8 ms·

Bush Did North Dakota

83 points by mrfusion 6y ago

TP_Noose 6y ago
With Jefferey Epstein having been outed and arrested, and given all of his well known connections in industry, academia, and politics, is it still controversial to say that there might be pedophilia within the ranks of government?
- klyrs 6y ago
  Yes, it's controversial. Trump says he never met the guy, nevermind the photo of them together. I don't follow QAnon, but if I was Q, I'd spin that picture as proof that Trump was investigating the pedo ring.
- FillardMillmore 6y ago
  That's not what QAnon is saying though. We've seen instances of government officials involved with pedophilia before, but QAnon and the pizzagate stuff is more precisely positing that not only is there pedophilia, but it's a highly coordinated effort within the government - and yes, that is controversial.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > is it still controversial to say that there might be pedophilia within the ranks of government? No, actual specific public officers have been arrested and convicted of child sex crimes. There's a difference between belief that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory is true, and belief that there might (or even the stronger belief that there absolutely is) "pedophilia within the ranks of the government". One is a very specific conspiracy theory, and one is a belief that a phenomenon which is present throughout humanity and which, like most things, is enabled by positions of power is not somehow magically completely excluded from government. (So, in a sense, an anti-conspiracy theory.)
  - oceanplexian 6y ago
    I'm sure if you surveyed people who believe in the "conspiracy" you would find opinions much more nuanced and not necessarily in complete agreement with it, like with anything. But of course the media likes to paint them with a broad brush, because it's easier than actually doing investigative journalism, and the pollsters get similar results, because they're not looking for nuance, they're looking to take a position and use statistics to justify it.
- duxup 6y ago
  > that there might be pedophilia within the ranks of government What does that mean? Like just based on the size of government... someone is probably a pedophile. But I don't know what that means other than there is a lot of people in government. Beyond that "that there might be pedophilia within the ranks of government" seems too vague.
colincooke 6y ago
The article is an interesting perspective on the factor of choices given in "opinion" polls. Forcing a choice one way or another has a really interesting effect (as in including only agree/disagree, and no "I don't know" option). It can force individuals to take a stance on a parent topic, even if that parent topic is implicit (for example "do you trust the government" for conspiracy theories). It reminds me a little of forced choice assesments [0], commonly used for interview screening or employee assesment. Its interesting, but kind of inevitable, that people will often default to the choice which is "best" rather than most accurate/correct. Forcing a choice can have all sorts of effects, and it depends on the context if that effect is good or not. [0] https://methods.sagepub.com/reference/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-communication-research-methods/i12999.xml https://methods.sagepub.com/reference/the-sage-encyclopedia-...
- data_ders 6y ago
  Also important is the order and method in which the choices are presented. Are respondents told at every question that they have "not sure" as an option? Is it the first option presented?
  - harry8 6y ago
    Order and medhod. Such an easy game to play, I'm sure there are much more subtle and effective ways of doing that the example I'm about to dash off here. We will only report the stats for the answers of question 3. Questionaire A. 1. Do you think Osama Bin Laden is evil? 2. Do you support Bin Laden being brought to justice for his actions? 3. Do you trust the government? --------------------------------------------------------- Questionaire B. 1. Did you believe the CDC when they said masks were useless against covid? 2. Do you believe the current consensus that they are useful against covid? 3. Do you trust the government?
    - gruez 6y ago
      AFAIK this is why survey firms usually publish their methodology (ie. script used to ask the respondents).
inetsee 6y ago
When I first saw this I was somewhat confused. I was wondering whether Slate Star Codex was back, but I hadn't seen any announcement. When I scrolled down to the bottom I saw that this post was from May 28, 2020. So Slate Star Codex is not back (yet?). (Sad Face.)
- benchaney 6y ago
  You may be interested in: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/09/11/update-on-my-situation/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/09/11/update-on-my-situation...
- Igelau 6y ago
  I was out of the loop on this. What the hell, NYT. This is why we can't have nice things.
data_ders 6y ago
My takeaway is that as a heuristic, I can dismiss claims of "x% of Y group believe Z" as meaningful when - x ~ 4% if the question offered an "unsure/ don't know" option, or - x ~ 33% if the question did not offer an "unsure/don't know" option. Do think as a populace we'll ever get beyond the inherent subjectivity of poll results? A NYT article yesterday, "Young People More Likely to Believe Virus Misinformation, Study Says" [1], cited that 28% of 18-24 y.o.s believe that humans originally got coronavirus from eating bats. But I looked at the paper [2], and it turns out they were offered a "not sure" option. So am I justified now in thinking that there's something wrong with these Gen Z kids? I think most likely not... [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/technology/young-people-more-likely-to-believe-virus-misinformation-study-says.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/technology/young-people-m... [2]: http://www.kateto.net/covid19/COVID19%20CONSORTIUM%20REPORT%2014%20MISINFO%20SEP%202020.pdf http://www.kateto.net/covid19/COVID19%20CONSORTIUM%20REPORT%...
- benchaney 6y ago
