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> The vast, vast majority of yesterday's conspiracy theories remain just conspiracy theories, and the vast majority of today's likely will as well. Maybe! You

by timr 4y ago

> The vast, vast majority of yesterday's conspiracy theories remain just conspiracy theories, and the vast majority of today's likely will as well. Maybe! You have no way of knowing which ones. > I'd be perfectly comfortable having anything that looks like a conspiracy theory hidden To rephrase: you'd be happy to have anything that makes you feel like it's a conspiracy theory hidden from view. A perfect way to guarantee confirmation bias. I suggest the alternative approach: if you aren't willing to keep an open enough mind to consider new evidence that challenges your assumptions, don't have an opinion. > with enough evidence having accumulated for it to get covered in a non-mocking way by NYT or NPR or whatever As a side note: if you think this is an objective standard for reliable evidence, you're in over your head. Just judging based on their commentary concerning topics in which I am an expert, neither is a reliable source of "blind faith" information. Danger, Will Robinson.

jaredwiener 4y ago
You can follow the Sagan Standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard) "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
- whiddershins 4y ago
  Unfortunately we aren’t so great at evaluating what an extraordinary claim is.
  - jaredwiener 4y ago
    This is sort of why journalism is an actual profession. Editors do this, or at least are supposed to. Listening to everything everyone says can have its upsides, but filtering out noise is not one of them.
    - whiddershins 4y ago
      Thats ... why on earth would I think any of the people involved in journalism are better at this than I am? That's not remotely their job description.
- timr 4y ago
  Definitely, but I put this in the "listen to all sides and think for yourself" bucket, which is (sadly) not something most people are willing to do. If we could just get people who aren't informed to recognize that they're not informed and not have an opinion, that would be a huge win for civil discourse.
  - chowells 4y ago
    I don't have time to listen to 1000 dumb ideas per day. I have a life to live. Also, I don't want my brain to get infected with whatever got Joe Rogan. I'm fine only caring about news after it's mainstream knowledge. Or even never; most news isn't worth the time it takes to consume it.
    - timr 4y ago
      > Also, I don't want my brain to get infected with whatever got Joe Rogan. If your brain is so fragile that it can't listen to some guy on a podcast without being "infected", then you're gonna have a hard time. Again, I'm not suggesting blind faith in dumb ideas. I'm not suggesting that you have to be an expert on anything. I'm suggesting that you have the will to say "I am not fully informed" when you don't know the answer.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        You already believe in hundreds of bad ideas and so do I. Feeding your brain bullshit reinforces bullshit output. On top of that the only thing most of us can say about almost everything under your rules would answered with 'I am not fully informed', shit, humanity isn't fully informed on anything.
        timr 4y ago
        > On top of that the only thing most of us can say about almost everything under your rules would answered with 'I am not fully informed', shit, humanity isn't fully informed on anything. Yes. Exactly. I'm calling for more modesty, and less political vitriol driven by a fictional, exaggerated sense of certainty. (Also, reinforcing that ideas cannot hurt you, which is an odd mental pathology that has become distressingly common as of late.)
- mistermann 4y ago
  > Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A problem: this is a razor that is useful for approximating what one believes to be true, it is not proper, strict epistemology. Also: it only yields belief, not truth, because it doesn't even try for truth - rather, it advises against doing that. Would be interesting to see what Carl would say in this context, as I presume he meant it in the context of science/physics, not metaphysics. I have arguments now and then with people on Carl Sagan videos on tiktok, and it is eye opening how many science fans are utterly incompetent when it comes to epistemology and logic. With just a tiny bit of abstraction (removing the object level specifics of the claim), they are indistinguishable from religious fundamentalists in their confident incorrectness / epistemic-unsoundness.
  - nradov 4y ago
    I've seen the phrase "trust the science" a lot lately, which indicates the someone fundamentally misunderstands what science actually is.
    - mistermann 4y ago
      An extremely interesting and complex discussion could be had about the merits of that advice. In a perfect world, it would be fine, since science is highly trustworthy. Unfortunately, the world we live in is far from perfect, making it far less easy to determine how optimal the approach is. And ironically, you would think that science minded people would understand and appreciate these complexities and their legitimate importance, however in my experience they tend to be the ones most averse to them.
willis936 4y ago
> You have no way of knowing which ones. I am pretty confident in my ability to prove that the Earth is round. I have sufficient faith that politicians do not harvest blood from babies to perform magic rituals. Many others and I do have some way of knowing which conspiracy theories will never be proven true.
- timr 4y ago
  Great! Now pick some that aren't completely obvious. Here's one to get you started: who blew up the Nord stream pipeline?
  - willis936 4y ago
    No. I know there are plenty of things in the "could be substantiated" camp. I very intentionally am not interested in discussing those. Your claim is that we have no way of discerning between "impossible" and "possible" conspiracy theories, which is wrong.
    - timr 4y ago
      That's a convenient rationalization, but I chose an example that was being dismissed as conspiracy within the current year. I literally have no opinion on the matter (see how that works?), but I know that it was a conspiracy, and now is an open debate.
      - willis936 4y ago
        And it qualifies as a "could be substantiated". See? We can tell which conspiracy theories could be true and which couldn't.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        It was a debate from day one. I don't know what you mean.
        deleted 4y ago
andrewflnr 4y ago
> Maybe! You have no way of knowing which ones. The claim 'today's "conspiracy theory" is tomorrow's verified fact' implies that you do know, or at least think you do. Which is it, do you have evidence confirming specific conspiracies or not? You vacillate between jaded confidence and wide-eyed ignorance whenever it looks like it will score you a conversational point, with no consistent model of the world behind your words. No wonder, because the consistent model of the world that works is "the vast majority (but not all) conspiracy theories are false", and that's the model you've decided to pick a fight with for some reason. Naturally your first response to a challenge is to flip the table and throw all the evidence on the ground.
apendleton 4y ago
> if you think this is an objective standard for reliable evidence, you're in over your head I don't, and I'm well aware of Gell-Mann amnesia, but I'm also not going to personally interview every witness of every event, or personally become an expert in every subject so as to be able to independently have a well-informed opinion about all of them. I accept that this means that sometimes I will not be perfectly informed, but even if it were possible to do all those things (and it isn't), it's not the way I would choose to spend my life. There are other ways to spend my time that I find more fulfilling, and I accept that that means outsourcing the work fact-finding to people who do it for a living, even if I know they're imperfect, and even if I know that at least in certain domains, I might be able to do it better if I tried. > Danger, Will Robinson To you, the danger is not knowing that there are, in fact, lizard people controlling the government. To me, the danger is in ending up spending my free time poring over fringe lizard-people Twitter. Personally I'm perfectly willing to accept the former danger to avoid the latter. I think we just have different priorities.
Blahah 4y ago
> Maybe! You have no way of knowing which ones. "Which ones are true" is far less relevant to my life than "which ones are relevant". I simply have no use for the information about who blew up the Nord pipeline, or how covid started. I'll evaluate claims affecting issues relevant to my life. The controversy of conspiracy theories is extremely powerful and is a distraction I choose to ignore, without evidence of contextual relevance that outweighs the low confidence in the evidence for the claim.

