I'm sorry if this post doesn't seem that high quality, but I do feel this might be the best place to ask. The point of this post is to inspire discussion, hopefully discussion that might be useful for answering certain questions I had.

On another board, I gathered evidence of the existence of  "mainstream" conspiracy theories with the goal of figuring out why those conspiracy theories are, well, mainstream. Part of the problem is that, because they're mainstream, many people here may believe in them and may even contest the idea that they are even conspiracy theories. I don't really want to get into arguments over if a conspiracy theory is true or not, so just remember "Politics Is The Mindkiller".

1) JFK was assassinated in a conspiracy. (75% of Americans believe this according to a 2003 Gallup poll.)

2) Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in a conspiracy. (58% of Americans believe this according to a 2008 CNN/Essence poll.)

3) Bush lied about WMDs. (43% of Americans according to a 2005 Pew Survey, only 41% disagreed with this statement, according to a 2005 Pew Survey.)

4) No international consensus on who did 9/11, with 49% of Mexicans, 66% of Egyptians, 40% of Turks, 52% of Jordanians and 55% of Palestinians naming a suspect other than al-Qaeda. This is from a 2008 World Public Opinion poll (graph below).

It's clear that at least some conspiracy theories are treated as mainstream in at least some polities, but other conspiracy theories, like "Americans hoaxed the moon landing" are fringe (only 6% of Americans believe this, according to a 2001 Gallup poll [link here]). In fact, many bloggers, including the economist Robin Hanson, labor under the idea that all conspiracy theories are fringe and wonder why are these individuals so different from the "mainstream". So here's two questions that I would like answered, because these results had been bugging me:

1) There is some sort of method by which an individual can 'filter' out the false and "fringe" conspiracy theory while then selecting a 'true' and "mainstream" conspiracy theory to be accepted. What factors play into an individual's decision-making process to determine what conspiracy theories to accept and what to reject?

2) Is the process of believing in conspiracy theories impacted by some form of rationality? Does Bayesian logic plays a role here as well...do individuals unconsciously rate the likelihood of a conspiracy theory and accept conspiracy theories with a high probability of it occurring (while rejecting conspiracy theories with a low probability of it occurring)?

Addendum: (I tried to select examples that could generally be agreed to be "conspiracy theories" to avoid arguments over definitions that I'd lose, but I may have failed in this sort of thing. To reveal bias, I believe that a conspiracy theory is a hypothesis about a covert plot by more than one individual.)

Recently, Tyler Cowen, on his blog, reported a story of a German court case where Demitrius Soupolos sued Frank Maus for "breach of contract". Demitrius paid Maus to do a certain service, which Maus then was unable to deliever. Maus argued that he was only paid to make a good effort on said service but was prevented from doing so (due to an "act of god", as one American legal scholar supposedly claimed). This got me curious: who would win that court case? So I began doing a Google search for more information about this case...only to see that this case has been repeated over and over. Tyler Cowen's blog post links to an article on this case written in March 30th 2009...and that all these other news stories just copy this article, word-for-word. There is no mention of a verdict anywhere in my searches (which I think would be fairly important concerning that this is a court case after all), nor were any of these news articles about Soupolos were written in Germany (where the court case was supposed to be held), leading me to conclude that this is nothing more than a hoax. Now, this may not be a hoax, but I'm fairly confident that it is a hoax.

Tyler made his blog post in March 23rd 2011...so why would this hoax story continue to spread long after 2009? The answer is simple: the context of the story. Frank Maus' service was impregnation of Demitrius' wife, a "beauty queen"*. The "act of god" that prevented Frank Maus for carrying out this service...was the fact that Frank Maus was infertile and didn't know of this infertility because his wife deceived him.

The story seems so weird, strange, and soap operaic when you added in the 'context' that it becomes understandable that somebody may instinctively wish to grapple with the implications of this story as opposed to digging in deeper and questioning the story's inauthenticity (and I must admit, when I was doing my research, I was not intending to question the story but merely wanted to know who won the court case in question). Let's assume that the Maus story is a fake. I have two questions based on that assumption:

1) If someone wants to create a hoax story that is generally accepted by the population (either for purely sadistic entertainment or for more sinister purposes), would he desire to create a story that is weird or unbelievable just to capitalize on the 'weird' factor and get people to accept it? If so, at what level of weirdness or unbelievability?

2) Assuming that a "rational" individual would prefer to have accurate and true information, how does one guard against some prankster using this sort of tactic?

*The excuse given in the story was that Demitrius Soupolos was infertile...but considering that a beauty queen should be someone of means, then Soupolos could have used technological advances such as IVF to deal with the infertility problem. This, alongside the bizzare nature of mentioning the detail of a beauty queen (who, when I did the search, once again bring up repeated copies of the same court case article), as if that is the only important thing about this woman in question, suggests that this is yet another evidence of this being a hoax.

EDIT: According to Douglas Knight, this story had originally started as a article in Jet Magazine, written in 1978. While it doesn't prove that it's not a "hoax", this new piece of evidence does help to explain why I was unable to find anything on Google search relating to the court case (other than repeated copies of the same story).

>"The heart of the problem is not how we vote for officials - it's that we vote for officials, instead of getting to vote on issues.

>Americans are proud of being "governed by the people", yet a citizen has no effective way to have any influence on any particular issue! If it's very important to me to promote gay rights or environmental responsibility, I'm supposed to vote for a Democrat? How effective is that?

>We need to ditch representative democracy if we want democracy. (The next question is whether we want democracy.)"---PhilGoetz

The main problem with direct democracy is that we are reliant on "the people", who may be ill-informed and not make correct choices on issue questions. With a representative democracy, you may have intelligent and rational actors who would make better policy choices. PhilGoetz may disagree though, and believe that it is important to enfranschie "the people" in policymaking...

Rather than rely on philosophical discussion based on values, I propose an experiment to find out if PhilGoetz' Direct Democracy works.

I start up a simulation (which I will not name so that you don't play the simulation ahead of time). I will give you Policy Questions based on the simulation, where you will simply vote Yes or No. Majority rules. (To make it more interesting, I'll have each vote represent a random "interest group", with control over entire voting blocs.) Anybody can change their vote at any time. If people don't have the time to vote, then can develop a "profile" which would allow them to vote in proxy. Voting will end after a specific period of time, or the moment the vote crosses over the majority threshold, and stays over for a required period of time.

The simulation will end in a war against an NPC country. If you "win" this war, you win the simulation, the Direct Democracy works, and then future experiments could lead to people comparing the effectiveness of different types of "democracy" in creating good policy. If you "lose" the war, the government is destroyed, and you lose the simulation. Direct Democracy may has some problems and need to be modified or abanonded.

I will limit the amount of information I will give you. I'll only give enough information so you understand how the simulation works, but no more. It's up to you to decide what is the best thing to do.