  Perhaps the takeaway should be that these sorts of studies need a control group. Now it may be difficult to find a population that would be good to serve as a control group, which I think points toward the idea that these sort of studies should be used to examine the differences between groups, rather than to make claims about any group in absolute terms. I also think that studies of the form "people who disagree with me are stupid because they think X" are fundamentally dumb. This particular issue is just a small part of why I think that.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  believe that humans originally got coronavirus from eating bats And what are we supposed to conclude from that fact? Someone heard that coronavirus is bat-related, it's not completely unreasonable to assume that it made the jump to humans when someone prepared one for eating.
  - ummonk 6y ago
    Yes this doesn't seem like an issue about misinformation, but rather about making a reasonable inference when knowing only a subset of relevant information (they probably remember that coronavirus originated from bats, and early on a wildlife market was suspected as the source of the outbreak and think based on this that people got infected by eating bats).
mariodiana 6y ago
I would have liked to see Pizzagate compared to the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was Vladimr Putin's sleeper agent, and that his campaign worked hand-in-hand with the Russians to steal the 2016 election. More than a few people believed that.
- Daishiman 6y ago
  I don't think reasonable people are asserting that Trump is a sleeper agent. What reasonable people are saying is that Trump is an authoritarian, a person who admires other strongmen, a person who has had business relationships with Russia and has no problems with vehement conflicts of interests, and that there have been substantial reports of Russians creating political connections with people in the Republican party and various think tanks. That's not necessarily a conspiracy, nor is it an idea of a "grand plan" to steal elections. Connections for the sake of influence and personal relationships have played part in politics since forever, and does not require conspiracist thinking to assert than and to assert certain factual evidence that suggests people are putting personal and party interests over that of national security.
malwarebytess 6y ago
Maybe this is an unnecessary comment but I think this was uninsightful for SSC. It's impossible to divorce some of the conspiracies from political alignment so I'm surprised he's willing to try to make a case for that; and if he wasn't doing that the perfunctory attempt at connecting this to a broader point about false belief and how it is acquired and retained failed. In the article before this one he more or less intimates that it's not necessary to publicly refute false heterodox belief (creationism/ID). W T F? He also ignores, or doesn't include the reasons why it became such a huge topic in the 2000s: bush's presidency.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> In the same way, maybe we can posit a North Dakota constant of 33%. This is how many people believe in conspiracy theories when there’s no reason at all to believe them, not even the flimsy reasons conspiracy theories usually provide. I think that's the wrong conclusion. What the statistic in question suggests is far narrower. That, when specifically directed not to seek out other information, about 1/3 of people will assume Alex Jones is telling the truth about an issue, while 2/3 will assume he is lying. I don't think generalizing that to level of belief in conspiracy theories is valid; while I suppose one might assume that the "North Dakota crash" refers to a conspiracy theory, the explicit question refers to whether Alex Jones is lying, so the personal credibility of that source is definitely being tested in the question (and without any actual story for respondents to evaluate, its the only thing that the question can be testing.)
- mod 6y ago
  The Alex Jones stuff was a construct the author used to illustrate a point. It was not the way the North Dakota question was phrased.
- schoen 6y ago
  If you look closely at the Chapman survey, though, it didn't mention Alex Jones; the reported statistics were based on a survey without that particular priming. The only mention of Alex Jones is a hypothetical example from Scott, which was not part of the survey, and the 33% is just > Respondents to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears were asked if “The government is concealing what they know about…the North Dakota crash.” A third of Americans (33%) think the government is concealing information about this invented event. Edit: I guess this phrasing (for each conspiracy) actually would be satisfied by the existence of any classified information about each topic, even classified information that wouldn't materially change the public's impression of the event. It's almost certainly true that "the government is concealing what they know about" the 9/11 attacks and the JFK assassination, for example, because there are some files and documents related to those matters that the government won't release publicly, which isn't the same as saying that those files and documents would change anyone's assessment of who is responsible for those events.
mordymoop 6y ago
Remember Moab.
- aaronbrethorst 6y ago
  The only one of Stephenson's books I've ever given up on.
  - beervirus 6y ago
    It was not my favorite either. But still better than most of what I read.
- emiliobumachar 6y ago
  What is Moab and why is it relevant? (Memory brings me the Mother of All Bombs, DDG brings me Moab, Utah, USA, and Moab, Jordan)
  - mordymoop 6y ago
    In Neal Stephenson's most recent novel, Fall, a plot element is what could be described as a fake disaster which transforms into an ongoing dispute over who caused the (fake) disaster, and why the government is trying to cover up the (fake) disaster, and so on. Basically, the Moab event becomes a culture war touchstone, much like the child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant. "Remember Moab" is the bumper stick version of this.
