The vast, vast majority of yesterday's conspiracy theories remain just conspiracy theories, and the vast majority of today's likely will as well. I'd be perfectly comfortable having anything that looks like a conspiracy theory hidden, and if tomorrow it becomes a verified fact (with enough evidence having accumulated for it to get covered in a non-mocking way by NYT or NPR or whatever), to see it then. Occasionally it's possible I'd find out about a few true things later than everybody else, but it's not like the course of human events depends on my knowing things the moment they're knowable. I think I'd be fine.
> The vast, vast majority of yesterday's conspiracy theories remain just conspiracy theories, and the vast majority of today's likely will as well.
Maybe! You have no way of knowing which ones.
> I'd be perfectly comfortable having anything that looks like a conspiracy theory hidden
To rephrase: you'd be happy to have anything that makes you feel like it's a conspiracy theory hidden from view. A perfect way to guarantee confirmation bias.
I suggest the alternative approach: if you aren't willing to keep an open enough mind to consider new evidence that challenges your assumptions, don't have an opinion.
> with enough evidence having accumulated for it to get covered in a non-mocking way by NYT or NPR or whatever
As a side note: if you think this is an objective standard for reliable evidence, you're in over your head. Just judging based on their commentary concerning topics in which I am an expert, neither is a reliable source of "blind faith" information. Danger, Will Robinson.
The claim 'today's "conspiracy theory" is tomorrow's verified fact' implies that you do know, or at least think you do. Which is it, do you have evidence confirming specific conspiracies or not? You vacillate between jaded confidence and wide-eyed ignorance whenever it looks like it will score you a conversational point, with no consistent model of the world behind your words. No wonder, because the consistent model of the world that works is "the vast majority (but not all) conspiracy theories are false", and that's the model you've decided to pick a fight with for some reason. Naturally your first response to a challenge is to flip the table and throw all the evidence on the ground.
I am pretty confident in my ability to prove that the Earth is round. I have sufficient faith that politicians do not harvest blood from babies to perform magic rituals. Many others and I do have some way of knowing which conspiracy theories will never be proven true.
I happen to have a keen interest in how different people experience ideas like conspiracy theories and the unknown in general, so I am always on the lookout for it in discussions online or in meetups - it is uncanny how often the Earth being around is offered up when someone is challenged about the unknown, including people who have substantial backgrounds in science or philosophy. Very LLM-like.
Definitely, but I put this in the "listen to all sides and think for yourself" bucket, which is (sadly) not something most people are willing to do.
If we could just get people who aren't informed to recognize that they're not informed and not have an opinion, that would be a huge win for civil discourse.
I don't have time to listen to 1000 dumb ideas per day. I have a life to live. Also, I don't want my brain to get infected with whatever got Joe Rogan. I'm fine only caring about news after it's mainstream knowledge. Or even never; most news isn't worth the time it takes to consume it.
> Also, I don't want my brain to get infected with whatever got Joe Rogan.
If your brain is so fragile that it can't listen to some guy on a podcast without being "infected", then you're gonna have a hard time.
Again, I'm not suggesting blind faith in dumb ideas. I'm not suggesting that you have to be an expert on anything. I'm suggesting that you have the will to say "I am not fully informed" when you don't know the answer.
You already believe in hundreds of bad ideas and so do I. Feeding your brain bullshit reinforces bullshit output.
On top of that the only thing most of us can say about almost everything under your rules would answered with 'I am not fully informed', shit, humanity isn't fully informed on anything.
> On top of that the only thing most of us can say about almost everything under your rules would answered with 'I am not fully informed', shit, humanity isn't fully informed on anything.
Yes. Exactly.
I'm calling for more modesty, and less political vitriol driven by a fictional, exaggerated sense of certainty.
(Also, reinforcing that ideas cannot hurt you, which is an odd mental pathology that has become distressingly common as of late.)
> If we could just get people who aren't informed to recognize that they're not informed and not have an opinion, that would be a huge win for civil discourse.
I agree, but I think this falls into the category of "we've tried literally nothing and we're all out of ideas".
If someone is sitting on a pile of $, I think something quite effective (but oh, would it be controversial) could be built.
> I'm suggesting that you have the will to say "I am not fully informed" when you don't know the answer.
"The spirit (will) is willing (well, sometimes) but the flesh is weak". Free will, heuristics, and consciousness/reality are extremely complex topics. I believe very strongly that modern day people have this ability in similar quantities to the ability of people from 50 years ago to not be racist. It is innate, second nature, System 1, outside their control.
From below:
>> Eventually you have to trust someone with something.
