think rather than hating on those who believe in conspiracies, or worse yet , trying to “convert them to the truth”, we need to find ways to make the situations less fraught. Obviously better counting and processing of mail in ballots would help in this. And yes I know many states made it deliberately difficult to count the ballots... Probably because a few cynical smart people realized they even if they lost, they could sow distrust, but that is an entirely different conversation.
Conspiracy theories are fun. That's reason enough for plenty of people like my uncle who has zero desire to find out if the zany things he reads on the internet are true. He get lots of excitement from these theories which he rarely gets from real news. I'm not sure if he actually believes this stuff or it just kayfabe from him.
I am extremely interested in what people actually mean when they say they "believe" something. It's clearly more complex than a simple statement of literal fact. It might be that literal fact is irrelevant but I think there's symbolic or emotional truth that people are endorsing that beats literal fact. I very much agree that it's a simplifying maneuver - instead of having to express a difficult-to-defend but obviously correct (at least to you) milieu of evidence, it's easier to have a silver bullet.
But if you're going to hold the belief no matter the literal evidence, and you're very certain in the milieu of emotional evidence, what's the point of defending it? That's what strikes me about the conspiracy epidemic. It's an attempt to mentally defend a belief against a hypothetical other. Not a real other, because they don't believe your conspiracy theory. But the beauty of a conspiracy theory is that you can tell yourself that you understand better than them, that you're smarter than them, and that if they were more intelligent, they *would* agree with you.
All of this assumes that the goal in all things is to justify yourself to other people - it feels like the point is to crowdsource your own critical faculties to the internet, and in doing so absolve yourself of doubt.
> The most recent time I fell for a conspiracy theory was Trump-Russiagate.
This is a fascinating test case. I still encounter people who insist, twisting this way and that, that there is evidence for Russiagate after all.
I would challenge anyone -- but especially the chief influencer here (Scott) -- to read the entire Mueller report (Volumes One and Two, plus footnotes) before making further comments on the trump/russia nexus.
Scott would perform a close reading and then publicly review his findings if he really wanted to treat this momentous chapter in the history of our fragile democracy seriously. But he won't do this, because he's simply not interested enough, so he convinces himself he has all the info he needs to proclaim his facile opinions and assumptions -- as if he's being more rational than those concerned enough to actually do the deep diving.
The Mueller report is not a credible source. It is an elaborate exercise in assembling circumstantial facts to make them appear "greater than the sum of the parts." One could do exactly the same with Hunter Biden's dealing in Ukraine, with similar import (cf. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/11/us/politics/hunter-biden-investigations.html).
Uh huh. Which is why you've never bothered to read it, right? Good grief. So much confidence in so much ignorance.
I have in fact read it. Why would you imagine that you know otherwise? Your remark reflects the cognitive patterns that Scott discusses in the post.
Because your descriptions of the document do not remotely coincide with its reality. All these flippancies around truth, facts, history, and fascistic appetite, which were unleashed by the former guy, are quite dangerous to our shared, fragile democracy -- so I hope you're at least amusing yourself.
I won't interact further with you, but I do challenge Scott to do a close reading of the entire report, and then review it thoroughly here. Maybe that would pique the interest of a few more readers who have been casual in their dismissals, unwilling to entertain the fact that the last decade was terrific practice for the Bannons, Putins, Flynns, and Trumps of the world.
"Fascistic appetite." Oh boy. No sign of being in a conspiratorial mindset here!
I would urge everyone to read the following in reference to Russiagate:
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php
What's seemingly different this time 'round is that conspiracists don't care that the evidence refutes their position. For example, when I asked a friend what evidence she has that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election for president, or that the Center for Disease Control is misrepresenting mortality statistics from Covid-19, she shrugs and says none is needed.
This Santos gentleman (?) who somehow goofed his way into Congress with an entirely fabricated identity is just taking Unreality to a new level. In winning, trust or character seem acceptable casualties; the important thing is to win.
Can someone give me a succinct explanation for why the belief that trump was inadvisably influenced or beholden to russian interests was indefensible *at the time*? or was that reasonable? I remember never thinking he was an actual russian plant, but idea that his indisputably secretive business couldn't have problems with foreign leverage never seemed crazy to me.
I think the belief wasn’t indeed single for random citizen when they were constantly hearing it from the intelligence world, democrats, and the MSM. The problem is those people were mostly lying their asses off bridges they hated Trump and were wishcasting all sorts of nonsense, some of which they invested themselves or knew was false.
I'm not sure this is a real distinction, although it may be a useful spectrum.
Just to throw out some examples:
- Qanon (which heavily overlaps with the adrenachrome stuff) is extremely evidence-focused. They're all about Q's Nostradamus-esque prophecies and elaborate numerical proofs. The core idea is "this guy has inside info, and he's repeatedly proven it by predicting things".
- Pizzagate, which also heavily overlaps with the adrenachrome stuff, is/was also very focused on evidence - long lists of emails that seemed confusing normally (large or unusual pizza orders) but made sense if they were in code (cheese pizza = children), alleged photos of pedophilic artwork on display, a guy went to "shoot up" the pizza place but only destroyed their hard drive, etc.
- Conversely, I've been hate-watching Netflix's recent much-derided Ancient Apocalypse show, starring Graham Hancock, and the guy *absolutely cannot shut up* about how close-minded, dogmatic, and fearful mainstream experts are and how much they hate him. While I kind of appreciate that he's at least honest that no-one takes him seriously, it's clear that he and his team think "look how much this pisses off the mainstream, you can't trust them" is their most compelling argument.
I will again suggest as a starting point Eco's Serendipities
Language and Lunacy (1998). The first essay is "The force of falsity".
Secondly, as part of rationalist program and because you are psychologist, you should present your thoughts in the context of a review of the literature. It's not like you're the first person to think about this.
