7 ms·

I lolled at the qualification of the conspiratorial bent arguments as fallacious. They clearly are not. Conspiracies happen and can take a long time to unwind.

by wjnc 8y ago

I lolled at the qualification of the conspiratorial bent arguments as fallacious. They clearly are not. Conspiracies happen and can take a long time to unwind. They should not make up the bulk of your argument and should not fuel a position without doubt, but they are not fallacious. Scientist make mistakes, take unwarranted positions and take bribes all the time. (I mean this across all fields not as any kind of direct accusation.) Some scepsis with any consensus is just smart logic.

nabla9 8y ago
Conspiratorial arguments have little no relation to actual real world conspiracies.
- williamdclt 8y ago
  I don't think we can make a generalization here, there's all kinds of conspiration theories and all kinds of conspiratorial arguments
  - tialaramex 8y ago
    The usual conspiracy theory invokes what is called a "Grand conspiracy" in which other investigations, prior thinking on the same subject, and contradicting evidence are all dismissed as part of the conspiracy. This is laughably implausible because it involves this vast co-ordinated effort, often for no discernible purpose except to prevent the theorist from being right about something. Actual secrets kept at some scale show the limits of what is possible, three of the best examples are from World War Two, a period that's near enough for us to have good records but distant enough that the secrets are long known to us. Ultra is the most obvious. "The ultra secret" was the fact that Allied codebreakers could read some (though not all, at various points in the war) Enigma and other encrypted messages sent via radio by the sprawling Axis forces. Only a few dozen key people knew this secret, but of necessity hundreds, perhaps around 1000 more had some limited insight because their work was connected with the breaking of German messages (e.g. Hut workers at Bletchley engaged in translating broken messages or finding "cribs"). You will find people from the latter group who believed Ultra was protected well into the late 20th century, but in fact it ceased even to be an official secret after 29 years, and by the 1970s BBC documentary editors felt comfortable assuming that a general audience would know about Ultra in the television adaptation of Jones' autobiography "Most Secret War". Second Manhattan. American development of a Nuclear Bomb could not of course be kept secret once the weapon had been used. But until then it was adequately guarded, there's no clear sign that Axis forces understood what the Americans were attempting or where. But lots of people tacitly knew about Manhattan, they just chose not to so anything until after the fact because "There's a secret military R&D base near where I live" is very obviously not something a patriotic person tells random strangers during a war... Thirdly the Normandy invasion. Again after the fact this secret could not be kept. Within hours of making landfall the German high command were aware that this was not, as they had initially believed, a feint, and that all available resources must be diverted to defend against it. But that was far too late. Still in the weeks, and especially days, prior to the actual invasion, it will have been apparent not only to the soldiers involved but to nearby civilians that a massive naval landing was to be attempted. It just wasn't possible to hide from the people of Southern England that there were shitloads of infantry and boats making ready to depart in the next few days. Again the secret didn't get out, for a very short time, because it will have been obvious to all who knew that this wasn't something you should tell the enemy about. Twenty Committee had successfully eliminated all German spies on the mainland (either turning them, imprisoning them, or as necessary killing them) so the only way for the secret to get out was for some idiot to tell the enemy themselves. So those help you judge rough scale for a conspiracy. If a hypothetical conspiracy seems _harder_ to keep than, say, Manhattan, yet it seems to need more people to keep the secret than, say, Normandy, and for them to keep it longer than, say, Ultra, all because otherwise they might get sued, rather than because Actual Nazis are going to invade their country, well that's clearly crazy.
    - bourgoin 8y ago
      I wonder if your proposed rough scale still applies in 2018. It was much more of an undertaking for 'some idiot' to tell the enemy themselves before social media. Today, I'm sure pictures of the D-Day boats in staging would be all over twitter within an hour - "anybody know what these are? just showed up in the harbour this morning." In the same vein, I find extraterrestrial UFO visitation harder and harder to believe with each year that passes without video evidence, now that everybody carries a powerful digital camera everywhere they go.
    - nabla9 8y ago
      Soviet intelligence knew about the Manhattan project in 1941, almost a year before The Manhattan Engineer District was created. FBI fought constant battle against Soviets infiltrators. Georgii Flerov (Soviet physicist) figured on his own that the US had a nuclear program in 1942 when he noticed that all publishing on the subject. And nobody cited his studies about fission of uranium. Manhattan project was so big that Germans could have figured it out from bits and pieces even with their ineffective intelligence, but they never put all the pieces in together. German intelligence officer came to Heisenberg at least three times and asked if it was possible that Americans were building an uranium bomb and he said no.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  Sure. The argument being debunked as "conspiratorial" isn't even really a conspiracy. Companies that pay for safety studies cause them to be biased. That objectively happens.
commandlinefan 8y ago
Well, remember, if the mainstream media isn't reporting on a particular conspiracy theory, that's evidence that it IS happening. Otherwise why would they be afraid to report it?
hodgesrm 8y ago
Sometimes there are conspiracies. But they are rare compared to simple incompetence. My objection to most conspiracy theories is that they skip over the null hypothesis, namely that one or more fallible humans screwed up.
schuyler2d 8y ago
I agree, and more so, it's something that most people feel more confident in assessing. Put yourself in the position of someone that genuinely doesn't trust themselves to assess scientific evidence. One scientist article says one thing one week another the next, and they all feel vaguely related and unrelated. If you can't trust yourself to weigh and understand the evidence yourself you instead look to the institutional pressures you think you understand. In all the topics there is a well-constructed 'Them' * GMOs: the FDA is largely controlled by the agriculture industry themselves, across parties and administrations. It's not irrational to fear that the FDA is not adequately regulating food. * Vaccines: similar fears about the pharmaceutical industry are valid. Both those industries have paid scientists, government regulators, and news organizations to spin data for their benefit and to avoid justice of different kinds. *Global warming: the same people that seem to be overly concerned about cute owls and monkeys are "the liberals" which control the universities/research. Sure smog is bad, but (as one Denver taxi driver said to me once) "it smells like money." Sure they mean well, but they are likely to blow the issues out of proportion. That's a system someone thinks they understand while who knows what an ice core really means. TFA indicated that avoiding indicating identity/allegiance might help, but I'd like to see that study actually done.
atq2119 8y ago
Not to mention that for two of the topics mentioned (vaccines and GMO foods), and notably the topic for which a quote of so-called "conspiratorial argument" was provided in the article, there's not just the issue of the scientific consensus but also of how the corresponding technology is applied in the real world. The highlighted argument about profit-seeking by companies is clearly a valid concern when it comes to how technologies are actually applied. It's why we have regulation and independent oversight bodies. (It's also unfair and misleading to call it a conspiratorial argument in the first place -- it's simply pointing out that an actor has financial interests and may therefore be biased, there's no conspiracy involved.) Maybe you'd want survey respondents to perfectly separate the concerns of applications vs. scientific consensus, but to be honest I think that's an unfair expectation.
repsilat 8y ago
Right. The article calls these things "fallacies", but that only strictly means that they're not slam-dunk arguments. Logical fallacies aren't necessarily bad heuristics, they just don't necessarily assure strict logical implication. (Often they are actually decent Bayesian "evidence", though I don't want to make that argument for the cases in TFA.)
- GauntletWizard 8y ago
  The Roman Trivium was Logic, Rhetoric, and grammar. Most of these arguments are logical fallacies - X does not guarantee Y - but are valid Rhetorical devices. Slippery slope is easiest to explain. If A, 90% chance of B, if B, 90% chance of C, if C, 90% chance of D. Therefore, if A, 73% of D - A implies D, if not perfectly. This is completely valid in Rhetoric, where you can't perfectly model anything, just approximate, but not logic, where truth or falsehood is digitized and binary. Most arguments that humans get into are rhetorical, but our focus on logic has left us vulnerable to misunderstanding. We are ignoring clear correlations because there's not a logical certainty.

