10 ms·

I always find it interesting how when these things get revealed, nobody seems to update their priors on "conspiracy theories" going forward. A couple weeks afte

• IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
  Reading the article, there is little being revealed here? A good part of the documents are about victims. Others reveal that.. a billionaire socialite had some acquaintances?
  • notahacker 4y ago
    This. If the documents were "thank you for inviting me to the island and introducing me to the very young girls" notes from famous people, I think the individuals involved would be fighting different court cases. We've already got pics of him acquainting himself with two former POTUSes, I'm not sure docs referencing considerably less famous individuals in ways a judge considers to be largely already public information or innocuous detail are going to reveal much or add much more to the rumour mill. Though frankly, since it's Epstein people would read stuff into his pizza delivery orders.
  • JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    We can pretend it doesn't matter that it's a billionaire pedophile sex-peddler. Most people see that and draw pretty obvious conclusions. Protesting that is pointless. The old saying, you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas, applies here.
• sva_ 4y ago
  If it has been confirmed, is it still a conspiracy theory?
  • xkbarkar 4y ago
    No, then it never happened….
  • mc32 4y ago
    Then it becomes a… conspiracy,
  • rtkwe 4y ago
    Generally what actually happens is small parts or details are confirmed and others aren't so there's still a 'conspiracy theory' about some facts while others are just facts.
• simplotek 4y ago
  > I always find it interesting how when these things get revealed, nobody seems to update their priors on "conspiracy theories" going forward. The problem with this blend of specious reasoning is that to start off these conspiracy theories do not have any prior whatsoever. These conspiracy loons build their system of belief at best around flimsy conjectures, and reinforce their baseless beliefs on any noise that they manage to overfit around those. A broken clock being right twice a day does not vindicate conspiracies around broken clocks.
  • Y_Y 4y ago
    I always knew there was something going on with broken clocks that we weren't supposed to find out about.
    • raverbashing 4y ago
      It certainly feels like the 90th of September sometimes
  • MrPatan 4y ago
    How many of these would you need to update in the direction of "maybe some of them do know some of what they're talking about"? Edit: Read the question again, and try to answer it. Let me rephrase the question: How many times do you need to find out that something the media told you was "misinformation" or "a conspiracy theory" was actually true, to start questioning them a biiiit more?
    • ethanbond 4y ago
      Sorry you’re interpreting the release of these documents as evidence that the conspiracists were right? If the conspiracy was correct, these would never be made public, not “they would be made public in a pretty reasonable span of time for our abysmally slow justice system,” which appears to be what’s happening. People filed a legal request to keep them private, that request has been overruled. What’s the conspiracy?
• nearbuy 4y ago
  Which conspiracy theory has been vindicated?
  • phpnode 4y ago
    The idea that Ghislaine Maxwell was one of the most powerful mods on Reddit, with close connections to the founders and admins, was widely derided at the time, but is probably true.
    • ShivShankaran 4y ago
      Probably this user https://www.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/comments/ https://www.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/comments/ Last commented few days before her arrest.
      • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
        From a quick scan, nothing about that suggests to me it's the account of Ghislaine Maxwell. What, other than the name maxwell, connects it to her?
        • rtkwe 4y ago
          I think the main thing people were pointing to was that account was extremely active then suddenly went inactive at the same time of Ghislaine's arrest. Been a while so there was probably other stuff too but that's the main one I recall.
          • phpnode 4y ago
            There's a summary here https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_the_evidence_that_reddit_user_maxwellhill/ https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_... But of course, it's a link to /r/conspiracy and as such is tainted, but stopped clocks and all that
            • 4y ago
• hash872 4y ago
  This is a classic example of a fallacious argument. Just because (whatever about Epstein, an n of 1) is true doesn't mean that JFK was assassinated by the mob or anti-Communists, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that US elections are routinely rigged, or that lizard people secretly run our government from inside of the hollow Earth or whatever. There's no connection between these claims- they still have to be evaluated separately
  • snapcaster 4y ago
    Right, but if you find yourself (like me) dismissing MANY stories that sound "crazy" or like "conspiracy theories" but then turn out to be true at what point do you change your priors? I'm not saying you should update to "all conspiracies are true" I'm personally not sure how much I should update but it does seem like there is a hole in my world model that I keep making this mistake over and over (like everyone else)
    • dwallin 4y ago
      This way madness lies. It's impossible to reach 100% accuracy when evaluating the veracity of a story, we are always operating with imperfect information. How critical you are of evidence helps sets the boundary for your range of reality but if you expand that sphere to make sure you don't leave out anything that might be true you are going to start including an increasingly large amount of things that aren't.
  • mistermann 4y ago
    >> I always find it interesting how when these things get revealed, nobody seems to update their priors on "conspiracy theories" going forward. A couple weeks after these stories break it's back to making fun of "tinfoil hat" people and acting like it's all a big joke. I wonder if it's some kind of deep seated coping mechanism to refuse to update beliefs on stuff like that. > This is a classic example of a fallacious argument. Just because (whatever about Epstein, an n of 1) is true doesn't mean that JFK was assassinated by the mob or anti-Communists, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that US elections are routinely rigged, or that lizard people secretly run our government from inside of the hollow Earth or whatever. There's no connection between these claims- they still have to be evaluated separately This is a classic example of a human being perceiving/describing reality in a way that is clearly and objectively not true....like, not even close. Here you are explicitly making a claim that someone has argued something that they have not actually argued. Your claim IS FALSE. And yet, you are criticizing the other person for "a fallacious argument". You do not only have it wrong, you have it BACKWARDS. My intuition is that you are not intentionally being deceptive, but rather have done this accidentally. I am curious to know whether believe my intuition to be correct, or have any other comments about what is taking place here today?