Lastly, conspiracy theory is a type of myth-making. Myth-making is not just a personal process, it is social process. So thinking about a personal motivation (or pathology) will be insufficient. As a myth-making process it is a shared process of attempting to explain and shape and participate in reality. Voegelin might provide some insights for serious investigation.
Every conspiracy theorist will point out that some conspiracies are actually true. Indeed, with recent revelations from the Twitter Files, it looks like a lot of the "We're being targeted by the government and our speech is being secretly shut down" was true. People complained about being shadow banned, but then Jack Dorsey came out and testified before Congress that they don't shadow ban. Anyone claiming that their speech was being shadow banned became a conspiracy theorist. They would point to very specific screenshots of account activity, "I usually get [X] number of reactions to my post, but they're now down >90%!"
"No, that's just because people stopped engaging with you for some other reason. I may not have an explanation for this specific instance, but coincidences happen and you're looking at one. You're asking me to hyper-focus on this very specific and not-signal-boosted piece of evidence over the Twitter CEO's Congressional testimony? In order to believe your conspiracy theory, we'd have to prioritize this one piece of evidence while also believing that:
1.) Twitter is shadow banning thousands of people
2.) Their CEO was willing to lie to congress
3.) A bunch of people at Twitter know about 1+2
4.) Nobody is coming forward as a whistle-blower."
This is the standard argument against conspiracy theories: the larger the conspiracy, the more difficult it is to keep it a secret. Someone will spill the beans. Sometimes conspiracy theorists will reply that, "maybe the CIA or the FBI planted people high up in the company to intercept this kind of thing." But then they just look like stark-raving loons, willing to make up excuses for why there are no whistleblowers.
Yet with the Twitter Files, we're seeing that - absent Musk's multi-billion-dollar over payment for his favorite apptivity and a strangely-inconsistent-but-probably-sincere commitment to free speech - there were multiple ongoing conspiracies with exactly this kind of fact pattern. They even included the FBI plant!
The two big questions are "doesn't this count as a whistle-blower event?" and the more difficult to answer, "was this a one-off event, or is it representative?" Let's start with the first question. I think there are multiple reasons to believe that but-for Musk we wouldn't see another whistle-blower:
1. If the criteria for whistle-blower starts with a person actually going through with a $44 billion purchase of a failing company, the bar is high enough we should not expect to detect conspiracies this way.
2. We've seen other whistle-blowers pay a high price for their activities, like Manning (convicted under Espionage Act) and Snowden (threatened to be tried in secret courts if he ever steps foot in a country with extradition to the US). It's certainly not the case that there ARE no whistleblowers, but it's also clear that conspirators are willing to set a high price on whistleblowers to keep them from talking (life-changing non-monetary prices, not just $44B). We should expect fewer whistleblowers depending on the potential costs of coming forward.
3. Multiple other social media companies were implicated in the Twitter Files, including Reddit, Wikipedia, Apple, Meta, and Alphabet. I'll admit that the hypothesis, "lots of people know about this thing, so it will make its way into the public domain" is compelling. I've believed it for years, and made that argument countless times to my Illuminati/Bildaberg/global conspiracy-believing friend. I'm as surprised as anyone to discover that this explanation doesn't match the evidence. Indeed, now that some of the Twitter Files have been out for a while, where are the shocking revelations from these other companies, even years after the conspiracy started?
This brings us to the second question, "is this representative of a larger ability to conceal conspiracies?" We appear to have some evidence that the USG was involved with many other social media/tech companies in the same way they were with Twitter. All that seems to be coming from the Twitter revelations, though. Where are all the whistleblowers from Meta? Why hasn't some intrepid news outlet reported about this from Wikipedia? We're literally talking about yesterday's conspiracy "theory" confirmed as today's news story, and yet we're not seeing leaks.
Or are we? Is there some small-town paper somewhere that reported Reddit's story, but the national and social media haven't picked it up? We know at this point that such stories can be suppressed. That they are suppressed. If the conspirators have the ability to make sure any story is suppressed, and the Wikipedia page edits out attempts to signal boost by people motivated enough to use DuckDuckGo or get around the censorship, can we really rely on the argument that it's too difficult to cover up a conspiracy?
"These are new tools." Maybe, but they've had a name for a long time: gatekeepers. Meet the new gatekeepers, same as the old gatekeepers.
Finally, I don't think all (or even most) conspiracy theories are true. Indeed, Twitter Files #14 outline a situation where Twitter was being accused of allowing Russian bot farms to run rampant on their system. They did an internal review and concluded that wasn't happening (for that specific case, not that this never happened). Despite this, a bunch of conspiracy theorists - including people in Congress! - kept pestering them about it and the conspiracy theory became a story.
Even Zvi, who isn't exactly fond of the establishment, found the Twitter Files to be a big nothingburger.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/12/30/the-twitter-files-covid-edition/
I'm not familiar with Zvi or their writing, though I know Scott mentions them occasionally. I'd like to point out that this specific analysis is only looking at the COVID-19 edition from David Zweig. After reading Zvi's take, I was not impressed. I'll just say that they seemed very hostile, made a number of statements that don't seem to be a careful reading of the story itself, and twisted logic in circles in order to conclude this was all a nothingburger(TM).
If that's an example of a 'good argument' on the con side of this subject, it suggests these dismissals of the Twitter Files are biased and unfounded. If you've got a better example, I'd love to see it, but I've been following/reading each of these as they come out and been surprised at exactly how much that was once 'conspiracy theory' has been solidly confirmed. Putting aside Zvi's odd take on the COVID edition, there's a lot in the Twitter Files.
