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One of my favorite Noam Chomsky moments is when a 9-11 "truther" is able to ask him a question about what he believes about the 9-11 conspiracy theories. Choms

• generalizations 5y ago
  > Chomsky responds with the typical comment that it would take an unprecedented amount of coordination to have so many people keep the secret that it doesn't even make sense. I remember hearing that argument made back in the 00's about government surveilance. The secret doesn't have to be kept perfectly, it just has to be made ridiculous.
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  • Judgmentality 5y ago
    Now I want to relearn all the 9/11 conspiracy theories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories
    • colordrops 5y ago
      One of the weirder ones is that there were over 80 cameras pointed at the plane that crashed into the Pentagon and the public has seen none of the videos.
      • sammalloy 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure that was debunked several years ago. Plus, video was finally released, so there's that.
        • lowkey 5y ago
          Per GP there were over 80 cameras but the pentagon, after years of calls for transparency shared a couple stills from one camera, so there’s that.
          • Judgmentality 5y ago
            Those stills have about the same quality as your typical Bigfoot photo though. Why not just release a damn video?
            • atatatat 5y ago
              Sunlight cures all infection.
              • shadowgovt 5y ago
                This phenomenon is a subset of the effect "Too much sunlight denatures complex molecules and kills carbon-based life."
            • pyuser583 5y ago
              They dont want to reveal the locations of their security cameras?
              • Judgmentality 5y ago
                If they already released a still, they already released the location.
                • 5y ago
  • humbledrone 5y ago
    It's worth noting that the government surveillance secret wasn't actually kept very well, largely because of exactly the effect that Chomsky describes -- keeping all the numerous people in on the secret didn't work, and so we found out about it. I'd argue that the government surveillance example actually strengthens Chomsky's argument.
    • Dnsv 5y ago
      It's really about the upper limit of what a 6 inch chimp brain can process. Or a group of chimps can process. Whether it's a chimp in govt or outside Rationality has an Upper Bound. Stick that on the Fridge. When the problem faced is too complex and that upper bound naturally gets hit stories flow out of the head on both sides. The right move is not to focus on the stories. The right move, for this has been studied for a long time under the Theory of Bounded Rationality, is to focus on simpler problems.
  • BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
    > The secret doesn't have to be kept perfectly, it just has to be made ridiculous. Better yet, make it a partisan issue. Half of the country will refuse to believe it while the other half will be unable to do anything about it.
    • atatatat 5y ago
      Confuse the issue more by flipflopping which party signals to their base to virtue signal giving a shit about the topic every....3-5 years.
  • bawolff 5y ago
    The level of coordination required to fake 9/11 seems on a very different level than the level required to wiretap some central points on the internet. And that's not even considering usa basically had a dept of wiretapping (the NSA) already set up or that the nsa's activities actually did leak.
    • wp381640 5y ago
      Not to mention that the post-911 NSA surveillance program leaked to the NYTimes within a few years
    • emoII 5y ago
      Does it really require all that much coordination? Some top-level military exec(s) want the military to get more funding. They're in contact with Bin Laden. Bin Laden gets a bit of money to put a couple of arabs on a "work-trip" to the US. The military-execs offer a couple of pilots a "crazy increase to their life insurance". Check their schedules to coordinate the day of the attack. I know there's a lot of detail left out and a lot of assumptions made, but I'm not convinced that it has to be an extremely complex and coordinated plan.
      • ddxxdd 5y ago
        Military funding of Bin Laden isn't that far-fetched, and it may have possibly been true in the past[0], but 9/11 truthers believe that the World Trade Center was taken down by missiles and controlled demolition, and that people who thought they saw a plane were confused. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_to_Osama_bin_Laden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_...
        • jcbrand 5y ago
          AFAIK most "truthers" don't subscribe to the missile theory when it comes to the towers (the Pentagon is a different story). I sometimes wonder whether the more out there conspiracy theories are simply used to discredit any concern or skepticism of the official narrative by lumping those concerned with the crazies.
