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ciphergoth comments on What causes people to believe in conspiracy theories? - Less Wrong
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Comments (45)
It would have been good to include a few entries here along the lines of "President Nixon tried to cover up the role of his re-election campaign in the Watergate break-in".
Or, for example, the theory that a head of state could have illegally circumvented U.S. law by falsely claiming to be a natural-born citizen based on a fake Hawaiian birth certificate.
Haha, sorry couldn't resist. Just in case, I beg everyone to click on the links before downvoting...
That's hilarious.
Hmm, this leads to an idea that maybe should go over in the experiment thread- see how good the general population is in saying they believe in actual conspiracies.
This does lead to a serious issue though, how do we distinguish the actual conspiracies from the non-conspiracies? See for example Cracked's Seven Insane Conspiracies That Actually Happened.
It seems that the set of actual conspiracies is much smaller than the set of claimed conspiracies so the prior is in general low. Also, most actual conspiracies are comparatively small scale and involve short-term interests compared to the general pool of conspiracies. However, there are some conspiracy theories that fall into this pattern that are generally considered to be in the crazy category- the most obvious two would be 9/11 conspiracy theories and JFK assassination theories. Thus, without actually looking at the evidence and motivation, it may be genuinely difficult to distinguish between the real and imagined conspiracies.
According to what I read on Wikipedia, it's not clear whether the "Business Plot" actually existed in any real sense... apparently, there's no evidence of it other than Smedley Butler's testimony.
This is certainly true of any other kind of theory, why should it be different for conspiracies?
Well, there are large classes of theories where almost all of them are just wrong to the point where we don't need to bother investigating more of them at all. Thus for example, there are a lot of ideas about sympathetic magic where the priors are so low that we don't need to check the claims. Similar remarks apply to ideas that require minds to be irreducible ontological entities.
Fair point. However, most conspiracies, while implausible and tied down with many burdensome details, do not actually violate physics as we know it.