6 ms·

Time seems to have had a way of vindicating at least some tin foil hatters, yet people today are just as ready to dismiss as 'crazy conspiracy theory' any simil

by api 11y ago

Time seems to have had a way of vindicating at least some tin foil hatters, yet people today are just as ready to dismiss as 'crazy conspiracy theory' any similar extrapolations or speculations. If you strip off the really genuinely nutty stuff, quite a bit of what I remember reading nutters talk about on places like Usenet alt.conspiracy in the 1990s is now reality. Some of what's now reality would have made them blush. The conspiranoids would have called you crazy if you'd suggested that everyone would be carrying devices that constantly report their location at all times to central servers owned by closely state-connected corporations -- and that people would accept this willingly and even pay out of pocket for these devices themselves.

pdkl95 11y ago
> dismiss as 'crazy conspiracy theory' This is simply a current example of the political strategy known as the paranoid style. Just like the fear about "reds" in McCarthyism and various right-wing groups that used racial fears for political gain, there has been a very succcessful application of the paranoid style against the very idea of investigating the intelligence community. If you (or anybody else) haven't read it, I suggest reading the original essay[1] on the subject. It may be over 50 year old, but it is probably one of the more important essays for understanding the modern (~post-WW2) American politics and how "conspiracy theory" has been used as a way of rallying people against "the enemy". [1] http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/ http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-ame...
tedunangst 11y ago
> If you strip off the really genuinely nutty stuff, quite a bit of what I remember reading nutters talk about on places like Usenet alt.conspiracy in the 1990s is now reality. well, yeah. if you ignore all the crazy, what's left isn't crazy. why is that surprising? > The conspiranoids would have called you crazy if you'd suggested that everyone would be carrying devices that constantly report their location at all times would they? that seems like a pretty obvious consequence of carrying a cell phone. maybe my recollection is different, but i don't think people were saying "the government reads your email" was a crazy idea. they were saying "the government reads your email on their secret moon base staffed by hitler clones" was a crazy idea. if you want to make the argument that the hatters were right all along but were wrongly dismissed, find a specific claim that was made, and a specific counterclaim. these "right all along" discussions always slide into unfalsifiable generalities and strawmen.
- scintill76 11y ago
  > well, yeah. if you ignore all the crazy, what's left isn't crazy. why is that surprising? Come on, you gave an example of "really genuinely nutty stuff" yourself: '"the government reads your email on their secret moon base staffed by hitler clones"'. I'm not saying I agree with GP exactly, but you're strawmanning it into a tautology when you seem to know exactly what was really meant.
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    I am saying that theories without predictive power are generally worthless. (this is true in many fields.) it is not enough to be right all along. if you want to be credible, you need to avoid being wrong all along, too. real example. the theory that the NSA secretly poisoned the DES s-boxes to introduce a backdoor. People insisted that's what happened without any evidence. They were wrong all along. Later, when dual-EC came along, I think people were a little skeptical it was really a backdoor precisely because of the DES story.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- api 11y ago
  "if you ignore all the crazy, what's left isn't crazy." That's exactly what I'm saying. If you ignore all the crazy, the stuff that's left was stuff that almost nobody else was saying: that there was some kind of "conspiracy" to implement a total surveillance state (PRISM and friends, and location-aware phones), that in the future the middle class was going to be destroyed and the world enslaved to the service of a tiny elite (the "sharing economy" of non-employees with no benefits), fascism is coming back (too many examples to list), corporations with shadowy "deep state" links will rule the Earth (TPP), etc. Remember that this was in the post-cold-war 1990s when everything was getting better, a rising tide would lift all boats, and freedom was going to ring. This was before 9/11, the great housing hyperinflation, the 2008 crash and the great stagnation, or our experiment at bringing democracy to Iraq ended with ISIS. Polite establishment intellectuals weren't saying those things. Only crazies were, and the crazies were largely right. Maybe they were bat shit crazy about the underlying mechanisms, but they were right about where things were going. IMHO a lot of conspiracy nuts are actually very perceptive and intelligent. They've got good pattern recognition circuits going. The problem is that they've got poor epistemology. They're not very careful thinkers, and they're