  • erk__ 5y ago
    Has government surveillance not been an open secret for decades for example you can dig up EU reports on Echelon from the early 00's which talks about a 1997 study that said that ECHELON routinely intercepts all e-mail, telephone and Fax. The issue is more that most did not believe in it until hard evidence was presented by whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...
    • colordrops 5y ago
      The official 9/11 story being a farce has been an open secret almost since the event. There are hundreds of verifiable facts that don't fit the official narrative.
      • bananapub 5y ago
        eg?
        • ttctciyf 5y ago
          Not a 9/11 truther, but there are some incongruities around official accounts of 9/11, for example the accounts of why CIA staffers actively blocked the FBI from being informed about the activities of future 9/11 hijackers, as discussed in the documentary "Who is Rich Blee". There's a morass of conflicting stories, but if you're interested you could start with a close look at [1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfreda_Frances_Bikowsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfreda_Frances_Bikowsky
          • ta988 5y ago
            Intelligence agencies have used all the recipes in the book to take a hit at each other, so there is that as well.
          • seppin 5y ago
            > CIA staffers actively blocked the FBI from being informed about the activities of future 9/11 hijacker That's not how it works.
  • shadowgovt 5y ago
    The main difference between government surveillance and 9/11 truther conspiracy is that the government surveillance "secret" can be kept in the open because the bulk of the citizenry doesn't care, or actually thinks it's in their best interests for the government to be surveilling everyone. In contrast, the bulk of the citizenry would be up in arms if there were indisputable proof that our government orchestrated a terrorist attack on American soil that killed thousands of people. Evidence: the reaction to the Snowden leaks. Lots of Americans responded to that news with "oh okay; that's a rational thing for the NSA to be doing to combat terrorism."
    • posix_me_less 5y ago
      > the citizenry would be up in arms if there were indisputable proof that our government orchestrated Not so sure about that. Large portion of population does believe that and they are not up in arms.
      • shadowgovt 5y ago
        It's not a wide enough margin. The Scrips 2006 poll suggested around 16% think it's "very likely" someone in the US government either assisted or took no action (as frame of reference, Pew Research suggests between 4 and 7% of respondent input is "bogus"... Not just random, but intentionally biased towards the most unlikely answer to troll the pollsters [https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2020/02/18/assessing-the-risks-to-online-polls-from-bogus-respondents/ https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2020/02/18/assessing-the...]).
        • atatatat 5y ago
          2006?!?!?!?!?!?!
          • shadowgovt 5y ago
            That was the generous year. Belief has waned since then. Statista probed the question in 2019 and found strong belief at 11%. https://www.statista.com/statistics/959504/belief-september-11-inside-job-conspiracy-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/959504/belief-september-...
  • atatatat 5y ago
    And the Manhattan Project before that ;)
• galaxyLogic 5y ago
  The trouble with (true) conspiracies is that too many people benefit from them not being investigated properly and openly.
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• tmn 5y ago
  The fallacy with that 9-11 rebuttal is that in its main stream form, 9-11 is as unprecedented as the conspiracy they are saying is far fetched. Why is it more infeasible to assume there was some inside help or looking the other way? Add in incentives as a result of the act, Israel’s known knowledge and surveillance of the act, seems pretty clear there’s more to it.
  • redis_mlc 5y ago
    There have been a few factual stories in the press that aren't well-known about the 911 conspiracy: - Saudi embassies across the US were involved in organizing the operation - members of the Saudi royal family very likely financed at least part of the operation, as well as others in that community, based on previous operations - One of the non-flying organizers lived in Canada, and crossed the border into the US overland to avoid a flying watchlist. His local mosque in Canada was very likely knowledgeable about his purpose and provided logistics, and likely he wasn't the only participant in Canada. - it's very likely the US govt. knew about the operation in advance from embassy intelligence intercepts. When I use "likely" above, I mean well over 90% probability in each case because that's how things work. It wasn't 19 dudes who just happened to fly into some buildings half way across the world - it was a coordinated international operation. When you read the press reporting on this, they start off very specific about the actions months beforehand, and get suddenly vague when discussing what the US govt. knew and did about it. Also, most of the US Middle East experts were forced out of the civil service when they continued saying there was a continuing threat - ideologies don't change.
