The timing of this article, especially given the tone of NYTimes' coverage of the PRISM event, is highly suspect.
/tinfoil
Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
41–50 of 58 posts
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#42Ah, 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!
Isn't NYT a quasi-PR-department of US government? See Judith Miller. Expect more damage control articles from NYT on the current fiasco.
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#432010 Conspiracy Theory: The US government is intercepting every online and cellular communication of it's citizens.
2013: Conspiracy Fact: The US government is intercepting every online and cellular communication of it's citizens.
Sometimes theories prove to be true.
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#44I 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 a…
It's an extension of the Animistic Fallacy[1].
Flash of lightning, rumbling thunder: Zeus threw a thunderbolt. Same thing scaled up -- we look for one or a few humans causing events.
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#45"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…
>'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'
That's an interesting quote from him, seeing as he has apparently provided thousands of documents to Greenwald:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/us/how-edward-j-snowden-or...
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
One has to question why belief in superstitions is so universal across human cultures to begin with, don't be so quick to dismiss it as reducing your fitness. People did not have a logical understanding of why something like a rat king[1] was bad, or that lighting three cigarettes with one match was bad[2], but through the lens of superstition and "knowing" something bad would happen even without any higher understanding, it may have saved them.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_king_(folklore)
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_on_a_match_(superstition)
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#47I 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 a…
To me it seems like this can also cut the other way, with some people assigning any positive results to the efforts of powerful people with whom they agree.
An example is the belief that economic growth results directly from government policy and actions. This is true to some extent, in that the government must enforce fair dealing. But we learned in the 20th century that economies that are too centrally directed will fall behind those that allow emergent behavior in an open marketplace.
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#48People are starting to wake up and question our truth, better shame them into submission again! Tinfoil hats for everyone!
(Reposted to bypass censorship. How ironic!)
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#49I have my own pet conspiracy theory and that is that the people (I don't know who, the usual conspirators?) are creating crazier and crazier conspiracy theories to discredit the declining percentage of conspiracy theories which are actually true. For example, there is a conspiracy theory that CIA knew about 9/11 to some detail and just decided to let it happen, which may hold some merit (i.e. while crazy it's the least crazy) and doesn't require thousands of people keeping a secret. And then there are the others - it was a controlled demolition, the plane didn't even hit the buildings, it had a massive bomb on its underbelly and even more unbelievable crazy stuff
Re: Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
#50The 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…
You're trying to answer the wrong questions instead of asking the right ones. The absence of answers to good questions says a lot more than half-assed answers to the wrong questions.
I don't profess to know what happened on 9/11. But if you ask the right questions, what we've been fed as the official theory comes out as an almost laughable story.
You might ask yourself why we as a society started a witch-hunt for those that try to find the truth behind it all. We blindly "supported" two or three wars and all the measures that were taken under the guise of security. We were OK with people being kidnapped, tortured, and held prisoner for a decade without any evidence. And nobody even knows why.
If you really put your teeth in these so called conspiracy theories, then one day you'll realize that the term becomes null and void, because it assumes that someone, or a group of people, actually knows what is up. Nobody does, we're just conditioned into taking anything our TV says at face value, so we assume "they" know. And why? For exactly the same reason you've mentioned, because we cannot accept that fact that something bad can go unnoticed and grow to something that big. So we get 2 nuanced stories from 4 TV-channels. Just enough to create the illusion that they're covering all the bases, while at the same time making us believe that we're forming our own and informed opinion by analysing all versions of the story.
But at this stage it is no longer a matter of people conspiring. The system has reached a state where it is normalcy. So, in places where it matters, only people that are already in the same mindset bubble up. Not because they are malicious or because someone has talked them into it, but because they're just a prime specimen of the environment they grew up in. It's a side-effect of a society that holds power and profit as its most important goal.
The reason a lot of people can not understand this is because they did not grow up in that same environment. So there is a disconnect between what we as a person believe we are capable of and what we're actually doing.