Take, for example, the edition where Twitter was told by the USIC that they had a bunch of paid Russian accounts directing the conversation. Twitter did an internal review and found that wasn't true. They said as much to the government, assuming good faith. Then the government 'leaked' stories making claims Twitter had already disproved and got Congress to threaten legislation if Twitter didn't 'clean up' their act: meaning comply with whatever 'requests' the government made. Eventually, Twitter concluded they would publicly retain the façade that they were reviewing tweets per their policy, but privately they accepted the de facto situation the government had forced on them of accepting USIC 'requests' uncritically. That's an incredible subversion of a public information-sharing company by the US government, taking over moderation of the platform and using it wholesale to guide public debate. I'm not sure how you can conclude that there's "nothing there".
If even Zvi disagrees with you, I think that's a strong sign that you're the one who is mistaken (or rather, stuck in a bubble of motivated reasoning and partisan groupthink).
I'm sure I, like everyone else, am subject to partisan groupthink. However, I've asked for an actual argument to support the hypothesis you've put forward. The link you gave me does not stand on its own merit. If you'd like, we can go through point-by-point and I can demonstrate where the arguments aren't sufficient to convince me. I'd just ask for a precommitment to a good-faith discussion, because I'd hate to devote a lot of time and words to mirroring-by-accusation of partisan groupthink.
I'm sorry I don't accept Zvi as authoritative? I accept evidence and reasoned arguments, but not appeals to authority. If we're appealing to authority, I have a PhD in Immunology and I work in clinical research, so this isn't an area where I'm just some guy off the street, but I wouldn't ask anyone to defer to my authority. I'd only ask them to defer to evidence and solid reasoning.
Based on your confidence, it sounds like there's a lot of good evidence and reasoned arguments Zvi makes elsewhere, but this is not a good example of either of those things. After reading the piece, the overall impression I'm left with is that Zvi absolutely agrees with the official government policy as a utilitarian good for society that should be supported. That many of the tweets militate against that policy and would take ACTUAL REASONED DEBATE to return a person who becomes skeptical of the official policy to the Right Way of Thinking, and may even lead many people to die as a result.
Thus, Zvi's analysis isn't "this is a nothingburger(TM) because I looked carefully and couldn't find anything there", but rather, "I choose not to see anything there, and I think it is Right that the government should ensure others do not get to choose whether to see anything as well."
No matter how careful we are, or how much we try to avoid it, we all struggle with biases. Zvi is mortal, just like the rest of us.
Zvi has been extremely critical of public health authorities as well as the media. He's exactly the kind of person you'd expect to hype up the "Twitter Files", which is why I was so surprised by his posts.
*sigh* You've given me three solid appeals to authority on Zvi, but no actual support for your position. I'll be charitable and provide you with three examples of concerning logic from the post you linked to, but if you're not willing to engage in actual defense of your position other than an appeal to Zvi's unassailable perfection in this area I'm going to bow out.
1. We'll start off easy. There's a great comment from "Glenn Raphael" at the link you gave me. Glen is more charitable about Zvi's misinterpretation of the exchange than I think is warranted, but it's a clear example of poor reasoning on Zvi's end. The headline, "Twitter non-experts censored actual medical experts by inappropriately identifying it as false information" stands.
2. Then there's the quibble about KellyKga and the sharing of 'misleading' data from the CDC. I struggle to understand why Zvi takes issue in the ways they do, seemingly uninterested in engaging with the actual content of the claims and evidence. One of the points made repeatedly in the Twitter Files is that government agencies and social media companies were not just targeting bigshots. They were targeting small time people, experts, and everyone else; and they were using people with no expertise to 'fact check' those people. They cast a broad net. These points come home in the KellyKga case, but Zvi refuses to allow Zweig to make that point because Zvi thinks he should be making a different point.
Meanwhile, Zvi completely ignores the point Zweig actually makes: "Tellingly, the Tweet by @KellyKga that was labeled "Misleading" was a reply to a tweet that contained actual misinformation. Covid has never been the leading cause of death from disease in children. Yet that tweet remains on the platform, and without a "misleading" label."
The point, "this tweet is misleading, and I'm telling you why it's misleading with the CDC's own data" is entirely valid, and nothing Zvi says disputes that point. Indeed, large numbers of people somehow came to the conclusion that COVID-19 is dangerous to children. Why? Could it be that thousands of small accounts trying to share the accurate observation that it's not all that dangerous to children were silenced? Well, it seems we have proof of exactly that happening - no matter how small the tweet or how small the reach.
Instead of taking that in good faith, though, Zvi makes the pedantic point that the original tweet was technically factually accurate. Okay? KellyKga never disputed that. What they - and Zweig - claimed was that taking this cherry-picked data out of context could easily mislead people into believing that:
1.) A major cause of death for children is disease, and is therefore interesting/important; but ... it's not. Here's some data from 2019, before COVID hit: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/causes-of-death-in-5-14-year-olds?country=~USA Now, if you have to start by breaking down "cause of death from infectious disease" and that's already <<10% of the causes of death, you're definitely entering misleading territory
2.) Within that disease subset, COVID is the leading cause of death disease in children. This is not true. Zvi weakly attempts to 'refute' it by making the lame argument that "the start date is cherry-picked, sure, but the end-date was 'today' at the time" - which negates the cherry-picking because ... ? No, it doesn't. It's still cherry-picking.
Zvi makes the false claim that Zweig and KellyKga "give the impression that the person in question is lying to us." No, they did not! They clearly stated that the tweet in question was "misleading". It was. This is beyond dispute - even by Zvi. Zvi sets up a straw man of what is not claimed ("lying") and handily defeats it. Then cries crocodile tears for the censored contents, claiming it's okay because they weren't actively kicked off the platform.
