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PaperclipPerfector  21hr ago (text post)   3492 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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(I originally posted this in the Small-Scale Questions thread, but @Primaprimaprima thought it might be a better fit here.)

Last week I finished reading Gerald Posner's Case Closed, his attempt to set the record straight on the JFK assassination and prove that Oswald acted alone. Posner reserves plenty of ire for the assorted conspiracy theories that mushroomed around the assassination over the last six decades.

I dislike the terms "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorist", as they're generally used as terms of dismissal or abuse: characterising a particular hypothesis as a "conspiracy theory" is tantamount to saying that it's untrue, and characterising the person who espouses it as a "conspiracy theorist" is tantamount to calling them paranoid and unserious. But this shouldn't be the case, because conspiracies do happen! Some important historical events really were the product of conspiracies. Imagine if a public figure was killed, you thought he might have been murdered, and I rolled my eyes and said "oh, you're one of those 'murder theorists'." Murders really happen! There's nothing intrinsically ridiculous about the hypothesis that a given dead person might have been intentionally and unlawfully killed by another person; nor is there anything intrinsically ridiculous about the hypothesis that a given event might have been the result of multiple clandestine actors working together to bring it about. As many have noted before me, theories about history or current affairs are rubbished and dismissed as "conspiracy theories" – right up until the very moment they're proven true, at which point they simply become historical fact.

However. We're all familiar with the type of person described by the term "conspiracy theorist". The people in tinfoil hats, the people who never believe the official story, the people who attribute every setback (no matter how trivial) to the dark hand of da Joos/the CIA/the Illuminati. These people may not be paranoid in a clinical sense, but they reflexively jump to the conclusion that there is more to every news story than meets the eye, and the conclusion seems effectively predetermined. They arrive at the conclusion first, then go looking for evidence to support it.

I wish we had better terms for "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorist", respectively. When we use the former, what we're really getting at is that a historical event is being attributed to a vast nefarious conspiracy on the basis of little to no evidence. "Conspiracy theory" should be a neutral term which expresses no judgement on whether the theory is true or not, but I think it would be genuinely helpful to have a separate term for how the term is used nowadays i.e. as a particularly far-fetched and implausible example of same. "Truther" is starting to catch on ("9/11 truther", "Lucy Letby truther"), but it would be nice to have a noun for the theory itself, as opposed to the person espousing it.

And when we characterise someone as a "conspiracy theorist", we don't usually mean that they espouse one conspiracy theory and no others. We usually mean that they advance conspiracy theories habitually and reflexively, that there are vast swathes of human history they attribute to the machinations of nefarious organisations operating in secret. People to whom the term "conspiracy theorist" don't, as a rule, endorse the mainstream historical narrative except for one little wrinkle: it's an entirely different worldview, a paranoid style. I think "tinfoil hat wearer" is a much more apt term for people with this worldview or mindset than "conspiracy theorist", except that I'm not sure if anyone actually wore a tinfoil hat in complete sincerity.

What do ye think? Any ideas? What would your preferred terms for these concepts be?

Given that Oswald has a documented CIA handler (George De Morhenshildt), I don’t know how proving he was the only shooter rules out a conspiracy at all.

I don't believe there's any evidence that de Morhenshildt actually worked for the CIA.

Also, I said that Oswald "acted alone", not merely that he was the "sole shooter".

It's far too broad a term to be useful. Even if you try to split it up into reasonable vs schizo ideas, the schizo ideas don't actually have much in common with each other (in terms of psychological motivations); you might also try to separate it into abstract ones (the cause of the world's issues is "capitalism," the Jews, patriarchy, wokedom) vs concrete ones (a bunch of narrow claims about specific people and institutions), but even that doesn't help too much in figuring out which theories are helpful or predictive of reality. Each proposed conspiracy needs to be individually analyzed, and the difference between which are high status vs low status depends mostly on how successfully the conspiracy has captured existing institutions.

My favorite conspiracy theory: there's a small group of people currently deploying trillions of dollars of resources toward the goal of creating a pet God to allow them to dominate all of reality, at the risk of ending human existence. They're secretive; don't (fully) describe their motivations or risks as they see them; engage in subterfuge and punishment of people who defect from the conspiracy; and use rhetoric about evil foreigners to justify why they have to do what they do. And most observers are sheeple who either take them at face value or critique them .

Am I a conspiracy theorist? I mean, yes, but the conspiracy theorist label doesn't help in evaluating my claims one way or another.

"Conspiracy theory" is a thing because claiming that something is a conspiracy is a convenient way to excuse poor evidence, lack of evidence or contrary evidence, or to claim that anything at all is evidence. Yes, people murder. Yes, people engage in conspiracies. And... yes, sometimes people do things without leaving any evidence, but if there's no evidence, you still should demand it before believing in something.

There’s two movies that always come to mind that I thought left an important remark about the nature of evidence.

There’s a fairly unremarkable scene in Enter the Dragon (the Bruce Lee movie), where he and some British guy are sitting in a room, watching an overhead projector roll tape on Han’s island as he’s getting the briefing on things. By the time he finishes explaining everything to Lee, Lee turns around and says something to the effect of, “If you’re sitting here and showing me all this, why don’t you just bust in on Han’s island and take him away?” And the guy says back, “We know everything. We can prove nothing.” The other movie is Shawshank Redemption, and the first few scenes in the beginning where Andy’s being tried in the courtroom and is being accused of murdering his wife. The prosecuting attorney is questioning him about the gun and he says, “Isn’t it remarkably convenient that you say you threw your gun into the river and yet there’s no evidence that was recovered? Isn’t that just all too convenient?” And Andy replies back by saying, “I actually find it awfully inconvenient that the gun was never found.”

