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Thanks for your thoughts. While I think its fair enough to 'default trust' the world you know, there is a risk in so doing. I think you're acknowledging that

Thanks for your thoughts. While I think its fair enough to 'default trust' the world you know, there is a risk in so doing. I think you're acknowledging that conspiring is a possibility - most people can't consider this. Although, I can't imagine anything more natural - of course people would work together to gain advantage! There is lots of information to support the grand conspiracy hypothesis if you choose to look. Eg the fact that all the US presidents are bloodline relations. Or that the UN (a non-elected entity) is determining the future infrastructure in your local city (pedestrianised, apartment blocks, smart meters, etc). Or that all the worlds' governments acted in tandem during the last 3 years - it was no long 'the economy stupid' but a mass media campaign. Etc. I would encourage you to look more deeply into any area where you are already an expert, and see who determines the parameters of acceptable discussion. Is there legislation, an administrative body, a licensing scheme? Who gets to determine the parameters under consideration, that all the companies and institutions then have to follow? Then consider, are these the parameters you yourself think are important? Can you envisage a way whereby the data can be subverted to misrepresent the reality? I think you'll be surprised how available the information for a grand conspiracy is. Of course its far more pleasant to imagine that life is unfolding naturally. IMO it simply is not the case and never has been. As Edward Bernais (the father of public relations and Freud's double nephew) expressed it, in 1928, in his book Propaganda: > The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind. Each individual is faced with a question - do I want to know the reality of the situation, or not? Its not as easy to answer as you might think. Each of us has to answer this for ourselves - pretending we weren't aware or something, is disingenuous.

anonymous_sorry 3y ago
I would encourage you to consider: what evidence would convince you that you're wrong? If the answer is "Nothing, any evidence against the conspiracy could have been manufactured by the conspirators", then you have a problem. For me, I would be convinced by an insider or two turning whistleblower. With documentary evidence that stands up to scrutiny. I was convinced by Snowden. Obviously I would expect a backlash and smear campaign from outlets under the influence of the conspirators in response. But I would expect a good proportion of established, serious journalists and experts (not just the usual suspects) to recognise the truth. You could say every established journalist is compromised. To me that just expands massively the pool of potential whistleblowers. > There is lots of information to support the grand conspiracy hypothesis if you choose to look. Do be wary of anomaly-hunting and take care to guard against confirmation bias. Seeking out confirmatory evidence for a hypothesis (rather than repeatedly trying to disprove it until it starts to look convincing) puts you at risk of this. Anything a bit weird or unusual becomes evidence for a conspiracy. But you should expect to find weird and unusual stuff all the time if you go looking for it, because the world is a big, chaotic place.
- verisimi 3y ago
  Sorry - a bit late to see this. You think whistleblowers are real. Ok - but there used to be footage of Snowden which showed some seriously odd anomalies - eg the arms of glasses his disappeared, his hand was see-through, etc. This is hard to find nowadays - but I have seen it. What that says to me, is that it is more than a possibility that footage of Snowden was faked - that he was a made-for-tv character. I don't know why that would be the case.. Perhaps its a case of the info he exposed was something of a controlled release - we were meant to hear about it in the way we did. What that also indicates is that one needs to be wary of the source of information. Eg what to make of the BBC reporting that WTC7 collapsed on 911, when it is still standing in the background? Or when Rishi Sunak's briefcase changes colour live on a news program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyHfzcItoFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyHfzcItoFs (Re Rishi - I didn't see it myself - but the colour change point isn't under debate.) The question is who is mediating your information? Which sources are trustworthy? Can Snopes be part of the control mechanism? Is it possible that a trick can be played on the whole world? Once you are aware that trusted sources of information lied, should you continue to trust them? Or is it more plausible to accept that they are intentional liars? (And no, not everyone has to be in on it.. very few need to know.) So, if I reverse the question now - why would you continue to trust proven liars, who are using news etc to present a fictionalised version of reality? Are you able to discern the facts from the fiction from what is presented to you on a screen?
  - anonymous_sorry 3y ago
    Of course the media lie, distort, and make mistakes. And media organisations have their agendas. You have to be careful to attempt to figure out fact from fiction. This is hard and I am honest with myself that I do it imperfectly. This anomaly hunting is precisely what I'm worried about though. If you take every anomaly as confirmation of your theory then you're lost in terms of the scientific method. Like scientific studies that haven't been pre-registered, you're subconsciously trawling through reams of mundane stuff that we all ignore, and eventually finding something superficially strange, remembering only that, and leaping from "this is unexplained" to "therefore my unfalsifiable hypothesis". This essentially lets you believe any number of things though. Perhaps there's a god that enjoys testing/messing with us, or we're in the matrix, or we're mentally ill and delusional, or everything we were ever told was a lie, or there is alien interference in human affairs, or our perceptions are being manipulated by a mind control device for the purpose of profit. All these theories are essentially unfalsifiable - which one, or which combination, to pick? What evidence can we use to discriminate between them? I put it to you that there is no evidence that could possibly do this. Sometimes apparently weird things will happen for ultimately mundane reasons. Sometimes those reasons will be obscure, but often they will known and you'll distrust the explanation. It took me seconds to find extremely boring explanations for two of the three anomalies you mention (I couldn't find anything either way on Snowden's glasses). So now I have a choice: believe that one rolling news reporter somewhere in the world made an honest mistake in a confusing and rapidly developing situation which then, by grim coincidence, later came true. Or believe that, what? The news were incompetently following a script? Even if 9/11 were an orchestrated inside job, why risk sharing the script so widely when you could just let them report events as they happened? Believe the Sky news producer who says the video editor changed the colour of a folder as a probably-too-subtle special effect intended to illustrate the script of a prepared piece about the UK budget statement (asking how "green" it would be). Or believe what? This piece of video was faked, and therefore all mediated information is deliberately manufactured by a secret world government? Again, I encourage you to honestly consider, what sort of evidence would convince you that you're wrong?