young_unixer 6y ago
People distrust media so much that "believe the oppositte of what media says" seems like a reasonable heuristic to them. You need to take that into account. Some may take that to the extreme of "believe the opposite of anything that sounds like what media would say"
ceilingcorner 6y ago
All of the ‘fake news’ discussion seems to be missing the forest for the trees. It also seems to be woefully unfamiliar with post-modern philosophy, e.g. Baudrillard. The reality is we probably aren’t going back to a world with a predominate narrative. Contrary to the mainstream story, conspiracies aren’t just something stupid people latch on to. They often hide metaphorical truths, even if the actual details are exaggerated or false. This should be obvious to anyone paying attention to events in the past decade, e.g. Epstein. Combined with information overload, technological advancements like A.I. commenting and deepfakes, and political-financial incentives to frame events in biased ways, I expect the situation to only fracture more. The only semi-solution, in my mind, would be a radically transparent nonprofit that is held to rigorous standards and isn’t dependent on advertising for income. It’s beyond me why the billionaire class hasn’t chipped in a few bucks to save the journalistic concept of truth - unless of course, they have no reason to.
- pjc50 6y ago
  A major contribution by the billionaire class against journalism was the murder of Kashoggi. The unsolved car bomb that killed the Panama papers journalist was probably also sponsored by someone very well off.
- dnautics 6y ago
  Let's not also forget that there are a substantial number of conspiracy (or crackpot) theories are true, like MKULTRA's existence, Tuskeegee Siphilis experiments, Government experimentation on populations (radioactive tracers over wichita, and red yeast over san francisco), politically orchestrated break-in and theft of DNC information (twice!), using a polio vaccination program as a front for CIA surveillance, black sites and extrajudicial renditions, etc etc etc...
- AQuantized 6y ago
  Who are they held to rigorous standards by? There would need to be a another pure body to hold them to task, and so on indefinitely. If billionaires were controlling the purse strings, it seems unlikely they would be as willing to report negatively on them or their businesses either. I'm unconvinced there is any way to deliver reasonably unbiased 'truth' journalistically
zepto 6y ago
It seems like if a source you expect to be trustworthy asks if there has been a cover up of something you have never heard of, the fact that you have never heard of it is a prior for there being a cover up!
- a1369209993 6y ago
  That would be: "the fact that you have never heard of it is evidence for there being a cover up", but otherwise yes.
  - zepto 6y ago
    It’s not evidence, though, is it? It’s just a reflection of your prior information state that influences the truth value you assign to the new proposition in the absence of evidence. That is a prior. There can’t be evidence of the cover up since the cover up is actually fictional.
    - a1369209993 6y ago
      > There can't be evidence of the cover up since the cover up is actually fictional. That's "proof", not "evidence". If you see someone holding a bloody knife, that's evidence in favor of them having killed someone, even if turns that they didn't (and thus that the evidence was misleading). Your prior would be the truth value you assign without knowing whether you've heard about the supposedly-covered-up thing. (Which is admittedly a hard epistemic state to be in for a significant length of time. Eg, compare: what is your prior that this question has a odd number of letters in it? Obviously about 0.5, but it's trivial to count them and force your epistemic state to near 0 or 1.)
      - zepto 6y ago
        A prior is not based on ignorance of your own knowledge. My prior about the number of letters in the question is based on what I do know about what I don’t know. I know nobody has told me. I know the letters are not alternating in color. I know the letters are not in a grid. I know there are more letters than a quick visual would allow me to count - e.g. more than 8, etc.
hammock 6y ago
There was a North Dakota crash though...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_oil_boom#/media/File:Oilrig_USA_weekly.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_oil_boom#/media/F... I'm really confused about what "North Dakota crash" is supposed to be suggestive of. A UFO?
Imnimo 6y ago
The floor is certainly lower than 33%. For example, here is another poll by the same firm showing only 16% total acceptance of "- The Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, CT was a hoax spread by people who want to impose strict gun control laws.", and only 12% among Trump voters (6% for Clinton voters). https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/jhdmzhxe6k/econTabReport.pdf https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docume...
throw18376 6y ago
it is widely believed that environmental factors in modern society are giving people depressive symptoms -- ranging from low-mood to dysthymia to full clinical depression. i am willing to speculate that the same may be true of psychosis. i'm not an expert or anything but what is true of depressive symptoms seems like it could be true of psychotic symptoms as well. many people may be suffering from very low-grade, subclinical psychotic symptoms, with a smaller number progressing to diagnosable mental illness. this idea is consonant with findings that schizophrenia diagnoses increase for people who live in cities, and with the social defeat hypothesis. it seems to me that this would explain the increase in the past few years in the particularly bizarre kind of conspiratorial thinking described here. old-fashioned conspiracies (JFK, UFOs) had a kind of internal coherence and logic that seems to have gone away -- if you look at conspiracy stuff nowadays, conspiracy theorists don't even try to make sense any more. it's a style of thinking that really seems like it must the result of some kind of difference in mental processes.

