Say that when people have covid plus some other disease at the same time, even if the other disease is not deadly, merely treating the other disease can reduce mortality, because the organism has less of an overall burden.
Wait until everyone nods.
Then add: Of course that might seem statistically like the other cure is "curing covid", right? So just to be sure, before you make a public announcement, please also test the cure on people who have only covid and nothing else.
> Somebody was proposing a hypothesis. And then somebody was like, "I think clearly Baumol disease is because of Y." Somebody was responding with, "That clearly is not true because of all of this evidence." The other person was like, "No, that doesn't really check out. I still think my original hypothesis [is correct]." Then the [second] person was like, "I don't know, man, here's some additional evidence." And then... the first commenter responded and was just like, "Shit, you're right. I was wrong."
> And I remember reading this. I wasn't that old, like 15 or 16 or something. But I remember reading this and just writing to one of my friends on Skype at the time in ALL CAPS, being like, "What the fuck man, I just saw someone change their mind on the internet!" And just being like, the thing that I had observed in that comment thread was drastically different than the thing that I had observed in all other online forums [up to that] time. It's just a playbook that I had expected and I'd seen play out already by the time, like hundreds of times, maybe even thousands of times: [if] you have two commenters on the internet, getting more heated and angry at each other, both trying to defend, [some position] that they have some reason to hold, it is never the case that it ends up with one person being like, "Oh, I was wrong. You're right."
> And that was huge. It's not the case that there aren't other places [like that] on the internet, the internet is huge these days. And there's lots of subreddits that also are capable of people saying that they changed their mind. But it continues to be a very, very small fraction of the internet. And I think it, like, does demonstrate today something substantially different going on.
Your observation makes the situation look a little worse than it really is. One of the things my father told me was that the purpose of an argument was not to convince someone but to give him the arguments with which he might later convince himself.
I think the argument is that the quoted populations are the people who are especially susceptible to Fox News' message, not the entirety of their viewer body.
In other words, they are what they are in large part because they watched Fox News, rather than choosing to watch Fox News because of what they are.
You're very persistent in linking your own blog in comments on this substack, often with little discernible connection to the topic at hand. I have some critical feedback, assuming that it is welcomed:
> It seems it started in 2016 with their capture by the Bernie Bros contingent. It wasn't Senator Sanders' ideas (Denmark is happier than the United States; if it was politically possible, we would gladly support those ideas). Rather, it was the anti-Clinton and then anti-establishment posts. Then it morphed into acceptance of more and more "everyone is out to get me and my small group who know the truth" conspiracies. (I wrote this last year in an obviously unsuccessful attempt to influence them.)
This paragraph seems to go out of its way to confuse with pronouns. "It seems it started ..." What does "it" refer to? The opening paragraph has as subjects "a friend", "their feed", and "they". I'm guessing "it" is a change in "their" posting behavior.
When you mention "their capture by the Bernie Bros contingent" it is hard to discern what "their" refers to. The posts themselves? Your singular friend?
In the parenthetical about Denmark, which reads somewhat as non sequitur, who is "we", kemo sabe? Bernie Bros? You and your friend? All of America?
Before the parenthetical, you say "It wasn't ... ideas." Then "It was ... the posts". It seems to me that these two "its" cannot possibly refer to the same thing. Who is making the anti-xyz posts you're referring to? It's a struggle to follow along.
Ivor Cummins just did a 43 minute video on determining Conspiracy Theories vs Actual Conspiracies. He has a 6 point list of requirements for something to be an actual conspiracy.
I think both of you should be citing evidence, although I think primarily it's on you to explain why we should take this person seriously enough to watch a 43 minute video.
He takes his six criteria for "Is this a conspiracy or a conspiracy theory" and applies them to various things, e.g. 9/11 Truther. He explains how smart people can get tricked into falling for a conspiracy theory.
That's not really "citing evidence." That's just a summary of the video.
I watched part of it, and while the 6 criteria aren't obviously unreasonable, it's never demonstrated what makes them better than some other set of criteria.
Props to you for giving material to support you PoV . But upon investigating it looks unconvincing. That blogger seemed biased against Cummins and mostly parroting official narrative.
P.s. i have no big stake either way. Except maybe my inherent bias against sources proven to be consistently and purposefully lying.
Cummins from his deleted tweets feels like he is consistent in his position he holds now( e.g. that COVID is a variant of respiratory infection very similar to flu)
"Parroting official narrative" -- did you read the Scottpost?
Sure, it seems likely that COVID will eventually become similar to the flu; killing your host is often a bad strategy for a parasite, but that's not the point of contention here.
The consistency of his positions, which is questionable given his deletions, also isn't the point of contention. The point was about his predictions. From the linked blogpost: "By the end of December, the UK had 8 people per million dying of COVID-19 each day, four times what Cummins predicted. This rose in January to a peak of 18 per million, nine times higher."
There's a mistaken belief that COVID seemed to super-charge that pathogens (or in some cases respiratory pathogens) evolve towards lower virulence, but that's not necessarily true. The normal view is that the evolution of virulence involves trade-offs between mechanisms of reproduction and transmission and host survival. Pathogens can become even more virulent over time if the fitness conditions favor that, which it easily can.
People looking for reassurance that COVID is on its way to becoming harmless spread this myth about viral evolution that has really stuck among people. I unfortunately often see it expressed with a sort of professorial condescension even though it's totally misinformed and wrong.
I said Cummins had a terrible predictive track record. Either he made multiple predictions falsified by reality or he didn't. The blogger in question could have hated Cummins since they fought each other on a playground as children and that would not change anything. Pointing out that Cummins was repeatedly wrong does not make one dismissable as "biased".
> Except maybe my inherent bias against sources proven to be consistently and purposefully lying.
Was the specific source I linked to one that you know of having lied? What makes you think Christopher Snowdon is less honest than Cummins?
If you're looking for cheap heuristics, discounting anybody who in this day and age uses "sheeple" unironically probably works pretty well. (Even if he used it on the side that I'd otherwise support.)
That's a weird distinction to draw. In the context of, say, medicine, "Medicinal Theory vs Actual Medicine" would not really make sense - they're not opposing or contradictory concepts. Medicinal Theory doesn't mean "False Medicine," so the difference in those two concepts is not in their veracity but the fact that one refers to a theory (which may or may not be true) while another refers to a theory that has been confirmed.
The more I read Scott's writing about this, the more I become convinced that there simply is no natural category of "conspiracy theories." There are simply theories, with better or worse epistemic support.
Yes, some of those theories have extremely bad epistemic support, and we should certainly learn to identify and reject them. But that's not primarily by categorization, i.e., dropping them into a category labeled "conspiracy theories." Rather, it's by applying epistemic criteria to the content of the theories.
I half agree. I think a key feature of a "conspiracy theory" is the element of a conspiracy. Some people are acting badly in secret, or hiding a truth for malign purposes.
To the extent a person can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories, key features are
1. A strong belief in Conflict Theory rather than Mistake Theory as a major driver of bad outcomes in the world.
2. A high estimation (often extreme overestimation) of large numbers of peoples' abilities to keep secrets.
3. A tendency to think of elites as their own distinct class, rather than people like themselves who happen to hold positions of authority.
I do think that if you don't hold these beliefs (especially 2), you will correctly reject lots of conspiracy theories and very few correct theories. Hence, it's useful to call some things "conspiracy theories" and give them short shrift.
Is Ivermectin a conspiracy theory though? Not necessarily, even if some Ivermectin proponents have fallen pray to conspiratorial secondary theories about the medical establishment. I think, some of what Scott is calling "conspiracy theories" are more like offbeat theories. Theories that hold the experts are wrong but not evil.
1) As you note, many advocates of Ivermectin are not claiming a "conspiracy" in the stronger sense that you outline.
2) In matters concerning politically charged government actions, especially those involving intelligence agencies, it's not clear that the elements you outline could not be part of a rationally held mental model.
Want to hear my 9/11 conspiracy theory? A group of nineteen Arab hijackers trained and supported by Al Qaeda conspired to hijack and fly planes into buildings. This is clearly a conspiracy theory, it says so right there.
Meanwhile, "Atlantis existed but archeologists are too stupid to notice" isn't a conspiracy theory at all.
It's true that many dumb theories do involve conspiracies (since you can easily explain away any counterevidence you like if you posit the existence of a massive conspiracy to fabricate counterevidence) but not all do, and not all theories involving conspiracies are wrong.
Let's just stop using "conspiracy theory" as shorthand for "dumb weird fringe theory poorly supported by evidence and believed only by kooks".
You both raise very good arguments that made me think. Let me clarify what I'm thinking by example. When it comes to 9/11, I believe the 19 Al Qaedas conspiracy theory but I reject out of hand the theory (rare in the US but popular in parts of the world) that 4,000 Jews received phone calls warning them not to go to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11. If 4,000 anybodies had received warning phone calls the night before, these people would warn their coworkers, word would spread through the city, and the next morning the building would be empty and the story of the mystery phone calls would be in the NY Times.
A while back I looked up the original Marjorie Taylor Greene post about "Jewish space lasers". The press focussed on the ambiguously anti-semitic part (it's some Rothschild linked company that supposedly has the lasers), but basically the whole thing is a long babbling series of associations that ultimately presumes that corporations have secret satellites that can collect solar energy and shoot energy beams and that it would be normal for such companies to create deadly wildfires in order to clear a path for a high-speed rail. The fires aren't even in the path of the planned rail but that's not the point. MTG thinks we live in a would where companies have secret sci-fi satellites and directly murder lots of Americans to reduce the price they'll pay for land or whatever.
My point here isn't that no conspiracies ever exist. Small numbers of criminals and terrorists and perhaps larger numbers of intelligence agency employees can certainly launch conspiracies. There's grey areas of plausibility (did the FSB blow up apartment buildings to justify the Chechen war, could the CIA have murdered Epstein in his jail cell)? But the Alex Joneses and MTGs of the world keep getting enormous amounts of stuff wrong, and it is always in the direction of far too many people keeping secrets and elites being far more psychotically evil than they actually are. They just have a stilted view of the world that means they get things wrong over and over. That's what I mean by conspiracy theories.
Regardless of all else, I agree with Scott that even if you are arguing with someone who believes in 4,000 Jews with space lasers or whatever, you'll get farthest by making calm factual arguments instead of declaring your opponent to be beneath you.
You've done the work that I would ask in debunking a conspiracy theory in a great way. When I, and I assume people like me (and Scott's point in writing these articles) ask for reasons to not consider a theory valid, it doesn't have to be hard. I never looked into the Jewish Space Lasers conspiracy, but had I heard about it and lacked any context to determine falsehood. A simple explanation like yours can go a long way. Not that I trust MTG, but I trust the typical media response to her very little as well. So them saying "she's an anti-Semite who believes in Jewish Space Lasers" I typically feel like I'm just missing information. If I heard that information from MTG, the chances that I (in a hypothetical sense, I know enough about her specifically to avoid it) believe it goes up. If I hear some stupid reply meant to call believers stupid, with no detail, then that doesn't have the intended effect of balancing MTG, it just tells me that they consider MTG a cultural enemy.
Now we get to the issue with using that terminology. By using "conspiracy theory" as shorthand for "stupid, crazy, insane theory that only lunatics believe," you are implanting a mind virus into roughly half the population - because when they hear about the "Small numbers of criminals and terrorists and perhaps larger numbers of intelligence agency employees"-type occurrences, they think "Hey, I've seen that type of claim before - CONSPIRACY THEORY!!! RED ALERT!!!"
It shouldn't be surprising that using a generic term to refer only to a subset of things covered by that term could lead to those connotations spilling over outside of that subset.
Of course, the reason why some people continue to do this is precisely because they want those connotations to spill over - they want a term they can use to cover up any allegations of bad behavior between two or more people. But those who actually care about having true beliefs should stop doing this.
I'm not sure how I feel about the usage of the term conspiracy theory in general; it does seem to best apply to theories that presume impossibly large/powerful/successful conspiracies and we tend to also use it to describe other theories that are just dumb in general.
However, the last paragraph in that comment there also seems to be positing a conspiracy that also seems implausible. While there is possibly an /extremely small/ number of people who intentionally overuse the term conspiracy theory so that one day they might have an easier time convincing the public that they or someone else is innocent of a real conspiracy, there is almost no way they could have any significant effect on the general usage of English around the world.
**But maybe there is a conspiracy among, say, journalists who secretly meet and discuss intentionally overusing this term so they can rescue their favorite politicians later, and they might have the power to actually influence the language if there were enough of them... and here we've gone full circle.
“ Let's just stop using "conspiracy theory" as shorthand for "dumb weird fringe theory poorly supported by evidence and believed only by kooks".”
I agree. We’ve lumped at least 3 things together:
1) theories about actual conspiracies where groups conspire to secretly commit nefarious acts
2) “pseudoscientific” or contrarian scientific theories (flat earth, cold fusion)
3) alternative history (Atlantis, Holocaust denial)
Of course there’s some bleed over. “Ivermectin is an effective drug against COVID” is type 2, but “the government is suppressing knowledge of Ivermectin effectiveness to enrich Big Pharma” is type 1.
All 3 can sometimes be true, and all 3 can have cases that are really hard to distinguish from correct theories even if they are false.
