Dr. Shades wrote:Okay, thanks.
But weren't conspiracy theorists the ones who uncovered Operation Paperclip and the Tuskeegee Experiments?
If so, remind me again why conspiracy theorists are bad?
Shades, I'd have to go back and review the history of both to comment on those two specifically. "Conspiracy theory" is one of those confusing labels that really ought to be replaced with a different term. It's confusing because there are real conspiracies. And it can be confusing because a "conspiracy theory" can be based on the actions of a single person. What bad about CT is that it is based on faulty reasoning that generally leads to false conclusions and accusations. And those accusations can and do end up harming real people.
The reliable way to prove the existence of a conspiracy is the way we prove the existence of anything else. The legal definition of a conspiracy is an agreement to do something illegal combined with one of the parties to the agreement take a substantial step to carry out the agreement. And you prove the existence of a conspiracy the same way you prove anything else -- through gathering and evaluating evidence. Watergate is a good example. Some guys get caught in a burglary of the DNC headquarters. You investigate why. Turns out they were hired. Who was that? Why did they hire guys to to break into DNC headquarters. You move from one fact to the next, and you end up with direct evidence that a group of guys in the White House agreed to do illegal things to help Nixon get re-elected. That's a conspiracy. The conclusion is arrived at by looking at all the evidence and seeing if the best explanation for what you've found is a conspiracy, whose existence is actually supported by the evidence you've found.
CT is like a God of the Gaps theory. Only instead of an all powerful God, it assumes an all powerful conspiracy. Conspiracy theorists don't try to gather all the evidence and find the best fit explanation. They hunt for anomalies -- things that they can't explain or that they don't think fit with a straightforward, best-fit explanation. Just as a God of the Gapper assumes that God is the explanation for something they can't explain, the CT'er assumes that intentional human action is the explanation. Once the CT'er finds enough of these "anomalies," it would require more than one person working in concert, and the Conspiracy Theory is, essentially complete. Note that there has been no attempt to actually discover evidence that the "anomalies" are in fact anomalous, that the anomaly was caused by deliberate human action, or that anyone agreed with anyone else to take action that resulted in the anomalies. The existence of the alleged "anomalies ", in and of itself, is proof to the CT'er of the existence of the conspiracy.
Once the CT'er concludes that the conspiracy exists, it's almost impossible to persuade them otherwise. They use exactly the same tactics that a mopologist uses. They assume a conspiracy exists, and then go through all sorts of contortions to dismiss evidence to the contrary -- even to the extent of claiming that evidence against the existence of a conspiracy actually proves how vast and strong and devious the conspiracy is.
And that's where the harm starts to arise. The members of the alleged conspiracy are target by the CT'er and demonized to the extent that believers in the CT harass, attack, or even kill the alleged members of the conspiracy. And this has become much more of a problem with the internet, where the CT'er can wind each other up non-stop just by typing on a keyboard. They can easily organize to harass targets, dox suspected conspiracy members, etc.
Just for a fun example, there is a whole new generation of flat earthers now. https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/16/us/flat- ... index.html You know the old Flat Earth Society -- that's just a front run by NASA to make people think flat earthers are crazy. NASA knows the truth -- the earth is flat and the moon landings were all faked. This corrupt government agency is withholding the truth from us.
And, at bottom, it results in a rejection in the notion of expertise. You can't trust NASA because they're hiding the truth. You can't trust NOAA because their lying about global warming to make money. Some yahoo on youtube is trusted more than folks who have spent their lives studying the same subject, because he can put together a slick video that mashes together a few incomplete facts, a bunch of misrepresented facts, and a few outright lies that go by fast enough that the average person has no time to exercise the requisite skepticism, let alone take the time to fact check.
So, year, I suspect it's the case that conspiracy theorists have been the first ones to assert the existence of an actual conspiracy. But that's kind of like the proverbial broken clock that's right twice a day. When everything is a conspiracy, you're bound to be right sometimes. But it ain't worth the cost of all the times you're wrong.