often a bit uneducated and inexperienced about how the world really works. As a result they tend to force-fit their observations and extrapolations onto silly cartoonish models of how the world works. The observations are correct, but the models are not. This is coupled with the fact that being loony outsiders, they have no reputation or political street cred to protect. They don't have to care about offending their superiors because they have none, and they aren't afraid of damaging their reputation because there's nowhere to go but up from 'fringe lunatic.' As a result, they can tell the truth insofar as they can point out trends nobody else wants to look at. According to Pravda grain production is only going up! Just replace the word "conspiracy" with "emergent behavior in a complex system" and re-read all that stuff. There is no Illuminati, but there is an "old boy network" where favors are traded for favors and corruption breeds. There is no New World Order per se, but there is a complex global economic system full of paradoxes and feedback loops and perverse incentives that behaves very much like one, and we do have corporations so big and complex and entrenched they're almost like a model of what a hostile AI would be like. Put these things together and you get everything the nutters write about minus the funny hats and secret societies. Then again... http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wall-street-secret-society.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wal...
dntrkv 11y ago
I know quite a bit of conspiracy nuts and I'm sure that some of the stuff they talk about may one day be revealed as true, but that doesn't mean that I will listen to 99% of their bullshit for 1% of potential truth. Throw enough mud at the wall...
geomark 11y ago
It seems to me that in today's environment with what we already know even using the term "conspiracy theory" marks you as a little bit naive.
krapp 11y ago
>people today are just as ready to dismiss as 'crazy conspiracy theory' any similar extrapolations or speculations. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary proof. No exceptions. Because 99% of the time, those extrapolations or speculations are exactly that - uninformed, paranoid fantasies without any grounding in reality. The ones who turn out to be right are inevitably drowned out by the ones who will believe any conspiracy so long as it seems paranoid enough, and given that signal to noise ratio, skepticism even in the face of vindication seems only right.
- ccvannorman 11y ago
  I predicted mass surveillance in 2008 and I am not known for jumping on board conspiracy theories. My reasons were that server infrastructure costs are getting lower while elites seek power to control others, and monitoring electronic things seemed like a natural conclusion to me. I was labeled a conspiracy theorist by my own family. Today, when I bring the Snowden revelations up with my family they say, "well duh, everybody knew that for many years" facepalm you just can't win. Everything at high levels is shit and corrupt and it will always be that way. Go make yourself a sandwich and be glad we aren't living in anarchy.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    > ...be glad we aren't living in anarchy. We aren't?
    - krapp 11y ago
      Haven't you been paying attention? We're living in a police state.
      - mirimir 11y ago
        Isn't that anarchy of a sort?
        krapp 11y ago
TeMPOraL 11y ago
There's conspiracy theory, and there's conspiracy theory. Nazi spacemen from the Moon are obviously bullshit, but there's a heuristic I found to be good at predicting the real stuff that most people still don't recognize and treat as conspiracy - namely, that with technology, if something is possible (i.e. not breaking the laws of physics) and would benefit a group with deep enough pockets, it will be done. So for example, is reading through most of the e-mail traffic possible? Yes, it is, there are ways to get this data in principle, and algorithms will help you in filtering. Is it useful for a government agency? Obviously. So it is most likely being done. Believing that before Snowden was not tinfoilhattery, it was accepting an obvious conclusion. Lo and behold, now we know for sure it happens. People still don't get it. I die a little inside every time I see someone genuinly surprised about side-channel attacks like timing, reading the screen from light reflected off a wall, reading keys by power analysis, reading keypresses from accelerometer, etc. It's obvious this can be done and will be done. Computers are not magic boxes, they're made of matter and obey the laws of physics. They interact with the world.
- a3n 11y ago
  Everything not impossible is inevitable.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I wouldn't go that far. You need both physical possibility and a good reason for doing something. Government dumping fake snow on Georgia is certainly possible, but much too expensive for no real reason whatsoever. Tapping all communications worldwide? Doable and there are parties with enough resources that would benefit greatly, so it's being done.
    - a3n 11y ago
      So a little poetic license, within the realm of reasonableness. :)