But flat earth is impossible without a conspiracy? There are people who claim to have personally seen Earth from afar, to have moved at great speed around it and that it has the shape of a sphere. For flat earth to be true they must form part of a conspiracy. Likewise, if Holocaust is a fabrication, someone must have fabricated it.
But that's not the central aspect of the theory. Perhaps a logical consequence of the theory is that a conspiracy would be required for it to be true, but it's odd to frame that as the defining characteristic of a theory like flat earth, as opposed to something that's directly defined by being a conspiracy, like JFK. I presume they do this to smuggle the negative connotations from one to another.
I think it's also important to call out the category of "theories involving a bunch of people independently (but not universally) deciding that it's in their best interests to behave a certain way, to the detriment of the public". There's no reason to label that a "conspiracy theory" except to discredit it for ideological reasons.
E. g. being antivax not because you believe something about the biological properties of the vaccine in question, but only because The Other Tribe strongly supports it and we can’t have anything in common with them? And if asked why, respond with some half-baked argument about the biological properties?
Doesn't that cut both ways? If one or more vaccines turn out to have caused significant side effects, are the pro-vaxxers not going to be accused of doing the same thing?
As a specific example "the vaccine stops transmission" was a widely expressed view by the pro-vaccine side, even after that was shown to be untrue (it lowered transmission for a few months, but not by enough to prevent society-wide spread similar to without the vaccine).
One obvious example was mentioned by Scott in this post. Lots of people treat the idea that average IQ varies by race as a nutty idea, even though a majority of the relevant experts think it is probably true. The reason is not that those people are in a conspiracy, it is that they think belief in that idea, even if true, has bad consequences.
Many of them likely are in a conspiracy. If a bunch of academic journal editors meet up and discuss how they should all reject any papers associated with race and intelligence, that is a conspiracy.
> 2. A high estimation (often extreme overestimation) of large numbers of peoples' abilities to keep secrets.
If the payoff is large enough and/or the cost sufficiently small, you will always have someone 'spilling beans'. Just take a look at how many Satoshis we have and how many people 'worked with Aliens' in their time in the US military. Hell, in the worst case, just quote an anonymous source, it's not like reputable journalists don't do this.
Lastly, people are not that bad at keeping secrets, either. If you manage things on a need-to-know-basis and stamp the occasional whistle-blower as a nut job you can get pretty far. Just look how long it took for the NSA surveillance to actually get leaked, even though we know now that thousands of people knew for years.
Also people into Pizzagate/Epstein theory point out to Instagram posts and leaked emails and children's testimonies and mentions dating back to 2008, so conspiracy theories don't rely on *nobody spilling the beans*, but on *no one would notice if they did*.
I thought about the NSA example but my impression is that while Snowden leaked the details, it was pretty widely known that the NSA was engaged in mass electronic surveillance of some sort. I remember my friends in high school (pre-9/11 this was funny) joking about sending e-mails with lots of terrorism-related keywords to waste the NSA's time.
The cover-up that genuinely impressed me was how many people knew valuable details about the D-Day landing that would have been valuable to the Germans, but that was a time when control of communication was much greater.
One of my favorite conspiracy theories is that Pfizer shut down its vaccine trial from late October 2020 until the day after the Election, putting all new samples into cold storage.
In fact, that's not a secret: the Pfizer executive in charge of vaccine development, William Gruber, told Stat News that's what Pfizer did on November 9, 2020, the day the success of the clinical trial was announced, much to reporter Matthew Herper's astonishment.
But, even though that's part of the public record, nobody cares.
So, while Pfizer delaying the announcement of its vaccine's efficacy until after the election might be a small-c conspiracy theory, it's not a Conspiracy Theory. Capital-C Conspiracy Theories have to appeal to a substantial number of people. There are lots of Conspiracy Theories about Pfizer and its vaccine, but the most plausible one doesn't qualify because practically nobody has even heard of it.
"Gruber said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October that they wanted to drop the 32-case interim analysis. At that time, the companies decided to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study, instead leaving samples in storage. The FDA was aware of this decision. Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday."
That they stopped the analysis is a true fact. Leaping from there to the inference that this was done to screw Trump is idiotic. The people who run Pfizer cared very little about who won the election, because it doesn't much affect their bottom line. On the other hand, they care very much indeed about that bottom line, and had they stuck to their original protocol, they would have been obliged by their agreement with the FDA to cut the trial short, because it had demonstrated its (unmabitious) primary endpoint, of more or less being better than nothing at slowing COVID.
What Pfizer *suspected* (correctly as it turned out), was that the vaccine would be much better than the primary endpoint goal -- which would of course translate into much more $$$ for Pfizer, Inc. -- but they could only prove that if they ran the trial all the way to the end. Had they continued their intermediate analysis, the protocol would call for cutting the trial short (so the control arm could get the vaccine), and then they would never have proof (except possibly after some laborious real-world study years later) that the vaccine was much better than they thought.
That's why they did it. As always, with business, and for that matter most smart people, it's not complicated psychology and hall of mirrors mechanism one needs to untangle, it's just about the benjamins. Adducing some ideological fetish that would have a Vice President of Pfizer throwing away potential $billions in future profit in order to see this schmo or that schmuck become President for a tiny part of the time over which he can expect to get handsome bonuses for a bountiful bottom line is massively overthinking things without using common sense, which is indeed the hallmark of the conspiracy theorist.
Pfizer thought through all the technical issues of their vaccine clinical trial during the summer of 2020 when they publicly published their protocol of when they would unblind results.
What they didn't count on was the political backlash from Democrats who were terrified of a successful vaccine turning out to be what the New York Times called Trump's "October surprise." Both Biden and Harris used their debates with Trump and Pence to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about a rushed Trump vaccine.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla consistently told Wall Street that he expected to have at least vaccine efficacy results to announce in late October 2020. So, analysts were shocked when he didn't mention the vaccine trial on the Pfizer earnings call of October 27, 2020. What we learned on 11/9/20 was that Pfizer had put their world-historical clinical trial in cold storage from late October until the day after the Election.
Here's my 2022 review of Bourla's memoir "Moonshot."
I was hoping he was going to offer an explanation for putting the "world's most important clinical trial" on hiatus, but instead he left the entire topic out of his autobiography. That suggests to me that he doesn't have an entirely innocent explanation that I'm overlooking.
Look, I sympathize with Bourla: he wanted to beat Moderna, which Pfizer did by a week, and he didn't want the Establishment (e.g., the likely next President, Joe Biden, the media, academia, the federal bureaucracy, etc.) to be outraged at Pfizer and its vaccine by providing Trump with his "October Surprise." He successfully threaded the needle. The Harvard B School should write up a case study of how he did it, with barely anybody even noticing his corner-cutting.
A good example of how long a secret can be kept is Bletchley Park.
The British decoding of German Enigma codes employed about 10,000 people at Bletchley Park during WWII, but it was unknown to the newspaper reading public until 1974 (with distorted tales of Ultra appearing in the press from about 1971 onward).
I've seen hints of the existence of Ultra in earlier books by insiders: e.g., Professor Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison's official history of the US Navy in WWII has one line about how U-Boat hunting in the Atlantic became so successful that it was almost as if somebody was reading the German codes. But I don't know that anybody who wasn't an insider got his joke until Stevenson's book a decade later.
Similarly, I would guess my father, a Lockheed engineer, visited Area 51 a number of times. (He often was off to work at Edwards AFB, and Area 51 was a more remote clone of Edwards.) But I never heard about it from him. My wife's uncle lived at Edwards for a couple of years and no doubt went to Area 51 as well. But he never talked about it.
Something I often tell people who believe conspiracy theories about covid vax (it kills millions but that's covered up, etc.) seems like a version of your (2) and (3), as I understand them: Scientists are not a club or a religious sect. They don't all know each other, and the don't all like and respect each other, and they're not particularly invested in presenting a united front. If a research team publishes a paper that looks suspicious, other scientists will request their raw data and go over what the team did with great, angry care. In fact they sometimes do that even when someone's results are not suspicious, driven by professional rivalry. And if they find something wrong with the research they will blow the whistle on the team and write letters to journal editors and the press about the matter. They also are not, as a group, all that bribable with money. They're not saints, but the currency that matters to them isn't Ben Franklins, it's being right, being smart, being in the forefront. If you keep in mind that this is what "the scientists" are like, it should be obvious that there is no way someone could get that whole bunch to agree to keep secret a body of data that shows the covid vax in fact kills many. many people.
"If you keep in mind that this is what "the scientists" are like, it should be obvious that there is no way someone could get that whole bunch to agree to keep secret a body of data that shows the covid vax in fact kills many. many people."
I don't believe there's a conspiracy to keep the COVID vax death toll secret. But is it possible to get a whole bunch of scientists to agree that men can be women any time they say so, or that socioeconomic discrepancies are entirely due to discrimination, or that Muslims do not commit disproportionate terrorist attacks? Make the punishment for unorthodox opinions heavy enough and almost all scientists will fold. You don't even need an authority to enforce the orthodoxy from the top down, because mutual denunciation and ostracism is enough. We're seeing this happen as we speak with woke ideology. As the woke say themselves, free speech does not mean speech without consequences. There's no a priori reason to believe that a similar pro-vax orthodoxy cannot be enforced, especially as anti-vax becomes synonymous with unwoke.
" But is it possible to get a whole bunch of scientists to agree that men can be women any time they say so."
Well what do you mean by agreeing that men can be women?(1) Do you mean scientists will literally say that male-to-female trans people are in every respect women -- XX chormosomes, able to have babies, etc.? I'm sure you do not mean that. (2) Do you mean that most scientists will say that if males want to do the hormones and surgery route and call themselves women, they do not object -- they consider it to a personal choice they have no say in? (3) Do you mean that scientists will say that the data indicate that M-to-F hormone and surgery transition is the best option for anyone with gender dysphoria -- that on average it leads to less suffering and a higher level of functioning?
Note that (1) and (3) are things regarding which scientists can analyze data and make statements about what's true and what's not . (2) is not -- it's an attitude. So let's look at (3), what doctors and mental health clinicians have to say about sexual transitioning. I'm a psychologist, and I can tell you that when my collegues and I talk about sexual transitioning as a solution to gender dysphoria we are skeptical regarding how great a solution it is. Regarding initiating sexual transitioning when someone's a teenager we are quite uneasy about it. The idea of beginning the transition with pre-pubescent kids horrifies most of us. It is also not difficult to find research regarding outcomes for people post-transition that indicate that post-transition people are not doing that great. The scientists who study gender dysphoria and gender change are not afraid to tell the truth about what they find. I have never been even mildly "punished" by my peers for my skepticism about sexual transitiioning as a successful treatment for these complexly unhappy folks, and virtually all my friends are liberal democrats.
I do not like wokesters any more than you do, but I'd like to see some evidence that they have kept scientists from doing research that might yield politically incorrect results regarding trans people, Muslim terrorism and inborn differences as a cause of poverty. You got any?
> I have never been even mildly "punished" by my peers for my skepticism
Have you ever *published* your opinions, or do you know someone who published something similar? Like, maybe the norm is that certain opinions are okay to have in private, but putting them on paper is what gets you in trouble.
If you imagine a world where 90% of psychologists are privately horrified of transitioning pre-pubescent kids, but 99% of psychological articles published in peer-review journals approve of it... that's more or less what some of the "conspiracy theorists" are saying.
I have never published anything about this -- I don't write articles. Have said it to patients, colleagues and acquaintances and not gotten bad reactions. I have said it online, but not in a setting where people have already committed to positions and are squatting in opposite ditches hurling pieces of fire and shit at each other. I mean, I am not angry about this issue in those conversations -- I'm not saying, "you fucking wokesters think you're more humane than anyone else, and actually you are coercive and cruel." I'm saying things like, "when I hear about a situation like this [say somebody's 11 year old going on puberty blockers] here is what I worry about." As regards the *science* of this, it is not difficult at all to find articles about the physical downsides and risks of puberty blockers. But of course that's not the main issue for most of us. The most disturbing thing is the idea of allowing a 10 year old's ideas about this matter to weigh so heavily in decisions that will have lifelong consequences. As a matter of fact, I have similar feelings when I see 16 year old gymnasts at the Olympics. Many years ago, probably at around the age of 6, the kid was gymnastics-crazy, as many little kids are, especially girls. And this one was very gifted. She dreamed of getting a gold medal at the Olympics, and the parents permitted her to live the life of an olympian in training for many years. She missed so much! Not to mention that for every girl who goes to the olympics there are thousands who devote their lives to trying and do not succeed. Many of them get seriously injured at some point, and occasionally one dies from a bad landing. I often mention this when people try to get me to watch the Olympics with them, and I actually get much more pushback for this idea than I do for my concerns about prepubescent transitioning. Nobody gets furious, but they say things like, "yeah, but the kid got to live out her dream," and look at me uneasily. I think they're thinking I have an unpleasant gift for finding the one weird downside of something wonderful.
Anyhow, endocrinologists are not shy about their data about the downside. As for the other downside -- letting a kid decide to take such a huge, life-altering course -- it is hard to research. You can interview and test kids along the way to get an idea of how things are going for them, and there are people doing that and publishing results, but you can't do anything remotely like an RCT. How would I back up my ideas if I were to write a book or an article about this topic? It would have to be pretty wide-ranging, right? I'd need to get data about how frequently 9 year olds express a wish to be the opposite gender -- how things work out for those who do not transition -- the fad side of gender diversity thinking -- similar fads -- measures of changing attitudes about parental authority, and the effect on kids of parents being permissive in certain ways. And then I'd have to pull it all together in one big long argument about how pre-puberty transition if rarely the best approach, and how people have come to think it is.
