Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
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Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#2FTA: "Kathryn Olmsted, a historian at the University of California, Davis, says that conspiracy theories wouldn’t exist in a world in which real conspiracies don’t exist. And those conspiracies — Watergate or the Iran-contra Affair — often involve manipulating and circumventing the democratic process."
So the answer to the question "Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories" is "because sometimes they are true."
FTA: "if you think one of the theories above is plausible, you probably feel the same way about the others, even though they contradict one another. "
FTA: "“The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories,” says Viren Swami, a psychology professor who studies conspiracy belief at the University of Westminster in England."
Note how we suddenly switched from discussing people who think a theory is "plausible" to "belief". There are certainly nutjobs who swallow implausible theories whole. These people are not rational. Those who commit the crime of conspiracy would love to tar those rational people who find such theories plausible with the same brush.
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#3FTA: "Kathryn Olmsted, a historian at the University of California, Davis, says that conspiracy theories wouldn’t exist in a world in which real conspiracies don’t exist. And those conspiracies — Watergate or the Iran-contra Affair — often involve manipulating and circumventing the democratic process." So the answer to the question "Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories" is "because sometimes they are true…
One thing I find interesting about many conspiracy theories is that they are effectively true, even when the conspiracy is false. Many seem to involve not a group of cohorts acting in agreement but a group of influential people with aligned interest acting independently.
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#4> But recent scientific research tells us this much: if you think one of the theories above is plausible, you probably feel the same way about the others, even though they contradict one another
Believing a thing is plausible doesn't necessarily mean believing it is actually true, ergo there's no contradiction in believing many contradictory things are "plausible" until the question is properly settled.
I always see this kind of shit from mainstream propaganda trying to ram home the party line and paint dissent as somewhere between crazy and eccentric, it's getting really old.
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#5The one thing about conspiracies I always consider is the number of complicit persons involved.
Take, for instance, "9/11 was an inside job". People were really taken off planes somewhere, then the planes where remote controlled, a missile hit the pentagon not a plane, demolition charges were set in the buildings, etc...
The man power needed to pull that off greatly exceeds the number of people willing to kill their own countrymen for money, political zeal, or fear.
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#6Ah, just on time... Another, "If you don't think like we do, you're insane" article from the greatest evidence of modern journalistic decline we have before us, The New York Times.
Begin the shift towards painting opponents of PRISM as conspiracy theorists. Oh, and I read in the NYTimes that conspiracy theorists are really suffering from personality disorders. It's in the DSM6!
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#7The one thing about conspiracies I always consider is the number of complicit persons involved. Take, for instance, "9/11 was an inside job". People were really taken off planes somewhere, then the planes where remote controlled, a missile hit the pentagon not a plane, demolition charges were set in the buildings, etc... The man power needed to pull that off greatly exceeds the number of people willing to kill their…
Lol. It's not like you're going to tell the cogs what the machine is up to.
>The one thing about conspiracies I always consider is the number of complicit persons involved.
Yeah, this is like the ground level of thought on these topics. Let's not turn our backs red.
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#8I'd like to think of myself as thinking rationality, but I think my unerring faith in Hanlon's Razor causes me to be reflexively skeptical of all conspiracies.
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#9Fact: Nobody has ever conspired to do anything, ever.
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#10"Confirmation bias - the tendency to pay more attention to evidence that supports what you already believe - is a well-documented and common human failing."
... Search bubbling doesn't help.
"Not only does more exposure to these alternative narratives help engender belief in conspiracies, he says, but the Internet's tendency toward tribalism helps reinforce misguided beliefs."
... In other words, just read the New York Times (or BoingBoing, since it's Maggie Koerth-Baker) and ignore everything else.
Edit: Oh, and the Alex Jones reference at the end is a nice ad hominem too - as long as we're counting logical fallacies - since nothing he has ever cited could possibly be accurate because: blow-hard, and conspiracy. Also: creationism, because: complicated!