by api 11y ago

pdkl95 11y ago

> dismiss as 'crazy conspiracy theory' This is simply a current example of the political strategy known as the paranoid style. Just like the fear about "reds" in McCarthyism and various right-wing groups that used racial fears for political gain, there has been a very succcessful application of the paranoid style against the very idea of investigating the intelligence community. If you (or anybody else) haven't read it, I suggest reading the original essay[1] on the subject. It may be over 50 year old, but it is probably one of the more important essays for understanding the modern (~post-WW2) American politics and how "conspiracy theory" has been used as a way of rallying people against "the enemy". [1] http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/ http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-ame...

tedunangst 11y ago

> If you strip off the really genuinely nutty stuff, quite a bit of what I remember reading nutters talk about on places like Usenet alt.conspiracy in the 1990s is now reality. well, yeah. if you ignore all the crazy, what's left isn't crazy. why is that surprising? > The conspiranoids would have called you crazy if you'd suggested that everyone would be carrying devices that constantly report their location at all times would they? that seems like a pretty obvious consequence of carrying a cell phone. maybe my recollection is different, but i don't think people were saying "the government reads your email" was a crazy idea. they were saying "the government reads your email on their secret moon base staffed by hitler clones" was a crazy idea. if you want to make the argument that the hatters were right all along but were wrongly dismissed, find a specific claim that was made, and a specific counterclaim. these "right all along" discussions always slide into unfalsifiable generalities and strawmen.

scintill76 11y ago
> well, yeah. if you ignore all the crazy, what's left isn't crazy. why is that surprising? Come on, you gave an example of "really genuinely nutty stuff" yourself: '"the government reads your email on their secret moon base staffed by hitler clones"'. I'm not saying I agree with GP exactly, but you're strawmanning it into a tautology when you seem to know exactly what was really meant.
- tedunangst 11y ago
  I am saying that theories without predictive power are generally worthless. (this is true in many fields.) it is not enough to be right all along. if you want to be credible, you need to avoid being wrong all along, too. real example. the theory that the NSA secretly poisoned the DES s-boxes to introduce a backdoor. People insisted that's what happened without any evidence. They were wrong all along. Later, when dual-EC came along, I think people were a little skeptical it was really a backdoor precisely because of the DES story.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
api 11y ago
"if you ignore all the crazy, what's left isn't crazy." That's exactly what I'm saying. If you ignore all the crazy, the stuff that's left was stuff that almost nobody else was saying: that there was some kind of "conspiracy" to implement a total surveillance state (PRISM and friends, and location-aware phones), that in the future the middle class was going to be destroyed and the world enslaved to the service of a tiny elite (the "sharing economy" of non-employees with no benefits), fascism is coming back (too many examples to list), corporations with shadowy "deep state" links will rule the Earth (TPP), etc. Remember that this was in the post-cold-war 1990s when everything was getting better, a rising tide would lift all boats, and freedom was going to ring. This was before 9/11, the great housing hyperinflation, the 2008 crash and the great stagnation, or our experiment at bringing democracy to Iraq ended with ISIS. Polite establishment intellectuals weren't saying those things. Only crazies were, and the crazies were largely right. Maybe they were bat shit crazy about the underlying mechanisms, but they were right about where things were going. IMHO a lot of conspiracy nuts are actually very perceptive and intelligent. They've got good pattern recognition circuits going. The problem is that they've got poor epistemology. They're not very careful thinkers, and they're often a bit uneducated and inexperienced about how the world really works. As a result they tend to force-fit their observations and extrapolations onto silly cartoonish models of how the world works. The observations are correct, but the models are not. This is coupled with the fact that being loony outsiders, they have no reputation or political street cred to protect. They don't have to care about offending their superiors because they have none, and they aren't afraid of damaging their reputation because there's nowhere to go but up from 'fringe lunatic.' As a result, they can tell the truth insofar as they can point out trends nobody else wants to look at. According to Pravda grain production is only going up! Just replace the word "conspiracy" with "emergent behavior in a complex system" and re-read all that stuff. There is no Illuminati, but there is an "old boy network" where favors are traded for favors and corruption breeds. There is no New World Order per se, but there is a complex global economic system full of paradoxes and feedback loops and perverse incentives that behaves very much like one, and we do have corporations so big and complex and entrenched they're almost like a model of what a hostile AI would be like. Put these things together and you get everything the nutters write about minus the funny hats and secret societies. Then again... http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wall-street-secret-society.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wal...