You have to. While this is not logically, physically, necessarily true, I think this is literally true for most people, as a consequence of the evolved nature of consciousness, combined with culturally-ingrained norms, one of which is whether philosophy was a part of the educational curriculum one was exposed to... And even then, how good one is at it, in fact (which is typically inaccessible, thus imagined/simulated).
Another:
>> To you, the danger is not knowing that there are, in fact, lizard people controlling the government. To me, the danger is in ending up spending my free time poring over fringe lizard-people Twitter.
Also simulated. Sure, it's "just snark", "speaking colloquially", {excuse du jour}, but I wonder if the mind atrophies with lack of use like muscles do.
A problem: this is a razor that is useful for approximating what one believes to be true, it is not proper, strict epistemology.
Also: it only yields belief, not truth, because it doesn't even try for truth - rather, it advises against doing that.
Would be interesting to see what Carl would say in this context, as I presume he meant it in the context of science/physics, not metaphysics.
I have arguments now and then with people on Carl Sagan videos on tiktok, and it is eye opening how many science fans are utterly incompetent when it comes to epistemology and logic. With just a tiny bit of abstraction (removing the object level specifics of the claim), they are indistinguishable from religious fundamentalists in their confident incorrectness / epistemic-unsoundness.
An extremely interesting and complex discussion could be had about the merits of that advice.
In a perfect world, it would be fine, since science is highly trustworthy. Unfortunately, the world we live in is far from perfect, making it far less easy to determine how optimal the approach is.
And ironically, you would think that science minded people would understand and appreciate these complexities and their legitimate importance, however in my experience they tend to be the ones most averse to them.
"Which ones are true" is far less relevant to my life than "which ones are relevant".
I simply have no use for the information about who blew up the Nord pipeline, or how covid started. I'll evaluate claims affecting issues relevant to my life.
The controversy of conspiracy theories is extremely powerful and is a distraction I choose to ignore, without evidence of contextual relevance that outweighs the low confidence in the evidence for the claim.
> if you think this is an objective standard for reliable evidence, you're in over your head
I don't, and I'm well aware of Gell-Mann amnesia, but I'm also not going to personally interview every witness of every event, or personally become an expert in every subject so as to be able to independently have a well-informed opinion about all of them. I accept that this means that sometimes I will not be perfectly informed, but even if it were possible to do all those things (and it isn't), it's not the way I would choose to spend my life. There are other ways to spend my time that I find more fulfilling, and I accept that that means outsourcing the work fact-finding to people who do it for a living, even if I know they're imperfect, and even if I know that at least in certain domains, I might be able to do it better if I tried.
> Danger, Will Robinson
To you, the danger is not knowing that there are, in fact, lizard people controlling the government. To me, the danger is in ending up spending my free time poring over fringe lizard-people Twitter. Personally I'm perfectly willing to accept the former danger to avoid the latter. I think we just have different priorities.
I was just browsing your site a few days ago; did you just push a UI update? It looks a lot better and is a lot more relaxing on the eyes (eye strain) that it was before. Looks great.
Is it not difficult to know whether a conspiracy theory ends up being a conspiracy or on the other hand a belief ending up being an actual conspiracy and the only tool to suss things out is the passage of time? We will likely not have certainty on the JFK assassination, unless the remaining sealed docs have relevant info.
Not all journalism is created equal. I've found that NYT's The Daily coverage of SVB has been rife with misinformation and editorialization. They picked a controversial narrative du jour and expected the listeners to be stupid enough to believe whatever lies or spin they say.
But basically, we cant be a truth telling machine. We can, however, filter out the obvious noise and hold our journalist partners accountable if we find issues with their reporting. We speak with every reporter who onboards to the site, and reach out when needed.
How will you try to find issues? Many claims are made and accepted as true in the media without any verifiable facts to back them up. There's an inherently political valence to which claims receive this treatment at every level (national, geopolitical, etc).
That claim itself sounds like it could use some verification to back it up.
That said, this is why we vet journalists as they come on. We cannot guarantee that no one will ever get something wrong, but we can limit how often it happens. On Twitter/HN/etc, anyone can post anything and face little to no consequences -- thats how trolling can happen. Journalists have bylines attached, and those mess ups can haunt them the rest of their careers. They don't want to get things wrong. We don't want them to get things wrong either. And if something is wrong, then we put out a correction.
I personally don't think a journalist is "held accountable" if all that's being done is an email to them asking for a correction or clarification in an article.
Generally, corrections and retractions are the responsibility of the editor, not the individual journalist (of course, the editor can delegate the work, but they're still responsible for it). The mechanism and its working is pretty well established, by now.