I have been in both those kinds of situations where the same logic at work applies. I’ve sat across from people in discussions where I 100% knew they were lying, because I was standing right next to them when something that became questioned happened. And they knew they were lying. You could read it by the smirk on their face. But, I had no evidence to present. Why would I be so concerned with evidence? It’s not like I’m doing anything wrong. This is the mentality honest people operate with and it’s how they get screwed over by dishonest people. I’ve become so burned and so cynical from certain people I grew up with, I meticulously document what it is I do, such that I always have something that amounts to evidence and proof of no wrongdoing by me. Even when there’s nothing even remotely suggesting something questionable, in the most innocent circumstances. It’s why I never delete text messages and haven’t in over a decade; I archive emails before deleting them; I put text notification alerts on every financial transaction I make, etc.

If you were standing next to them when it happened, you're a witness. And witnesses are not "no evidence" just because the credibility of the witness can be questioned.

Tell that to the people in charge. It’s my word against theirs.

"It's not what you know. It's what you can prove." - Alonzo Harris in Training Day.

My sibling loved that movie. Probably why I hated it.

It's a great character and a great performance in search of a better movie for both.

People in power lie. The truth for them is what is convenient and what they can get away with.

I think irrational conspiracy theorists notice this habitual lying and just extend it everywhere. Even to the point of absurdity.

Rational conspiracy theorists can notice the lying when it is ultra convenient for those in power, and when it is easy to get away with it.

This will produce some false positives. Sometimes the truth is convenient for those in power. Some crazy jihadists carrying out 9/11 is certainly convenient if you want more excuses to mess around in the middle east.

I don't like blaming the victim in these cases. The problem is not that people are prone to conspiracy theorizing. It's that they correctly notice those in power are happy and willing to lie about the truth all the time, and it kinda breaks their brains trying to figure it out. The problem remains the liars, and their willingness to torch the public's trust, not those who are confused by it.

We would need a sea change in culture for that to change. A teller of harsh truths is not lauded, they are hated. Confessing to crimes is not a path to redemption it's just a speedy path to punishment. An honest politician is an out of work politician.

A teller of harsh truths is not lauded, they are hated.

S'war immer so:

12 Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” 13 Then the Pharisees said to him, “You are testifying on your own behalf; your testimony is not valid.” 14 Jesus answered, “Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid because I know where I have come from and where I am going, but you do not know where I come from or where I am going. 15 You judge by the material world, I judge no one. 16 Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is valid, for it is not I alone who judge but I and he who sent me. 17 In your law it is written that the testimony of two witnesses is valid. 18 I testify on my own behalf, and the Father who sent me testifies on my behalf.” 19 Then they said to him, “Where is your Father?” Jesus answered, “You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also.” 20 He spoke these words while he was teaching in the treasury of the temple, but no one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come.

21 Again he said to them, “I am going away, and you will search for me, but you will die in your sin. Where I am going, you cannot come.” 22 Then the Jews said, “Is he going to kill himself? Is that what he means by saying, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come’?” 23 He said to them, “You are from below, I am from above; you are from this world, I am not from this world. 24 I told you that you would die in your sins, for you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am.” 25 They said to him, “Who are you?” Jesus said to them, “Why do I speak to you at all? 26 I have much to say about you and much to condemn, but the one who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him.” 27 They did not understand that he was speaking to them about the Father. 28 So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am and that I do nothing on my own, but I speak these things as the Father instructed me. 29 And the one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what is pleasing to him.” 30 As he was saying these things, many believed in him.

31 Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” 33 They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?”

34 Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. 35 The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. 36 So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. 37 I know that you are the seed of Abraham, yet you look for an opportunity to kill me because there is no place in you for my word. 38 I declare what I have seen beside my Father; as for you, you do what you have heard from your father.”

39 They answered him, “Abraham is our father.” Jesus said to them, “If you are Abraham’s children, you would do what Abraham did, 40 but now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did. 41 You are indeed doing what your father does.” They said to him, “We are not illegitimate children; we have one Father, God himself.” 42 Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came forth from God, and now I am here. I did not come on my own, but he sent me. 43 Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you are not able to hear my word. 44 You are from the father of the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. The devil was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and so is his father. 45 But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. 46 Which of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? 47 Whoever is from God hears the words of God. The reason you do not hear them is that you are not from God.”

48 The Jews answered him, “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” 49 Jesus answered, “I do not have a demon, but I honor my Father, and you dishonor me. 50 Yet I do not seek my own glory; there is one who seeks and judges. 51 Very truly, I tell you, whoever keeps my word will never see death.” 52 The Jews said to him, “Now we know that you have a demon. Abraham died, and so did the prophets, yet you say, ‘Whoever keeps my word will never taste death.’ 53 Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? The prophets also died. Who do you claim to be?” 54 Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, he of whom you say, ‘He is our God,’ 55 though you do not apprehend him. But I recognize him; if I would say that I do not, I would be a liar like you. But I have met him, and I keep his word. 56 Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad.” 57 Then the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” 58 Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham came into being, I am.” 59 So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.

