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Alejandro1 comments on Irrationality Game II - Less Wrong Discussion

13 [deleted] 03 July 2012 06:50PM

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Comment author: Alejandro1 07 July 2012 02:04:23AM 4 points [-]

For what it's worth, I came across the theory before, in a pretty respectable setting: a popularization book by a historian, where many conspiracy theories (along with "mysteries" like Easter Island) where examined, usually with skeptical conclusions. The Pearl Harbor one was one of the few with a "possible, but unproven" verdict.

Comment author: Andreas_Giger 07 July 2012 09:43:12AM *  1 point [-]

Do you remember the title of that book?

Comment author: Alejandro1 07 July 2012 01:23:48PM 3 points [-]

I read it long ago, in a Spanish translation from French. It seems the book has not been published in English. The original title is Dossiers secrets de l'histoire, by Alain Decaux.

Comment author: Rhwawn 08 July 2012 12:04:27AM 1 point [-]

That reduces the value of the example, IMO. Political conspiracy stuff relies on so much contextual material and government records that it's hard for a foreigner to make a good appraisal of what went on. It would be like a monolingual American trying to make heads or tails of that incident decades ago (whose name escapes me at the moment) where a high-level Communist Party official died in a airplane crash with his family; was it a normal accident, or was he fleeing a failed coup attempt to Russia, as the conspiracy/coverup interpretations went? If you can't even read Chinese, I have no idea how one could make a even half-decent attempt to judge the incident.