benelliott comments on What causes people to believe in conspiracy theories? - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Servant 07 May 2011 12:06AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (45)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: benelliott 07 May 2011 03:14:58PM 3 points [-]

Thus, without actually looking at the evidence, it may be genuinely difficult to distinguish between the real and imagined conspiracies.

This is certainly true of any other kind of theory, why should it be different for conspiracies?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 07 May 2011 03:19:45PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: benelliott 07 May 2011 03:37:55PM 3 points [-]

Fair point. However, most conspiracies, while implausible and tied down with many burdensome details, do not actually violate physics as we know it.