Two things can be true at the same time. You don’t have to be one of those people who goes the other extreme and says, “I don’t believe in conspiracies. You’re right. I believe everything the government tells me.” Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re not being followed; and just because JFK wasn’t a conspiracy doesn’t mean people think conspiracies don’t happen. “Conspiracy” in the popular sense of the word carries a lot of baggage and has become something of a tarnish word; in the same way “skeptic” has to those outside of the scientific community (which is akin to calling someone a “naysayer”).

Part of the problem your average person has is coming to grips with the fact that absurd and impossible seeming things, happen literally every single day. In a country of approximately 300 million people, if you have an event that’s a million to one, you’re statistically guaranteed to have 300 of those events at any given moment. High profile people get shot every single day. So what if one of them happens to be the US president? There’s been documentaries that claim the government killed 2Pac. (It was just Compton related gang activity.) And as far as secrecy goes, there are a lot of secrets in the world. There are secrets in my own life that I’ll keep and go to the grave with. Just remember the US couldn’t even keep the nuclear bomb a secret; and it got leaked to the Soviet Union anyway. I believe in “conspiracies” much the same way anyone else does. Conspiracy to commit murder. Two rich people conspiring to fuck over their workers. Conspiracies that a lizard king secretly rules in the White House? Call me skeptical. Very skeptical.

The problem is that one of the objectives of the conspiracies is to stay secret, at minimum until they achieve their primary goals. Many preferably would stay hidden afterwards to avoid the bad PR. (The conspiracy that planned the assassination of Frans Ferdinand succeeded in the assassination, but links to Serbian intelligence soon surfaced, which was a failure in staying hidden.) Some objectives preclude staying hidden. (Case study: all the coups, ever).

As a consequence, evidence of successful hidden conspiracies is rare because they stay hidden, but evidence from half-assed or partially successful conspiracies and conspiracies that intended to become public is relatively more plentiful. Thus naive reading of the easily accessible evidence directs towards a probably false conclusion that conspiracies usually become public. Yet because absence of successfully hidden evidence is superficially similar to absence of evidence that never existed, it's equally stupid to reverse the stupidity and conclude from lack of evidence that your favorite hypothesized conspiracy is true and extremely good at hiding evidence. Targeted, rigorous, high-effort investigations (such as mafia trials) are able to pierce conspiracies and produce credible evidence, but it is probable that not all conspiracies are investigated in such manner. Yet it is easier and cheaper to make claims of thorough investigations that support your political convenient conspiracy claims (see the case study of Stalin's show trials and most Twitter rumors) than truly investigate.

I don't really know if there is a good way out of this conundrum.

I dislike the terms "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorist", as they're generally used as terms of dismissal or abuse: characterizing a particular hypothesis as a "conspiracy theory" is tantamount to saying that it's untrue, and characterizing the person who espouses it as a "conspiracy theorist" is tantamount to calling them paranoid and unserious. But this shouldn't be the case, because conspiracies do happen!

Of course they do, there is a criminal conspiracy term under many jurisdictions and these conspiracies are prosecuted all the time ranging from Drug or weapon trafficking, white collar fraud, RICO conspiracies, various government corruption schemes and many more.

However. We're all familiar with the type of person described by the term "conspiracy theorist". The people in tinfoil hats, the people who never believe the official story, the people who attribute every setback (no matter how trivial) to the dark hand of da Joos/the CIA/the Illuminati.

Actually we are in fact not familiar with "the type". Or to be more precise, there is more than just one type. The tinfoil hat chemtrail wacko is one type. But there are many other types, in general all leftisim is just one huge conspiracy theory. You know the type: everything is because of capitalism and billionaires. Or alternatively everything is because of white supremacy or patriarchy or whatnot. These are all the same level of "theories" than your regular schizoid who sees aliens everywhere, but for some reason being a commie leftist who thinks everything is because of capitalism is somehow considered as a normal thing.

So I agree with @Primaprimaprima that "conspiracy theory" label is primarily a propaganda term that is used just as an ad hominem attack on opponents epistemological credentials. It is often used in battery of ad hominems where one attacks all three faculties:

  • Attack on you epistemological legitimacy: "Only conspiracy theorists believe that, no serious academic can believe what you believe, you are outside of scientific consensus"
  • Attack on your mental legitimacy: "Who hurt you? Something must have happened to you, only people with unresolved trauma say these hurtful things. Did you try therapy?"
  • Attack on your moral legitimacy: "Only racists and fascists say what you say. You should be ashamed of what you say"

I've made the same argument in person as well, and it's an irksome topic to be sure. Conspiracies are part of a suite of perfectly normal human behaviour, so normal that we frequently engage in it without being entirely aware, for which I've taken a liking to the term "prospiracy", when people collectively behave in a way that look from the outside like a conspiracy, but without any signs for the conspicuous, conscious communication that is necessary for a "proper" conspiracy. But even for those, once you dig deeper, you'll notice that at least a few people seem to be aware of what they're doing and communicate with each other about it, so the lines get blurry regardless.

For the decidedly implausible kind, I think that "schizo (theory)" is apt. Short and clear distinction from painting all conspiracies alike. But I think it has fallen from favour as a term ever since the left has embraced anti-ism: It sounds mean and ableist, even when employed correctly.