We have not; though I believe they take a little more of a position than we're comfortable with -- we're looking for straight reporting, without opinion.
> today's "conspiracy theory" is tomorrow's verified fact.
How many tomorrows will we be waiting through to finally verify that the moon landing was faked, that the UN has a plan to invade the US using black helicopters, we're all being poisoned/mind-controlled by chemtrails, deepwater horizon was a false flag operation by environmental activists, Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and Sandy Hook was invented and staged by crisis actors?
> "conspiracy theory" has always been a term of propaganda and rhetoric
"Conspiracy theory" as a label has a substantial meaning. They usually require the existence of hidden powers, thrive on being outside/rhetorically above the mainstream, resist falsification ("the lack of evidence is exactly what we'd expect if powerful people were covering it up!").
The label can be used in bad faith, but so can names for rhetorical fallacies.
> There is no button for bypassing the noise of human civilization and remaining above the fray.
But there is. Everyone is driven by risk and reward, you get a pretty good idea of what is true and what isn't if you are able to objectively overlook a person or organization's motives and what they have to gain from saying something and what they might lose if they are fudging the truth.
For example: What did the WHO have to gain or lose from taking China at their word on how Covid-19 didn't come from Wuhan early on in the pandemic? Oh, they would've lost the cooperation of the largest country by population, and without them, the WHO basically becomes irrelevant since you lose the ability to coordination disease responses with 1/7th of the world's population.
I wasn't talking about the origin of Covid in particular; there are plenty of other examples of "facts" that turned out to not be facts in the past few years. The entire meme of "fake news" is a parasitic mind-worm that didn't exist before 2015 or so.
But thank you for illustrating my point, however indirectly: the non-natural origin of Covid was a conspiracy theory, and is now just a politically flavored debate.
'Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you remember that?'
Can you give some of the other examples? The only ones I can think of are COVID related and even then there were also plenty of COVID conspiracies that were "facts" and not facts.
When it comes to war, the default assumption of citizens of ANY country is that their government is withholding vital information which would make them not support the war. Either they are outright lying (WMDs in Iraq) or hiding information (Secret War in Laos, the Iran-Contra Affair, the US placing nuclear
missiles against USSR in Turkey, or secret operations designed to draw another country into a war).
Years later they will declassify it and be proud of their choices, not even regretting the millions of people who died as a result.
Often if there is a proxy war somewhere, it was because the KGB or CIA was involved in instigating it.
So when we are told that we are simply “arming moderate rebels in Syria”, that is not much different than Russia saying they are “supporting the separatists in Donetsk” since 2014. They empower mostly terrorists and exacerbate conflicts that would have otherwise been resolved if US or Russian weapons weren’t used by the separatists / terrorists.
Same with Saudi and Iranian government in the Yemen civil war. A popular revolution (Arab spring) to overthrow some hated government sounds like a great achievement until larger powers get involved and arm the counterrevolutionaries against the revolutionaries leading to a bloody civil war. In Russia this happened after the Bolsheviks took power - with 20 million dead.
So when you read about the war in Ukraine, say, your default assumption can be that you are being told only enough to support the war as the current administration wants you to, and all dissent would be forcefully suppressed. In 8 years expect to finally learn what the CIA has done, because at that point they could declassify the full extent of it:
Ukraine, like Syria, was a theater for a proxy war between USA (wanting to fully surround and tame Russia) and Russia (wanting to maintain its influence in its own neighbors just as China and USA want to do). I would not be surprised at all if it involved covert arming and training of “not so moderate” people on all sides. Very likely the uprisings in Belarus and Kazakhstan in 2021 had elements of spy agencies fomenting revolutions to do regime change there and see what can happen.
The Russians do it far less stealthily (Strelkov and Motorola) than the CIA. But they have gotten better at it … just in the last few months the resignations of governments in Slovakia and Moldova (that get hardly reported in the West) have me suspecting strongly that Russian saboteurs have tried to foment revolution there to overthrow pro-Western governments, just as USA did the other way in Ukraine.
Iraq WMD[0] were moved from Iraq to Syria by air bridge[1], where they are used frequently[2].
USA spent lot of effort to strip Ukraine from nuclear weapons and other military tech which can be used to harm USA, see Budapest memorandum. Just year ago, USA predicted that Ukraine will fall in two weeks, but Ukraine refused to comply with that.
You're right. Both USA and Russia had terribly miscalculated, while they were both arming terrorists and ramping up the proxy war in Ukraine.