by timr 4y ago

jaredwiener 4y ago

You can follow the Sagan Standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard) "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

whiddershins 4y ago
Unfortunately we aren’t so great at evaluating what an extraordinary claim is.
- jaredwiener 4y ago
  This is sort of why journalism is an actual profession. Editors do this, or at least are supposed to. Listening to everything everyone says can have its upsides, but filtering out noise is not one of them.
  - whiddershins 4y ago
    Thats ... why on earth would I think any of the people involved in journalism are better at this than I am? That's not remotely their job description.
timr 4y ago
Definitely, but I put this in the "listen to all sides and think for yourself" bucket, which is (sadly) not something most people are willing to do. If we could just get people who aren't informed to recognize that they're not informed and not have an opinion, that would be a huge win for civil discourse.
- chowells 4y ago
  I don't have time to listen to 1000 dumb ideas per day. I have a life to live. Also, I don't want my brain to get infected with whatever got Joe Rogan. I'm fine only caring about news after it's mainstream knowledge. Or even never; most news isn't worth the time it takes to consume it.
  - timr 4y ago
    > Also, I don't want my brain to get infected with whatever got Joe Rogan. If your brain is so fragile that it can't listen to some guy on a podcast without being "infected", then you're gonna have a hard time. Again, I'm not suggesting blind faith in dumb ideas. I'm not suggesting that you have to be an expert on anything. I'm suggesting that you have the will to say "I am not fully informed" when you don't know the answer.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      You already believe in hundreds of bad ideas and so do I. Feeding your brain bullshit reinforces bullshit output. On top of that the only thing most of us can say about almost everything under your rules would answered with 'I am not fully informed', shit, humanity isn't fully informed on anything.
      - timr 4y ago
        > On top of that the only thing most of us can say about almost everything under your rules would answered with 'I am not fully informed', shit, humanity isn't fully informed on anything. Yes. Exactly. I'm calling for more modesty, and less political vitriol driven by a fictional, exaggerated sense of certainty. (Also, reinforcing that ideas cannot hurt you, which is an odd mental pathology that has become distressingly common as of late.)
mistermann 4y ago
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A problem: this is a razor that is useful for approximating what one believes to be true, it is not proper, strict epistemology. Also: it only yields belief, not truth, because it doesn't even try for truth - rather, it advises against doing that. Would be interesting to see what Carl would say in this context, as I presume he meant it in the context of science/physics, not metaphysics. I have arguments now and then with people on Carl Sagan videos on tiktok, and it is eye opening how many science fans are utterly incompetent when it comes to epistemology and logic. With just a tiny bit of abstraction (removing the object level specifics of the claim), they are indistinguishable from religious fundamentalists in their confident incorrectness / epistemic-unsoundness.
- nradov 4y ago
  I've seen the phrase "trust the science" a lot lately, which indicates the someone fundamentally misunderstands what science actually is.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    An extremely interesting and complex discussion could be had about the merits of that advice. In a perfect world, it would be fine, since science is highly trustworthy. Unfortunately, the world we live in is far from perfect, making it far less easy to determine how optimal the approach is. And ironically, you would think that science minded people would understand and appreciate these complexities and their legitimate importance, however in my experience they tend to be the ones most averse to them.