As an aside, this argument that shadow banning isn't as bad as kicking people off the platform seems exactly backward. Say tomorrow Musk asks you to take his job as Twitter CEO. You're tasked with the problem of people violating terms of service. "Kick 'em off," you reply. "We do, but they just make another free account." It's the same problem as robocallers getting new numbers every time you block them. It works for a nanosecond and just creates more work for you. What if, instead, you never kick them off, though? You quarantine everything they say by dropping it to the bottom of an infinite scroll, so they never know that the reason people aren't engaging with them is because they can't see them. Since they can still tweet, they're not creating a new account - unless you made the mistake of telling them about the shadow ban - and you've effectively eliminated their ability to speak. Yet Zvi uncritically assesses that this is BETTER than kicking someone off outright, because at least they can still tweet into the ether at nobody. This is bizarre reasoning.
Zvi cryptically supports censorship of tweets based on 'judgement calls' of people who are not qualified to levy those judgements, but lets this pass? It's clearly misinformation that will lead people to make incorrect decisions. Zvi's reasoning for why it's okay for Power to err on the side of caution comes back again and again to, "but people might die if they get it wrong one way, so we should give them a pass". Indeed, this seems to be the whole argument - not that the content of the Twitter Files is incorrect, but that the censorship is acceptable to Zvi. Nothing about the KellyKga instance does anything but obfuscate this otherwise clear case: Twitter moderation took a real and good attempt to dispel misinformation, incorrectly labeled it as misinformation, and left that misinformation up. Twitter moderation spread misinformation. That's ... not a nothingburger(TM), it's a headline.
3. Next, I struggled to understand how Zvi could so heavily misread the tweet by ID_ethics as "misleading" because ... it repeated the results of a scientific paper and nothing else? Zvi complains that "the person being censored is trying to tell people not to vaccinate", but that claim is not supported by the plain text of the tweet itself, which is literally just a repeat of safety information in a Nature publication. It's unclear why Zvi makes this inaccurate claim. Maybe ID_ethics was doing that in other tweets? But Zvi isn't making the case that those other tweets should be censored or labeled 'misleading'. Zvi makes the case that a straightforward retweet of clinical data is 'misleading'. But the statements Zvi makes to support their claim about ID_ethics's tweets are not correct.
Once again, we get to the real reason Zvi is giving Twitter a pass: because a person reading the tweet might conceivably interpret it as misleading it was therefore perfectly fine for Twitter to label it as such, regardless of the facts. "Is this Tweet misleading in practice, giving the impression the vaccines are going to kill young people?" With what? Data alone? This is straining at a gnat, as with most of the other objections. Somehow Zvi isn't concerned about censorship of directly tweeted safety concerns from scientific papers, but is concerned that the government might not be able to control OTHERS from misleading the public if provided with that true information. I'm not sure how they avoid being misled themselves, though, given they're hiding the scientific results they disagree with from public discussion. Zvi seems to imply that it's okay because all it got was a "misleading" label. But ID_ethics claims they were shadowbanned for >1 year over this. https://twitter.com/ID_ethics/status/1607473119555641345 Either way, the headline, "Twitter censors sharing of scientific data contrary to government-supported narrative" seems like a big headline. I'd be very skeptical of anyone who dismisses it, not because it isn't TRUE, but because it's inconvenient.
This is the fundamental problem, as I see it: At the heart of scientific knowledge/discovery is the process of distinguishing something that was previously overlooked because it didn't fit into the broad categories we put it into, or because we'd missed some very specific piece of evidence.
Before Watson and Crick published their groundbreaking structure of DNA, Linus Pauling published his own. He had the same 'B-form' X-ray crystallography data W&C got from Franklin, which is the rationale he gave for making his structure helical. But he put the hydrophobic bases pointing outward and even had some small Van Der Walls overlaps. Why make such monumental mistakes? Pauling explains in his original paper: the bases wouldn't pair. He tried, but it didn't work. He figured some not-yet-identified structural molecules were keeping the whole thing together. After all, usually in biology we find it's more complicated than it appears at first.
But base pairing WAS the simple answer. Why did it work for W&C, but not for Pauling? Because a chemist in their department noticed Crick working (unsuccessfully) on getting the bases to pair and asked why he was using the less-stable Enol form and not the Keto form (cf Enol-Keto tautaumerization in your o-chem textbook). Crick didn't know about this. Pauling had overlooked it (despite making Nobel-winning discoveries in other aspects of Chemistry).
The idea that discovery of a deeper truth hinges on "a very specific detail" is how a lot of scientific discoveries have been made. Minor mutation in HBG gene causing sickle-cell anemia? Minor measurement deviation in the orbit of a moon of Jupiter? Got some mold growing on your agar plate?
What's the difference between an eccentric scientist and a loony conspiracy nut? (Maybe there isn't always a difference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Views_on_HIV/AIDS_and_climate_change) If we define the same method of hyper-focus as a flaw in evidence processing, do we lose more than just a few people pursuing outlandish ideas? Is there a way to dismiss details that don't matter without dismissing the kind of details that change the world?
> But if Trump was secretly an agent in the pay of Vladimir Putin, sent to destroy democracy, then that’s literal treason. There are no gray areas. You could explain in a single, objectively true sentence why he was one of the greatest villains in American history. There is a sense in which Trump being a literal traitor compresses information elegantly; instead of a mountain of vague cues suggesting that he is evil, there is a single fact that sums up his evilness perfectly.
This seems like the sort of model that would be reinforced based on the free energy principle/predictive processing. Simple, salient, and easy to shoehorn observations into supporting. In your second class of conspiracy theories, there might be a little rim around the low energy states but it seems like all it takes is a little push for some people to go up and over that hill
Conspiracy theories in the energy landscape seem a bit like black holes in spacetime: point-like attractor states. It's weird though that defending the conspiracy often involves what seems like a lot of complexity and epicycles of conspiracy (e.g. pizzagate). Maybe the hole is too deep to get out of by that point, or too intertwined with the person's identity?