83 points by mrfusion 6y ago

With Jefferey Epstein having been outed and arrested, and given all of his well known connections in industry, academia, and politics, is it still controversial to say that there might be pedophilia within the ranks of government?

klyrs 6y ago
Yes, it's controversial. Trump says he never met the guy, nevermind the photo of them together. I don't follow QAnon, but if I was Q, I'd spin that picture as proof that Trump was investigating the pedo ring.
FillardMillmore 6y ago
That's not what QAnon is saying though. We've seen instances of government officials involved with pedophilia before, but QAnon and the pizzagate stuff is more precisely positing that not only is there pedophilia, but it's a highly coordinated effort within the government - and yes, that is controversial.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> is it still controversial to say that there might be pedophilia within the ranks of government? No, actual specific public officers have been arrested and convicted of child sex crimes. There's a difference between belief that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory is true, and belief that there might (or even the stronger belief that there absolutely is) "pedophilia within the ranks of the government". One is a very specific conspiracy theory, and one is a belief that a phenomenon which is present throughout humanity and which, like most things, is enabled by positions of power is not somehow magically completely excluded from government. (So, in a sense, an anti-conspiracy theory.)
- oceanplexian 6y ago
  I'm sure if you surveyed people who believe in the "conspiracy" you would find opinions much more nuanced and not necessarily in complete agreement with it, like with anything. But of course the media likes to paint them with a broad brush, because it's easier than actually doing investigative journalism, and the pollsters get similar results, because they're not looking for nuance, they're looking to take a position and use statistics to justify it.
duxup 6y ago
> that there might be pedophilia within the ranks of government What does that mean? Like just based on the size of government... someone is probably a pedophile. But I don't know what that means other than there is a lot of people in government. Beyond that "that there might be pedophilia within the ranks of government" seems too vague.