"Well what do you mean by agreeing that men can be women?"
I mean exactly that: they will say that trans-women are real women. If your objection is that this isn't a precise statement of fact but more of an attitude, you'd be right. However, pro-vax and anti-vax are both attitudes too. A medical professional would say "the vaccine is safe and you should take it", not "the risk of X type of adverse reaction within 2 months in population Y is Z%". It doesn't matter if every journal is filled with articles quantifying the risks of the COVID vaccine; if scientists are not allowed to adopt the attitude "the vaccine is dangerous and you should not take it", then the public would be led astray by following scientific consensus. I'll reiterate again that I don't think this has happened yet and I am pro-vax, but the more censorious the pro-vaccine side gets, the less credible they become.
"I'd like to see some evidence that they have kept scientists from doing research that might yield politically incorrect results regarding trans people, Muslim terrorism and inborn differences as a cause of poverty. You got any?"
"PLOS One explained that in response to “readers’ concerns,” they were seeking “further expert assessment on the study’s methodology and analyses.” If so, that’s fair enough. But in an unusual display of transparency, Brown added their own statement that their “community members” had been “expressing concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.”"
"It’s been an open secret for years that prestigious journals will often reject submissions that offend prevailing political orthodoxies—especially if they involve controversial aspects of human biology and behavior—no matter how scientifically sound the work might be. The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups."
"American geneticists now face an even more drastic form of censorship: exclusion from access to the data necessary to conduct analyses, let alone publish results. Case in point: the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory."
"However, the ethical authority appears to be gearing up to issue some form of punishment related to the case.
“I don’t see anywhere that ethical permission is sought to test the hypothesis if immigrants are over-represented in statistics on convicted rapists,” the body said. The scientists were also criticized for insufficient evaluation as they failed to indicate how their research should “reduce exclusion and improve integration.”"
"So let's look at (3), what doctors and mental health clinicians have to say about sexual transitioning. I'm a psychologist, and I can tell you that when my collegues and I talk about sexual transitioning as a solution to gender dysphoria we are skeptical regarding how great a solution it is. Regarding initiating sexual transitioning when someone's a teenager we are quite uneasy about it. The idea of beginning the transition with pre-pubescent kids horrifies most of us. It is also not difficult to find research regarding outcomes for people post-transition that indicate that post-transition people are not doing that great. The scientists who study gender dysphoria and gender change are not afraid to tell the truth about what they find. I have never been even mildly "punished" by my peers for my skepticism about sexual transitiioning as a successful treatment for these complexly unhappy folks, and virtually all my friends are liberal democrats."
Thank you for describing your experience. I'm surprised that your peers are so open-minded, but I guess practicing psychologists are not as rigidly constrained by orthodoxy as I thought, which gives me some hope for the future. I'm in academia, which is the wokest of the woke of the elite institutions. So are almost all scientists. As a scientist myself, I find it hard to imagine the courage it would take for a social scientist to even admit to taking an unwoke hypothesis seriously, let alone taking it seriously enough to do a study on it and publish the unwoke results. It reminds me of my childhood in an authoritarian country, where people who opposed the government definitely existed, but no official public statement from any high-profile individual or organization was ever anti-government. The atmosphere is exactly the same: hushed voices, doctrinal training sessions, obvious things that everyone knew but nobody admitted, an invitation to come "drink tea" with your friendly local authority if you ever questioned the orthodoxy.
A funny example of how it usually takes more than one whistleblower to get the truth out is that millions of people with three digit IQs remain utterly convinced that "Science has proven that race does not exist." Yet, in 2018 the superstar of population genetics, Harvard's David Reich, published a book saying that's not true and the New York Times published his essay saying that's not true.
But I almost never run into anybody online who says, "I used to believe that science had proved race doesn't exist, but then I read this top Harvard scientist in the New York Times saying that wasn't true, so I changed my mind." As far as I can tell, almost everybody who paid attention to Reich already agreed with what he had to say, and huge numbers of people who think of themselves as intellectuals who know that science proves races does not exist paid no heed whatsoever.
The funniest example was when journalist Angela Saini went to interview Reich for her book about how science had proven race does not exist and he flat out told her the thesis of her book was wrong. As far as I can tell, that just proved to her how pervasive the menace of racist pseudoscience was even at Harvard.
Was curious how hard it was to find someone saying online that Muslims commit a disproportionate number of terrorist attacks. It is definitely not difficult. Found 2 in 30 secs. Here's the ACLU: "While terrorism — even in the form of suicide attacks -- is not an Islamic phenomenon by defini tion, it cannot be ignored that the lion's share of terrorist acts and the most devastating of them in recent years have been perpetrated in the name of Islam." https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/ACLURM001331.pdf
Here's another: " According to Nesser (2018), Islamist terrorism (the focus of the present study) is the most prominent type of international terrorism. Islamism can generally be described as a set of ideologies and its proponents usually perceive specific political, legal and social aspects of other cultures and religions as incompatible with Islam (Eikmeier, 2007;)." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1464884921990223#bibr29-1464884921990223
Only glanced at both articles, but gist of what they were saying seemed to be that radical Islam is sort of like the form of Christianity that leads people to blow up abortion clinics, etc. -- i.e., that there's a subgroup of Muslims who are nutso killer fanatics, but that the religion itself is no more compatible with terrorism than the religions people are used to in America. That sounds fair to me.
Of course I agree that wokeism exists but it doesn't seem to me that it is hard to find researchers who are willing to state the facts you think of as unsayable.
>But is it possible to get a whole bunch of scientists to agree that [...] that socioeconomic discrepancies are entirely due to discrimination
Empirically, no (or at least it's extraordinarily difficult). I know this because the woke left has been trying for decades to engineer a scientific consensus on this issue, and yet it's next-to-impossible to find a scientist in the relevant fields who will actually say, in words, that this is true. I've spent a lot of time searching, and the most I've been able to find is scientists who will that the evidence is inconclusive and purely discrimination-based explanations can't be ruled out yet.
To my understanding and memory, ivermectin was being widely considered (worldwide) as a potential treatment for COVID at the same time the public media was denouncing it as horse paste and calling anyone trying it idiots. You don't need the scientists actually studying something to agree with each other, if the press is willing to pick a unified direction. There were real scientists trying to get the message out about alternate treatments and the dangers of lockdowns, but they were often stifled in very authoritarian ways. That's why so many people are interested in the Twitter Files - looking for evidence about when and why these actual scientists were denied the ability to share their thoughts. Not every dissenting opinion turned out to be correct, but a lot of stifled dissenting opinions have been verified now.
It was a literal conspiracy involving government forces, social media, and the press that shut down certain speakers if they wanted to talk about theories. That this happened to real scientists who have since been proven correct on at least some of the things they were trying to say is known to be true.
Yes, the Great Barrington Declaration was signed by many healthcare professionals and yet the media managed to completely discredit them. It was clear that it wasn't just that the public sentiment went this way, there were some strong forces working to discredit it.
The part about covid response is mostly negative. If you open the sources, you can see how he is being criticized for things that have turned out correct (for example, Cochrane report about masks).
Somehow, I have started to see a pattern. Take any distinguished scientist, physician or public health reporter with good credentials before pandemic, and suddenly they all are bad during covid response? Some of them made mistakes but wouldn't you think that they made mistakes in the past too? It is as if there is whole campaign to discredit any critics of lockdown policy.
The Great Barrington declaration hinged on two things: herd immunity and focused protection of the vulnerable. One turned out not to be possible, and the other was pretty obviously impossible at the time: There was and is no way to keep Covid out of nursing homes when it's circulating at high levels in the general population, let alone protecting the elderly not in nursing homes, immunocompromised, etc.
GBD authors and signatories also became pretty famous for declaring that cases were in their final decline just ahead of the next surge. E.g., Jay Bhattacharya saying "The emergency phase of the disease is over" and "we protected the vulnerable" right before the delta wave killed another quarter million Americans. (A GBD supporter asserting the end of the pandemic right before a wave became such a familiar occurrence that one researcher called it the Gupta Predictor, after author Sunetra Gupta.)
In general, the contrarian case on Covid represented by the GBD was rarely "it's going to kill a million-plus people one way or another, so there's no point in trying to control it", but repeatedly pointing to imagined inflection points as the beginning of the end while grossly underestimating the total, starting in about April 2020.
The first turned out not possible but in a way we all strengthened our immunity against covid either through vaccination or catching disease. It happens with all cold viruses and it was predictable that it will be the same for covid.
The second is not true. We can and could have provided focused protection to the elderly. In the UK many elderly living alone sheltered and avoided getting covid until vaccines came along. We could have provided the same thing for much less financial cost and impact on the society than lockdowns.
I personally had no pandemic at all. At no point of all these years I felt that I was in danger so great that I need to observe lockdowns, avoid travel, meeting people or even wear a mask. I understand that some people were in danger, mostly elderly and immunosuppressed. I definitely was careful in contacts with them. Pandemic damage was completely self-inflicted caused by mass panic and it becomes more and more clear with every day.
We had Sweden as a contrariant case and it did well, not much different from most other countries who had hard lockdowns.
I would also suggest that nursing homes were largely irrelevant. They are places where people are going to die. The median age of death from covid is 82+ years. The pandemic restrictions was a war of the elderly against the young.
I agree that the GBD was not very well developed, it lacked concrete details and their suggestions lacked practicality. Nevertheless, they were shut down immediately, blocked and demonised, never given a chance to explain and improve their position. That was really sad.
> They don't all know each other, and the don't all like and respect each other, and they're not particularly invested in presenting a united front.
The straightforward response to this that I've seen: sure they are, they want more research grants so they all want to keep the climate change gravy train running.
> They also are not, as a group, all that bribable with money.
Even if that were true, money is what lets them do what they actually want to do, so it's important.
> To the extent a person can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories, key features are
This suggests that the problem is not the conspiracy theory per se, but rather the "conspiracy theory mindset".
Wrong theories appear all the time. Without this mindset, they would be evaluated, and after collecting enough evidence rejected. People with this mindset break this mechanism, simply because they never give up, no matter what. Even worse, they try to convince other people to adopt the same mindset.
Besides the general anti-epistemology, an important component is how strongly emotionally invested those people are. It's as if they were traumatized by something.
Like, imagine someone who was a victim of police abuse, or knows someone who was. If such person spends the rest of their life writing angry anti-establishment rants -- I get it. It may not be the optimal reaction, but it is a natural reaction. The surprising thing is what someone has a similar emotional reaction about... pyramids, or ivermectin, or miracle mineral supplement, or whatever.
My best guess is that they basically use the topic as a metaphor for... something else. (Something like: "My abusive father believes that he is right about everything. Just like those scientists do. But I will prove all of them wrong!" And now you cannot give up, because if ivermectin actually does not work... then your abusive father metaphorically wins.) And I suppose many people have unsolved emotional problems, so when you show them a way to channel their feelings, they are hooked.
And when someone's reaction to people with fringe beliefs is... verbal abuse... that just strengthens the emotional connection ("yes, more evidence that I am actually fighting against abusive people").
Yeah, it's crazy how some people just could not stop trying to spread disinformation about the value of lockdowns and masks. We clearly know that lockdowns were not effective and should have stopped far earlier, but they just kept going!
I'm being snarky, but I draw exception to what theories polite society is willing to dismiss as part of a "conspiracy theory mindset" and which theories are not.
Pseudoscientific movements and other fringe scholarly movements very often end up incorporating an element of conspiracy theory. This is because when you arguments you believe to be persuasive are looked low upon by experts, there's only so many ways you can explain that, especially if your movement is large enough to have not escaped people's notice. One of the easiest routes to explaining this is proposing some form of conspiracy theory among the academic establishment to deny you. This conspiracy may be formal, but more often it's more of an informal alignment of interests - a conspiracy of incentive if you will. Global warming is the result of scientists under pressure to toe the line for that sweet, sweet grant money, for instance.
Once people start seeing conspiracy in one, it becomes easy to see that same kind of conspiracy elsewhere, which is one reason why crank movements seem to have a magnetism. The reasoning that protects them is promiscuous.
So while the theories themselves aren't conspiracy theories proper, people often end up using terms like that interchangeably because they're so commonly found together. This is technically wrong, but mostly forgivable.
There seems to be a similar effect in the opposite direction, where anti-conspiracy "aggressive conformist" types start denying the possibility of conspiracy anywhere they hear about it - it's rare to see someone who denies conspiracy in one place and accepts it in another. In my experience, those who use the term "conspiracy theory" in the way you describe tend to categorically dismiss all theories involving people working together behind the scenes, often even denying that people follow incentives, as well.
People skeptical of JFK assassination conspiracy theories or moon landing conspiracy theories generally seem to just accept that Watergate happened or that organized crime exists. To be frank, the idea that people who reject conspiracy theories generally don't believe that people even engage in conspiracies or behave according to incentives sounds ridiculous.
I guess I should add a caveat - they disbelieve all conspiracy theories that would harm them politically. It is true that the most fervent anti-conspiracy-theory hyperconformists heavily pushed the baseless Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, even years after it had been debunked. But they didn't even think of that as a conspiracy theory, because those in power control these labels, and so they reframed it as a "collusion" theory (literally just a synonym for conspiracy).
