My objection to conspiracy theories is the saliency bias. Conspiracy theorists ignore entirely plausible if not outright proven conspiracies because that makes

My objection to conspiracy theories is the saliency bias. Conspiracy theorists ignore entirely plausible if not outright proven conspiracies because that makes them boring. And at the same time, they continue to pursue conspiracies that have mountains of opposing evidence because they're interesting, or because it makes a group of people they hate look bad. Like, let's take the moon landings as an example. Those are some of the most well-documented events to question, so there's lots of evidence for them that's kind of difficult to fake[0]. Hell, if they did film actors in a studio, how did they keep the Soviets from immediately noticing and embarrassing America over it? Faking the moon landings would be a pure ideological win for Soviet Communism. I think the most instructive example is Jeffrey Epstein. There is more conspiracy theorist interest in whether or not his prison suicide was a murder than the actual child sex ring he was running! The moment a conspiracy theory is proven, conspiracy theorists move on to something more farfetched, as if explanation destroys their power. So now that "a good chunk of US and UK politicians were organized pedos" isn't salient enough, now we have to invent rogue endocrinologists overprescribing HRT in the name of Satanists getting high off adrenochrome in the nonexistent basement of a third-rate DC pizza parlor. There is literally nothing scientific about this. Conspiracy theorists will never uncover a single actual conspiracy. The thing about conspiracies is that they tend to be frustratingly mundane: like, "Intuit pays off Senators to make tax filing difficult" levels of boring. If you want to keep that from getting out, what you can do is invent a more salient theory and deliberately leak that instead. How many actual conspiracies are being covered up by conspiracy theorists only chasing after the interesting ones? [0] Take the Apollo Guidance Computer, a luggage-sized electronic computer that actually did most of the mission calculations for spaceflight. There's about fifty of them, and they are fully working computers that collectors have even managed to restore to fully working order. Why waste the billions it took to develop such a thing if you're just going to film a few actors in a studio?