colincooke 6y ago

The article is an interesting perspective on the factor of choices given in "opinion" polls. Forcing a choice one way or another has a really interesting effect (as in including only agree/disagree, and no "I don't know" option). It can force individuals to take a stance on a parent topic, even if that parent topic is implicit (for example "do you trust the government" for conspiracy theories). It reminds me a little of forced choice assesments [0], commonly used for interview screening or employee assesment. Its interesting, but kind of inevitable, that people will often default to the choice which is "best" rather than most accurate/correct. Forcing a choice can have all sorts of effects, and it depends on the context if that effect is good or not. [0] https://methods.sagepub.com/reference/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-communication-research-methods/i12999.xml https://methods.sagepub.com/reference/the-sage-encyclopedia-...

data_ders 6y ago
Also important is the order and method in which the choices are presented. Are respondents told at every question that they have "not sure" as an option? Is it the first option presented?
- harry8 6y ago
  Order and medhod. Such an easy game to play, I'm sure there are much more subtle and effective ways of doing that the example I'm about to dash off here. We will only report the stats for the answers of question 3. Questionaire A. 1. Do you think Osama Bin Laden is evil? 2. Do you support Bin Laden being brought to justice for his actions? 3. Do you trust the government? --------------------------------------------------------- Questionaire B. 1. Did you believe the CDC when they said masks were useless against covid? 2. Do you believe the current consensus that they are useful against covid? 3. Do you trust the government?
  - gruez 6y ago
    AFAIK this is why survey firms usually publish their methodology (ie. script used to ask the respondents).

inetsee 6y ago

When I first saw this I was somewhat confused. I was wondering whether Slate Star Codex was back, but I hadn't seen any announcement. When I scrolled down to the bottom I saw that this post was from May 28, 2020. So Slate Star Codex is not back (yet?). (Sad Face.)

benchaney 6y ago
You may be interested in: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/09/11/update-on-my-situation/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/09/11/update-on-my-situation...
Igelau 6y ago
I was out of the loop on this. What the hell, NYT. This is why we can't have nice things.

data_ders 6y ago

My takeaway is that as a heuristic, I can dismiss claims of "x% of Y group believe Z" as meaningful when - x ~ 4% if the question offered an "unsure/ don't know" option, or - x ~ 33% if the question did not offer an "unsure/don't know" option. Do think as a populace we'll ever get beyond the inherent subjectivity of poll results? A NYT article yesterday, "Young People More Likely to Believe Virus Misinformation, Study Says" [1], cited that 28% of 18-24 y.o.s believe that humans originally got coronavirus from eating bats. But I looked at the paper [2], and it turns out they were offered a "not sure" option. So am I justified now in thinking that there's something wrong with these Gen Z kids? I think most likely not... [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/technology/young-people-more-likely-to-believe-virus-misinformation-study-says.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/technology/young-people-m... [2]: http://www.kateto.net/covid19/COVID19%20CONSORTIUM%20REPORT%2014%20MISINFO%20SEP%202020.pdf http://www.kateto.net/covid19/COVID19%20CONSORTIUM%20REPORT%...

benchaney 6y ago
Perhaps the takeaway should be that these sorts of studies need a control group. Now it may be difficult to find a population that would be good to serve as a control group, which I think points toward the idea that these sort of studies should be used to examine the differences between groups, rather than to make claims about any group in absolute terms. I also think that studies of the form "people who disagree with me are stupid because they think X" are fundamentally dumb. This particular issue is just a small part of why I think that.
HarryHirsch 6y ago
believe that humans originally got coronavirus from eating bats And what are we supposed to conclude from that fact? Someone heard that coronavirus is bat-related, it's not completely unreasonable to assume that it made the jump to humans when someone prepared one for eating.
- ummonk 6y ago
  Yes this doesn't seem like an issue about misinformation, but rather about making a reasonable inference when knowing only a subset of relevant information (they probably remember that coronavirus originated from bats, and early on a wildlife market was suspected as the source of the outbreak and think based on this that people got infected by eating bats).

mariodiana 6y ago

I would have liked to see Pizzagate compared to the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was Vladimr Putin's sleeper agent, and that his campaign worked hand-in-hand with the Russians to steal the 2016 election. More than a few people believed that.

