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Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

nytimes.com

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Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

#21

Post by vy8vWJlco »

jpatokal wrote: post #19
vy8vWJlco wrote: post #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 Yo…

Did you just try to discredit an article about conspiracy theories by alleging that the article is in fact part of another conspiracy theory? I think you just proved the article's point.

Self-promotion is hardly a conspiracy (unless you can have a conspiracy of one, from a simple conflict of interest... namely in the form of: "alternative narratives are bad," says the author, quoting on behalf of a well-established narrative).

Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

#23

Post by mpyne »

vy8vWJlco wrote: post #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 Yo…

"Tribalism" is not incorrect though. You mention Bradley Manning in hacktivist circles and they'll nearly unanimously tell you that man is a hero who didn't do anything wrong at all.

And then Snowden comes in and goes out of his way to mention in his interview that, 'oh by the way, I carefully chose specific things to leak as I didn't want to risk national security, I just want to help my country'. Gee, who does that sound different from?

But it won't matter that Snowden has chided Manning, because Manning is part of the tribe, and it's not enough that the tribe upholds his principles (which they surely share), but the tribe must also uphold all his actions.

I grew up for years only seeing this kind of tribalism amongst the GOP supporters (the types who idolized Rush Limbaugh despite his divorces and drug use, or claimed that waterboarding is OK because Ashcroft said so). It's quite disappointing to have seen that become such an issue outside of the GOP as well.

Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

#24

Post by LowKarmaAccount »

There are some theories that fall into a third category of "unlikely, hard to prove, probably false but intensely fascinating." A good example is Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind [1], which Richard Dawkins describes as:

"A book that is as strange as its title suggests. It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets."[2]

By the way, the Wikipedia page about Jaynes' book uses part of that quotation, but cuts off the last sentence.

Dawkins provides a good summary of the book:

"Jaynes notes that many people perceive their own thought processes as a kind of dialogue between the 'self and another internal protagonist inside the head. Nowadays we understand that both 'voices' are our own - or if we don't we are treated as mentally ill...

"Jaynes's suggestion is that some time before 1000 BC people in general were unaware that the second voice - the Gilbert Pinfold voice - came from within themselves. They thought the Pinfold voice was a god: Apollo, say, or Astarte or Yahweh or, more probably, a minor household god, offering them advice or orders. Jaynes even located the voices of the gods in the opposite hemisphere of the brain from the one that controls audible speech. The 'breakdown of the bicameral' mind was, for Jaynes, a historical transition. It was the moment in history when it dawned on people that the external voices that they seemed to be hearing were really internal. Jaynes even goes so far as to define this historical transition as the dawning of human consciousness. There is an ancient Egyptian inscription about the creator god Ptah, which describes the various other gods as variations of Ptah's 'voice' or 'tongue'. Modern translations reject the literal 'voice' and interpret the other gods as 'objectified conceptions of [Ptah's] mind'. Jaynes dismisses such educated readings, preferring to take the literal meaning seriously. The gods were hallucinated voices, speaking inside people's heads. Jaynes further suggests that such gods evolved from memories of dead kings, who still, in a manner of speaking, retained control over their subjects via imagined voices in their heads. [2]

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicamer...

[2]: http://books.google.com/books?id=yq1xDpicghkC&printsec=front... (page 392)

Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

#26

Post by mpyne »

LowKarmaAccount wrote: post #24

There are some theories that fall into a third category of "unlikely, hard to prove, probably false but intensely fascinating." A good example is Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind [1], which Richard Dawkins describes as: "A book that is as strange as its title suggests. It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in…

Thanks so much for linking that... I think my own head just exploded from considering what you just wrote.

Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

#27

Post by mpyne »

Afforess wrote: post #20
danso wrote: post #8

I'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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

Isn't that just as bad as someone who is naively trusting of every conspiracy theory they hear?

Well, it would certainly at least make a better fitness function for a genetic algorithm.

Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

#28

Post by moens »

etherael wrote: post #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. The more amazing thing is how many people believe that any content published in the NYT/MSM is largely true and unbiased.

Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

#29

Post by ecmendenhall »

I wrote my undergrad thesis on conspiracy theories (in Turkish politics)[1], but it includes a section reviewing academic literature on conspiracy theories and a lot of resources in the bibliography.

Karl Popper wrote briefly about conspiracy theories in "Open Society and its Enemies."[2] It was part of a larger argument about emergent vs. planned orders, but I think it's a very good point: many conspiracy theories arise "from the mistaken theory that, whatever happens in society – especially happenings such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike – is the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups." It's simply hard for us to accept that improbable, harmful events are the result of lots of unplanned actions rather than one malevolent design.

[1]: http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/14... [2]: http://ovo127.com/2011/01/24/sir-karl-popper-the-conspiracy-...

Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

#30

Post by pessimizer »

mpyne wrote: post #23
vy8vWJlco wrote: post #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 Yo…

"Tribalism" is not incorrect though. You mention Bradley Manning in hacktivist circles and they'll nearly unanimously tell you that man is a hero who didn't do anything wrong at all. And then Snowden comes in and goes out of his way to mention in his interview that, 'oh by the way, I carefully chose specific things to leak as I didn't want to risk national security, I just want to help my country'. Gee, who does that…

A lot of people prefer indiscriminate leaking, and feel that any national security cost is worth it. Just because Snowden thinks of it differently doesn't mean that we now all have to think of leaking that way - that's tribal.
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