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Alejandro1 comments on Conspiracy Theories as Agency Fictions - Less Wrong
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For anyone interested in conspiracy theories, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum is required reading. As the TvTropes article on the book says:
The plot is basically that the narrator and a couple of friends, bored, skeptical intellectuals who work in a publishing company where they deal daily with crackpot conspiracy theorists, decide one day to invent just for kicks the ultimate conspiracy theory, a Plan that explains the whole history of the world. Not spoiling much when I say it doesn't end well.
Near the end there are some nice reflections on what lies behind the impulse to invent such theories. An excerpt:
I disagree that fictional evidence is a good source of information on a controversial topic. Yes, psychology is always a controversial topic and fiction is actually a good source of information about it. But fiction is generally more reliable on topics it is not explicitly addressing.
Note that Italy is the country in which the Freemasons really did have a plan to take control over the press and then the government.* The country whose future prime minister claimed to have learned from a Ouija board the location of the kidnapped former PM. The publication of the book is closer in time to these events than to current day.
* Large groups of Italians can't keep secrets for decades, but secrecy turned out not to be necessary.
I second this recommendation.
Another excerpt concerns the Kabbalic interpretation of automobiles; I find it hysterical.
Funny, indeed, but I had to fish your website out of the Google cache to read it!
I think the problem is on your end; I can access it fine via Firefox or elinks, Pingdom has sent me no reports nor Cloudflare, downforeveryoneorjustme says it's up, and my Google Analytics are reporting a usual amount of traffic to my domain.