However, there definitely is a failure mode of rationality wherein one becomes a "debunker" and defines their identity around "debunking conspiracy theories," as if it is a foregone conclusion that all such theories are false and it's just a matter of finding a way to debunk them. But of course sometimes people really do conspire with one another.
A logical consequence of disbelieving all conspiracy theories is that you disbelieve all (new) conspiracies, because all revealed conspiracies started as theories at some point.
The correct category is "theories contrary to the current scientific consensus." A conspiracy theory could be both part of the consensus and true — consider the history of the communist movement. A false consensus could be the result of something other than a conspiracy.
The only feature of a "conspiracy theory" is that it is a theory about a conspiracy. Because... that's what the words say.
The attempt to associate all sorts of other things with the term "conspiracy theory" is driven by a desire to get rid of any term for "two or more people working together to do something behind the scenes." If that is happening, they literally just don't want us to have a word that we can use to describe it. If "conspiracy theory" is reserved for a hundred different stigmatized and pathologized things, we just don't even have the language to describe that that is happening.
Like, imagine if we did the same for any other type of theory. Imagine if any "Biological Theory" was just declared categorically false, simply by nature of being related to biology. That would seem to imply a judgement about the existence of biology, no?
Their goal is to suggest that any act of two or more people working together behind the scenes is axiomatically impossible. Because if someone points out some evidence for this bad behavior behind the scenes, they can pattern-match you onto imaginary "flat earthers" or whatever the astroturfed "conspiracy theory" of the week is.
> The only feature of a "conspiracy theory" is that it is a theory about a conspiracy. Because... that's what the words say.
You know language often doesn't work like this, right? Do you struggle with understanding idioms?
If you're worried that the evolution of the term "conspiracy theory" to mean this leaves no room to describe legitimate conspiracies, the word we ordinarily use for that is just "conspiracy."
It is perfectly valid to use a sequence of words to mean simply what those words mean, as written, even if some consider it to be an idiom or term of art. Words can have multiple meanings. This is laughably basic stuff.
"Conspiracy" obviously doesn't work. "It's a conspiracy, man!" and things of that form have already been memed quite extensively. Further, the problem with the term "conspiracy theory" is not that it is used by people who believe in such theories, but that it is applied as a label to their theories by those with power. So they don't have the ability to just avoid being labelled with that term. The only thing we can do is change the connotations of the term in common usage to better represent the frequent truthfulness of such theories.
Some sequences of words have a well-understood meaning that is very different than just the sum of what the individual words normally mean. See e.g. "rootless cosmopolitan" or "fellow traveller". If you use those words without understanding that, there will be miscommunication. So you should probably try not to do that.
This is a fully-general counterargument against ever using a word in any sense other than its first listed dictionary definition. That eliminates the vast majority of word usage.
You're proposing an alternative meaning of the term "conspiracy theory" to common parlance based on your literal reading of what the component parts of the term mean. Not only that, but you seem to think this is fundamentally the "correct" meaning, then accuse others of being prescriptivist. This is all silly, but you imagine disagreement with you is rooted in a misunderstanding of linguistics that is "laughably basic." I don't know what to tell you. Sometimes phrases mean something other than what the most literal reading of them would suggest.
If you allow me a little speculation, what appears to be going on is there are conspiracy theories as people normally understand them that you are personally sympathetic to and you are bristling at the dismissiveness the label brings.
I'm not "proposing an alternative meaning," I'm stating the obvious fact that that is one of the meanings of the word. It's easily the second most common usage.
> you seem to think this is fundamentally the "correct" meaning, then accuse others of being prescriptivist.
You're the one who's trying to disallow me from using it that way.
> you imagine disagreement with you is rooted in a misunderstanding of linguistics that is "laughably basic."
You've misused the concept of linguistic prescriptivism twice now already.
> Sometimes phrases mean something other than what the most literal reading of them would suggest.
Another basic linguistics error. The meaning of words depends on how they are used and the context in which they are used. Using a sequence of words to mean what the words mean as written, rather than as a term of art, is never "incorrect" - again, extremely basic. Do better.
> there are conspiracy theories as people normally understand them that you are personally sympathetic to and you are bristling at the dismissiveness the label brings
Do you have a memory issue or something? I don't mean any offense if you do, I know remembering things from one comment ago can be tricky.
Anyway, yes, obviously that is my objection. Do you really think a bootlicking aggressive conformist would ever disagree with the way those in power abuse language? To repeat:
> The attempt to associate all sorts of other things with the term "conspiracy theory" is driven by a desire to get rid of any term for "two or more people working together to do something behind the scenes." If that is happening, they literally just don't want us to have a word that we can use to describe it. If "conspiracy theory" is reserved for a hundred different stigmatized and pathologized things, we just don't even have the language to describe that that is happening.
Hard agree. Labeling something a "conspiracy theory" is just a political move to drive an uncertain claim out of the public discourse, while other equally uncertain claims are validated by "experts say this so shut up". There is uncertainty around a very wide range of claims, and no substitute for the ability to think for yourself.
There's a conspiracy theory community that holds conventions and stuff. There's clearly a great deal of overlap in believers and ideas between most conspiracy theories. It is a very visible cluster in belief-space.
With that said, I don't think arguing over whether specific ideas are conspiracy theories is fruitful, especially not when it devolves into technicalities. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Scott used to wonder how to distinguish between "there's no evidence" qua "experts haven't investigated", vs "there's no evidence" qua "experts have investigated and determined it's wrong". "Conspiracy theory" seems to be an argument-from-authority which strongly suggests the latter.
I'd argue there is a somewhat natural category of conspiracy theories. They're theories that there's a large conspiracy of people who are doing something bad that at first glance you wouldn't realize is their doing. Usually the blame is put on certain groups like the masons, the Illuminati, the CIA, the US as a whole, or sometimes even a large and diverse demographic like Jews or Arabs. Some examples are "Bush did 9/11" or "HAARP causes earthquakes (on purpose)". Theories like these can sometimes be true, but often are only founded in paranoid fantasies.
Then there's the broader category of beliefs that go something like "X is true but academics, politicians and the media are deliberately covering it up". They do involve a conspiracy of sorts, because the clear truth of X is deliberately being kept from people by a conspiracy of experts. But the subject of the theory can be pretty much anything. Atlantis is one example. Sometimes these theories are straightforwardly wrong ("vaccines cause autism"). Sometimes there's a lot of conflicting evidence and it's hard to claim a deliberate cover-up ("glyphosate is dangerous"). And sometimes it's a sort of philosophical question that involves a lot of factors so there can't really be a "correct" answer even in principle ("everyone should go vegan"). And sometimes it's a factual question and the doubters are correct ("wmds in Iraq").
But it's true that "conspiracy theory" has become a bit of a swear word that you can apply to any science- or politics-related belief that you don't like. In any case, the P.C. word for it is "conspiracy myth" these days, because "theory" was seen as giving them too much credit.
That use of myth is funny, since that's another word they Orwelled - etymologically, "myth" simply refers to beliefs and stories that have been passed down over a long period of time, and in fact typically refers to things that "have a significant truth or meaning" according to Wiktionary.
Of course, contemporarily, myth is used as a synonym of "false belief," in an example of the same bit of linguistic trickery that happened to "conspiracy theory". If they can take a word describing a particular, distinct concept, and shift the meaning to "false, crazy thing," then they can propagate the belief that all examples of that particular original thing are false, without evidence ever coming in to the equation.
I think essential part of conspiracy theory is a specific epistemology, where you assume that minority of evidence is more reliable than the majority of evidence.
The whole "conspiracy" part isn't about some people having an organisation or agreement to futher their goals in secret. It's about a group of people counterfeiting the majority of evidence. Big Pharma counterfeighted their trials of ivermectin, Zionist government hid the fact of its existence, Scientists deny the truth of flat earth to diminish Christianity, Archeologist frauded the evidence so that no-one new about Atlantis. The pattern is the same. You can't trust the established institutions because they are all in the evidence falsifying conspiracy, no matter how many good arguments they have. You can only trust the tiny minority of contarians, even if their evidence isn't very good.
I strongly agree. Maybe the label of "conspiracy theory" had some kind of independent value at one point, but it's used and abused as a means to shut down conversation or discredit theories too quickly to maintain a status as good heuristics in all cases.
Consider two examples - NASA faking the moon landing, and the CIA spending 20 years developing torture techniques for interrogation on unwilling US citizens. One of those is true, and it's not immediately obvious (if you don't already know any details) which one is harder to believe.
We know and have proof that conspiracies exist, and also that the government has repeatedly conspired against its own people in ways both illegal and nefarious. Given real history, I have a hard time taking "that's just a conspiracy theory" seriously at face value. Give me some detail, give me some reasons why we should consider it wrong.
"Conspiracy theory" is almost universally used as a term of art to refer to the false ones. To say something is a conspiracy theory is to say it is a claim to conspiracy that is unreasonable. That's why we don't ordinarily call Watergate a conspiracy theory even though it plainly involved a conspiracy.
I think almost by definition, we cannot know for sure that a conspiracy theory is false. We can only know for sure that it is true (because it is proven), but conspiracy theories cannot usually be disproved.
As far as whether a particular conspiracy is "unreasonable", the problem here is that history is chalk full of conspiracies that any reasonable person would consider unreasonable when they were happening, yet they later were proven to have happened.
I can't think of any great heuristic for asserting that a particular conspiracy is obviously wrong that, when back-tested against actual conspiracies, would correctly identify legitimate conspiracies and filter out only the bad ones.
MK Ultra (my example from above) would absolutely have been considered "unreasonable" at the time it was actually happening. It would have been labelled a "conspiracy theory" as a direct attempt to discredit it, probably by the CIA itself and likely by multiple other government organizations.
Jokes about "the CIA is listening to my conversations through my teeth" (there's a joke on a joke about it in a Futurama episode, but it used to be a pretty common trope) were a way to deflect criticism by mocking the idea that the CIA would be torturing US citizens - despite the fact that they actively were!
The point is that to claim something is a conspiracy theory is to claim that it is unreasonable to believe. A person can be wrong about this, but that's what the charge means. A literal reading of the term would lead you to think it is any assertion that a conspiracy has happened, but that's not what people mean by the term. Again, Watergate is not normally described as a conspiracy theory even though it involved a conspiracy in its most literal sense. A conspiracy theory is an explanation for event or situation that supposes it is the result of an implied or explicit agreement of people in positions of influence, usually for sinister motives, that is unreasonable to think. The term has evolved to have this meaning, and it rarely is used outside of this context.
Another person replied to this point by saying you can't ever really know if a conspiracy claim is false or unreasonable, but I just don't think that's an accurate understanding of how to be justified in a belief that a claim is wrong. If you instead argue, "People thought something was a conspiracy theory, but it turned out to be true" then I just read that as, "It turns out people are wrong sometimes!" And, well, yeah. That's true.
But then I'm not sure how much we've gained by labeling something a "conspiracy theory" (and presumably that it should be discredited) if we agree that people saying that can be wrong, including in some of the most egregious cases - like MK Ultra.
If we agree that a "conspiracy theory" can certainly still be correct, and that the proper course of action is to consider the evidence for and against, then why use a term often identified with an active attempt to discredit the theory?
We've gained a way to have a shorthand description of a particular kind of false theory that people can become attracted to. This is how it is generally used.
The term is associated with attempting to discredit a theory because the term is an expression that the theory is discredited. You should look at it, depending on context, as a warning, a dismissal, or a claim about a theory being dubious inviting further engagement. Your objection reduces into, "How can you call something wrong if it could be right?" and I'm not sure what to say to that beyond, "People sometimes make mistakes."
People don't really use "conspiracy theory" to describe conspiracies they believe are real unless they are being ironic or are acknowledging that most people think of their beliefs that way. Once you stop trying to read the term so literally, the normal intended meaning should be reasonably clear.
How would this even work for the Ivermectin debate?
Say that when people have covid plus some other disease at the same time, even if the other disease is not deadly, merely treating the other disease can reduce mortality, because the organism has less of an overall burden.
Wait until everyone nods.
Then add: Of course that might seem statistically like the other cure is "curing covid", right? So just to be sure, before you make a public announcement, please also test the cure on people who have only covid and nothing else.
Love the humility and intelligence in this post. There should be more on the internet like it.
Ugh. I get another feeling: erase the internet and start over.
Depending on your definition of social media, that would also delete substack and all of Scotts recent writings.
> There should be more on the internet like it.
This reminded me of a recent podcast with Oliver Habryka:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4NFDwQRhHBB2Ad4ZY/the-filan-cabinet-podcast-with-oliver-habryka-transcript
> Somebody was proposing a hypothesis. And then somebody was like, "I think clearly Baumol disease is because of Y." Somebody was responding with, "That clearly is not true because of all of this evidence." The other person was like, "No, that doesn't really check out. I still think my original hypothesis [is correct]." Then the [second] person was like, "I don't know, man, here's some additional evidence." And then... the first commenter responded and was just like, "Shit, you're right. I was wrong."