IMO the main problem with conspiracy theory is the "conspiracy": large groups of people are generally bad at closely cooperating without leaking information. Although it does happen, the other main problem with most conspiracy theories is requiring a long-term plan with broad predictions (like public perception) to mostly succeed, which (granted, in the public eye) seems to never happen. And to top it off, most conspiracy theorists don't provide an obvious motive and their evidence seems like obvious mistakes. So you expect me to believe this massive group orchestrated a years-long plan without any leaks or slip-ups, predicted what no-one else could (and relied on those predictions for their years-long plan, so they must have been either very confident or very reckless), except for these glaring flaw only a group of crackpots discovered; and why so much effort and risk, what couldn't be accomplished through simpler means? Well, it hasn't been disproven...

Emergent theories are easier to believe: rather than a group coordinating to do something, members all have similar motivation, and rather than planning ahead, their actions just happen to lead to or benefit from the outcome. In fact, there may be lots of coordination and omission, because people can identify their "ingroup" and "outgroup" mostly reliably and even subconsciously; but no center or plan, just natural human behavior, and it's not actually secret, the signs are obvious just not to you. The other thing about emergent theories is the leaders actually aren't human (there are none), and the plan actually isn't human-made (there is none), which explains no good motive and obvious flaws.

Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Consequently, never attribute a masterminded evil plan to typical human behavior on a large scale inadvertently causing big problems.

So you expect me to believe this massive group orchestrated a years-long plan without any leaks or slip-ups, predicted what no-one else could (and relied on those predictions for their years-long plan, so they must have been either very confident or very reckless), except for these glaring flaw only a group of crackpots discovered; and why so much effort and risk, what couldn't be accomplished through simpler means?

This is naturally just how people think but it isn’t how historical development and processes work. History isn’t the result of an overarching plan that only happens with some global elite at the press of a single button up in some nefarious high tower somewhere. When I was growing up, there were a lot of kids in my neighborhood that I saw and interacted with a lot due to their unavoidable proximity to my friend group, and I mentored a lot of younger peers and taught them quite a bit. There were a couple of them I can recall having to explain the concept path dependencies to. Things in the world don’t happen because of some “grand master plan.” They happen because overtime there’s a thousand little events taking place in the world that collectively add up in the direction of particular, emergent outcomes.

When people ask questions like, “Who rules the world?”, they think you can’t answer questions like that meaningfully without appealing to some ultimate, single factor explanation that unfolds like a conspiracy and explains why everything happens the way it does. It’s the US and multinational corporations that run the world, by and large. They just don’t run it like a cartoon conspiracy, because historical events are messy, incomplete, with countervailing forces against present day trends, along with everything else. It’s part of the natural historical lifecycle of things.

This basically misunderstands the dynamics at play in real life wholesale:

  1. Large groups of people can in fact be fairly good at closely cooperating without leaking information.
  2. Generally speaking, leaking information often does not "matter." Many leaks happen without impacting the broader consciousness. Furthermore, becoming "fully" public does nothing to stop the conspiracy, at least not in a timely manner. Look at Harvey Weinstein. Look at the roughly 70 years of leaks from the U.S. government that UFOs are real, have crashed, and that alien bodies have recovered. Look at the recent revelations that your Samsung television is spying on you. Look at my prior comment on conspiracy as a coordination problem. Jurassic Park understood this.
  3. Leaks are not necessarily true (see #2), and dedicated actors see to it that false leaks are common enough to shield real ones.
  4. Public perception largely does not matter; good conspirators typically target the relevant "policymakers" and not the public. But to the extend that public perception does, it's quite possible to change it. There are entire industries dedicated to doing both of these things openly.
  5. Finally, unless you define "conspiracy theory" to only refer to criminal conspiracies (which would mean that, for instance, UFO conspiracy theories aren't) plenty of conspiracies are perfectly legal. In fact, they are so legal that you hardly need to hide what you are doing. Sometimes it's in fact mandatory and required by law. "Covering up a crime" is illegal, but "providing a rigorous defense to the accused" is in fact not just permitted but required, and even though they both can tend towards the same end. A team of people working together to get a criminal off the hook on a technicality only doesn't register as a conspiracy to us because they don't need to do it covertly.

This last point is very important to understand because the popular version of conspiracy theory, indulged in by the worst conspiracy theorists and the favorite strawman of debunkers, does often postulate large degrees of covert coordination, which allows real conspiracies to operate more-or-less openly without even being viewed as sinister. Obviously there are in fact covert actions that take place, but real life conspiracies (much like real life espionage) operates on a spectrum from covert to overt, and overt actions can be chained together with less overt actions to achieve desired goals.

It's true that the straw-man conspiracy theory, with 300 bloodsuckers sitting on thrones in Lichtenstein somewhere deciding the fate of the world isn't true (at least, I don't think it is; I haven't had direct personal experience of it) but the popular version of a conspiracy theory, where hidden forces work behind the scenes to sway the fate of the nation, is basically true. It's just that general shape that it takes is so familiar that it doesn't strike us as a conspiracy, because we're all conspirators. We've (almost) all signed an NDA, or spilled a rumor at just the right time, or "gundecked" a report to keep somebody from looking bad. And the "big" conspiracies often aren't really different from this in mechanism, only in ambition.

However these basically mundane ways can be very effective. They're just not very satisfying to people who are excited to learn about Hyperborea, lizard shape-shifters, or at least something out of a James Bond movie. Things like "the military spying on the President and leaking classified information to the press undermine his policies" not only happen, but can be successfully covered up for decades, and the details are so mundane that when they are released, conspiracy theorists and the public alike are barely aware of it, even though it's a textbook case study of supposedly-mythical "Deep State" at work.