If more than a few people get really worked up about a given belief, I start thinking it’s probably false. Nobody gets really passionate about the law of gravity, but people spend massive amounts of emotional energy trying to convince themselves and others that various scams, superstitions, quacks, and political agendas are super-awesome. It’s like they know, somewhere in the back of their minds, that it’s all bs, but they really wish it were true and are desperately trying not to notice
> I remember things about how conspiracy theories are linked to schizotypy, schizotypy is linked to schizophrenia, and schizophrenia is a condition of aberrant salience, ie your brain getting confused about how much different facts matter in relation to each other. All of this seems to fit together and I feel like I’m on the verge of understanding the whole phenomenon.
I've been circling around the same thing. You should read about Vervaeke's work on relevance realization and Klein's Data-frame theory of sensemaking. It seems to me that arbitrary relevance realization is indistinguishable from schizophrenia. If your body kept telling you over and over again that the buzzing in your ears was relevant, you too might conclude that the government put something in your brain.
Though buzzing in the ears may be a bad example because salience is primarily a visual phenomena in humans. And isn't it interesting the lack of overlap between schizophrenics and the blind? My abnormal psych teacher used to say that schizophrenia was primarily a perceptual issue. I never understood that till I thought about it this way.
Infowars is also arbitrary relevance realization. They include irrelevant context (eg FBI death numbers) and exclude relevant context. This makes them basically indistinguishable from a schizophrenic.
This group that prides themselves on their intelligence so, still believes the Warren Commission report, and seems to be unaware that, just for example the House Committee on Assassinations and every other post-Warren report has concluded that Oswald did not act alone. That's bizarre. Not as bizarre as JKF, Oswald, Jack Ruby, and Robert Kennedy all being killed by lone nuts, and the Trump and Buden administration's both refusing to release the last of the files.
How many coincidences does it take to pique your curiosity?
Jack Ruby died of cancer in 1967.
There is quite a bit of controversy about Ruby's death but the proximal cause was a pulmonary embolism. 'Something' caused a blockage in an artery in his lungs. He did have cancer at the time of the embolism. I should not have included Ruby in the list in the way that I did. Perhaps I should have indicated that he died shortly before he was to receive a retrial, which had the potential to be substantially less biased towards him and perhaps free him from custody. It should be noted that while in custody he had, shall we say 'gone nuts' to a remarkable and unusual degree in a way that had never been noticed while he was a free man. Unfortunately, I can only find a single page letter about his autopsy without anything really useful on it. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/lee-harvey-oswalds-killer-jack-9577093 Still 3 out of 4 ain't bad.
Also, I referenced the House Committee on Assassinations which should have been the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
So: Ruby being shot by a lone nut would be evidence for your point of view.
Ruby NOT being shot, but dying while having lung cancer, is also suspicious.
Meanwhile. Sirhan Sirhan is alive 55 years after his crime, but I guess that's not any indication that there's nothing more to his case than the motivation he has explained in great detail.
It's very heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.
So, reading a link to a major mainstream media source to find out what I was talking about would be too much work so you instead resort to simple sarcasm. That explains why you are so attached to simplistic positions which can't be believed by anyone who examines the evidence.
I BTW have only advocated the position that there is a high number of coincidences, and that only one official investigation supported the 'lone nut' theory, more comprehensive investigations do not.
If you were better at the snide dismissal without looking at evidence I would suggest you stick with it, but you might be better served by another tack.
A thought occured to me, and I need to type it down in order to force my brain to form it clearly, and to implant it in my memory by associating it with the context of this post, the process of typing it, etc.
Anyways, here goes postmodernist drivel:
Empathizing with "conspiracy theorists" and describing their thought processes in terms of universal modes of human reasoning goes a long way, but it still unfairly singles them out. The very same universals of reasoning that lead people to mistakenly believe a false alternative theory can lead them to mistakenly believe a false established one, yet we don't speak derisively of "status quo theorists". Or rather, some people do speak derisively of "sheeple" and "NPCs" and so on, and we'd rightly recognize those as pure insults, emotionally-loaded and self-serving, so maybe it's time to relegate "conspiracy theorists" and other terms for people holding views outside of mainstream to the same status.
We're all trying to make sense of the world with limited knowledge and even more limited first-hand experience, and we're all bound to make mistakes, so the least we can do is to recognize that and stop shaming other people for making theirs. Not just because they're ultimately just like us, just working with different inputs and brain tuning. Also because, every once in a while, one of them will be on to something. We need individuals who differ, who strain from conventional wisdom and investigate alternative theories, in order to generate new hypotheses, and to be able to ever collectively change our mind.
If we need to call some of them out, let's not call them out for differing from status quo (many people who moved human knowledge forward did) or for believing in conspiracies (conspiracies do exist). If they're factually wrong, illogical and/or close-minded, there should be plenty of that to point out. If they're neither, but still sound weird, it's perfectly possible to remain unconvinced and respectfully differ.
PS: I am not sure that "your enemies are fundamentally just people like you, trying to balance their universal human selfish and pro-social instincts in a way that best matches their circumstances" isn't a bigger blackpill. On one hand, it allows you to trust other people (if not never to harm you, then at least to act within some comprehensible bounds) and retain your hope for humanity. On the other, where do we even go from there? You can defeat other people, but how do you defeat Moloch?
I think you're confusing a lot of things here. First, what is happening with a conspiracy theory.
All conspiracy theories are primarily a failure of contextualising information. As such, conspiracy theories do not explain away evidence or facts, at least not in the way that normal theories do. Conspiracy theories incorporate evidence. To explain away something is to say that it is not true or relevant. To incorporate it is to say it is true/relevant, but the broader context points to the same or similar conclusion. Hence the "conspiracy" part of the theory.
