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“Musk needs government subsidies for his companies” is not sufficient to assume “the establishment has direct control over Musk’s adventures in twitter”. This strikes me as conspiratorial thinking. There are plenty of ways that the Musk-establishment relationship could be coloured without him being an enthusiastic and willing member, or otherwise a directly and forcibly controlled party.
Sure, but I am yet to hear a good argument against conspiratorial thinking.
It leads to incorrect predictions if it makes predictions at all. It's usually used to explain rather than make useful predictions. It's model involves people smarter, more cooperative, and more disciplined than they really are. It promotes either inaction or ineffectual flailing.
Not compared any of the alternatives. Same applies to Hanlon's Razor, or various forms of "skeptical", "assume good faith from the system, or any other "respectable" type of thinking I see contrasted with conspiratorial thinking.
Again, same, except other types of thinking promote shrugging things off, and pretending nothing happened.
That's just flat out untrue. Conspiratorial thinking does not involve levels of intelligence, cooperation, or discipline beyond what we've already seen from human behavior.
You seem to be contrasting conspiratorial thinking with blind trust in authority. I don't think that's the only alternative. I think the default assumption is that any given individual or group is foolish and treading water and build your hypothesis up from there.
No, like I said, I'm comparing to a typical skeptical framework, commonly used to dismiss conspiracy theories. I see how "assume good faith" could lead to a misunderstanding, but I specifically brought up Hanlon's Razor to take "any individual group is foolish and trading water" into account as well.
Notice how that approach also explains rather than predicts, and promotes inaction.
You see a pothole in the road. If you believe that the government has left it there intentionally to punish your community because it's too white, you're unlikely to call 411. If you believe it's because the public works department just didn't know about it because they're mortal, you call 411.
You see evidence of Epstein running an underage prostitution Ponzi scheme, that the police were aware of it, and see them stand down when the federal prosecution gave him a slap on the wrist.
What do you do when you believe it was a conspiracy, vs when you believe it was incompetence?
Conspiracy: Do nothing, because if they have the power to let Epstein run rampant, surely you stand no chance.
Incompetence: You demand competence. You watch the Netflix documentary (no coverup here) and you look at your local politics to see if they're mishandling any cases similarly.
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