If Russia attacked Ukraine's capital the way USA attacked Iraq and other countries ("shock and awe" and carpet bombing) then yes they would have surrendered. Russia did this in Syria (Aleppo, Homs) and Chechnya (Grozny) where the entire city was razed to the ground. There, they were fighting anti-government forces, and just like in Afghanistan etc. they were very brutal.
It had all the same elements: NATO welcoming Georgia, two breakaway republics who wanted independence, Russia intervening on their behalf, Russia sending a slow-moving convoy of tanks to the capitol to intimidate them and force them to agree to stop shelling these breakaway regions forever. (Russia of course would station peacekeepers there to make sure of that, and also to protect their black sea fleet / military interests).
The difference is, in that war, they reached an agreement in a week, and the war was over. Nicolas Sarkozy helped make that happen.
This time around, Ukraine was too far into NATO + CIA arming and training their army and irregulars (far-right batallions) all over the country, for it to have ended that way. Russia had hoped that it would all be over by the time the tanks reached Kyiv. But that never happened.
Here is a lot of evidence for this:
1) Russia already had done this exact thing with Georgia. It's more reasonable to expect them to want to do the same thing and expect a similar result. After the agreement, Russia never went further to take over all of Georgia nor since 2008 went beyond stationing peacekeepers in the breakaway republics, so all the breathless claims that if peace agreement is reached, Russia will continue invading Europe, seem to be totally contradicted in the case of Georgia.
2) All military experts were baffled why Russia didn't use its air superiority to decisively win in a few days
They badly miscalculated, yes, but even if they hadn't -- doing a Desert Storm was never an option. Two primary reasons.
If Russia attacked Ukraine's capital the way USA attacked
Iraq and other countries ("shock and awe" and carpet
bombing) then yes they would have surrendered.
One: Russia never had the option of carrying out that sort of attack because they have repeatedly demonstrated that their military isn't capable of carrying out those sorts of ultra high tempo, synchronized, combined arms operations. Russia has some modern toys, but their ability to actually conduct a war is essentially WWII (if not WWI) era attacks with artillery and human waves.
Two: Anti-tank and anti-aircraft defenses are more potent and more plentiful than they were in the conflicts you named. I'm not even sure that the US could pull a Desert Storm these days in an era of S300/S400 air defenses and anti-tank Javelins.
This time around, Ukraine was too far into NATO + CIA arming
and training their army and irregulars (far-right batallions)
all over the country, for it to have ended that way. Russia
had hoped that it would all be over by the time the tanks
reached Kyiv. But that never happened.
I don't know that we need conspiracy thinking here. After Georgia and Crimea it wasn't exactly rocket science to see that Putin was going to keep snatching up territory every few years. Yes, NATO attempted appeasement in the past... it clearly. did. not. work.
NATO needed to draw a line in the sand, and Ukraine was willing to fight.
I'm also curious about this statement:
Both USA and Russia had terribly miscalculated
How has the USA miscalculated? They have a partner in Ukraine who is willing to fight like a demon to hold back Putin and dissuade him from attempting more of this in the future. All NATO has to do is send toys and money. The strategic value NATO is getting here is tremendous, and most of the world seems to think that stopping Putin is a just cause.
All military experts were baffled why Russia didn't use its air
superiority to decisively win in a few days
Really? Not the ones I follow. This is pretty cut and dried. Air superiority against Ukraine's air defenses would require some really hellacious SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses) operations and a willingness to sustain some shocking and expensive (by modern standards) losses of fighter aircraft.
Russia has the ability to do neither of those things. They don't have stealthy aircraft, they don't have a lot of aircraft in general, and they can't afford those losses. I'm actually surprised that anybody would be surprised.
They clearly miscalculated since they thought Ukraine would surrender in days, and offered Zelensky a plane to fly out of there. They had expected to sacrifice the Ukrainian people by waging a years-long guerilla war arming neo-nazi groups with stingers and so on, just as they did the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Just for reference 2 million civilians died in the Afghan war we perpetuated just to stick it to the Soviets and “make them bleed for as long and as hard as possible”.
Whenever governments try to force others, it backfires:
1) Ukraine tried to force Donetsk and Luhansk to submit, bombed them and didn’t want to give them autonomy. Russia got involved and now Ukraine is in much worse shape.
2) Russia tried to force Ukraine to submit, stop bombing Donetsk and not join NATO. They rolled in with tanks, but USA and NATO got involved, and now Russia is stuck in a quagmire and is economically isolated from the West. Putin got the very NATO unity and expansion he feared.
3) The USA tried to force Europe and the rest of the world to sanction Russia “or else” economically, even (likely) blew up the gas pipelines so there would be no temptation to renew relations with Russia. Now US dollar hegemony is increasingly under threat, and going down from its peak. USA gets the very exodus from the dollar that it feared.