To expand on this , consider normal reactions to conspiracy theories. The normal response tends to reject them completely and immediately. If you hear that the moon landing is fake and somehow never heard this before, the first response is to say that isn't true and move on, without knowing a single extra fact about the moon landing. No extra facts will change this, because you're just so certain about your prior that you're never going to change it. On the face of it, it sounds similar to a conspiracy theorist, their prior being "there is a conspiracy". But actually, conspiracy theorists don't start that way, and they change their theories all the time. The conspiracy follows from the fact pattern they see. The problem is an inability to understand which facts are relevant.
Second, emotions don't have anything to do with this. The evidence for the illuminati isn't a gut feeling of hatred of elites, it's things like "Why do twelve supposedly separate news agencies seem to publish the same article at the same time without openly talking to each other?" or "Why does the government lie to us?" or "Why is seemingly basic information kept hidden?". In other words, the evidence for the Illuminati is the noticed gaps in the narrative. The gaps need to be explained, and are filled with conspiracy.
Third, I think you may not understand the difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. Conspiracies happen. Conspiracy theories don't. MKUltra happened. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was propaganda. ECHELON was confirmed in 2015. But we have yet to uncover the fake moon landing. The Illuminati hasn't been revealed. Nobody has found a single lizard person. The difference between these is conspiracies get found out, and conspiracy theories keep updating to new evidence forever. Conspiracy theorising is rationality turned towards nothing.
My point here is that Trump-Russiagate wasn't you and everyone believing in a conspiracy theory. It was more or less falling to a conspiracy. It was a psy-op. Political warfare. Propaganda. These are synonyms. Like other conspiracies, it was found out. And since it is different, believing in Trump-Russiagate is not the same thing as believing the Illuminati control everything. It's a failure, but the opposite failure. Conspiracy theorists are extremely critical of consensus, because conspiracy theorists are constantly taking in new evidence which they can't contextualise properly. They end up noticing say, certain IQ and wealth distributions and notice that the average person doesn't know or care about it, and then *that* gets thrown in as further evidence for a conspiracy about the Elders of Zion or whatever. People like you who fell for Trump-Russiagate, as you said, "...didn’t believe in an active way, so much as hear that lots of other people believed it, assume it was probably true, and not bother looking into it."
One final thing that isn't quite here or there, but I found it kind of irritating. Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and died from a suicide nobody believes, while Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of trafficking children... to a clientele list which has been and is still deliberately kept secret from us. Is this evidence to a conspiracy theory, or a partially uncovered conspiracy?
Insightful comment. I agree with much of it. But I think I would draw the boundaries around what constitutes a conspiracy theory slightly differently.
You say, "All conspiracy theories are primarily a failure of contextualising information." Which I pretty much agree with except that later you suggest that conspiracy theories that are originated by psy-ops, political warfare or propaganda are not 'real' conspiracy theories.
Another thing that bothers me about this is that it seems like your position would imply that every conspiracy that is only suspected is merely a "conspiracy theory" until such time as it may be confirmed that it was an actual conspiracy at which point it is retroactively declared that it was never a 'real' conspiracy theory at all.
I do agree that Scott thinking, "Huh, I guess Putin probably has Kompromat on Trump." is a far cry from him being a conspiracy theorist but probably there were other people who fell harder for it than he did.
Apologies if I misunderstood or misconstrued you. Understanding is hard.
Let me try to elaborate then on a few things. Hopefully this clears things up some instead of making it worse.
I suppose the first thing to say is that my thought here is that the defining trait of a conspiracy theory is the reasoning used to reach the conclusion, rather than the conclusion itself. All the major conspiracy theories we can think of have been poured over endlessly, and yet they haven't concluded. That is, it is neither the case that they have been shown true, or that they have been proven false to those who believe them. This is because you can't prove what isn't true, and because the defining feature of the conspiracy theorist's thinking is that they will always incorporate new information and change the theory to suit it. So for example, if somehow it came out that the moon landing was in fact fake, I wouldn't say that it was never a conspiracy theory because the only way this is possible is if true fact pattern did not match the fact pattern of the conspiracy theorists OR the moon landing believers.
Trump-Russiagate, it's not a conspiracy theory in the sense that nobody honestly followed a train of logic from an excessively broad range of evidence and then never let go of it. It was an active psy-op handled by active participants. Those not involved in its "active" propagation but who believed it and passively propagated it also did not do so on the basis of faulty reasoning. They did so because they trusted a false consensus. Said false consensus being manufactured.
There is I suppose something to be said about there being real conspiracy theory thinking involved with the broader ideas that some conservatives call "blue-anon". I'm however not convinced this would count either, because it seems like just a sort of run-away affect of Trump-Russiagate. That is, some people are in fact adding epicycles to suggest that various crimes are constantly piling, but actually this seems to be because Trump, or "Trumpism" is still active in politics, so there are still non-conspiracy-theory reasons to perpetuate political warfare against him.
Okay thanks, I think I understand your position better now.
Didn't Sam Harris say that he if he found out that Joe Biden had literal dead babies in his basement (and presumably Biden was the one who killed them) he would still vote for Biden of Trump?
That's pretty close to your example.
how would u distinguish this type of thinking with say, believing in the simulation hypothesis
On the pyramid thing. What are the odds that the aliens would have adopted our systems for measuring either latitude or the speed of light? To me the 1:1m coincidence is proof that we live in a simulation. It's the only way this could have happened. So, aliens!
Apologies if someone has already made this point, but 1) chill hippies often aren't really chill, they've just developed a convincing affect; and 2) it's hard to talk about conspiratorial (or any) beliefs if we can't say exactly what a "belief" is.
It could just be that certain ideas are worthwhile to hold. They make you feel exalted over others bc you are wise (you know a secret truth), or calm or reassured (God loves you), or free and invincible (COVID is just a government manipulation of public fear), or categorically superior (that other group of humans is vastly less good/deserving than mine).
