“The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories.” … Psychologists say that’s because a conspiracy theory isn’t so much a response to a single event as it is an expression of an overarching worldview. (
Most of the time, in order to get a large number of people to be part of a conspiracy, you need to have a case that it's being done for a good reason. If you're trying to keep a secret, each person that learns the secret is a potential leak, and, to a first approximation, each person you might recruit to participate in a large conspiracy has the same chance of betraying you as a member of the general population. So you can indeed have a conspiracy that involves hundreds or even thousands of people, but only if it's a "good" conspiracy that most people would support.
For example, the biggest "conspiracy" ever concocted was the Manhattan Project - and not one person ever leaked anything about it to the Axis powers. Why? Because there would be almost no Americans that would be willing to perform that kind of betrayal. On the other hand, the details of the Manhattan Project were indeed leaked to the Soviet Union. After all, the Soviet Union was our ally in World War II. Why shouldn't they be involved in the war's most important R&D project? If you recruited an American at random, your chances of that person being a Nazi sympathizer was almost zero, but the chances of that person being a Soviet sympathizer was a lot higher.
This is where a lot of "ridiculous" conspiracy theories, such as the 9/11 Truthers, become impossible to believe. If you don't have a population that you can safely recruit co-conspirators from, you can't have a conspiracy that involves more than a handful of people, and many conspiracy theories propose conspiracies that are huge violations of this rule.
Excellent advice for literary persuasiveness! IIRC studies show that partial anthropomorphism is most memorable and persuasive - it's why Egyptian gods have the heads of animals but the bodies of humans and so on.
No, quite the opposite is the case. If conspiracy theories were all false, then non-conspirativists would be expressing their personalities through their beliefs less than conspirativists express their personalities, since they would also be expressing their epistemic superiority. ( http://tinyurl.com/6kamrjs ) The absence of conspiracies would vitiate the parallel that Hanson is drawing between the two stances, each more or less equally sensitive to truth.
The number of people who worked on mkultra, and the cost of the program were relatively small, although it eventually was revealed in the 1970s, also, the KGB probably knew about the program but didn't reveal it because they had a similar program (which is why a 9/11 truther conspiracy is so unlikely: the Chinese would have nothing to loose and much to gain from revealing such a conspiracy to the world). That there were Soviet spies in the US was no secret, everyone knew this, they just didn't know the identities of the agents, just like the Soviets didn't know the identities of Western agents in the USSR, but knew that they were there.
Yet, as a matter of historical fact, there was a sizeable number of ridiculous conspiracies involving quite large number of people, which did not surface for decades or longer. E.g. mkultra, or US human irradiation experiments, just to name two.
From the other side, there was a fairly big number of commie spies everywhere including upper echelons in the US. Note that presence of commie spies in the secret US conspiracies didn't unearth those either because USSR ain't going to tell you what it knows.
(The wealth of intelligence may well have been the reason world war 3 didn't ever happen, though).
Ordinary or not, your predictions have only an incredibly low probability of working, due to reliance on multitude of mostly unstated assumptions. (For the ordinary assumptions, it is perhaps more explicit, and so those who want to be persuasive pick extraordinary assumptions, which, even though even less likely to hold, look like there was more effort and less assuming. )
Predictions are almost always very unlikely to be true even without any evidence towards any contrary prediction, through the simple matter of it being a wild guess. If you had extreme inference ability, there are many areas (e.g. history where you can infer backwards then find confirmation) where you could get recognition for it, and far future societies are not among those.
You're not using that inference ability on such topics, because you want to win some status guaranteed, and because somewhere inside something in your head counts all those assumptions and knows that your probability of being correct is an epsilon. (It may be a larger epsilon than that of other guessers, true, but it is still an epsilon).
On the other hand, of course the non insane speculations are socially useful right now, even if incredibly unlikely to be correct, simply to provide some more samples and dilute influence of people who privilege ideas for fun and profit.
edit: an illustration on assumptions:
Suppose that you are to predict 10 digits from a pseudorandom number generator which outputs 0 with higher probability than any other digit. (E.g. it's a 20 sided die with 0 on 5 of the faces, 1 on 4 of the faces, 2 on 3 of the faces, 3 on 2 of the faces, and other digits on 1 face). You predict 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 . Your guess is the best. But those who understand your guess know you have about 1 in a million chance of being right. No one is going to be very certain in your guess.
