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.
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.