Harvey Weinstein

Wasn't he (and Epstein) prosecuted? Not everyone was arrested, but especially with the amount implicated, Epstein is evidence against the elite successfully keeping conspiracies (although it did seem to involve everyone, so was particularly hard to keep). He was also publicly prosecuted once before his final arrest, the only reason it never made headlines is because the mainstream didn't care; look at how it suddenly cared years after his final arrest, more than ever before, (although this could be a conspiracy of its own) I suspect because some people realized Trump was involved and Biden (and other Dems that would be government staff) were no longer relevant.

UFOs are real, have crashed, and that alien bodies have recovered

I'm still very skeptical of this: so far all the "evidence" I've seen has been unconvincing and not very plausible. How come UFO reports have gone down so much since the proliferation of cameras and other technology that would verify them?

Recent revelations that your Samsung television is spying on you

Samsung and "Smart TVs" in general have been known for years to spy on users. And the recent revelations are also evidence against a successful conspiracy. Samsung employees never had strong incentive to leak these features, because the reaction would be "duh", and consumers who pay attention and care have long abandoned Samsung's TVs.

This last point is very important to understand because the popular version of conspiracy theory, indulged in by the worst conspiracy theorists and the favorite strawman of debunkers, does often postulate large degrees of covert coordination, which allows real conspiracies to operate more-or-less openly without even being viewed as sinister.

A "conspiracy" by definition must be secret. You're right that large groups operate in the open, with basic obfuscation or a low profile so most people don't realize what they're doing. But that's not necessarily intentional (they probably present themselves as ordinary and ethical...because they genuinely think they are); and when it is, it's trivial to bypass if one looks closely, which only roughly fits the idea of "secret".

Wasn't he (and Epstein) prosecuted?

Right, but years after it was an open secret that he was abusive.

I'm still very skeptical of this: so far all the "evidence" I've seen has been unconvincing and not very plausible.

You see my point. You're correct to be skeptical. But the idea that something leaking thwarts the thing just isn't true; did Weinstein stop abusing women once it was clear other people had learned about it? No, he was convicted for things that happened years and years later! Similarly, if there's any truth at all to the UFO thing, the conspiracy has been ticking along despite being "leaked" in the 1940s.

How come UFO reports have gone down so much since the proliferation of cameras and other technology that would verify them?

I don't think they have gone down.

The idea that cameras and other technology could verify them is mostly nonsense anyway; pictures and (accounts of) radar returns of "UFOs" have been public for years and it's not some slam-dunk that persuades people; believers will believe them even when they are fake and skeptics will doubt them even if they aren't. Step outside and take a picture of an airliner at cruising altitude with your cell phone. What's that tell you if you don't already know it's an airliner? Next to nothing, and setting up a radar in your back yard to get a skin return doesn't tell you much more unless you have NTCR.

Of course in real life most people have better things to do than e.g. sort through old photographic plates looking for bright spots and thus it's pretty much only people who go looking for UFOs who find them, which rather taints the credibility of the whole affair.

And the recent revelations are also evidence against a successful conspiracy.

Any conspiracy that's been verified is "evidence against a successful conspiracy" inasmuch as people are aware of it and don't really dispute it. But a successful conspiracy is one that accomplishes its goals; once that happens, it often doesn't actually matter if people are aware of it (hence why we learn new things about World War Two and the Cold War every year.)

A "conspiracy" by definition must be secret.

But at the same time no conspiracy by definition is secret, because by definition at least two people must know. This is a neat little trick you can use to argue that no conspiracy is really a conspiracy, because (obviously) inadequate steps were taken to keep it secret. But obviously if the conspiracy is illegal it's no defense that you didn't try to keep it a secret. Similarly, I would argue that "secrecy" has various levels, and that simply because something is not secret to everyone or even to non-members of the conspiracy does not render something not a conspiracy.

For instance, look at the famous example of how the Soviet Union was able to deduce that the US was working on an atomic weapon (because, as I understand it, the American scientific literature on the topic dried up). Just because the Soviets were able to figure it out does not mean that there was not an attempt to keep it secret. Furthermore, it was successfully kept secret from the public. Finally, it's noteworthy that the effort was detected precisely because of the conspiracy to keep it secret.

Thus there was a conspiracy to cover up information and it succeeded, albeit imperfectly. The fact that it was not perfect does not mean that there is a conspiracy.

But that's not necessarily intentional (they probably present themselves as ordinary and ethical...because they genuinely think they are);

It very much can be intentional; there's a reason "black money" organizations exist (and that's on the legal side of things.)

and when it is, it's trivial to bypass if one looks closely, which only roughly fits the idea of "secret".

I think it's helpful to step back and ask yourself if knowing the information would make a material difference. For instance, PR firms are real, and businesses hire them, and sometimes PR firms even publicize which businesses they work with or vice versa. There's no secret there. Nevertheless, newspapers do not disclose that they've been assisted by a PR firm on a story. Why not? Would knowing they have been materially change the way you read the article?

Similarly with ghostwriters. If you've read an op-ed (not a column, but an op-ed) in a newspaper, there's a good chance it was ghostwritten, and this fact is also public. But this is not disclosed. Why not? Would knowing who wrote it materially change the way you read the op-ed?

(Check out Paul Graham's "The Submarine" if you haven't already, it highlights a lot of what I am trying to gesture at.)