by wjnc 8y ago

nabla9 8y ago

Conspiratorial arguments have little no relation to actual real world conspiracies.

williamdclt 8y ago
I don't think we can make a generalization here, there's all kinds of conspiration theories and all kinds of conspiratorial arguments
- tialaramex 8y ago
  The usual conspiracy theory invokes what is called a "Grand conspiracy" in which other investigations, prior thinking on the same subject, and contradicting evidence are all dismissed as part of the conspiracy. This is laughably implausible because it involves this vast co-ordinated effort, often for no discernible purpose except to prevent the theorist from being right about something. Actual secrets kept at some scale show the limits of what is possible, three of the best examples are from World War Two, a period that's near enough for us to have good records but distant enough that the secrets are long known to us. Ultra is the most obvious. "The ultra secret" was the fact that Allied codebreakers could read some (though not all, at various points in the war) Enigma and other encrypted messages sent via radio by the sprawling Axis forces. Only a few dozen key people knew this secret, but of necessity hundreds, perhaps around 1000 more had some limited insight because their work was connected with the breaking of German messages (e.g. Hut workers at Bletchley engaged in translating broken messages or finding "cribs"). You will find people from the latter group who believed Ultra was protected well into the late 20th century, but in fact it ceased even to be an official secret after 29 years, and by the 1970s BBC documentary editors felt comfortable assuming that a general audience would know about Ultra in the television adaptation of Jones' autobiography "Most Secret War". Second Manhattan. American development of a Nuclear Bomb could not of course be kept secret once the weapon had been used. But until then it was adequately guarded, there's no clear sign that Axis forces understood what the Americans were attempting or where. But lots of people tacitly knew about Manhattan, they just chose not to so anything until after the fact because "There's a secret military R&D base near where I live" is very obviously not something a patriotic person tells random strangers during a war... Thirdly the Normandy invasion. Again after the fact this secret could not be kept. Within hours of making landfall the German high command were aware that this was not, as they had initially believed, a feint, and that all available resources must be diverted to defend against it. But that was far too late. Still in the weeks, and especially days, prior to the actual invasion, it will have been apparent not only to the soldiers involved but to nearby civilians that a massive naval landing was to be attempted. It just wasn't possible to hide from the people of Southern England that there were shitloads of infantry and boats making ready to depart in the next few days. Again the secret didn't get out, for a very short time, because it will have been obvious to all who knew that this wasn't something you should tell the enemy about. Twenty Committee had successfully eliminated all German spies on the mainland (either turning them, imprisoning them, or as necessary killing them) so the only way for the secret to get out was for some idiot to tell the enemy themselves. So those help you judge rough scale for a conspiracy. If a hypothetical conspiracy seems _harder_ to keep than, say, Manhattan, yet it seems to need more people to keep the secret than, say, Normandy, and for them to keep it longer than, say, Ultra, all because otherwise they might get sued, rather than because Actual Nazis are going to invade their country, well that's clearly crazy.
  - bourgoin 8y ago
    I wonder if your proposed rough scale still applies in 2018. It was much more of an undertaking for 'some idiot' to tell the enemy themselves before social media. Today, I'm sure pictures of the D-Day boats in staging would be all over twitter within an hour - "anybody know what these are? just showed up in the harbour this morning." In the same vein, I find extraterrestrial UFO visitation harder and harder to believe with each year that passes without video evidence, now that everybody carries a powerful digital camera everywhere they go.
  - nabla9 8y ago
    Soviet intelligence knew about the Manhattan project in 1941, almost a year before The Manhattan Engineer District was created. FBI fought constant battle against Soviets infiltrators. Georgii Flerov (Soviet physicist) figured on his own that the US had a nuclear program in 1942 when he noticed that all publishing on the subject. And nobody cited his studies about fission of uranium. Manhattan project was so big that Germans could have figured it out from bits and pieces even with their ineffective intelligence, but they never put all the pieces in together. German intelligence officer came to Heisenberg at least three times and asked if it was possible that Americans were building an uranium bomb and he said no.
Dylan16807 8y ago
Sure. The argument being debunked as "conspiratorial" isn't even really a conspiracy. Companies that pay for safety studies cause them to be biased. That objectively happens.