But I'm not convinced holding an idea in your head, or even arguing vociferously in its favor, is always the same thing as *believing* it. And in fact I think a lot of conspiracists spend a great deal of energy thinking and talking about conspiratorial notions in order to convince themselves that they believe something they don't necessarily believe.
So I have a test I put certain arguments to (albeit, for obvious reasons, only mentally). It's called The Meatgrinder of Truth.
The MOT determines whether the person arguing, say, that the Democrats are a front for alien lizard people, genuinely believes that narrative or has simply convinced himself that he does (or wants to believe it and hopes that by persuading others, he will himself feel more justified in truly believing it, or whatever). Because we are all more careful when something personal is at stake, and because belief tends to be cheap (ht to Pascal), what the MOT does is erase the value of fake belief.
The test is simple: Would the conspiracist place himself in the maw of a giant meat grinder whose gears are activated by the recitation of a falsehood the reciter knows to be false or unlikely--and then utter the thing he "believes"?
The MOT obviously is unquestionable and unchallengeable itself: it can't be accused of bias or corruption because it is, essentially, God as Fleischhacker. And the subject of its test, confronted with the possibility of being reduced to hamburger, should become motivated very quickly to learn to identify his own capacity for self examination and self-preserving doubt.
I think the part of my brain that makes other people believe in conspiracies is broken. (Hi, other Asperger's/HFA people!) In 11th grade English class, we were asked "Who really killed Jay Gatsby?" I was literally the only person in the class who answered "George Wilson," i.e., the guy who was found dead with a gun next to Gatsby's body, and who believed that Gatsby had killed his wife. Every other kid latched on to one conspiracy theory or another. I believe that in my case, that mental module is instead devoted to cataloguing Star Wars lore. (Star Wars never hurt anyone!)
This is why we need to engage in black magic to ressurect Hitler twice, once as an adult and once as a child, and convince the adult Hitler to rape and eat the child Hitler so that we can unequivocally have legitimate fully justified hate. If we automate this process and add in recliners with robot arms that feed us grapes whioe in space then we will have fully automated luxury space justified hatred.
(This is not serious, do not ressurect Hitler. Do not take this post seriously. It is a joke).
There was a question in the survey that I have been thinking about; it nags at me.
It was to do with internal dialogues and asked what grammatical person they took place in.
I have forgotten what I answered but I have been trying to pay attention to it whenever I wander off by myself. (I cycle between you I and we (never they).
YOU was the front runner, and what I realized was that whenever it was something vaguely negative or judgmental at issue YOU ruled. When I was pleased with myself "I" was the preferred form of address. "We" is very special. I would like it to show up more often.
It's always the other guy.
You just spent 1500 words reinventing the concept of motivated reasoning. Yes, people come up with reasons to justify their emotional stances. This isn't news.
I think you're right to examine the motivating emotion, but I propose a different one. Everyone I know who fell down the conspiracy rabbit hole derive great entertainment value from it. They especially enjoy saying, "man, you won't believe what's really going on," in a spooky, aloof way, and they love hearing people talk that way to them. It's just very fun to get the kinda of special "insights" your second kind of conspiracy theory offers.
A second motivation is group identity. Pinker points out that people process evidence differently when their paycheque or survival depends on it. Conspiracy theories are likely processed by a different part of the brain, the one that handles mythology and group identity, not eating and surviving bear attacks. It makes sense, from an evolutionary perspective, to believe in wacky conspiracies if it helps make you part of a group.
Related to Russia: A new study of Russia-based Twitter posts by New York University researchers buries the canard that Russian bots played any significant role in swinging the 2016 election for Donald Trump.
https://jacobin.com/2023/01/hillary-clinton-russian-bots-2016-presidential-election-trump
I never thought the idea that Russia had kompromat on Trump made any sense and it still doesn't. And the Steele dossier was pretty obviously just a collection of wild rumors.
On the other hand I find both the Senate Intelligence Committee's and Mueller's investigative conclusions regarding the 2016 election -- that Russia actively tried to help Trump and hurt Clinton, that multiple Trump campaign staffers including the campaign chair actively tried to coordinate with Russia's efforts, and that Trump was negotiating business deals with the Russian government while running for president -- to be solidly sourced and credible.
Apparently, based on the conversation here, the above means that I have "fallen for Russiagate"? Heh....that's ridiculous but also a bit saddening somehow.
> For these conspiracies, maybe the evidence that people are trying to explain isn’t weird bullet trajectories or pyramid-related coincidences, it’s their own emotions.
I think there's more to this than you're letting on.
1. Many years ago I was in a not-very-good romantic relationship with someone who had a tendency to make me feel very self-conscious. One day I found myself feeling worse about the whole thing than ever, and ended up dumping a bunch of my insecurities out on her. The following day, I was still feeling awful, assuming it was from the relationship issues. I left work early, got home… and threw up everything I'd eaten.
And then shortly afterwards I realized I felt a lot better. Much more relaxed. Turns out for the past two days, I'd been eating leftovers of some food that had given me indigestion, but I didn't notice the physical symptoms, or misinterpreted them as the general sort of upset stomach that sometimes comes with anxiety. It was the opposite: being sick had made me anxious. The relationship problems were still there and did end up (much later) leading to us breaking up, but they weren't the only explanation for why I felt especially like shit that day.
2. People going through a manic or hypomanic episode often deny that they have a problem, instead explaining their emotions by saying they've experienced a spiritual awakening of some kind, or fallen desperately in love, or something else like that. I'm sure you've probably seen this in your psychiatry work.
3. Misattribution of arousal is a well-known psychological phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misattribution_of_arousal
If you're a man, and a pretty lady chats you up on a wobbly suspension bridge, you might subconsciously assume that the excitement you're feeling, those butterflies in your stomach and your pounding heart, are because of her rather than the bridge, and be more responsive when she asks you for your number.