> And I remember reading this. I wasn't that old, like 15 or 16 or something. But I remember reading this and just writing to one of my friends on Skype at the time in ALL CAPS, being like, "What the fuck man, I just saw someone change their mind on the internet!" And just being like, the thing that I had observed in that comment thread was drastically different than the thing that I had observed in all other online forums [up to that] time. It's just a playbook that I had expected and I'd seen play out already by the time, like hundreds of times, maybe even thousands of times: [if] you have two commenters on the internet, getting more heated and angry at each other, both trying to defend, [some position] that they have some reason to hold, it is never the case that it ends up with one person being like, "Oh, I was wrong. You're right."
> And that was huge. It's not the case that there aren't other places [like that] on the internet, the internet is huge these days. And there's lots of subreddits that also are capable of people saying that they changed their mind. But it continues to be a very, very small fraction of the internet. And I think it, like, does demonstrate today something substantially different going on.
Your observation makes the situation look a little worse than it really is. One of the things my father told me was that the purpose of an argument was not to convince someone but to give him the arguments with which he might later convince himself.
There's a lot of convincing the silent audience, too, especially on online fora
That's an excellent piece of wisdom, and one well worth remembering. It sounds like it's a quote - do you happen to know the source?
I was quoting my father. I doubt he was quoting anyone.
A wise man.
Yes.
I'm not sure where I stand (I value your time and wonder what is the best use of it) but I have had bad experience with conspiracy theories.
https://www.mattball.org/2021/10/last-mental-health-note-mind-is-fragile.html
And the friend is the comment on that post. <sigh>
That blog post reads as though you are not entirely immune to tribalistic conspiracies yourself.
Just out of curiosity, are you arguing that Fox News's audience is entirely made up of "Racists. Sexists. Anti-LGBTQ fanatics. Killers."?
I think the argument is that the quoted populations are the people who are especially susceptible to Fox News' message, not the entirety of their viewer body.
In other words, they are what they are in large part because they watched Fox News, rather than choosing to watch Fox News because of what they are.
That stinks of the "if only they knew what I knew, they'd agree with me" conceit.
Matt,
You're very persistent in linking your own blog in comments on this substack, often with little discernible connection to the topic at hand. I have some critical feedback, assuming that it is welcomed:
> It seems it started in 2016 with their capture by the Bernie Bros contingent. It wasn't Senator Sanders' ideas (Denmark is happier than the United States; if it was politically possible, we would gladly support those ideas). Rather, it was the anti-Clinton and then anti-establishment posts. Then it morphed into acceptance of more and more "everyone is out to get me and my small group who know the truth" conspiracies. (I wrote this last year in an obviously unsuccessful attempt to influence them.)
This paragraph seems to go out of its way to confuse with pronouns. "It seems it started ..." What does "it" refer to? The opening paragraph has as subjects "a friend", "their feed", and "they". I'm guessing "it" is a change in "their" posting behavior.
When you mention "their capture by the Bernie Bros contingent" it is hard to discern what "their" refers to. The posts themselves? Your singular friend?
In the parenthetical about Denmark, which reads somewhat as non sequitur, who is "we", kemo sabe? Bernie Bros? You and your friend? All of America?
Before the parenthetical, you say "It wasn't ... ideas." Then "It was ... the posts". It seems to me that these two "its" cannot possibly refer to the same thing. Who is making the anti-xyz posts you're referring to? It's a struggle to follow along.
Ivor Cummins just did a 43 minute video on determining Conspiracy Theories vs Actual Conspiracies. He has a 6 point list of requirements for something to be an actual conspiracy.
Why should anyone take anything he says seriously? Doesn't he have a terrible predictive track record on COVID?
No, he has a very good predictive track. If you disagree, please cite evidence.
I think both of you should be citing evidence, although I think primarily it's on you to explain why we should take this person seriously enough to watch a 43 minute video.
He takes his six criteria for "Is this a conspiracy or a conspiracy theory" and applies them to various things, e.g. 9/11 Truther. He explains how smart people can get tricked into falling for a conspiracy theory.
That's not really "citing evidence." That's just a summary of the video.
I watched part of it, and while the 6 criteria aren't obviously unreasonable, it's never demonstrated what makes them better than some other set of criteria.
What other criteria have been proposed?
https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2021/05/theres-one-born-every-minute-ivor.html
Props to you for giving material to support you PoV . But upon investigating it looks unconvincing. That blogger seemed biased against Cummins and mostly parroting official narrative.
P.s. i have no big stake either way. Except maybe my inherent bias against sources proven to be consistently and purposefully lying.
Cummins from his deleted tweets feels like he is consistent in his position he holds now( e.g. that COVID is a variant of respiratory infection very similar to flu)
"Parroting official narrative" -- did you read the Scottpost?
Sure, it seems likely that COVID will eventually become similar to the flu; killing your host is often a bad strategy for a parasite, but that's not the point of contention here.
The consistency of his positions, which is questionable given his deletions, also isn't the point of contention. The point was about his predictions. From the linked blogpost: "By the end of December, the UK had 8 people per million dying of COVID-19 each day, four times what Cummins predicted. This rose in January to a peak of 18 per million, nine times higher."
There's a mistaken belief that COVID seemed to super-charge that pathogens (or in some cases respiratory pathogens) evolve towards lower virulence, but that's not necessarily true. The normal view is that the evolution of virulence involves trade-offs between mechanisms of reproduction and transmission and host survival. Pathogens can become even more virulent over time if the fitness conditions favor that, which it easily can.
People looking for reassurance that COVID is on its way to becoming harmless spread this myth about viral evolution that has really stuck among people. I unfortunately often see it expressed with a sort of professorial condescension even though it's totally misinformed and wrong.
I said Cummins had a terrible predictive track record. Either he made multiple predictions falsified by reality or he didn't. The blogger in question could have hated Cummins since they fought each other on a playground as children and that would not change anything. Pointing out that Cummins was repeatedly wrong does not make one dismissable as "biased".
> Except maybe my inherent bias against sources proven to be consistently and purposefully lying.
Was the specific source I linked to one that you know of having lied? What makes you think Christopher Snowdon is less honest than Cummins?
If you're looking for cheap heuristics, discounting anybody who in this day and age uses "sheeple" unironically probably works pretty well. (Even if he used it on the side that I'd otherwise support.)
A Ctrl+F for "sheeple" only turns up your comment in this thread.
Cummings uses it in the link you posted to velvetgloveironfist, although oddly only in a blurry screenshot.
That's a weird distinction to draw. In the context of, say, medicine, "Medicinal Theory vs Actual Medicine" would not really make sense - they're not opposing or contradictory concepts. Medicinal Theory doesn't mean "False Medicine," so the difference in those two concepts is not in their veracity but the fact that one refers to a theory (which may or may not be true) while another refers to a theory that has been confirmed.
The more I read Scott's writing about this, the more I become convinced that there simply is no natural category of "conspiracy theories." There are simply theories, with better or worse epistemic support.
Yes, some of those theories have extremely bad epistemic support, and we should certainly learn to identify and reject them. But that's not primarily by categorization, i.e., dropping them into a category labeled "conspiracy theories." Rather, it's by applying epistemic criteria to the content of the theories.
I half agree. I think a key feature of a "conspiracy theory" is the element of a conspiracy. Some people are acting badly in secret, or hiding a truth for malign purposes.
To the extent a person can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories, key features are
1. A strong belief in Conflict Theory rather than Mistake Theory as a major driver of bad outcomes in the world.
2. A high estimation (often extreme overestimation) of large numbers of peoples' abilities to keep secrets.
3. A tendency to think of elites as their own distinct class, rather than people like themselves who happen to hold positions of authority.
I do think that if you don't hold these beliefs (especially 2), you will correctly reject lots of conspiracy theories and very few correct theories. Hence, it's useful to call some things "conspiracy theories" and give them short shrift.
Is Ivermectin a conspiracy theory though? Not necessarily, even if some Ivermectin proponents have fallen pray to conspiratorial secondary theories about the medical establishment. I think, some of what Scott is calling "conspiracy theories" are more like offbeat theories. Theories that hold the experts are wrong but not evil.
Two points:
1) As you note, many advocates of Ivermectin are not claiming a "conspiracy" in the stronger sense that you outline.
2) In matters concerning politically charged government actions, especially those involving intelligence agencies, it's not clear that the elements you outline could not be part of a rationally held mental model.
"Conspiracy theory" is just a terrible category.
Want to hear my 9/11 conspiracy theory? A group of nineteen Arab hijackers trained and supported by Al Qaeda conspired to hijack and fly planes into buildings. This is clearly a conspiracy theory, it says so right there.
Meanwhile, "Atlantis existed but archeologists are too stupid to notice" isn't a conspiracy theory at all.
It's true that many dumb theories do involve conspiracies (since you can easily explain away any counterevidence you like if you posit the existence of a massive conspiracy to fabricate counterevidence) but not all do, and not all theories involving conspiracies are wrong.
Let's just stop using "conspiracy theory" as shorthand for "dumb weird fringe theory poorly supported by evidence and believed only by kooks".
You both raise very good arguments that made me think. Let me clarify what I'm thinking by example. When it comes to 9/11, I believe the 19 Al Qaedas conspiracy theory but I reject out of hand the theory (rare in the US but popular in parts of the world) that 4,000 Jews received phone calls warning them not to go to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11. If 4,000 anybodies had received warning phone calls the night before, these people would warn their coworkers, word would spread through the city, and the next morning the building would be empty and the story of the mystery phone calls would be in the NY Times.
A while back I looked up the original Marjorie Taylor Greene post about "Jewish space lasers". The press focussed on the ambiguously anti-semitic part (it's some Rothschild linked company that supposedly has the lasers), but basically the whole thing is a long babbling series of associations that ultimately presumes that corporations have secret satellites that can collect solar energy and shoot energy beams and that it would be normal for such companies to create deadly wildfires in order to clear a path for a high-speed rail. The fires aren't even in the path of the planned rail but that's not the point. MTG thinks we live in a would where companies have secret sci-fi satellites and directly murder lots of Americans to reduce the price they'll pay for land or whatever.
My point here isn't that no conspiracies ever exist. Small numbers of criminals and terrorists and perhaps larger numbers of intelligence agency employees can certainly launch conspiracies. There's grey areas of plausibility (did the FSB blow up apartment buildings to justify the Chechen war, could the CIA have murdered Epstein in his jail cell)? But the Alex Joneses and MTGs of the world keep getting enormous amounts of stuff wrong, and it is always in the direction of far too many people keeping secrets and elites being far more psychotically evil than they actually are. They just have a stilted view of the world that means they get things wrong over and over. That's what I mean by conspiracy theories.
Regardless of all else, I agree with Scott that even if you are arguing with someone who believes in 4,000 Jews with space lasers or whatever, you'll get farthest by making calm factual arguments instead of declaring your opponent to be beneath you.
You've done the work that I would ask in debunking a conspiracy theory in a great way. When I, and I assume people like me (and Scott's point in writing these articles) ask for reasons to not consider a theory valid, it doesn't have to be hard. I never looked into the Jewish Space Lasers conspiracy, but had I heard about it and lacked any context to determine falsehood. A simple explanation like yours can go a long way. Not that I trust MTG, but I trust the typical media response to her very little as well. So them saying "she's an anti-Semite who believes in Jewish Space Lasers" I typically feel like I'm just missing information. If I heard that information from MTG, the chances that I (in a hypothetical sense, I know enough about her specifically to avoid it) believe it goes up. If I hear some stupid reply meant to call believers stupid, with no detail, then that doesn't have the intended effect of balancing MTG, it just tells me that they consider MTG a cultural enemy.
Now we get to the issue with using that terminology. By using "conspiracy theory" as shorthand for "stupid, crazy, insane theory that only lunatics believe," you are implanting a mind virus into roughly half the population - because when they hear about the "Small numbers of criminals and terrorists and perhaps larger numbers of intelligence agency employees"-type occurrences, they think "Hey, I've seen that type of claim before - CONSPIRACY THEORY!!! RED ALERT!!!"
It shouldn't be surprising that using a generic term to refer only to a subset of things covered by that term could lead to those connotations spilling over outside of that subset.
Of course, the reason why some people continue to do this is precisely because they want those connotations to spill over - they want a term they can use to cover up any allegations of bad behavior between two or more people. But those who actually care about having true beliefs should stop doing this.
I'm not sure how I feel about the usage of the term conspiracy theory in general; it does seem to best apply to theories that presume impossibly large/powerful/successful conspiracies and we tend to also use it to describe other theories that are just dumb in general.
However, the last paragraph in that comment there also seems to be positing a conspiracy that also seems implausible. While there is possibly an /extremely small/ number of people who intentionally overuse the term conspiracy theory so that one day they might have an easier time convincing the public that they or someone else is innocent of a real conspiracy, there is almost no way they could have any significant effect on the general usage of English around the world.
**But maybe there is a conspiracy among, say, journalists who secretly meet and discuss intentionally overusing this term so they can rescue their favorite politicians later, and they might have the power to actually influence the language if there were enough of them... and here we've gone full circle.
There is no way the entire media repeating it for decades could have any significant effect?
“ Let's just stop using "conspiracy theory" as shorthand for "dumb weird fringe theory poorly supported by evidence and believed only by kooks".”
I agree. We’ve lumped at least 3 things together:
1) theories about actual conspiracies where groups conspire to secretly commit nefarious acts
2) “pseudoscientific” or contrarian scientific theories (flat earth, cold fusion)
3) alternative history (Atlantis, Holocaust denial)
Of course there’s some bleed over. “Ivermectin is an effective drug against COVID” is type 2, but “the government is suppressing knowledge of Ivermectin effectiveness to enrich Big Pharma” is type 1.
