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Conspiracy theories are interesting: - they show you which parts of society inspire distrust (COVID is more a trust crisis than a health one IMO). - they can

Conspiracy theories are interesting: - they show you which parts of society inspire distrust (COVID is more a trust crisis than a health one IMO). - they can show a lot of creativity (lizard people, come on!). - they may point at something that will turn out to be in need of examination (remember before snowden how the gov spying on everyone was tinfoil hat BS?). - they force public debate, and raise attention to important questions (e.g: how social network apps influence our society). A like the article says, they show you in which way people secretly suffer. And that deserves compassion.

eterm 5y ago
> remember before snowden how the gov spying on everyone was tinfoil hat BS? No, not at all. Before Snowden people regularly talked about the government spying on everyone, we just didn't know any details of how it worked. I remember there was absoultely no shortage of discussion among conspiracy theorists and regular people alike about "echelon" in the nineties for example. Pretending that everyone thought the government was innocent and not spying on everyone before the Snowden leaks is an attempt to rewrite history and place a false narrative.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  We were a minority discussing it, and if you brought it at a diner table you would have been the definitly labelled as paranoid. I think you are the one rewritting history here.
  - _teyd 5y ago
    I’m not sure. I also definitely remember everyone thinking that it was very likely the government was spying internally also. The scale was a surprise, but not that spying happened internally. It was quite in the popular culture as well, with shows like X-Files and movies like Hackers and Sneakers and others touching on it. It was anyway for sure not limited to Art Bell types.
    - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
      X-files is a good exemple: Mulder is the architype of the odd uncle of the familly. Turns out he is right, but still, the entire world think he is bonker. We always knew about some spying, but if you have said something resembling to xkeyscore, it would have looked like science fiction. Even the patriot act: people believed it was temporary. In fact, they were happy it was voted. Somebody was doing something about 9/11. The voices against it were a minority. Worst, people talking about the mass spying were associated with 9/11 denyiers to remove credibility from them. One has to remember it was still a boomer world, meaning the perception from the public of what computer systems could do was still somewhat limited. Snowden revelations were in 2013. In 2010 my mother was still missing icons when trying to click on them and the last phone books arrived in her mailbox. I remember gently mocking her about it, but for her, it was easier to use.
- teddyh 5y ago
  The belief that the government was actually spying on everyone was fringe. It was there, since it was obviously plausible, but basically nobody wanted to believe it, so most people dismissed it out of hand with something like “they would never do that”. No “regular people” knew what ECHELON was.
  - asimpletune 5y ago
    I don't think it was fringe. There was the patriot act and secret courts and all that stuff. There were even people who tried to expose this stuff but failed because of a catch-22: to sue the govt for spying on you, you had to show standing, which you couldn't do, because the govt was secretly spying on you. That being said, I think a lot of people didn't believe in this stuff, which I guess makes it sort of fringe, but I think it was more like there was an attitude of laziness, technical ignorance, and a lot of nationalism to catch the terrorists.
    - eldenwrong 5y ago
    - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
      Secret courts were more debated than mass spying, so let's not mix that up.
- xvector 5y ago
  Even if conspiracists "knew all along," normies were genuinely enlightened by the Snowden revelations. That's why it was such a significant event.
- jl6 5y ago
  My recollection was that the majority position was "of course the government can spy on us, that's how they solve crimes", without knowing, and perhaps without wanting to know, any details - and I see little evidence this has changed.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    There is a difference between being able to record your phone on demand, and PRISM.
jonathanstrange 5y ago
I know where the talking about trust comes from, it comes from the theories of knowledge by testimony in epistemology, but as I've tried to convince others in an academic context, these theories might be flawed themselves. Apart from very simple "the cat is on a mat" type of examples, there might be no "knowledge by testimony." For example, contrary to what people sometimes insinuate, you cannot gain genuine knowledge from reading a textbook and simply trusting the source, and I cannot imagine a single instance in my academic life where this would have made sense. Science and philosophy require a skeptical attitude. Trust may play a role but theories of knowledge by testimony overemphasize it. By the same token, nobody needs to trust authorities and institutions. What goes astray in conspracy theories is not trust in testimony per se, but the judgement of one's own abilities and epistemic position versus those of others. People have a natural bias of overestimating their own abilities but with modern media this has gone completely astray; even well-educated people have started to confuse genuine knowledge with knowing where to look up allaged facts. Somebody with a realistic attitude towards their own abilities is able to correctly judge when someone else knows more about a subject matter. This doesn't mean that you have to or should trust that other person, but - if you insist in putting this in terms of trust, which I don't recommend - you need to be able to recognize when you cannot trust your own judgement more than that of others. Losing this ability to evaluate one's own epistemic capacity versus that of others in a subject matter seems to be a rather natural consequence of the liberation of knowledge by the internet. The same phenomenon of misjudging one's own abailities might have existed with owners of the complete volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, only those were extremely rare, already very educated, and it was probably harder to recognize. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I believe that epistemologists are wrong to consider "knowledge by testimony" necessarily based on trust, or at least the role of trust in it is overrated and the phrase "knowledge by testimony" is doubtful to start with. Trust in authorities is not needed, what is needed is a correct judgement of one's own beliefs in relation to those of others, and this requires intellectual humility. If people would conclude from comspiracy theories that they should remain agnostic about certain subject matters and leave those to experts who spent more time delving into them, they would not be a problem at all - they would simply just be what they are, more or less outlandish hypotheses and alternative explanations with a certain lack of publicly verifiable evidence. The problem is that people lack intellectual humility and form very strong beliefs about subject matters they haven't studied in detail. My 2 cents, sorry for the long rant. It is based on substantial disagreement with colleagues about this topic.
loceng 5y ago
Re: "COVID is more a trust crisis than a health one IMO" More foundationally we're in an intellectual-ideological crisis. Conspiracy theories are different than conspiracy hypotheses - the quality of the proof or argument points. I think it's important to understand too though that "conspiracy theory" is the same if not very close to ideology, or say an ideologue, just an ideology has a more developed framework. This does all tie back to trust and knowledge/education, or different funnels or channels of indoctrination - and whether the information seen is ripe with critical thinking or devoid of it; whether it has been analyzed and adequately criticized, challenged, or if it is more akin to propaganda and manipulation.