dntrkv 11y ago

I know quite a bit of conspiracy nuts and I'm sure that some of the stuff they talk about may one day be revealed as true, but that doesn't mean that I will listen to 99% of their bullshit for 1% of potential truth. Throw enough mud at the wall...

geomark 11y ago

It seems to me that in today's environment with what we already know even using the term "conspiracy theory" marks you as a little bit naive.

krapp 11y ago

>people today are just as ready to dismiss as 'crazy conspiracy theory' any similar extrapolations or speculations. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary proof. No exceptions. Because 99% of the time, those extrapolations or speculations are exactly that - uninformed, paranoid fantasies without any grounding in reality. The ones who turn out to be right are inevitably drowned out by the ones who will believe any conspiracy so long as it seems paranoid enough, and given that signal to noise ratio, skepticism even in the face of vindication seems only right.

ccvannorman 11y ago
I predicted mass surveillance in 2008 and I am not known for jumping on board conspiracy theories. My reasons were that server infrastructure costs are getting lower while elites seek power to control others, and monitoring electronic things seemed like a natural conclusion to me. I was labeled a conspiracy theorist by my own family. Today, when I bring the Snowden revelations up with my family they say, "well duh, everybody knew that for many years" facepalm you just can't win. Everything at high levels is shit and corrupt and it will always be that way. Go make yourself a sandwich and be glad we aren't living in anarchy.
- mirimir 11y ago
  > ...be glad we aren't living in anarchy. We aren't?
  - krapp 11y ago
    Haven't you been paying attention? We're living in a police state.
    - mirimir 11y ago
      Isn't that anarchy of a sort?
      - krapp 11y ago

TeMPOraL 11y ago

There's conspiracy theory, and there's conspiracy theory. Nazi spacemen from the Moon are obviously bullshit, but there's a heuristic I found to be good at predicting the real stuff that most people still don't recognize and treat as conspiracy - namely, that with technology, if something is possible (i.e. not breaking the laws of physics) and would benefit a group with deep enough pockets, it will be done. So for example, is reading through most of the e-mail traffic possible? Yes, it is, there are ways to get this data in principle, and algorithms will help you in filtering. Is it useful for a government agency? Obviously. So it is most likely being done. Believing that before Snowden was not tinfoilhattery, it was accepting an obvious conclusion. Lo and behold, now we know for sure it happens. People still don't get it. I die a little inside every time I see someone genuinly surprised about side-channel attacks like timing, reading the screen from light reflected off a wall, reading keys by power analysis, reading keypresses from accelerometer, etc. It's obvious this can be done and will be done. Computers are not magic boxes, they're made of matter and obey the laws of physics. They interact with the world.

a3n 11y ago
Everything not impossible is inevitable.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I wouldn't go that far. You need both physical possibility and a good reason for doing something. Government dumping fake snow on Georgia is certainly possible, but much too expensive for no real reason whatsoever. Tapping all communications worldwide? Doable and there are parties with enough resources that would benefit greatly, so it's being done.
  - a3n 11y ago
    So a little poetic license, within the realm of reasonableness. :)