(Caveat: although this is commonly talked about in psychology, I just checked and found it predates the replication crisis, and there seem to have been failures to replicate this research since then, see https://twitter.com/stephen_want/status/1156615935949754368 or https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1980-29578-001. Take it with a bit of a grain of salt I guess.)
The point I'm trying to make is that I think there is something to the idea that people have to create explanations for their own emotions, and that they sometimes get it wrong. Given that, it would make sense that simpler, clearer, and less-embarrassing explanations would be more attractive.
Not only is the latitude of the great pyramid equal to the speed of light, but PI squared equals the speed of gravitational acceleration on earth (9.8m/s)! Another conspiracy, centuries in the making, by the illuminati, in the setting of measurement units.
is there a link of this?
woke people trying to shut down schools for gifted people because “believing in merit is racist”
I feel like the strong undercurrent for those crazier ones is importantly undergirded by racism and anti-semitism. Like, people receive all of this hatred against Jews and POC from their environment and parents and such, but find when they encounter normies there's no convincing way to explain why they hate them so much, so they come up with QAnon and George Soros related conspiracy theories and such. The key point being that the emotions they feel so strongly are received when they're very young and don't care about evidence and logical arguments and such, and the conspiracy theory is the post-hoc Zamboni explanation.
It's worth pausing on your description of archaeologists aligning loosely with a bit of suppression of evidence of aliens, because archaeologists have a common experience that doesn't require deliberate, intentional coordination.
Of course, I don't think aliens built the pyramids. But I do think Donald Trump was, in some sense, a Russian agent, even if he and those around him didn't specifically think that. I I think he was cultivated and promoted and indirectly funded and aided through a specific Kremlin-run operation. When his campaign was approached by someone credibly claiming to be a conduit to the Kremlin, offering to coordinate the release of illegally obtained documents, his campaign eagerly instructed them on when to release these. (The source of this information is his campaign itself, which publicly released the email exchange.)
Do I think Donald Trump was trained as an FSB agent, and as a mission to destroy America? No, but I do think he was secretly allied with the Kremlin, in a you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours way that he has used throughout his career.
I posted something in another thread that seems to be relevant here. My definition of anxiety is knowing something to be true but refusing to believe it. I use this framing to guide my internal inquiries. If i am feeling anxiety, then what am I missing?
This all seems speculative (nothing wrong with that at the hypothesis stage) and it’s a field that has actually been studied a fair bit so I’m just going to inject some peer-reviewed research. This is literally just the first link I got from Google, so I have no special knowledge here.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6282974/
Your antepenultimate Graf, "if only" echos a line from Gulag Archipelago:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
I've always found this observation powerful, as is yours.
I am eternally thankful to you for regularly injecting thoughfulness and clarity into my life, and those of thousands others.
The whole post was wonderful. But this paragraph, tangetial though to the central point, hit something deep -
" (the biggest blackpill of all is that your enemies are just as bad as you think, but careful to only do evil in illegible boring ways that just barely avoid crossing any bright lines - not only will they ruin your life, they won’t even grant you the satisfaction of moral clarity when you’re hating them) "
I was interested in your account of having fallen for the Trump-Russiagate conspiracy theory - and also your characterization of it as binary (either Trump was in the pay of the Russians or he wasn't). I wouldn't view it as binary in that sense - there are a lot of ways to coordinate and accept influence that don't include literal suitcases of cash.
Is your view of Trump-Russiagate affected at all by the recent news that Charles McGonigal, an FBI manager involved in the Russiagate investigation, has recently been indicted for having worked with and taken money from Oleg Deripaska? https://www.newsweek.com/charles-mcgonigal-trump-russia-2016-investigation-muller-1776049
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/01/23/mcgonigal-deripaska-indictment-fbi/
Tl;Dr -- cognitive dissonance is super powerful
I think there is a good amount of confusion around the concept of a conspiracy theory. Calling every outlandish theory a conspiracy theory keeps us from understanding what a conspiracy theory is and the psychology behind such theories.
For a theory to be a "conspiracy theory", there has to be some conspiring in it. Alien stories made up about how pyramids are built are not conspiracy theories because they are just poor explanations for something that looks otherwise inexplicable--aliens are not conspiring against anyone. Also, belief in them can heavily involve beliefs about "knowing what others do not know", which I feel are connected to narcissistic feelings that are typical among believers in bullshit.
What you call "conspiracies of emotion", on the other hand, are actual conspiracy theories because they involve, for example, Trump conspiring against the US or the global elite conspiring against ordinary citizens. They can also be driven by a lack of good or easy explanations for some phenomena: For example, many Turks do not understand why the US keeps supporting PKK-ally Kurdish militia in Syria. Given the difficulty of digging deeper into the intricacies of international relations to understand the reasons, Turks often swiftly reach the seemingly easiest conclusion: The US is conspiring against Turkey because a stable Turkey would pose a threat to Israel (a considerable amount of Turks believe Israel rules the US) or some other US interests in the region. The real explanation is perhaps much more complex than just the US being mean to Turkey--I assume it involves keeping the power balances in the region, keeping a NATO ally away from facing Russia and Iran on the battlefield, logistical solutions etc.
In conclusion, I think the overarching category here should be "bullshit theories" rather than conspiracy theories. Every bullshit theory may have some cognitive and affective background, and a specific subset of those bullshit theories are conspiracy theories. Of course, I also need to add that some conspiracy theories are built on a well-established evidential basis and true.
PS: I recommend everyone to read "van Prooijen, J. W., & Van Vugt, M. (2018). Conspiracy theories: Evolved functions and psychological mechanisms. Perspectives on psychological science, 13(6), 770-788." It is an excellent paper on the psychology of conspiracy theories.
Damn. I'm way late to the party. Whatever.
I think humans mostly behave—or react—based on emotions, which often turn to irrational actions and thoughts.