  • perl4ever 5y ago
    Any conspiracy powerful enough to affect world events in a major way would be the source of some or all of the popular conspiracy theories. So they tell you something, but not taken at face value. People have been talking about Israeli and Saudi conspiracies since it happened, so I think it's safe to assume that is what the real conspiracy wants people to think.
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• TeeMassive 5y ago
  > Chomsky responds with the typical comment that it would take an unprecedented amount of coordination to have so many people keep the secret that it doesn't even make sense. That's often the weakest point of conspiracy theories. But I think this argument is exaggerated because it depends entirely on the assumption that 3 letters agencies didn't reach a level of sophistication and didn't accumulate enough know-how over their decades of existence to overcome this kind of human obstacle. Just right off my head I can think of several ways that this risk can and has been minimized: compartmentalization, black mail, child porn accusations (true or otherwise), close monitoring, murder, need to know kept very low, etc. Also as a counterexample, see Operation Gladio where "stay-behind" units formed a hidden army inside NATO countries unbeknownst to their leaders and were involved in multiple terrorist attacks, massacres and harassment campaigns against "leftist" groups they deemed subversive and also to create a "strategy of tension". This has been going on from the 60s to the 80s and didn't begin to be uncovered until the 90s. Also see MKUltra and operation Northwoods for actual government conspiracies, which weren't discovered due to the "unprecedented amount of coordination to have so many people keep the secret".
• mssundaram 5y ago
  I don't think it would take an unprecedented amount of coordination, because not many people would even need to know the secret. During times of mass chaos there is a collective emotional and psychological understanding that is easily influenced. At a simple level, see the "Brain Games - Social Conformity" experiment by National Geographic.
• AndrewBissell 5y ago
  > Chomsky responds with the typical comment that it would take an unprecedented amount of coordination to have so many people keep the secret that it doesn't even make sense. Let's say that someone came out tomorrow and said, "9/11 was an inside job, and in my role as Undersecretary of the Army I was instructed by Donald Rumsfeld to do X, Y, and Z to help carry it out." What is it, exactly, that Noam Chomsky believes would happen? Does he think this whistleblower would get a segment on 60 Minutes? Fawning mugshots on the cover of Time magazine? No, they'd be easily marginalized, pathologized as a crank, and ultimately disposed of. What would even be the incentive for someone to throw themselves into the buzzsaw of our complicit media and its credulous consumers? This is something ignorant people (including Chomsky himself) also will often say about the JFK assassination, "oh someone would have come forward and said something." Well, people did come forward and say things, dozens of them, and they were ignored, mocked, harassed, and sometimes killed. With this kind of intimidation down to a science and communications channels more thoroughly surveilled than ever, coordinating a large action (especially with the standard spycraft techniques of compartmentalization and need-to-know) is probably easier than ever. The lies are never foolproof, they're just delivered within a resilient system which controls how (and whether) the lies are talked about.
  • fighterpilot 5y ago
    Chomsky's point is that the N people that need to be involved is large, so even if you think it's unlikely that one co-conspirator would come forward (you are right on that), when N is large then the probability that at least one will come forward, 1-pow(1-p, N), becomes much more likely. Your other point about people not being believed is a separate point to the above. Has there been people claiming to have been involved in 9/11 on the inside that haven't been believed?
    • atatatat 5y ago
      You don't need to keep them all quiet, just yank their YouTube videos or arrest them for their machine having child pornography.
      • 5y ago
• LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Hrm. There is also compartmentalization an a need to know base. I remember having seen a documentary about the Manhattan Project, wherein even people who lived and worked on and in those sites discovered only decades later on what they really worked. By seeing another, earlier documentary ;->