commandlinefan 8y ago

Well, remember, if the mainstream media isn't reporting on a particular conspiracy theory, that's evidence that it IS happening. Otherwise why would they be afraid to report it?

hodgesrm 8y ago

Sometimes there are conspiracies. But they are rare compared to simple incompetence. My objection to most conspiracy theories is that they skip over the null hypothesis, namely that one or more fallible humans screwed up.

schuyler2d 8y ago

I agree, and more so, it's something that most people feel more confident in assessing. Put yourself in the position of someone that genuinely doesn't trust themselves to assess scientific evidence. One scientist article says one thing one week another the next, and they all feel vaguely related and unrelated. If you can't trust yourself to weigh and understand the evidence yourself you instead look to the institutional pressures you think you understand. In all the topics there is a well-constructed 'Them' * GMOs: the FDA is largely controlled by the agriculture industry themselves, across parties and administrations. It's not irrational to fear that the FDA is not adequately regulating food. * Vaccines: similar fears about the pharmaceutical industry are valid. Both those industries have paid scientists, government regulators, and news organizations to spin data for their benefit and to avoid justice of different kinds. *Global warming: the same people that seem to be overly concerned about cute owls and monkeys are "the liberals" which control the universities/research. Sure smog is bad, but (as one Denver taxi driver said to me once) "it smells like money." Sure they mean well, but they are likely to blow the issues out of proportion. That's a system someone thinks they understand while who knows what an ice core really means. TFA indicated that avoiding indicating identity/allegiance might help, but I'd like to see that study actually done.

atq2119 8y ago

Not to mention that for two of the topics mentioned (vaccines and GMO foods), and notably the topic for which a quote of so-called "conspiratorial argument" was provided in the article, there's not just the issue of the scientific consensus but also of how the corresponding technology is applied in the real world. The highlighted argument about profit-seeking by companies is clearly a valid concern when it comes to how technologies are actually applied. It's why we have regulation and independent oversight bodies. (It's also unfair and misleading to call it a conspiratorial argument in the first place -- it's simply pointing out that an actor has financial interests and may therefore be biased, there's no conspiracy involved.) Maybe you'd want survey respondents to perfectly separate the concerns of applications vs. scientific consensus, but to be honest I think that's an unfair expectation.

repsilat 8y ago

Right. The article calls these things "fallacies", but that only strictly means that they're not slam-dunk arguments. Logical fallacies aren't necessarily bad heuristics, they just don't necessarily assure strict logical implication. (Often they are actually decent Bayesian "evidence", though I don't want to make that argument for the cases in TFA.)

GauntletWizard 8y ago
The Roman Trivium was Logic, Rhetoric, and grammar. Most of these arguments are logical fallacies - X does not guarantee Y - but are valid Rhetorical devices. Slippery slope is easiest to explain. If A, 90% chance of B, if B, 90% chance of C, if C, 90% chance of D. Therefore, if A, 73% of D - A implies D, if not perfectly. This is completely valid in Rhetoric, where you can't perfectly model anything, just approximate, but not logic, where truth or falsehood is digitized and binary. Most arguments that humans get into are rhetorical, but our focus on logic has left us vulnerable to misunderstanding. We are ignoring clear correlations because there's not a logical certainty.