• melling 4y ago
  It’s a noisy world. There are people feeding the conspiracy theories, not because they want answers, but because it’s a business. Keep gathering facts and build the case. Remember the Seth Rich “conspiracy theory“? https://www.npr.org/2020/11/24/938545344/fox-news-settles-with-seth-richs-parents-for-false-story-claiming-clinton-leaks https://www.npr.org/2020/11/24/938545344/fox-news-settles-wi...
• duxup 4y ago
  I’ve got no time to keep track of everyone’s baseless conspiracy theories. I see those folks pat themselves out n the back when the flimsiest of “evidence” shows up. Most conspiracy theories these days are a moving targets, involve innuendo, or incoherent.
  • mistermann 4y ago
    > I’ve got no time to keep track of everyone’s baseless conspiracy theories. Do you have time for conspiracy theories that are not baseless? Or, how about for ones that are actually true? Or more generally speaking: do you have time to wonder about how much (genuine) interest you have in what is actually true, as well as believing only in what is actually true? For example: > I see those folks pat themselves out n the back when the flimsiest of “evidence” shows up. What do you actually mean by this? As a thought experiment...if you think of it in terms of a Venn diagram composed of: - the entirety of all conspiracy theorists that exist - conspiracy theorists who you have had exposure to - conspiracy theorists who pat themselves out on the back when the flimsiest of “evidence” shows up - conspiracy theorists who do not pat themselves on the back when the flimsiest of “evidence” shows up ...if you were to sketch these out on a piece of paper: a) Do you think you would have difficulty drawing that diagram? b) How would you go about deciding how much overlap for the circles? c) How closely do you believe your diagram would match actual reality (assume that we have access to an omniscient being who knows the answers to all questions)? For extra safety, I will also add this: "Inb4 Sealioning, JAQing off, and various other very common rhetorical/evasive techniques/behaviors that are deployed rather than simply engaging in good faith, honest discussion." https://www.gizmosphere.org/inb4-origin-rise/ https://www.gizmosphere.org/inb4-origin-rise/
• IceHegel 4y ago
  Most of the time our loss function doesn’t seem to be optimizing for truth, but rather social position.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• andrewla 4y ago
  This comment is great because it is a Rorschach test, and you can see it in the replies. Some people read this as "conspiracy theorists will continue to believe despite being proven wrong" and some read it as "conspiracy skeptics will continue to disbelieve despite this one being vindicated".
• mistermann 4y ago
  > I always find it interesting how when these things get revealed, nobody seems to update their priors on "conspiracy theories" going forward. A couple weeks after these stories break it's back to making fun of "tinfoil hat" people and acting like it's all a big joke. I wonder if it's some kind of deep seated coping mechanism to refuse to update beliefs on stuff like that Me too, but despite having thousands of threads containing millions of comments on this topic over the years, we seem to never make any forward progress on these things. Maybe this approach is not optimal, perhaps not even remotely? Something very common I've noticed in threads like this: notice how many people make what appear to be factual statements (they are stated in the form of facts), for which there is quite literally no way to acquire the knowledge in the first place. And also consider: these conversations are taking place on Hacker News, and presumably, the intelligence level (actual knowledge, capacity to execute logic with skill, etc) here is much higher than one would find in more normal communities. As a though experiment: what if a way could be found to coerce the people in a community to behave differently than is being done in here? So, rather than each person imaging what is true (and then proceeding to believe that what they have imagined is actually true), what if people instead wondered what was actually true. This is much closer to how things work in science/engineering/software, and those domains tend to very reliably produce good results, and if this approach works there perhaps it could also work in this area as well. Do you think this "way out there" theory may produce better results? (And if you have any recommendations for even greater improvements, I am all ears.)
• edanm 4y ago
  Which conspiracy exactly are you referring to in this case? (Genuine question, I'm not up to date on anything to do with this.) In general, I don't find that the specifics of conspiracies that come out were known before. It's not like people have been theorizing for years about X, then we find out that X is actually true. It's usually completely unrelated to the big conspiracy theories people are talking about. So when a "conspiracy" comes out (and there's a question what we mean by conspiracy theory here,) when something like this comes out, I definitely update in the direction of "lots of things are happening in the world which I don't know about and might alarm me." But those things are usually far less impressive than real conspiracy theories make things seem. I also update in the direction of "these kinds of things are hard to keep secret," since, after all, I'm hearing about them! Although I wonder how many things are never heard about? In any case, the fact that it turns the FBI ran crazy programs in the 60s and we all know about it now does not cause me to update in the direction of "the moon landing is fake," or "9/11 was an inside job," or most conspiracy nonesense.
• happytoexplain 4y ago
  This attitude implies a wealth of fallacies, including: - The category of things under the umbrella "conspiracy theory" are necessarily either all ridiculous or all plausible. - There is some thread binding all conspiracy theories together such that if one is validated, the rest become more plausible (but not the other way around). - Epstein's guilt and all of his acquaintances were considered to be a conspiracy theory in the "ridiculous" category by many. - Baseless theories can not be true. - If a theory turns out to be true, then any prior criticism of it is invalid or somehow "bad" and should not have been applied even at the time. More than anything, though, this attitude insists on an "us vs them" model that antagonizes people who are, holistically taken, more reasonable than the imagined enemy.