All 3 can sometimes be true, and all 3 can have cases that are really hard to distinguish from correct theories even if they are false.
But flat earth is impossible without a conspiracy? There are people who claim to have personally seen Earth from afar, to have moved at great speed around it and that it has the shape of a sphere. For flat earth to be true they must form part of a conspiracy. Likewise, if Holocaust is a fabrication, someone must have fabricated it.
But that's not the central aspect of the theory. Perhaps a logical consequence of the theory is that a conspiracy would be required for it to be true, but it's odd to frame that as the defining characteristic of a theory like flat earth, as opposed to something that's directly defined by being a conspiracy, like JFK. I presume they do this to smuggle the negative connotations from one to another.
I think it's also important to call out the category of "theories involving a bunch of people independently (but not universally) deciding that it's in their best interests to behave a certain way, to the detriment of the public". There's no reason to label that a "conspiracy theory" except to discredit it for ideological reasons.
E. g. being antivax not because you believe something about the biological properties of the vaccine in question, but only because The Other Tribe strongly supports it and we can’t have anything in common with them? And if asked why, respond with some half-baked argument about the biological properties?
Doesn't that cut both ways? If one or more vaccines turn out to have caused significant side effects, are the pro-vaxxers not going to be accused of doing the same thing?
As a specific example "the vaccine stops transmission" was a widely expressed view by the pro-vaccine side, even after that was shown to be untrue (it lowered transmission for a few months, but not by enough to prevent society-wide spread similar to without the vaccine).
One obvious example was mentioned by Scott in this post. Lots of people treat the idea that average IQ varies by race as a nutty idea, even though a majority of the relevant experts think it is probably true. The reason is not that those people are in a conspiracy, it is that they think belief in that idea, even if true, has bad consequences.
Many of them likely are in a conspiracy. If a bunch of academic journal editors meet up and discuss how they should all reject any papers associated with race and intelligence, that is a conspiracy.
> 2. A high estimation (often extreme overestimation) of large numbers of peoples' abilities to keep secrets.
If the payoff is large enough and/or the cost sufficiently small, you will always have someone 'spilling beans'. Just take a look at how many Satoshis we have and how many people 'worked with Aliens' in their time in the US military. Hell, in the worst case, just quote an anonymous source, it's not like reputable journalists don't do this.
Lastly, people are not that bad at keeping secrets, either. If you manage things on a need-to-know-basis and stamp the occasional whistle-blower as a nut job you can get pretty far. Just look how long it took for the NSA surveillance to actually get leaked, even though we know now that thousands of people knew for years.
Also people into Pizzagate/Epstein theory point out to Instagram posts and leaked emails and children's testimonies and mentions dating back to 2008, so conspiracy theories don't rely on *nobody spilling the beans*, but on *no one would notice if they did*.
I thought about the NSA example but my impression is that while Snowden leaked the details, it was pretty widely known that the NSA was engaged in mass electronic surveillance of some sort. I remember my friends in high school (pre-9/11 this was funny) joking about sending e-mails with lots of terrorism-related keywords to waste the NSA's time.
The cover-up that genuinely impressed me was how many people knew valuable details about the D-Day landing that would have been valuable to the Germans, but that was a time when control of communication was much greater.
One of my favorite conspiracy theories is that Pfizer shut down its vaccine trial from late October 2020 until the day after the Election, putting all new samples into cold storage.
In fact, that's not a secret: the Pfizer executive in charge of vaccine development, William Gruber, told Stat News that's what Pfizer did on November 9, 2020, the day the success of the clinical trial was announced, much to reporter Matthew Herper's astonishment.
But, even though that's part of the public record, nobody cares.
So, while Pfizer delaying the announcement of its vaccine's efficacy until after the election might be a small-c conspiracy theory, it's not a Conspiracy Theory. Capital-C Conspiracy Theories have to appeal to a substantial number of people. There are lots of Conspiracy Theories about Pfizer and its vaccine, but the most plausible one doesn't qualify because practically nobody has even heard of it.
Got a quotation? I think I found the article in question but ctrl-f election found nothing.
"Gruber said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October that they wanted to drop the 32-case interim analysis. At that time, the companies decided to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study, instead leaving samples in storage. The FDA was aware of this decision. Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday."
Got a citation for the Stat News article?
It's probably this one: https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/09/covid-19-vaccine-from-pfizer-and-biontech-is-strongly-effective-early-data-from-large-trial-indicate/
That they stopped the analysis is a true fact. Leaping from there to the inference that this was done to screw Trump is idiotic. The people who run Pfizer cared very little about who won the election, because it doesn't much affect their bottom line. On the other hand, they care very much indeed about that bottom line, and had they stuck to their original protocol, they would have been obliged by their agreement with the FDA to cut the trial short, because it had demonstrated its (unmabitious) primary endpoint, of more or less being better than nothing at slowing COVID.
What Pfizer *suspected* (correctly as it turned out), was that the vaccine would be much better than the primary endpoint goal -- which would of course translate into much more $$$ for Pfizer, Inc. -- but they could only prove that if they ran the trial all the way to the end. Had they continued their intermediate analysis, the protocol would call for cutting the trial short (so the control arm could get the vaccine), and then they would never have proof (except possibly after some laborious real-world study years later) that the vaccine was much better than they thought.
That's why they did it. As always, with business, and for that matter most smart people, it's not complicated psychology and hall of mirrors mechanism one needs to untangle, it's just about the benjamins. Adducing some ideological fetish that would have a Vice President of Pfizer throwing away potential $billions in future profit in order to see this schmo or that schmuck become President for a tiny part of the time over which he can expect to get handsome bonuses for a bountiful bottom line is massively overthinking things without using common sense, which is indeed the hallmark of the conspiracy theorist.
Pfizer thought through all the technical issues of their vaccine clinical trial during the summer of 2020 when they publicly published their protocol of when they would unblind results.
What they didn't count on was the political backlash from Democrats who were terrified of a successful vaccine turning out to be what the New York Times called Trump's "October surprise." Both Biden and Harris used their debates with Trump and Pence to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about a rushed Trump vaccine.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla consistently told Wall Street that he expected to have at least vaccine efficacy results to announce in late October 2020. So, analysts were shocked when he didn't mention the vaccine trial on the Pfizer earnings call of October 27, 2020. What we learned on 11/9/20 was that Pfizer had put their world-historical clinical trial in cold storage from late October until the day after the Election.
Here's my 2022 review of Bourla's memoir "Moonshot."
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-missing-piece/
I was hoping he was going to offer an explanation for putting the "world's most important clinical trial" on hiatus, but instead he left the entire topic out of his autobiography. That suggests to me that he doesn't have an entirely innocent explanation that I'm overlooking.
Look, I sympathize with Bourla: he wanted to beat Moderna, which Pfizer did by a week, and he didn't want the Establishment (e.g., the likely next President, Joe Biden, the media, academia, the federal bureaucracy, etc.) to be outraged at Pfizer and its vaccine by providing Trump with his "October Surprise." He successfully threaded the needle. The Harvard B School should write up a case study of how he did it, with barely anybody even noticing his corner-cutting.
A good example of how long a secret can be kept is Bletchley Park.
The British decoding of German Enigma codes employed about 10,000 people at Bletchley Park during WWII, but it was unknown to the newspaper reading public until 1974 (with distorted tales of Ultra appearing in the press from about 1971 onward).
I've seen hints of the existence of Ultra in earlier books by insiders: e.g., Professor Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison's official history of the US Navy in WWII has one line about how U-Boat hunting in the Atlantic became so successful that it was almost as if somebody was reading the German codes. But I don't know that anybody who wasn't an insider got his joke until Stevenson's book a decade later.
Similarly, I would guess my father, a Lockheed engineer, visited Area 51 a number of times. (He often was off to work at Edwards AFB, and Area 51 was a more remote clone of Edwards.) But I never heard about it from him. My wife's uncle lived at Edwards for a couple of years and no doubt went to Area 51 as well. But he never talked about it.
Something I often tell people who believe conspiracy theories about covid vax (it kills millions but that's covered up, etc.) seems like a version of your (2) and (3), as I understand them: Scientists are not a club or a religious sect. They don't all know each other, and the don't all like and respect each other, and they're not particularly invested in presenting a united front. If a research team publishes a paper that looks suspicious, other scientists will request their raw data and go over what the team did with great, angry care. In fact they sometimes do that even when someone's results are not suspicious, driven by professional rivalry. And if they find something wrong with the research they will blow the whistle on the team and write letters to journal editors and the press about the matter. They also are not, as a group, all that bribable with money. They're not saints, but the currency that matters to them isn't Ben Franklins, it's being right, being smart, being in the forefront. If you keep in mind that this is what "the scientists" are like, it should be obvious that there is no way someone could get that whole bunch to agree to keep secret a body of data that shows the covid vax in fact kills many. many people.
"If you keep in mind that this is what "the scientists" are like, it should be obvious that there is no way someone could get that whole bunch to agree to keep secret a body of data that shows the covid vax in fact kills many. many people."
I don't believe there's a conspiracy to keep the COVID vax death toll secret. But is it possible to get a whole bunch of scientists to agree that men can be women any time they say so, or that socioeconomic discrepancies are entirely due to discrimination, or that Muslims do not commit disproportionate terrorist attacks? Make the punishment for unorthodox opinions heavy enough and almost all scientists will fold. You don't even need an authority to enforce the orthodoxy from the top down, because mutual denunciation and ostracism is enough. We're seeing this happen as we speak with woke ideology. As the woke say themselves, free speech does not mean speech without consequences. There's no a priori reason to believe that a similar pro-vax orthodoxy cannot be enforced, especially as anti-vax becomes synonymous with unwoke.
" But is it possible to get a whole bunch of scientists to agree that men can be women any time they say so."
Well what do you mean by agreeing that men can be women?(1) Do you mean scientists will literally say that male-to-female trans people are in every respect women -- XX chormosomes, able to have babies, etc.? I'm sure you do not mean that. (2) Do you mean that most scientists will say that if males want to do the hormones and surgery route and call themselves women, they do not object -- they consider it to a personal choice they have no say in? (3) Do you mean that scientists will say that the data indicate that M-to-F hormone and surgery transition is the best option for anyone with gender dysphoria -- that on average it leads to less suffering and a higher level of functioning?
Note that (1) and (3) are things regarding which scientists can analyze data and make statements about what's true and what's not . (2) is not -- it's an attitude. So let's look at (3), what doctors and mental health clinicians have to say about sexual transitioning. I'm a psychologist, and I can tell you that when my collegues and I talk about sexual transitioning as a solution to gender dysphoria we are skeptical regarding how great a solution it is. Regarding initiating sexual transitioning when someone's a teenager we are quite uneasy about it. The idea of beginning the transition with pre-pubescent kids horrifies most of us. It is also not difficult to find research regarding outcomes for people post-transition that indicate that post-transition people are not doing that great. The scientists who study gender dysphoria and gender change are not afraid to tell the truth about what they find. I have never been even mildly "punished" by my peers for my skepticism about sexual transitiioning as a successful treatment for these complexly unhappy folks, and virtually all my friends are liberal democrats.
I do not like wokesters any more than you do, but I'd like to see some evidence that they have kept scientists from doing research that might yield politically incorrect results regarding trans people, Muslim terrorism and inborn differences as a cause of poverty. You got any?
> I have never been even mildly "punished" by my peers for my skepticism
Have you ever *published* your opinions, or do you know someone who published something similar? Like, maybe the norm is that certain opinions are okay to have in private, but putting them on paper is what gets you in trouble.
If you imagine a world where 90% of psychologists are privately horrified of transitioning pre-pubescent kids, but 99% of psychological articles published in peer-review journals approve of it... that's more or less what some of the "conspiracy theorists" are saying.
I have never published anything about this -- I don't write articles. Have said it to patients, colleagues and acquaintances and not gotten bad reactions. I have said it online, but not in a setting where people have already committed to positions and are squatting in opposite ditches hurling pieces of fire and shit at each other. I mean, I am not angry about this issue in those conversations -- I'm not saying, "you fucking wokesters think you're more humane than anyone else, and actually you are coercive and cruel." I'm saying things like, "when I hear about a situation like this [say somebody's 11 year old going on puberty blockers] here is what I worry about." As regards the *science* of this, it is not difficult at all to find articles about the physical downsides and risks of puberty blockers. But of course that's not the main issue for most of us. The most disturbing thing is the idea of allowing a 10 year old's ideas about this matter to weigh so heavily in decisions that will have lifelong consequences. As a matter of fact, I have similar feelings when I see 16 year old gymnasts at the Olympics. Many years ago, probably at around the age of 6, the kid was gymnastics-crazy, as many little kids are, especially girls. And this one was very gifted. She dreamed of getting a gold medal at the Olympics, and the parents permitted her to live the life of an olympian in training for many years. She missed so much! Not to mention that for every girl who goes to the olympics there are thousands who devote their lives to trying and do not succeed. Many of them get seriously injured at some point, and occasionally one dies from a bad landing. I often mention this when people try to get me to watch the Olympics with them, and I actually get much more pushback for this idea than I do for my concerns about prepubescent transitioning. Nobody gets furious, but they say things like, "yeah, but the kid got to live out her dream," and look at me uneasily. I think they're thinking I have an unpleasant gift for finding the one weird downside of something wonderful.