BRICS is an expanding economic alliance against USA just like NATO is a military alliance against Russia (and soon, QUAD will be a military alliance against China).
China is taking a leadership position in the world, it will likele reconcile Saudi Arabia and Iran (sunnis and shiites), end the war in Yemen, and take them both into BRICS. It will own the Middle East. BRICS already rivals G7 in economic size and far exceeds it in population but they are now working on bilateral trade and a basket of currencies to exit US dollar.
That means all that free stuff from abroad will be coming to an end and the dollar’s purchssing power will be lower, and less H1B visa scientists coming to boost our ranks.
It always backfires when you try to push people around. Better to simply listen to them and care about their issues.
They clearly miscalculated since they thought Ukraine
would surrender in days, and offered Zelensky a plane
to fly out of there
That's a contingency plan, not a miscalculation. Of course it makes sense to be prepared for as many possible outcomes as possible.
If Zelensky was willing to fight, we were ready to arm him. If Zelensky was not willing to fight, we were willing to offer him safety because he would be much more useful in American hands than Russian ones, and we would have armed insurgents.
To call this a "miscalculation" makes about as much sense as calling it a "miscalculation" to have fire extinguishers in your house if a fire never actually occurs.
They had expected to sacrifice the Ukrainian people
"Sacrificing" implies we're merely using them. This is a mutual arrangement. Nobody is forcing Ukraine to fight. They are willing, and we are arming and assisting them. No, it's not idealistic altruism but we share common goals.
It always backfires when you try to push people around.
Better to simply listen to them and care about their issues.
I don't disagree with the second half of your post, but it's a massive non-sequitur. Nobody is pushing Ukraine into fighting.
You logic is hard to follow. Can you explain why Ukraine suddenly invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, started to bomb Ukrainian cities and how Russia was involved into all that?
A politically charged example would be the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Supposedly it was a conspiracy theory too dangerous to even share … when in actuality it was legitimately his laptop. It was an unprecedented use of censorship that failed spectacularly.
This one is a real oddity-- in some context he said it wasn't his laptop, on the other hand he is suing the the guy for violating his privacy --which is plausible if say someone hacked into his actual laptop and stole his emails and photos and stored them on this laptop... but then people were claiming the emails were fake --and we had like 100 ex-intel saying it was Russian disinfo... and of course they now are backpedaling.
Normal people don’t care about the laptop story. They don’t care if he goes to prison or not. It’s not relevant to almost anyone.
Then Joe candidly spoke about his fucked up son — everyone cares about that. Eventually we all know or knew someone that can’t seem to get it together, often someone we love. I doubt US presidents are capable of love, that was probably as close as we’ll get. Meanwhile, anyone talking about the story after that starts to look like a monster.
Charge the guy, don’t charge him, who cares? I’m sure if there are solid charges a US Attorney will prosecute. There are 94 of them and Biden has only nominated 70, plenty left over from last admin to pursue it if they want (plus the 2 years they’ve had since the election).
Normal people don’t care, they are busy trying to survive and a brand new marker would run out of ink before you could draw a line from “president’s quiet failson” back to their life.
I used this politically inflammatory story because it was an example of the platforms literally censoring news. How is that not relevant to the discussion at hand? I didn’t mention “normal people” or if they should care about it, that’s orthogonal to the topic.
If normal people don’t care then why did 100 ex-intel guys bother to write an article claiming it was Russian disinformation at the risk of influencing a national election and ironically then actually influencing said election which they claimed was trying to be influenced by the Russkies?
By this logic, the WHO is permanently beholden (like: gun to the head) to China and India for exactly your rules. I don't agree. The mainland Chinese gov't did not cooperate. The world survived (mostly) due to excellent science (new vaccines).
> today's "conspiracy theory" is tomorrow's verified fact
Most popular conspiracy theories remain just that, if not provably false. Horrible events do not compute for most, and they reach for alternate answers.
> Conspiracy theories offer easy answers by casting the world as simpler and more predictable than it is. Their popularity may pose a threat to societal well-being.
> In fact (pun not intended), "conspiracy theory" has always been a term of propaganda and rhetoric.
Wow, just wow. I'm not sure if it is even possible to be more wrong about something than you are about this.
That vast majority of conspiracy theories remain exactly the type of garbage they started out as. I can't even imagine how you could come the position that they are some sort of billboard of truth, ignored by the masses. I mean you literally embedded a conspiracy theory into your stance that anybody who argues against a conspiracy theory(which is evidentially truth by definition) is one who is attempting to suppress the truth.
