Conspiracy theorists aren't real. My theory is that they are a fabrication meant to make us disprove anything that goes against the mainstream narrative.
In reality, the truth is always somewhere in the middle.
No, no, it's hilarious! An apropos invocation of the golden mean fallacy, exactly as you introduced it: "the truth is always somewhere in the middle"!!!
I don’t think they’re joking. I would be curious to hear from them.
A lot of conspiracy theorists think they’re in the middle. They identify some crazies in their group but still hang out with them and use their presence to justify their own, still extreme, opinions as the moderate view.
I don't think they were joking either — is incongruous with their first statement.
Calling it a "dumb take" however is more likely to invite fighting rather than discussion.
Is there any historical evidence that the conspiracy theorists were ever half-right (or right at all)? To be sure, there have been conspiracies in the past but our inability to keep a secret seems to have always trumped attempts to conceal (but IANAH, I am not a historian).
Wait, do we mean different things by conspiracy theorists not being real? Because, otherwise, I can’t see how you can think this is not a joke. I think they mean there literally are no people alive/real that hold conspiracy theory views. Clearly there are real people who espouse conspiracy theories, therefore OP must be joking.
But subliminal messaging is considered a conspiracy theory. Maybe it's not as obvious as messages played backwards, but if it's not happening already, there are definitely people working on it. The UK Government has a "nudge unit". I suppose arguably it's not a conspiracy theory any more because we all just assume it goes on.
Are the vaccine conspiracies really that outlandish, in a world where the US government once intentionally infected black people with syphilis and let them die in the Tuskegee syphilis study? (I'm triple vaxxed, just pointing it out.)
At one point before Snowden, the whole NSA thing was considered a conspiracy theory by many.
World governments have done some really crazy things in the past and kept it secret for a long time. Why do we assume now is any different?
You're right, I was mixing it up with the Guatemala syphilis experiments.
Clearly the vaccine conspiracy theories are mostly nuts, but I think what GP poster was getting at is that the truth is often somewhere in the middle. Yeah there are no microchips from Bill Gates in there, but.. I don't know.. will we end up finding that a bunch of safety data was fudged to get a vaccine out quickly? Maybe. That happens anyway, so it wouldn't surprise me that much. Certainly in the UK, some of the data was technically correct but presented to the public in a misleading way.
Point is, I'm sure our governments are up to all sorts of shady stuff, just as they always have been, and in the future we'll find out that some of the conspiracy theories were not completely incorrect. The fact that they have done so much shady stuff in the past is what drives many of these conspiracy theories.
And back to the original point, does it really seem that outlandish that CIA psyops might be intentionally seeding these groups with nutty beliefs because they were getting uncomfortably close to something actually true? We'll find out in 50 years, I suppose, if we're still alive...
> does it really seem that outlandish that CIA psyops might be intentionally seeding these groups with nutty beliefs because they were getting uncomfortably close to something actually true?
Not that outlandish but my own experience has shown that people can come up with crazy all on their own. Time will reveal, or it won’t.
Did you actually meet real people that believe the chip story or are you just repeating what some anon on the Internet said?
Call me a conspiracy theorist if you wish, but I am not so sure these people actually exist. Except of course the occasional nut case that goes out yelling on the streets and you would simply ignore IRL.
Of course not, but then, I’m not anywhere near a social circle that would permit those kinds of people. I’m sure they exist.
But my question still stands, if not the microchip thing, what is a conspiracy theory about the vaccines that has merit worth considering given 5 minutes of critical thinking and research? None, as far as I’m aware.
Jokes aside, I'd be 0% surprised if there were some famous conspiracy theorists who were on various intelligence agencies payrolls to draw attention and make the idea of a conspiracy look silly.
There's also some "voluntary cover" involved; people who know things are eager to tell what they know as well as avoid the consequences. So they're likely to add a dose of crazy too, to disassociate what might be recognizably their experiences into something they can deny at need.
Few people tell their stories with full fidelity anyway, we gloss over our mistakes and make everything better and less banal by instinct.
There are some real nut cases out there, like the whole "Q" thing. But I think that the true believers and the most fervently vocal ones are a fairly small minority and the rest look at it the same way as Santa and the Easter bunny.
> the rest look at it the same way as Santa and the Easter bunny.
Ha ha, as an atheist, I chuckled at where you stopped. After unraveling the Santa Conspiracy as a child I began to question all of our other "cultural lore".
Fake news worked. That is Hans dynasty and one of the scholar insisted on the old idea that emperor has to give up his seat to the whatsoever good guy, like the legendary 3 kings pre-history. One did handover to the scholar proposing this. No bloodshed. I think it is the most peaceful handover of sovereign of million people in the ancient history. Just keep on talking and one day people may find sone bird are just drone. And all are. And hacker news are just fake news about real news.
It's all fun and games until the NSA actually creates bird drones for spying on citizens for the sake of national security and any one who identifies them are labeled insane and have their rights stripped and shipped to a oil refinery in north dakota.
Or the NSA commits illegal massive surveillance at a global scale, and an NSA analyst reveals it then gets asylum in Russia and US citizens shrug and move on forgetting it ever happened.
> NSA commits illegal massive surveillance at a global scale
has illegality been proven?
From what I could find they performed surveillance under FISA warrants.
There are obviously greater conspiracy theories, but are they supported by evidence?