anonymous_sorry 3y ago

I would encourage you to consider: what evidence would convince you that you're wrong? If the answer is "Nothing, any evidence against the conspiracy could have been manufactured by the conspirators", then you have a problem. For me, I would be convinced by an insider or two turning whistleblower. With documentary evidence that stands up to scrutiny. I was convinced by Snowden. Obviously I would expect a backlash and smear campaign from outlets under the influence of the conspirators in response. But I would expect a good proportion of established, serious journalists and experts (not just the usual suspects) to recognise the truth. You could say every established journalist is compromised. To me that just expands massively the pool of potential whistleblowers. > There is lots of information to support the grand conspiracy hypothesis if you choose to look. Do be wary of anomaly-hunting and take care to guard against confirmation bias. Seeking out confirmatory evidence for a hypothesis (rather than repeatedly trying to disprove it until it starts to look convincing) puts you at risk of this. Anything a bit weird or unusual becomes evidence for a conspiracy. But you should expect to find weird and unusual stuff all the time if you go looking for it, because the world is a big, chaotic place.

verisimi 3y ago
Sorry - a bit late to see this. You think whistleblowers are real. Ok - but there used to be footage of Snowden which showed some seriously odd anomalies - eg the arms of glasses his disappeared, his hand was see-through, etc. This is hard to find nowadays - but I have seen it. What that says to me, is that it is more than a possibility that footage of Snowden was faked - that he was a made-for-tv character. I don't know why that would be the case.. Perhaps its a case of the info he exposed was something of a controlled release - we were meant to hear about it in the way we did. What that also indicates is that one needs to be wary of the source of information. Eg what to make of the BBC reporting that WTC7 collapsed on 911, when it is still standing in the background? Or when Rishi Sunak's briefcase changes colour live on a news program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyHfzcItoFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyHfzcItoFs (Re Rishi - I didn't see it myself - but the colour change point isn't under debate.) The question is who is mediating your information? Which sources are trustworthy? Can Snopes be part of the control mechanism? Is it possible that a trick can be played on the whole world? Once you are aware that trusted sources of information lied, should you continue to trust them? Or is it more plausible to accept that they are intentional liars? (And no, not everyone has to be in on it.. very few need to know.) So, if I reverse the question now - why would you continue to trust proven liars, who are using news etc to present a fictionalised version of reality? Are you able to discern the facts from the fiction from what is presented to you on a screen?
- anonymous_sorry 3y ago
  Of course the media lie, distort, and make mistakes. And media organisations have their agendas. You have to be careful to attempt to figure out fact from fiction. This is hard and I am honest with myself that I do it imperfectly. This anomaly hunting is precisely what I'm worried about though. If you take every anomaly as confirmation of your theory then you're lost in terms of the scientific method. Like scientific studies that haven't been pre-registered, you're subconsciously trawling through reams of mundane stuff that we all ignore, and eventually finding something superficially strange, remembering only that, and leaping from "this is unexplained" to "therefore my unfalsifiable hypothesis". This essentially lets you believe any number of things though. Perhaps there's a god that enjoys testing/messing with us, or we're in the matrix, or we're mentally ill and delusional, or everything we were ever told was a lie, or there is alien interference in human affairs, or our perceptions are being manipulated by a mind control device for the purpose of profit. All these theories are essentially unfalsifiable - which one, or which combination, to pick? What evidence can we use to discriminate between them? I put it to you that there is no evidence that could possibly do this. Sometimes apparently weird things will happen for ultimately mundane reasons. Sometimes those reasons will be obscure, but often they will known and you'll distrust the explanation. It took me seconds to find extremely boring explanations for two of the three anomalies you mention (I couldn't find anything either way on Snowden's glasses). So now I have a choice: believe that one rolling news reporter somewhere in the world made an honest mistake in a confusing and rapidly developing situation which then, by grim coincidence, later came true. Or believe that, what? The news were incompetently following a script? Even if 9/11 were an orchestrated inside job, why risk sharing the script so widely when you could just let them report events as they happened? Believe the Sky news producer who says the video editor changed the colour of a folder as a probably-too-subtle special effect intended to illustrate the script of a prepared piece about the UK budget statement (asking how "green" it would be). Or believe what? This piece of video was faked, and therefore all mediated information is deliberately manufactured by a secret world government? Again, I encourage you to honestly consider, what sort of evidence would convince you that you're wrong?