Meanwhile this other guy, he tries to look like a living crystal ball with some superior powers of guessing, and he predicts something like 2 3 0 2 1 0 0 4 3 6 which looks like something that a crystal ball might tell, and so is more persuasive in some sense, even though, not being a working future-telling crystal ball, less likely to be correct. Some % people will give that guy's claims probability well above one in a million, and given enough reach, he'll have a larger number of believers. Not because his guess is better, and not because his argument is better, but because it is more deceptive. (Likewise, predicting 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 will perversely persuade more people in >2^-20 probability than your 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 , because former looks like secret knowledge and latter does not).
edit:Let's give it a try. We are guessing about a PRNG, e.g. sha1 hash of this sentence converted to base 20 then used in place of 20-sided die described above. Let's suppose I say that the first digits will be 2 3 0 2 1 0 0 4 3 6 . You say, the digits will be 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 . Maybe I calculated the correct digits in my head somehow, maybe I actually calculated them on computer, who knows? You clearly didn't. So my number would persuade some people much better than your number would persuade anyone. (People tend to do this trick subconsciously, and it gets described as a fallacy).
Pointing out that there are many true conspiracy theories casts doubt on any meta-level discussion of conspiracy theorizing and inferences therefrom, is all.
My recent work has been on a very unusual topic: the social implications of brain emulations. To avoid the above mentioned biases, I thus try to make ordinary assumptions, and to use ordinary methods and sources.
I contend this is the wrong way to deal with bias, and it produces another bias: overcompensation. (See "The deeper solution to the mystery of moralism—Morality and free will are hazardous to your mental health" — http://tinyurl.com/9exlxlk .)Added 5/23 A better reference for overcompensation bias is "Overcompensation for persuasion" — http://tinyurl.com/26w4k4j .
So that's why catgirls are so adorable! ^_^
Most of the time, in order to get a large number of people to be part of a conspiracy, you need to have a case that it's being done for a good reason. If you're trying to keep a secret, each person that learns the secret is a potential leak, and, to a first approximation, each person you might recruit to participate in a large conspiracy has the same chance of betraying you as a member of the general population. So you can indeed have a conspiracy that involves hundreds or even thousands of people, but only if it's a "good" conspiracy that most people would support.
For example, the biggest "conspiracy" ever concocted was the Manhattan Project - and not one person ever leaked anything about it to the Axis powers. Why? Because there would be almost no Americans that would be willing to perform that kind of betrayal. On the other hand, the details of the Manhattan Project were indeed leaked to the Soviet Union. After all, the Soviet Union was our ally in World War II. Why shouldn't they be involved in the war's most important R&D project? If you recruited an American at random, your chances of that person being a Nazi sympathizer was almost zero, but the chances of that person being a Soviet sympathizer was a lot higher.
This is where a lot of "ridiculous" conspiracy theories, such as the 9/11 Truthers, become impossible to believe. If you don't have a population that you can safely recruit co-conspirators from, you can't have a conspiracy that involves more than a handful of people, and many conspiracy theories propose conspiracies that are huge violations of this rule.
Excellent advice for literary persuasiveness!
Definitely, since you're taking the low road. (But never let yourself forget: cultism and paying people to agree with you are far better.)
Excellent advice for literary persuasiveness! IIRC studies show that partial anthropomorphism is most memorable and persuasive - it's why Egyptian gods have the heads of animals but the bodies of humans and so on.
You're such a essentialist http://tinyurl.com/pm6m3yh
No, quite the opposite is the case. If conspiracy theories were all false, then non-conspirativists would be expressing their personalities through their beliefs less than conspirativists express their personalities, since they would also be expressing their epistemic superiority. ( http://tinyurl.com/6kamrjs ) The absence of conspiracies would vitiate the parallel that Hanson is drawing between the two stances, each more or less equally sensitive to truth.
“Some people just like to be odd.” And some people just *are* odd, whether or not they like to be so.
Of course it does.
Actually, it does not.