Daishiman 6y ago
I don't think reasonable people are asserting that Trump is a sleeper agent. What reasonable people are saying is that Trump is an authoritarian, a person who admires other strongmen, a person who has had business relationships with Russia and has no problems with vehement conflicts of interests, and that there have been substantial reports of Russians creating political connections with people in the Republican party and various think tanks. That's not necessarily a conspiracy, nor is it an idea of a "grand plan" to steal elections. Connections for the sake of influence and personal relationships have played part in politics since forever, and does not require conspiracist thinking to assert than and to assert certain factual evidence that suggests people are putting personal and party interests over that of national security.

malwarebytess 6y ago

Maybe this is an unnecessary comment but I think this was uninsightful for SSC. It's impossible to divorce some of the conspiracies from political alignment so I'm surprised he's willing to try to make a case for that; and if he wasn't doing that the perfunctory attempt at connecting this to a broader point about false belief and how it is acquired and retained failed. In the article before this one he more or less intimates that it's not necessary to publicly refute false heterodox belief (creationism/ID). W T F? He also ignores, or doesn't include the reasons why it became such a huge topic in the 2000s: bush's presidency.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> In the same way, maybe we can posit a North Dakota constant of 33%. This is how many people believe in conspiracy theories when there’s no reason at all to believe them, not even the flimsy reasons conspiracy theories usually provide. I think that's the wrong conclusion. What the statistic in question suggests is far narrower. That, when specifically directed not to seek out other information, about 1/3 of people will assume Alex Jones is telling the truth about an issue, while 2/3 will assume he is lying. I don't think generalizing that to level of belief in conspiracy theories is valid; while I suppose one might assume that the "North Dakota crash" refers to a conspiracy theory, the explicit question refers to whether Alex Jones is lying, so the personal credibility of that source is definitely being tested in the question (and without any actual story for respondents to evaluate, its the only thing that the question can be testing.)

mod 6y ago
The Alex Jones stuff was a construct the author used to illustrate a point. It was not the way the North Dakota question was phrased.
schoen 6y ago
If you look closely at the Chapman survey, though, it didn't mention Alex Jones; the reported statistics were based on a survey without that particular priming. The only mention of Alex Jones is a hypothetical example from Scott, which was not part of the survey, and the 33% is just > Respondents to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears were asked if “The government is concealing what they know about…the North Dakota crash.” A third of Americans (33%) think the government is concealing information about this invented event. Edit: I guess this phrasing (for each conspiracy) actually would be satisfied by the existence of any classified information about each topic, even classified information that wouldn't materially change the public's impression of the event. It's almost certainly true that "the government is concealing what they know about" the 9/11 attacks and the JFK assassination, for example, because there are some files and documents related to those matters that the government won't release publicly, which isn't the same as saying that those files and documents would change anyone's assessment of who is responsible for those events.

mordymoop 6y ago

Remember Moab.

aaronbrethorst 6y ago
The only one of Stephenson's books I've ever given up on.
- beervirus 6y ago
  It was not my favorite either. But still better than most of what I read.
emiliobumachar 6y ago
What is Moab and why is it relevant? (Memory brings me the Mother of All Bombs, DDG brings me Moab, Utah, USA, and Moab, Jordan)
- mordymoop 6y ago
  In Neal Stephenson's most recent novel, Fall, a plot element is what could be described as a fake disaster which transforms into an ongoing dispute over who caused the (fake) disaster, and why the government is trying to cover up the (fake) disaster, and so on. Basically, the Moab event becomes a culture war touchstone, much like the child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant. "Remember Moab" is the bumper stick version of this.

young_unixer 6y ago

People distrust media so much that "believe the oppositte of what media says" seems like a reasonable heuristic to them. You need to take that into account. Some may take that to the extreme of "believe the opposite of anything that sounds like what media would say"

ceilingcorner 6y ago

All of the ‘fake news’ discussion seems to be missing the forest for the trees. It also seems to be woefully unfamiliar with post-modern philosophy, e.g. Baudrillard. The reality is we probably aren’t going back to a world with a predominate narrative. Contrary to the mainstream story, conspiracies aren’t just something stupid people latch on to. They often hide metaphorical truths, even if the actual details are exaggerated or false. This should be obvious to anyone paying attention to events in the past decade, e.g. Epstein. Combined with information overload, technological advancements like A.I. commenting and deepfakes, and political-financial incentives to frame events in biased ways, I expect the situation to only fracture more. The only semi-solution, in my mind, would be a radically transparent nonprofit that is held to rigorous standards and isn’t dependent on advertising for income. It’s beyond me why the billionaire class hasn’t chipped in a few bucks to save the journalistic concept of truth - unless of course, they have no reason to.