Anyhow, endocrinologists are not shy about their data about the downside. As for the other downside -- letting a kid decide to take such a huge, life-altering course -- it is hard to research. You can interview and test kids along the way to get an idea of how things are going for them, and there are people doing that and publishing results, but you can't do anything remotely like an RCT. How would I back up my ideas if I were to write a book or an article about this topic? It would have to be pretty wide-ranging, right? I'd need to get data about how frequently 9 year olds express a wish to be the opposite gender -- how things work out for those who do not transition -- the fad side of gender diversity thinking -- similar fads -- measures of changing attitudes about parental authority, and the effect on kids of parents being permissive in certain ways. And then I'd have to pull it all together in one big long argument about how pre-puberty transition if rarely the best approach, and how people have come to think it is.
"Well what do you mean by agreeing that men can be women?"
I mean exactly that: they will say that trans-women are real women. If your objection is that this isn't a precise statement of fact but more of an attitude, you'd be right. However, pro-vax and anti-vax are both attitudes too. A medical professional would say "the vaccine is safe and you should take it", not "the risk of X type of adverse reaction within 2 months in population Y is Z%". It doesn't matter if every journal is filled with articles quantifying the risks of the COVID vaccine; if scientists are not allowed to adopt the attitude "the vaccine is dangerous and you should not take it", then the public would be led astray by following scientific consensus. I'll reiterate again that I don't think this has happened yet and I am pro-vax, but the more censorious the pro-vaccine side gets, the less credible they become.
"I'd like to see some evidence that they have kept scientists from doing research that might yield politically incorrect results regarding trans people, Muslim terrorism and inborn differences as a cause of poverty. You got any?"
Trans people: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brown-university-caves-to-trans-activists-protesting-research/
"PLOS One explained that in response to “readers’ concerns,” they were seeking “further expert assessment on the study’s methodology and analyses.” If so, that’s fair enough. But in an unusual display of transparency, Brown added their own statement that their “community members” had been “expressing concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.”"
Genetic bases of socioeconomic differences: https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-to-genetics-database
"It’s been an open secret for years that prestigious journals will often reject submissions that offend prevailing political orthodoxies—especially if they involve controversial aspects of human biology and behavior—no matter how scientifically sound the work might be. The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups."
"American geneticists now face an even more drastic form of censorship: exclusion from access to the data necessary to conduct analyses, let alone publish results. Case in point: the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory."
Muslims: https://rmx.news/article/swedish-scientists-prosecuted-for-finding-that-most-rapes-are-committed-by-immigrants/
"However, the ethical authority appears to be gearing up to issue some form of punishment related to the case.
“I don’t see anywhere that ethical permission is sought to test the hypothesis if immigrants are over-represented in statistics on convicted rapists,” the body said. The scientists were also criticized for insufficient evaluation as they failed to indicate how their research should “reduce exclusion and improve integration.”"
This case was covered by Scott Alexander.
"So let's look at (3), what doctors and mental health clinicians have to say about sexual transitioning. I'm a psychologist, and I can tell you that when my collegues and I talk about sexual transitioning as a solution to gender dysphoria we are skeptical regarding how great a solution it is. Regarding initiating sexual transitioning when someone's a teenager we are quite uneasy about it. The idea of beginning the transition with pre-pubescent kids horrifies most of us. It is also not difficult to find research regarding outcomes for people post-transition that indicate that post-transition people are not doing that great. The scientists who study gender dysphoria and gender change are not afraid to tell the truth about what they find. I have never been even mildly "punished" by my peers for my skepticism about sexual transitiioning as a successful treatment for these complexly unhappy folks, and virtually all my friends are liberal democrats."
Thank you for describing your experience. I'm surprised that your peers are so open-minded, but I guess practicing psychologists are not as rigidly constrained by orthodoxy as I thought, which gives me some hope for the future. I'm in academia, which is the wokest of the woke of the elite institutions. So are almost all scientists. As a scientist myself, I find it hard to imagine the courage it would take for a social scientist to even admit to taking an unwoke hypothesis seriously, let alone taking it seriously enough to do a study on it and publish the unwoke results. It reminds me of my childhood in an authoritarian country, where people who opposed the government definitely existed, but no official public statement from any high-profile individual or organization was ever anti-government. The atmosphere is exactly the same: hushed voices, doctrinal training sessions, obvious things that everyone knew but nobody admitted, an invitation to come "drink tea" with your friendly local authority if you ever questioned the orthodoxy.
A funny example of how it usually takes more than one whistleblower to get the truth out is that millions of people with three digit IQs remain utterly convinced that "Science has proven that race does not exist." Yet, in 2018 the superstar of population genetics, Harvard's David Reich, published a book saying that's not true and the New York Times published his essay saying that's not true.
But I almost never run into anybody online who says, "I used to believe that science had proved race doesn't exist, but then I read this top Harvard scientist in the New York Times saying that wasn't true, so I changed my mind." As far as I can tell, almost everybody who paid attention to Reich already agreed with what he had to say, and huge numbers of people who think of themselves as intellectuals who know that science proves races does not exist paid no heed whatsoever.
The funniest example was when journalist Angela Saini went to interview Reich for her book about how science had proven race does not exist and he flat out told her the thesis of her book was wrong. As far as I can tell, that just proved to her how pervasive the menace of racist pseudoscience was even at Harvard.
Was curious how hard it was to find someone saying online that Muslims commit a disproportionate number of terrorist attacks. It is definitely not difficult. Found 2 in 30 secs. Here's the ACLU: "While terrorism — even in the form of suicide attacks -- is not an Islamic phenomenon by defini tion, it cannot be ignored that the lion's share of terrorist acts and the most devastating of them in recent years have been perpetrated in the name of Islam." https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/ACLURM001331.pdf
Here's another: " According to Nesser (2018), Islamist terrorism (the focus of the present study) is the most prominent type of international terrorism. Islamism can generally be described as a set of ideologies and its proponents usually perceive specific political, legal and social aspects of other cultures and religions as incompatible with Islam (Eikmeier, 2007;)." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1464884921990223#bibr29-1464884921990223
Only glanced at both articles, but gist of what they were saying seemed to be that radical Islam is sort of like the form of Christianity that leads people to blow up abortion clinics, etc. -- i.e., that there's a subgroup of Muslims who are nutso killer fanatics, but that the religion itself is no more compatible with terrorism than the religions people are used to in America. That sounds fair to me.
Of course I agree that wokeism exists but it doesn't seem to me that it is hard to find researchers who are willing to state the facts you think of as unsayable.
>But is it possible to get a whole bunch of scientists to agree that [...] that socioeconomic discrepancies are entirely due to discrimination
Empirically, no (or at least it's extraordinarily difficult). I know this because the woke left has been trying for decades to engineer a scientific consensus on this issue, and yet it's next-to-impossible to find a scientist in the relevant fields who will actually say, in words, that this is true. I've spent a lot of time searching, and the most I've been able to find is scientists who will that the evidence is inconclusive and purely discrimination-based explanations can't be ruled out yet.
To my understanding and memory, ivermectin was being widely considered (worldwide) as a potential treatment for COVID at the same time the public media was denouncing it as horse paste and calling anyone trying it idiots. You don't need the scientists actually studying something to agree with each other, if the press is willing to pick a unified direction. There were real scientists trying to get the message out about alternate treatments and the dangers of lockdowns, but they were often stifled in very authoritarian ways. That's why so many people are interested in the Twitter Files - looking for evidence about when and why these actual scientists were denied the ability to share their thoughts. Not every dissenting opinion turned out to be correct, but a lot of stifled dissenting opinions have been verified now.
It was a literal conspiracy involving government forces, social media, and the press that shut down certain speakers if they wanted to talk about theories. That this happened to real scientists who have since been proven correct on at least some of the things they were trying to say is known to be true.
Yes, the Great Barrington Declaration was signed by many healthcare professionals and yet the media managed to completely discredit them. It was clear that it wasn't just that the public sentiment went this way, there were some strong forces working to discredit it.
Just for curiosity I looked up what wikipedia says about Vinay Prasad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinay_Prasad
The part about covid response is mostly negative. If you open the sources, you can see how he is being criticized for things that have turned out correct (for example, Cochrane report about masks).
Somehow, I have started to see a pattern. Take any distinguished scientist, physician or public health reporter with good credentials before pandemic, and suddenly they all are bad during covid response? Some of them made mistakes but wouldn't you think that they made mistakes in the past too? It is as if there is whole campaign to discredit any critics of lockdown policy.
The Great Barrington declaration hinged on two things: herd immunity and focused protection of the vulnerable. One turned out not to be possible, and the other was pretty obviously impossible at the time: There was and is no way to keep Covid out of nursing homes when it's circulating at high levels in the general population, let alone protecting the elderly not in nursing homes, immunocompromised, etc.
GBD authors and signatories also became pretty famous for declaring that cases were in their final decline just ahead of the next surge. E.g., Jay Bhattacharya saying "The emergency phase of the disease is over" and "we protected the vulnerable" right before the delta wave killed another quarter million Americans. (A GBD supporter asserting the end of the pandemic right before a wave became such a familiar occurrence that one researcher called it the Gupta Predictor, after author Sunetra Gupta.)
In general, the contrarian case on Covid represented by the GBD was rarely "it's going to kill a million-plus people one way or another, so there's no point in trying to control it", but repeatedly pointing to imagined inflection points as the beginning of the end while grossly underestimating the total, starting in about April 2020.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-pandemic-is-over-again/
The first turned out not possible but in a way we all strengthened our immunity against covid either through vaccination or catching disease. It happens with all cold viruses and it was predictable that it will be the same for covid.
The second is not true. We can and could have provided focused protection to the elderly. In the UK many elderly living alone sheltered and avoided getting covid until vaccines came along. We could have provided the same thing for much less financial cost and impact on the society than lockdowns.
I personally had no pandemic at all. At no point of all these years I felt that I was in danger so great that I need to observe lockdowns, avoid travel, meeting people or even wear a mask. I understand that some people were in danger, mostly elderly and immunosuppressed. I definitely was careful in contacts with them. Pandemic damage was completely self-inflicted caused by mass panic and it becomes more and more clear with every day.
We had Sweden as a contrariant case and it did well, not much different from most other countries who had hard lockdowns.
I would also suggest that nursing homes were largely irrelevant. They are places where people are going to die. The median age of death from covid is 82+ years. The pandemic restrictions was a war of the elderly against the young.
I agree that the GBD was not very well developed, it lacked concrete details and their suggestions lacked practicality. Nevertheless, they were shut down immediately, blocked and demonised, never given a chance to explain and improve their position. That was really sad.
> They don't all know each other, and the don't all like and respect each other, and they're not particularly invested in presenting a united front.
The straightforward response to this that I've seen: sure they are, they want more research grants so they all want to keep the climate change gravy train running.
> They also are not, as a group, all that bribable with money.
Even if that were true, money is what lets them do what they actually want to do, so it's important.
> To the extent a person can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories, key features are
This suggests that the problem is not the conspiracy theory per se, but rather the "conspiracy theory mindset".
Wrong theories appear all the time. Without this mindset, they would be evaluated, and after collecting enough evidence rejected. People with this mindset break this mechanism, simply because they never give up, no matter what. Even worse, they try to convince other people to adopt the same mindset.
Besides the general anti-epistemology, an important component is how strongly emotionally invested those people are. It's as if they were traumatized by something.
Like, imagine someone who was a victim of police abuse, or knows someone who was. If such person spends the rest of their life writing angry anti-establishment rants -- I get it. It may not be the optimal reaction, but it is a natural reaction. The surprising thing is what someone has a similar emotional reaction about... pyramids, or ivermectin, or miracle mineral supplement, or whatever.
My best guess is that they basically use the topic as a metaphor for... something else. (Something like: "My abusive father believes that he is right about everything. Just like those scientists do. But I will prove all of them wrong!" And now you cannot give up, because if ivermectin actually does not work... then your abusive father metaphorically wins.) And I suppose many people have unsolved emotional problems, so when you show them a way to channel their feelings, they are hooked.
And when someone's reaction to people with fringe beliefs is... verbal abuse... that just strengthens the emotional connection ("yes, more evidence that I am actually fighting against abusive people").
Yeah, it's crazy how some people just could not stop trying to spread disinformation about the value of lockdowns and masks. We clearly know that lockdowns were not effective and should have stopped far earlier, but they just kept going!
I'm being snarky, but I draw exception to what theories polite society is willing to dismiss as part of a "conspiracy theory mindset" and which theories are not.
Pseudoscientific movements and other fringe scholarly movements very often end up incorporating an element of conspiracy theory. This is because when you arguments you believe to be persuasive are looked low upon by experts, there's only so many ways you can explain that, especially if your movement is large enough to have not escaped people's notice. One of the easiest routes to explaining this is proposing some form of conspiracy theory among the academic establishment to deny you. This conspiracy may be formal, but more often it's more of an informal alignment of interests - a conspiracy of incentive if you will. Global warming is the result of scientists under pressure to toe the line for that sweet, sweet grant money, for instance.
Once people start seeing conspiracy in one, it becomes easy to see that same kind of conspiracy elsewhere, which is one reason why crank movements seem to have a magnetism. The reasoning that protects them is promiscuous.
So while the theories themselves aren't conspiracy theories proper, people often end up using terms like that interchangeably because they're so commonly found together. This is technically wrong, but mostly forgivable.
