The 9/11 Meta-Truther Conspiracy Theory

43 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 December 2009 06:59PM

Date:  September 11th, 2001.
Personnel:  Unknown [designate A], Unknown [designate B], Unknown [designate C].

A:  It's done.  The plane targeted at Congress was crashed by those on-board, but the Pentagon and Trade Center attacks occurred just as scheduled.

B:  Congress seems sufficiently angry in any case.  I don't think the further steps of the plan will meet with any opposition.  We should gain the governmental powers we need, and the stock market should move as expected.

A:  Good.  Have you prepared the conspiracy theorists to accuse us?

B:  Yes.  All is in readiness.  The first accusations will fly within the hour.

C:  Er...

A:  What is it?

C:  Sorry, I know I'm a bit new to this sort of thing, but why are we sponsoring conspiracy theorists?  Aren't they our arch-nemeses, tenaciously hunting down and exposing our lies?

A:  No, my young apprentice, just the opposite.  As soon as you pull off a conspiracy, the first thing you do is start a conspiracy theory about it.  Day one.

continue reading »

Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence

49 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 December 2007 10:14PM

        "...then our people on that time-line went to work with corrective action.  Here."
        He wiped the screen and then began punching combinations.  Page after page appeared, bearing accounts of people who had claimed to have seen the mysterious disks, and each report was more fantastic than the last.
        "The standard smother-out technique," Verkan Vall grinned.  "I only heard a little talk about the 'flying saucers,' and all of that was in joke.  In that order of culture, you can always discredit one true story by setting up ten others, palpably false, parallel to it."
                —H. Beam Piper, Police Operation

Piper had a point.  Pers'nally, I don't believe there are any poorly hidden aliens infesting these parts.  But my disbelief has nothing to do with the awful embarrassing irrationality of flying saucer cults—at least, I hope not.

You and I believe that flying saucer cults arose in the total absence of any flying saucers.  Cults can arise around almost any idea, thanks to human silliness.  This silliness operates orthogonally to alien intervention:  We would expect to see flying saucer cults whether or not there were flying saucers.  Even if there were poorly hidden aliens, it would not be any less likely for flying saucer cults to arise.  p(cults|aliens) isn't less than p(cults|~aliens), unless you suppose that poorly hidden aliens would deliberately suppress flying saucer cults.  By the Bayesian definition of evidence, the observation "flying saucer cults exist" is not evidence against the existence of flying saucers.  It's not much evidence one way or the other.

This is an application of the general principle that, as Robert Pirsig puts it, "The world's greatest fool may say the Sun is shining, but that doesn't make it dark out."

continue reading »