So it is that when you open up a newspaper, the entire thing is riddled with little falsehoods or lies of omission that create a false impression, and are the result of not one grand unified conspiracy but dozens of little trivial ones. And as I said, not much different in kind than you adhering to your corporate NDA, or not telling a friend that you're regifting their present, or winking at a subordinate's smoke break, or what have you - but vastly different in ambition because the goal of these little conspiracies is to change the world in which you and I live. And those are relatively mundane, but the same mechanisms that can obscure these little mundane conspiracies can also serve to conceal the CIA recovering a secret Soviet submarine, or USAID trying to undermine the Cuban government by creating a Twitter clone. Tor (which was made by the US Naval Research Laboratory, by the way) conceals the online activity of the petty drug purchaser and the U.S. intelligence operative alike.

You're going to feel like my comparison of PR firms to the Grand Illuminati Council of Lizardfolk is absurd, that the former doesn't meet the definition of conspiracy theory. But I'm trying to tell you that the latter is a weakman that trains your mind to dismiss real conspiracies. The voice in your head that says "that's trivial to bypass if one looks closely" is the same voice that tells you not to look closely.

Leaks are not necessarily true (see #2), and dedicated actors see to it that false leaks are common enough to shield real ones.

One of my favorite episodes of the X-Files was one where Mulder got mind-swapped with a guy whose entire job was creating fake conspiracies, selectively leaking to the press, etc. all to distract from the real secret stuff that the feds were doing.

One of my favorite episodes of the X-Files was one where Mulder got mind-swapped with a guy whose entire job was creating fake conspiracies, selectively leaking to the press, etc. all to distract from the real secret stuff that the feds were doing.

People eat this up because they know the « feds » are a criminal (natural law, inb4 But The Badge) conspiracy, but the issue is this overemphasizes their competence. They are also not that smart. In fact you know how on TV you consume propaganda about how they have genius analysts working for them? They don't in real life. They contract out technical stuff like cracking locked phones to criminal (natural law) corporations. It's actually kind of pathetic. The state is clearly this unintelligent appendage sucking out intelligence from the broader civil society; it is not self-generating.

The actual quality of "the feds" depends on the fed. Some of their personnel (NSA geeks, Navy nuclear technicians) are extremely intelligent (at least as far as test-taking goes).

The areas of the federal bureaucracy that select for politicking in particular are quite capable of pulling off conspiracies.

Emergent theories are easier to believe

The Futility of Emergence:

The failures of phlogiston and vitalism are historical hindsight. Dare I step out on a limb, and name some current theory which I deem analogously flawed?

I name emergence or emergent phenomena—usually defined as the study of systems whose high-level behaviors arise or “emerge” from the interaction of many low-level elements. (Wikipedia: “The way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”) Taken literally, that description fits every phenomenon in our universe above the level of individual quarks, which is part of the problem. Imagine pointing to a market crash and saying “It’s not a quark!” Does that feel like an explanation? No? Then neither should saying “It’s an emergent phenomenon!”

I have lost track of how many times I have heard people say, “Intelligence is an emergent phenomenon!” as if that explained intelligence. This usage fits all the checklist items for a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. What do you know, after you have said that intelligence is “emergent”? You can make no new predictions. You do not know anything about the behavior of real-world minds that you did not know before. It feels like you believe a new fact, but you don’t anticipate any different outcomes. Your curiosity feels sated, but it has not been fed. The hypothesis has no moving parts—there’s no detailed internal model to manipulate. Those who proffer the hypothesis of “emergence” confess their ignorance of the internals, and take pride in it; they contrast the science of “emergence” to other sciences merely mundane.

A fun exercise is to eliminate the adjective “emergent” from any sentence in which it appears, and see if the sentence says anything different:

Before: Human intelligence is an emergent product of neurons firing.

After: Human intelligence is a product of neurons firing.

Another fun exercise is to replace the word “emergent” with the old word, the explanation that people had to use before emergence was invented:

Before: Life is an emergent phenomenon.

After: Life is a magical phenomenon.

Now as for what you wrote specifically, I would call this individualistic theory, and not emergent. That's clearer. But you said:

members all have similar motivation, and rather than planning ahead, their actions just happen to lead to or benefit from the outcome.

Let's use red tribe as an example. Clearly, some of their members plan ahead. Are you modeling mice here, or men?

  • In fact, there may be lots of coordination and omission, because people can identify their "ingroup" and "outgroup" mostly reliably and even subconsciously; but no center or plan, just natural human behavior, and it's not actually secret, the signs are obvious just not to you.

Partially true. Conspiracy = coordination + secret. Sometimes, there's not-secret coordination. However, there is no requirement that there be no center or plan at all. Very often in human groups there is, in fact, a center and a plan. Like Donald Trump and Project 2025. What is more interesting is thinking about the ultimate power of this center. Usually it is there, but it only partially explains phenomena.

The other thing about emergent theories is the leaders actually aren't human (there are none),

No, usually human groups have leaders.

the plan actually isn't human-made

Typically there are some plans and the plans are in fact made with the big brain in the skull which evolved for a reason to be able to make plans.

Members do plan ahead and sometimes coordinate, they may have leadership, may even believe they are forming a conspiracy. The difference from a real conspiracy theory is that the actual plans and coordination are a small part of the overall process, and the leaders have little control over it; more like, the process started and they happened to notice and ride it, but they didn't cause it to happen and it would've happened without them (maybe with others instead).