eterm 5y ago

> remember before snowden how the gov spying on everyone was tinfoil hat BS? No, not at all. Before Snowden people regularly talked about the government spying on everyone, we just didn't know any details of how it worked. I remember there was absoultely no shortage of discussion among conspiracy theorists and regular people alike about "echelon" in the nineties for example. Pretending that everyone thought the government was innocent and not spying on everyone before the Snowden leaks is an attempt to rewrite history and place a false narrative.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
We were a minority discussing it, and if you brought it at a diner table you would have been the definitly labelled as paranoid. I think you are the one rewritting history here.
- _teyd 5y ago
  I’m not sure. I also definitely remember everyone thinking that it was very likely the government was spying internally also. The scale was a surprise, but not that spying happened internally. It was quite in the popular culture as well, with shows like X-Files and movies like Hackers and Sneakers and others touching on it. It was anyway for sure not limited to Art Bell types.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    X-files is a good exemple: Mulder is the architype of the odd uncle of the familly. Turns out he is right, but still, the entire world think he is bonker. We always knew about some spying, but if you have said something resembling to xkeyscore, it would have looked like science fiction. Even the patriot act: people believed it was temporary. In fact, they were happy it was voted. Somebody was doing something about 9/11. The voices against it were a minority. Worst, people talking about the mass spying were associated with 9/11 denyiers to remove credibility from them. One has to remember it was still a boomer world, meaning the perception from the public of what computer systems could do was still somewhat limited. Snowden revelations were in 2013. In 2010 my mother was still missing icons when trying to click on them and the last phone books arrived in her mailbox. I remember gently mocking her about it, but for her, it was easier to use.
teddyh 5y ago
The belief that the government was actually spying on everyone was fringe. It was there, since it was obviously plausible, but basically nobody wanted to believe it, so most people dismissed it out of hand with something like “they would never do that”. No “regular people” knew what ECHELON was.
- asimpletune 5y ago
  I don't think it was fringe. There was the patriot act and secret courts and all that stuff. There were even people who tried to expose this stuff but failed because of a catch-22: to sue the govt for spying on you, you had to show standing, which you couldn't do, because the govt was secretly spying on you. That being said, I think a lot of people didn't believe in this stuff, which I guess makes it sort of fringe, but I think it was more like there was an attitude of laziness, technical ignorance, and a lot of nationalism to catch the terrorists.
  - eldenwrong 5y ago
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    Secret courts were more debated than mass spying, so let's not mix that up.
xvector 5y ago
Even if conspiracists "knew all along," normies were genuinely enlightened by the Snowden revelations. That's why it was such a significant event.
jl6 5y ago
My recollection was that the majority position was "of course the government can spy on us, that's how they solve crimes", without knowing, and perhaps without wanting to know, any details - and I see little evidence this has changed.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  There is a difference between being able to record your phone on demand, and PRISM.