willis936 4y ago

> You have no way of knowing which ones. I am pretty confident in my ability to prove that the Earth is round. I have sufficient faith that politicians do not harvest blood from babies to perform magic rituals. Many others and I do have some way of knowing which conspiracy theories will never be proven true.

timr 4y ago
Great! Now pick some that aren't completely obvious. Here's one to get you started: who blew up the Nord stream pipeline?
- willis936 4y ago
  No. I know there are plenty of things in the "could be substantiated" camp. I very intentionally am not interested in discussing those. Your claim is that we have no way of discerning between "impossible" and "possible" conspiracy theories, which is wrong.
  - timr 4y ago
    That's a convenient rationalization, but I chose an example that was being dismissed as conspiracy within the current year. I literally have no opinion on the matter (see how that works?), but I know that it was a conspiracy, and now is an open debate.
    - willis936 4y ago
      And it qualifies as a "could be substantiated". See? We can tell which conspiracy theories could be true and which couldn't.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      It was a debate from day one. I don't know what you mean.
      - deleted 4y ago

andrewflnr 4y ago

> Maybe! You have no way of knowing which ones. The claim 'today's "conspiracy theory" is tomorrow's verified fact' implies that you do know, or at least think you do. Which is it, do you have evidence confirming specific conspiracies or not? You vacillate between jaded confidence and wide-eyed ignorance whenever it looks like it will score you a conversational point, with no consistent model of the world behind your words. No wonder, because the consistent model of the world that works is "the vast majority (but not all) conspiracy theories are false", and that's the model you've decided to pick a fight with for some reason. Naturally your first response to a challenge is to flip the table and throw all the evidence on the ground.

apendleton 4y ago

> if you think this is an objective standard for reliable evidence, you're in over your head I don't, and I'm well aware of Gell-Mann amnesia, but I'm also not going to personally interview every witness of every event, or personally become an expert in every subject so as to be able to independently have a well-informed opinion about all of them. I accept that this means that sometimes I will not be perfectly informed, but even if it were possible to do all those things (and it isn't), it's not the way I would choose to spend my life. There are other ways to spend my time that I find more fulfilling, and I accept that that means outsourcing the work fact-finding to people who do it for a living, even if I know they're imperfect, and even if I know that at least in certain domains, I might be able to do it better if I tried. > Danger, Will Robinson To you, the danger is not knowing that there are, in fact, lizard people controlling the government. To me, the danger is in ending up spending my free time poring over fringe lizard-people Twitter. Personally I'm perfectly willing to accept the former danger to avoid the latter. I think we just have different priorities.

Blahah 4y ago

> Maybe! You have no way of knowing which ones. "Which ones are true" is far less relevant to my life than "which ones are relevant". I simply have no use for the information about who blew up the Nord pipeline, or how covid started. I'll evaluate claims affecting issues relevant to my life. The controversy of conspiracy theories is extremely powerful and is a distraction I choose to ignore, without evidence of contextual relevance that outweighs the low confidence in the evidence for the claim.