The difference from a real conspiracy theory is that the actual plans and coordination are a small part of the overall process, and the leaders have little control over it;

Or it could be a big but not complete part of the process, and the leaders have a lot but not complete control over it. Or big could be moderate. How do you know whether it's big, moderate, or little/small? What are you basing this off of?

more like, the process started and they happened to notice and ride it, rather than they caused it to happen.

It depends what you mean. In general leaders ride their followers, because they do not have the power of mind control. But their plans are the product of agency.

What are you basing this off of?

The typical conspiracy theory heavily implies if not outright states near-complete centralization: a group (spontaneously or after an event) meets, plans something, and carefully orchestrates it. The reality, that what they were planning started without them and would continue without them (via some other group), or that their plan was a small part of what the conspiracy theory accuses them of, makes the theory misleading: it gives the impression these people have more competence and foresight than reality.

The secret ingredient is moralism and ideology. You have to establish beforehand what a good person believes, and what only a bad person would support. This way, a leak can be dismissed as a traitor, a heretic, an inhuman monster. This can and often is substantially emergent (where IMO the term "prospiracy" is nice), but plenty of people actually know perfectly well what they're doing. Another valuable trick in the book is establishing that not only is it immoral to reveal the conspiracy, it is already immoral to even investigate. That way, a conspiracy can simultaneously recruit large numbers of people, with only very few being in on the details in practice.

I've personally seen this in action on HBD, where many geneticists think it's true, yet actively spread slander about anyone who publicly talks because they genuinely believe that revealing it would have terrible outcomes. But the basic principle is always the same, whether it's companies, cults or large-scale activism.

they genuinely believe that revealing it would have terrible outcomes

Do they believe that? The motivation has always struck me as more like "I have to make public statements about HBD being evil in order to progress in my career," not that it'll result in a Fourth Reich.

Of course, that's speculative about interior mental states we don't have access to, but so is the Fourth Reich hypothesis.

I've seen it a few times, from people who admit to the whole progressive spiel about blank slates and non-hbd being false, yet want to keep it in place lest society instantly devolve into some genocidal nazi-like hellscape where the strong brutally discriminate against the weak...

For some yes, but one of my PhD supervisors who is otherwise not shy to get into fights has, after a pint in private at the pub, all but explicitly said that he thinks the public is simply not ready. To him, the average person is really bad at parsing statistical average differences as anything but "is better than", the worst racists will feel vindicated, it's just going to result in a lot of unfair discrimination, and it's not even clear if that discrimination will be strictly speaking irrational. I may not entirely agree with him, but I 100% believe that he believes this.

And one part where I've not quite changed, but let's say expanded, my mind on is how bad zealots can be depending on ideologies. I'm convinced the same kind of person who used to mindlessly support the Nazis in the 30s (or the communists in the USSR), has been mindlessly supporting the left in western countries since ca the 70s. It's a person that thinks in black and white extremes and can't handle anything but simple moralistic tales, who is always looking for scapegoats.

This may seem like a terrible indictment of them as people, and it mostly is, but it also means that we've successfully "defused" them, since the left of that time simply wasn't that bad in comparison. Getting them into campaigns for LGBT rights, environmental protections or animal right of some stupid spotty owl or whatever other issue impacting 0.1% of people was actually kind of a good deal. What we really need to avoid is that these people switch again to a murderous ideology, whether far right or far left. The problem is they've been steadily moving towards the murderous far left, and there seems to be no way to hold them in check which doesn't also involve empowering the far right. But they'll never go away, only ever get into different ideologies.

large groups of people are generally bad at closely cooperating without leaking information.

But wouldn’t business be impossible if this were true? Wouldn’t the notion of a trade secret or an agreement with confidential terms just not exist?

Some software projects (e.g. highly anticipated new video games) are in development for years before their existence is made public, and the interested parties do manage to keep it a secret before the public announcement. Presumably, there were some such projects that got canceled before the announcement, and they were doomed to permanent obscurity.

Or think about source code. Surely there are some highly valuable commercial software packages whose source code has never been leaked, yes? (Ignoring recent advances in AI reverse engineering.)

ADDENDUM: Although I’m certainly not unbiased here, I imagine that there’s an equally strong reciprocal bias among some individuals of a more Rationalist bent towards believing that conspiracies are impossible; if it is possible for groups of people to successfully hide valuable information, then this would mean that social and political factors can stymie the free flow of information, which runs counter to the dream of completing a fully rational and scientific analysis of reality that is unencumbered by social limitations.

I think there's a general principle that exists that the more impactful (I searched for a better term and could not come up with it) the thing that is being planned is, the greater risk of the conspiracy falling apart: what keeps a conspiracy together is a unity of purpose and goals. The greater the material impact upon the world, both (in general) the larger number of people you need to recruit, and the more difficult it is to align the preferences of all those involved.

I think it is probably much easier to keep a group of people silent about making a new video game or car than it is to say, conduct a terrorist attack or false flag.

I think this is also due to the nature of a conspiracy to do a legal act versus an illegal act. For one, a conspiracy to do something that is legal means that the conspirators will face no repercussions for not revealing the conspiracy: as far as they're concerned, the value proposition is all in keeping silent and there's no gain in it for them (and often quite a bit of punishment) for yapping. Furthermore, the nature of the enterprise being legal means that to maintain secrecy the conspirators are able to establish an effective bureaucracy to deter leaks: scrupulously collecting evidence of who has access to what materials at what time. Obviously an illegal conspiracy would not be seeking to create a parallel paper trail where it exhaustively collects data on the discrete nature of criminality of the various participants.