The number of people who worked on mkultra, and the cost of the program were relatively small, although it eventually was revealed in the 1970s, also, the KGB probably knew about the program but didn't reveal it because they had a similar program (which is why a 9/11 truther conspiracy is so unlikely: the Chinese would have nothing to loose and much to gain from revealing such a conspiracy to the world). That there were Soviet spies in the US was no secret, everyone knew this, they just didn't know the identities of the agents, just like the Soviets didn't know the identities of Western agents in the USSR, but knew that they were there.
Yet, as a matter of historical fact, there was a sizeable number of ridiculous conspiracies involving quite large number of people, which did not surface for decades or longer. E.g. mkultra, or US human irradiation experiments, just to name two.
From the other side, there was a fairly big number of commie spies everywhere including upper echelons in the US. Note that presence of commie spies in the secret US conspiracies didn't unearth those either because USSR ain't going to tell you what it knows.
(The wealth of intelligence may well have been the reason world war 3 didn't ever happen, though).
Ordinary or not, your predictions have only an incredibly low probability of working, due to reliance on multitude of mostly unstated assumptions. (For the ordinary assumptions, it is perhaps more explicit, and so those who want to be persuasive pick extraordinary assumptions, which, even though even less likely to hold, look like there was more effort and less assuming. )
Predictions are almost always very unlikely to be true even without any evidence towards any contrary prediction, through the simple matter of it being a wild guess. If you had extreme inference ability, there are many areas (e.g. history where you can infer backwards then find confirmation) where you could get recognition for it, and far future societies are not among those.
You're not using that inference ability on such topics, because you want to win some status guaranteed, and because somewhere inside something in your head counts all those assumptions and knows that your probability of being correct is an epsilon. (It may be a larger epsilon than that of other guessers, true, but it is still an epsilon).
On the other hand, of course the non insane speculations are socially useful right now, even if incredibly unlikely to be correct, simply to provide some more samples and dilute influence of people who privilege ideas for fun and profit.
edit: an illustration on assumptions:
Suppose that you are to predict 10 digits from a pseudorandom number generator which outputs 0 with higher probability than any other digit. (E.g. it's a 20 sided die with 0 on 5 of the faces, 1 on 4 of the faces, 2 on 3 of the faces, 3 on 2 of the faces, and other digits on 1 face). You predict 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 . Your guess is the best. But those who understand your guess know you have about 1 in a million chance of being right. No one is going to be very certain in your guess.
Meanwhile this other guy, he tries to look like a living crystal ball with some superior powers of guessing, and he predicts something like 2 3 0 2 1 0 0 4 3 6 which looks like something that a crystal ball might tell, and so is more persuasive in some sense, even though, not being a working future-telling crystal ball, less likely to be correct. Some % people will give that guy's claims probability well above one in a million, and given enough reach, he'll have a larger number of believers. Not because his guess is better, and not because his argument is better, but because it is more deceptive. (Likewise, predicting 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 will perversely persuade more people in >2^-20 probability than your 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 , because former looks like secret knowledge and latter does not).
edit:Let's give it a try. We are guessing about a PRNG, e.g. sha1 hash of this sentence converted to base 20 then used in place of 20-sided die described above. Let's suppose I say that the first digits will be 2 3 0 2 1 0 0 4 3 6 . You say, the digits will be 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 . Maybe I calculated the correct digits in my head somehow, maybe I actually calculated them on computer, who knows? You clearly didn't. So my number would persuade some people much better than your number would persuade anyone. (People tend to do this trick subconsciously, and it gets described as a fallacy).
Pointing out that there are many true conspiracy theories casts doubt on any meta-level discussion of conspiracy theorizing and inferences therefrom, is all.
How is what I said in conflict with that article?
My recent work has been on a very unusual topic: the social implications of brain emulations. To avoid the above mentioned biases, I thus try to make ordinary assumptions, and to use ordinary methods and sources.
I contend this is the wrong way to deal with bias, and it produces another bias: overcompensation. (See "The deeper solution to the mystery of moralism—Morality and free will are hazardous to your mental health" — http://tinyurl.com/9exlxlk .)Added 5/23 A better reference for overcompensation bias is "Overcompensation for persuasion" — http://tinyurl.com/26w4k4j .
Even a conservative watch is right twice a day...