pjc50 6y ago
A major contribution by the billionaire class against journalism was the murder of Kashoggi. The unsolved car bomb that killed the Panama papers journalist was probably also sponsored by someone very well off.
dnautics 6y ago
Let's not also forget that there are a substantial number of conspiracy (or crackpot) theories are true, like MKULTRA's existence, Tuskeegee Siphilis experiments, Government experimentation on populations (radioactive tracers over wichita, and red yeast over san francisco), politically orchestrated break-in and theft of DNC information (twice!), using a polio vaccination program as a front for CIA surveillance, black sites and extrajudicial renditions, etc etc etc...
AQuantized 6y ago
Who are they held to rigorous standards by? There would need to be a another pure body to hold them to task, and so on indefinitely. If billionaires were controlling the purse strings, it seems unlikely they would be as willing to report negatively on them or their businesses either. I'm unconvinced there is any way to deliver reasonably unbiased 'truth' journalistically

zepto 6y ago

It seems like if a source you expect to be trustworthy asks if there has been a cover up of something you have never heard of, the fact that you have never heard of it is a prior for there being a cover up!

a1369209993 6y ago
That would be: "the fact that you have never heard of it is evidence for there being a cover up", but otherwise yes.
- zepto 6y ago
  It’s not evidence, though, is it? It’s just a reflection of your prior information state that influences the truth value you assign to the new proposition in the absence of evidence. That is a prior. There can’t be evidence of the cover up since the cover up is actually fictional.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    > There can't be evidence of the cover up since the cover up is actually fictional. That's "proof", not "evidence". If you see someone holding a bloody knife, that's evidence in favor of them having killed someone, even if turns that they didn't (and thus that the evidence was misleading). Your prior would be the truth value you assign without knowing whether you've heard about the supposedly-covered-up thing. (Which is admittedly a hard epistemic state to be in for a significant length of time. Eg, compare: what is your prior that this question has a odd number of letters in it? Obviously about 0.5, but it's trivial to count them and force your epistemic state to near 0 or 1.)
    - zepto 6y ago
      A prior is not based on ignorance of your own knowledge. My prior about the number of letters in the question is based on what I do know about what I don’t know. I know nobody has told me. I know the letters are not alternating in color. I know the letters are not in a grid. I know there are more letters than a quick visual would allow me to count - e.g. more than 8, etc.

hammock 6y ago

There was a North Dakota crash though...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_oil_boom#/media/File:Oilrig_USA_weekly.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_oil_boom#/media/F... I'm really confused about what "North Dakota crash" is supposed to be suggestive of. A UFO?

Imnimo 6y ago

The floor is certainly lower than 33%. For example, here is another poll by the same firm showing only 16% total acceptance of "- The Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, CT was a hoax spread by people who want to impose strict gun control laws.", and only 12% among Trump voters (6% for Clinton voters). https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/jhdmzhxe6k/econTabReport.pdf https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docume...

throw18376 6y ago

it is widely believed that environmental factors in modern society are giving people depressive symptoms -- ranging from low-mood to dysthymia to full clinical depression. i am willing to speculate that the same may be true of psychosis. i'm not an expert or anything but what is true of depressive symptoms seems like it could be true of psychotic symptoms as well. many people may be suffering from very low-grade, subclinical psychotic symptoms, with a smaller number progressing to diagnosable mental illness. this idea is consonant with findings that schizophrenia diagnoses increase for people who live in cities, and with the social defeat hypothesis. it seems to me that this would explain the increase in the past few years in the particularly bizarre kind of conspiratorial thinking described here. old-fashioned conspiracies (JFK, UFOs) had a kind of internal coherence and logic that seems to have gone away -- if you look at conspiracy stuff nowadays, conspiracy theorists don't even try to make sense any more. it's a style of thinking that really seems like it must the result of some kind of difference in mental processes.