I think this is also due to the nature of a conspiracy to do a legal act versus an illegal act.

I'm not sure I really buy this distinction in common use; this would move hypothesizing about e.g. UFO cover ups mostly out of the realm of a conspiracy theory, since presumably it's not actually illegal for the government to e.g. conduct crash retrievals and reverse-engineering and classify all of their findings.

I think there's a general principle that exists that the more impactful (I searched for a better term and could not come up with it) the thing that is being planned is, the greater risk of the conspiracy falling apart

Sure, that’s a reasonable thing to believe. But now we’ve moved from “people can’t keep secrets” to “well they couldn’t keep a secret that big”. Now we’ve entered the domain of qualitative judgements.

Yeah, that is more accurate. Game developers can keep projects secret because there's no point in leaking and a big point in not doing that (you've been working on this project for years, why spoil it?) Companies can keep trade secrets because it would be apparent if a competitor stole them, then the financial gain would be undone by lawsuits, and what other motive is there?

But ethics violations are frequently leaked, although we don't know if they're a small fraction of those committed. And the more severe the violation, especially when it starts falling apart (e.g. because it relies on a conspiracy-theory-sized plan), the more likely someone bails to cover themselves, or accidentally does something suspicious.

I recognize within myself a psychological disposition to be drawn to topics and thought patterns that would often be classified as "conspiratorial" (I don't know if anyone here still remembers my UFO posts from a few years back), so I have a personal interest in this.

Some people believe in something akin to the Generalized Anti-Conspiracy Principle: "It's impossible for conspiracies to exist, because large groups of people can't keep secrets; the information will always become public". But, I don't see much of a reason to believe that the GACP is true. You and your bank and the government have kept your social security number secret enough that your bank account is still intact. (Your SSN might be floating around on the deep web somewhere if it was part of a large breach, but, that seems to me to be different than it being widely available public knowledge.)

Much like the term "pseudoscience", the term "conspiracy theory" is primarily a social/political category, rather than a value-neutral epistemological one. People make all sorts of false claims all the time, and the plain and simple word "false" is sufficient to describe most of them. Calling something "pseudoscience" or a "conspiracy theory" rarely adds additional semantic content beyond calling it "false", except to bring attention to it as a dangerous type of wrongthink that must be suppressed. (For most people here who hold any type of anti-woke belief, it wouldn't be too hard to find someone in The Cathedral who would indict them of conspiratorial or pseudoscientific thinking. Perhaps moldbug's notion of "The Cathedral" is a conspiracy itself? Who knows.)

As for the "personality type" you identified, I'm not in too much of a rush to find a term to label it. Perhaps some of these people are on the "schizophrenia spectrum", perhaps some are not. (Hilariously, I was watching a youtube video of a woman describing her experience with schizophrenia. She said "I often have trouble taking my anti-psychotic medication on schedule, because one of my frequent delusions is that my doctors are using the medication for mind control", and I thought to myself "...I mean, I don't want to scare you or encourage you or anything, but I can see how that's an exaggerated version of something that has a kernel of truth to it. I mean, have you seen the side effects of the shit they're feeding people these days??") People are going to come up with terms for it anyway, because it's a salient social pattern that people are going to notice. But I don't want to contribute to the medicalization and over-pathologization of what I see as normal psychological variance.

I don't see much of a reason to believe that the GACP

Indeed. People use this argument as an all purpose proof that large conspiracies are impossible. Given a small statistical likelihood of someone leaking every conspiracy larger than a few conspirators would be leaked.

But the major conspiracies that were revealed in the 20th century were not leaked. The criminals and conspirators in the FBI and CIA had a perfect 0% leak rate on COINTELPRO and MKUltra. They forgot to shred a few copies of some documents and leftists broke into a field office and stole other documents so they were revealed despite the lack of leakers. Operation Choke Point is a more recent example of their disciplined lack of leaking. GACP is trivially false with a basic understanding of the modern history of government malfeasance.

I recognize within myself a psychological disposition to be drawn to topics and thought patterns that would often be classified as "conspiratorial" (I don't know if anyone here still remembers my UFO posts from a few years back), so I have a personal interest in this.

What conspiracy theories do you believe, specifically?

Jews run the world! (Well, they do run the American foreign policy establishment.)

That’s always the most enduring conspiracy that comes to my mind. Yes. Jews run the world. Even to the point of them being exterminated and sent to gas chambers without the ability to do anything about it. A strange syncretism of believing that Jews are somehow both superhuman and subhuman. If it’s the fact that as a group, they’ve tended to become successful and do very well for themselves in the places they inhabit such that their occupy important positions and seats of power, that’s undoubtedly true. But that isn’t quite the same thing.

"Believe" is a strong word.

I would like aliens to be real, but I recognize that the probability that we've actually had contact with them is ultimately very slim.

I believe in a battery of familiar "right wing conspiracy theories" about racial replacement in western nations, but, similar to what Brainwavez described in his post, I believe that these are more "emergent phenomena" rather than people literally conspiring in a dark room.

I have a "religious predisposition" and feel the gravitational pull of various religious/spiritual beliefs despite consciously assenting to atheism and materialism, which has nothing to do with conspiracy theories per se, but is probably a related phenomenon with a similar underlying neurological basis.

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