jonathanstrange 5y ago

I know where the talking about trust comes from, it comes from the theories of knowledge by testimony in epistemology, but as I've tried to convince others in an academic context, these theories might be flawed themselves. Apart from very simple "the cat is on a mat" type of examples, there might be no "knowledge by testimony." For example, contrary to what people sometimes insinuate, you cannot gain genuine knowledge from reading a textbook and simply trusting the source, and I cannot imagine a single instance in my academic life where this would have made sense. Science and philosophy require a skeptical attitude. Trust may play a role but theories of knowledge by testimony overemphasize it. By the same token, nobody needs to trust authorities and institutions. What goes astray in conspracy theories is not trust in testimony per se, but the judgement of one's own abilities and epistemic position versus those of others. People have a natural bias of overestimating their own abilities but with modern media this has gone completely astray; even well-educated people have started to confuse genuine knowledge with knowing where to look up allaged facts. Somebody with a realistic attitude towards their own abilities is able to correctly judge when someone else knows more about a subject matter. This doesn't mean that you have to or should trust that other person, but - if you insist in putting this in terms of trust, which I don't recommend - you need to be able to recognize when you cannot trust your own judgement more than that of others. Losing this ability to evaluate one's own epistemic capacity versus that of others in a subject matter seems to be a rather natural consequence of the liberation of knowledge by the internet. The same phenomenon of misjudging one's own abailities might have existed with owners of the complete volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, only those were extremely rare, already very educated, and it was probably harder to recognize. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I believe that epistemologists are wrong to consider "knowledge by testimony" necessarily based on trust, or at least the role of trust in it is overrated and the phrase "knowledge by testimony" is doubtful to start with. Trust in authorities is not needed, what is needed is a correct judgement of one's own beliefs in relation to those of others, and this requires intellectual humility. If people would conclude from comspiracy theories that they should remain agnostic about certain subject matters and leave those to experts who spent more time delving into them, they would not be a problem at all - they would simply just be what they are, more or less outlandish hypotheses and alternative explanations with a certain lack of publicly verifiable evidence. The problem is that people lack intellectual humility and form very strong beliefs about subject matters they haven't studied in detail. My 2 cents, sorry for the long rant. It is based on substantial disagreement with colleagues about this topic.

loceng 5y ago

Re: "COVID is more a trust crisis than a health one IMO" More foundationally we're in an intellectual-ideological crisis. Conspiracy theories are different than conspiracy hypotheses - the quality of the proof or argument points. I think it's important to understand too though that "conspiracy theory" is the same if not very close to ideology, or say an ideologue, just an ideology has a more developed framework. This does all tie back to trust and knowledge/education, or different funnels or channels of indoctrination - and whether the information seen is ripe with critical thinking or devoid of it; whether it has been analyzed and adequately criticized, challenged, or if it is more akin to propaganda and manipulation.