There seems to be a similar effect in the opposite direction, where anti-conspiracy "aggressive conformist" types start denying the possibility of conspiracy anywhere they hear about it - it's rare to see someone who denies conspiracy in one place and accepts it in another. In my experience, those who use the term "conspiracy theory" in the way you describe tend to categorically dismiss all theories involving people working together behind the scenes, often even denying that people follow incentives, as well.
People skeptical of JFK assassination conspiracy theories or moon landing conspiracy theories generally seem to just accept that Watergate happened or that organized crime exists. To be frank, the idea that people who reject conspiracy theories generally don't believe that people even engage in conspiracies or behave according to incentives sounds ridiculous.
I guess I should add a caveat - they disbelieve all conspiracy theories that would harm them politically. It is true that the most fervent anti-conspiracy-theory hyperconformists heavily pushed the baseless Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, even years after it had been debunked. But they didn't even think of that as a conspiracy theory, because those in power control these labels, and so they reframed it as a "collusion" theory (literally just a synonym for conspiracy).
However, there definitely is a failure mode of rationality wherein one becomes a "debunker" and defines their identity around "debunking conspiracy theories," as if it is a foregone conclusion that all such theories are false and it's just a matter of finding a way to debunk them. But of course sometimes people really do conspire with one another.
A logical consequence of disbelieving all conspiracy theories is that you disbelieve all (new) conspiracies, because all revealed conspiracies started as theories at some point.
The correct category is "theories contrary to the current scientific consensus." A conspiracy theory could be both part of the consensus and true — consider the history of the communist movement. A false consensus could be the result of something other than a conspiracy.
The only feature of a "conspiracy theory" is that it is a theory about a conspiracy. Because... that's what the words say.
The attempt to associate all sorts of other things with the term "conspiracy theory" is driven by a desire to get rid of any term for "two or more people working together to do something behind the scenes." If that is happening, they literally just don't want us to have a word that we can use to describe it. If "conspiracy theory" is reserved for a hundred different stigmatized and pathologized things, we just don't even have the language to describe that that is happening.
Like, imagine if we did the same for any other type of theory. Imagine if any "Biological Theory" was just declared categorically false, simply by nature of being related to biology. That would seem to imply a judgement about the existence of biology, no?
Their goal is to suggest that any act of two or more people working together behind the scenes is axiomatically impossible. Because if someone points out some evidence for this bad behavior behind the scenes, they can pattern-match you onto imaginary "flat earthers" or whatever the astroturfed "conspiracy theory" of the week is.
> The only feature of a "conspiracy theory" is that it is a theory about a conspiracy. Because... that's what the words say.
You know language often doesn't work like this, right? Do you struggle with understanding idioms?
If you're worried that the evolution of the term "conspiracy theory" to mean this leaves no room to describe legitimate conspiracies, the word we ordinarily use for that is just "conspiracy."
Are you a linguistic prescriptivist?
It is perfectly valid to use a sequence of words to mean simply what those words mean, as written, even if some consider it to be an idiom or term of art. Words can have multiple meanings. This is laughably basic stuff.
"Conspiracy" obviously doesn't work. "It's a conspiracy, man!" and things of that form have already been memed quite extensively. Further, the problem with the term "conspiracy theory" is not that it is used by people who believe in such theories, but that it is applied as a label to their theories by those with power. So they don't have the ability to just avoid being labelled with that term. The only thing we can do is change the connotations of the term in common usage to better represent the frequent truthfulness of such theories.
Some sequences of words have a well-understood meaning that is very different than just the sum of what the individual words normally mean. See e.g. "rootless cosmopolitan" or "fellow traveller". If you use those words without understanding that, there will be miscommunication. So you should probably try not to do that.
This is a fully-general counterargument against ever using a word in any sense other than its first listed dictionary definition. That eliminates the vast majority of word usage.
You're proposing an alternative meaning of the term "conspiracy theory" to common parlance based on your literal reading of what the component parts of the term mean. Not only that, but you seem to think this is fundamentally the "correct" meaning, then accuse others of being prescriptivist. This is all silly, but you imagine disagreement with you is rooted in a misunderstanding of linguistics that is "laughably basic." I don't know what to tell you. Sometimes phrases mean something other than what the most literal reading of them would suggest.
If you allow me a little speculation, what appears to be going on is there are conspiracy theories as people normally understand them that you are personally sympathetic to and you are bristling at the dismissiveness the label brings.
I'm not "proposing an alternative meaning," I'm stating the obvious fact that that is one of the meanings of the word. It's easily the second most common usage.
> you seem to think this is fundamentally the "correct" meaning, then accuse others of being prescriptivist.
You're the one who's trying to disallow me from using it that way.
> you imagine disagreement with you is rooted in a misunderstanding of linguistics that is "laughably basic."
You've misused the concept of linguistic prescriptivism twice now already.
> Sometimes phrases mean something other than what the most literal reading of them would suggest.
Another basic linguistics error. The meaning of words depends on how they are used and the context in which they are used. Using a sequence of words to mean what the words mean as written, rather than as a term of art, is never "incorrect" - again, extremely basic. Do better.
> there are conspiracy theories as people normally understand them that you are personally sympathetic to and you are bristling at the dismissiveness the label brings
Do you have a memory issue or something? I don't mean any offense if you do, I know remembering things from one comment ago can be tricky.
Anyway, yes, obviously that is my objection. Do you really think a bootlicking aggressive conformist would ever disagree with the way those in power abuse language? To repeat:
> The attempt to associate all sorts of other things with the term "conspiracy theory" is driven by a desire to get rid of any term for "two or more people working together to do something behind the scenes." If that is happening, they literally just don't want us to have a word that we can use to describe it. If "conspiracy theory" is reserved for a hundred different stigmatized and pathologized things, we just don't even have the language to describe that that is happening.
On 2: do you accept the existence of the Galactic Federation? If not, why not? The secret is out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haim_Eshed
Hard agree. Labeling something a "conspiracy theory" is just a political move to drive an uncertain claim out of the public discourse, while other equally uncertain claims are validated by "experts say this so shut up". There is uncertainty around a very wide range of claims, and no substitute for the ability to think for yourself.
There's a conspiracy theory community that holds conventions and stuff. There's clearly a great deal of overlap in believers and ideas between most conspiracy theories. It is a very visible cluster in belief-space.
With that said, I don't think arguing over whether specific ideas are conspiracy theories is fruitful, especially not when it devolves into technicalities. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
There's a number of clusters along mostly political lines, but they do connect
Scott used to wonder how to distinguish between "there's no evidence" qua "experts haven't investigated", vs "there's no evidence" qua "experts have investigated and determined it's wrong". "Conspiracy theory" seems to be an argument-from-authority which strongly suggests the latter.
I'd argue there is a somewhat natural category of conspiracy theories. They're theories that there's a large conspiracy of people who are doing something bad that at first glance you wouldn't realize is their doing. Usually the blame is put on certain groups like the masons, the Illuminati, the CIA, the US as a whole, or sometimes even a large and diverse demographic like Jews or Arabs. Some examples are "Bush did 9/11" or "HAARP causes earthquakes (on purpose)". Theories like these can sometimes be true, but often are only founded in paranoid fantasies.
Then there's the broader category of beliefs that go something like "X is true but academics, politicians and the media are deliberately covering it up". They do involve a conspiracy of sorts, because the clear truth of X is deliberately being kept from people by a conspiracy of experts. But the subject of the theory can be pretty much anything. Atlantis is one example. Sometimes these theories are straightforwardly wrong ("vaccines cause autism"). Sometimes there's a lot of conflicting evidence and it's hard to claim a deliberate cover-up ("glyphosate is dangerous"). And sometimes it's a sort of philosophical question that involves a lot of factors so there can't really be a "correct" answer even in principle ("everyone should go vegan"). And sometimes it's a factual question and the doubters are correct ("wmds in Iraq").
But it's true that "conspiracy theory" has become a bit of a swear word that you can apply to any science- or politics-related belief that you don't like. In any case, the P.C. word for it is "conspiracy myth" these days, because "theory" was seen as giving them too much credit.
That use of myth is funny, since that's another word they Orwelled - etymologically, "myth" simply refers to beliefs and stories that have been passed down over a long period of time, and in fact typically refers to things that "have a significant truth or meaning" according to Wiktionary.
Of course, contemporarily, myth is used as a synonym of "false belief," in an example of the same bit of linguistic trickery that happened to "conspiracy theory". If they can take a word describing a particular, distinct concept, and shift the meaning to "false, crazy thing," then they can propagate the belief that all examples of that particular original thing are false, without evidence ever coming in to the equation.
who are "they"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth#Definitions
Who knows. Maybe atheists, or that one other religion that tends to do this kind of stuff.
Sounds like "they" are a very niche group and wouldn't have much influence. So can we just ignore what "they" do or try to do?
I don't know what you're talking about - "they" literally rule all the world's major institutions.
I think essential part of conspiracy theory is a specific epistemology, where you assume that minority of evidence is more reliable than the majority of evidence.
The whole "conspiracy" part isn't about some people having an organisation or agreement to futher their goals in secret. It's about a group of people counterfeiting the majority of evidence. Big Pharma counterfeighted their trials of ivermectin, Zionist government hid the fact of its existence, Scientists deny the truth of flat earth to diminish Christianity, Archeologist frauded the evidence so that no-one new about Atlantis. The pattern is the same. You can't trust the established institutions because they are all in the evidence falsifying conspiracy, no matter how many good arguments they have. You can only trust the tiny minority of contarians, even if their evidence isn't very good.
I strongly agree. Maybe the label of "conspiracy theory" had some kind of independent value at one point, but it's used and abused as a means to shut down conversation or discredit theories too quickly to maintain a status as good heuristics in all cases.
Consider two examples - NASA faking the moon landing, and the CIA spending 20 years developing torture techniques for interrogation on unwilling US citizens. One of those is true, and it's not immediately obvious (if you don't already know any details) which one is harder to believe.
We know and have proof that conspiracies exist, and also that the government has repeatedly conspired against its own people in ways both illegal and nefarious. Given real history, I have a hard time taking "that's just a conspiracy theory" seriously at face value. Give me some detail, give me some reasons why we should consider it wrong.
"Conspiracy theory" is almost universally used as a term of art to refer to the false ones. To say something is a conspiracy theory is to say it is a claim to conspiracy that is unreasonable. That's why we don't ordinarily call Watergate a conspiracy theory even though it plainly involved a conspiracy.
I think almost by definition, we cannot know for sure that a conspiracy theory is false. We can only know for sure that it is true (because it is proven), but conspiracy theories cannot usually be disproved.
As far as whether a particular conspiracy is "unreasonable", the problem here is that history is chalk full of conspiracies that any reasonable person would consider unreasonable when they were happening, yet they later were proven to have happened.
I can't think of any great heuristic for asserting that a particular conspiracy is obviously wrong that, when back-tested against actual conspiracies, would correctly identify legitimate conspiracies and filter out only the bad ones.
MK Ultra (my example from above) would absolutely have been considered "unreasonable" at the time it was actually happening. It would have been labelled a "conspiracy theory" as a direct attempt to discredit it, probably by the CIA itself and likely by multiple other government organizations.
Jokes about "the CIA is listening to my conversations through my teeth" (there's a joke on a joke about it in a Futurama episode, but it used to be a pretty common trope) were a way to deflect criticism by mocking the idea that the CIA would be torturing US citizens - despite the fact that they actively were!
The point is that to claim something is a conspiracy theory is to claim that it is unreasonable to believe. A person can be wrong about this, but that's what the charge means. A literal reading of the term would lead you to think it is any assertion that a conspiracy has happened, but that's not what people mean by the term. Again, Watergate is not normally described as a conspiracy theory even though it involved a conspiracy in its most literal sense. A conspiracy theory is an explanation for event or situation that supposes it is the result of an implied or explicit agreement of people in positions of influence, usually for sinister motives, that is unreasonable to think. The term has evolved to have this meaning, and it rarely is used outside of this context.
Another person replied to this point by saying you can't ever really know if a conspiracy claim is false or unreasonable, but I just don't think that's an accurate understanding of how to be justified in a belief that a claim is wrong. If you instead argue, "People thought something was a conspiracy theory, but it turned out to be true" then I just read that as, "It turns out people are wrong sometimes!" And, well, yeah. That's true.
But then I'm not sure how much we've gained by labeling something a "conspiracy theory" (and presumably that it should be discredited) if we agree that people saying that can be wrong, including in some of the most egregious cases - like MK Ultra.
If we agree that a "conspiracy theory" can certainly still be correct, and that the proper course of action is to consider the evidence for and against, then why use a term often identified with an active attempt to discredit the theory?
We've gained a way to have a shorthand description of a particular kind of false theory that people can become attracted to. This is how it is generally used.
The term is associated with attempting to discredit a theory because the term is an expression that the theory is discredited. You should look at it, depending on context, as a warning, a dismissal, or a claim about a theory being dubious inviting further engagement. Your objection reduces into, "How can you call something wrong if it could be right?" and I'm not sure what to say to that beyond, "People sometimes make mistakes."
People don't really use "conspiracy theory" to describe conspiracies they believe are real unless they are being ironic or are acknowledging that most people think of their beliefs that way. Once you stop trying to read the term so literally, the normal intended meaning should be reasonably clear.