It so blatantly violates what a reasonable person would suppose is just to the extent that such actions being legal would in effect mean we had in effect jettisoned every bit of the soul and spirit of the law in favor of spurious interpretations that could be thinly used to justify what is done if and only if one is a sociopath with no conception of the purpose or spirit of the law.
perhaps unsurprisingly it is still being fought in court, because the US government is very slow to investigate itself.
that being said, in 2020:
The panel held that the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans ... pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
> Check page 13. They directly reference Snowden. I'm getting a strong sense that you are a troll.
I sometimes make mistakes, I was not aware that Snowden leaked this program too.
Anyway, illegality of this program is not proven yet, all collection happened under FISA warrants as I initially said, I think this was the topic?
> Your understanding, based on ignoring the linked document?
I obviously didn't go through all 60 pages of court document, I believe it was your burden to provide exact citation to support of your point for the sake of discussion.
Given the global scale I can assure you that the illegality has been proven in many affected countries. The main question is if it's also illegal in the US.
Oil refinery workers in remote areas get paid a fortune and live in low cost centres, they work for a few years and retire early.
That does kind of sound like a punishment of the future: you have to do 'manual labour' - which people are so unwilling to do, that it also happens to be the highest paid.
White collar workers make TikToks for lattes, Blue Collar workers are the high income earners.
Oil refinery workers are generally college educated petrochemical engineers.
Their "peers" in the corporate office often make much more than they do. I don't know of what refinery workers are "retiring early" but my grandfather's 30 year CITGO pin as well as cancer that runs through my family from proximity to those "low cost centers" leaves much to be desired of this rose tinted narrative you're describing.
"Oil refinery workers are generally college educated petrochemical engineers. "
Alberta Oil workers are 1% 'petrochemical' Engineers. They are 'everything else'. Cooks, drivers, daycare workers, maintenance, carpenters, electricians, managers, team leads etc. etc. and earn about $120-200K, and while at the camp everything is provided for them in quantity (food is amazing if you like 'Denny's' kind of food).
An an engineer who worked in refineries in the US its pretty obvious to me that you haven't spent any time at all in a refinery or you'd know that the vast majority of people in a refinery are not engineers. They are pipe fitters, operators, electricians, welders, machinists, general laborers, managers, admin people, etc. Engineers are a small minority.
I have read that most newly minted millionaires own their own construction/contractor business.
I can say, anecdotally, when I lived in Silicon Valley the blue-collar guy down the street had his own house painting business and did alright as near as I could tell. I know he got in a few hours of golf during most days.
This is the thesis of the Millionare Next Door and it probably still applies roughly adjusting for inflation, etc.
Another is if you take millionaire to mean “feel well off or rich” then being in a lower wealth industry will help that vs having everyone around you also be wealthy.
I remember hearing research about these in 2012. I went to school right next to the Air Force Research Laboratory which controls a $2B+ budget, and there were research projects around biomimicry, etc. As your link shows, miniature drones that look like birds and mimic actual bird movements definitely exist.
IIRC, there has been similar research devoted to small burrowing ground animals as well.
How prevalent these are in the wild, and where and what they are used for is a whole other topic, but their existence is crystal clear. I wonder how many people outside of engineering fields actually know about this vs think it is some sort of science fiction.
I think people who self-identify as lefties still do, but they’ve had almost no political influence since LBJ left office, so since before its publication (I know that seems like a contradiction in order of events, but I just mean the constituents of the same political tendency over time). What is termed “the left” in popular news media definitely does not, but that has been the case practically since it’s publication. Since the Clinton turn at least.
> This is the fourth interview McIndoe has given as himself, not his conspiracist character.
The fact that he occasionally does sincere interviews and then goes on to (back in character) deny that the interview took place seems a little unhealthy. I know it's all a big joke but it just feels like real people could fall into this satire conspiracy theory when he attacks the credibility of legitimate journalists.
I think it’s part of the joke (and by consequence of real life conspiracy theories) that you will never know for sure what is the true. Good, lasting CTs are by definition impossible to disprove completely. It is up to you to decide what is real without anyone telling you. It is a good exercise.
The flat earthers did it first and did it better. The fact that most people think that the flat earthers are mostly serious makes it a more clever satire.
I'm sure many people are ready to point out that there are actually people that believe the satire, but that's true of most satire.
See my first comment. There are always people that will take a joke seriously. That doesn't make it any less a joke. The fact that YOU can't distinguish it as a joke merely lends credit to my point.
The whole "birds are fake" thing is a long running and largely apolitical joke that predates 2017 by at least a decade. That's where this Peter guy got the idea from in the first place. The Guardian is complete trash. They will write anything and pass it off as factual to get clicks. It's nakedly propagandistic in its attempt to tie every unpopular idea back into one public personality (Trump) and push petty tribalism that way. There is no large group of Trump supporters/voters who believe birds are battery powered. Not everyone you politically disagree with is a moron who lacks agency.
I've yet to see any kind of productive or useful discourse come out of mainstream media in regards to the Q nonsense. That kind of stuff can't gain traction under a system that prides itself on truth and transparency. Same goes for the COVID-19 related tensions that culminated in pitiful US vaccination rates and people eating animal-grade deworming paste. The underlying problems are not really so partisan in nature.
>Flat earth is also interesting because it tends to be correlated with strongly religious.
I think it would be more interesting to see how many of them haven't been on a plane and how long ago they last read non-fiction literature.
It's amazing how these trash authors keep doing this, find individual who talks about conspiracy or believes in weird stuff and tie him to Trump or Rush or voted certain side, it helps keep their readers in their bubble.
I'm fairly sure this is also just the latest in a series of articles the Guardian have run about "movements" that are really just trending subreddits. I might be misremembering that but they definitely had one about r/antiwork, which in fairness was also covered by other media and had a lot more potential to turn into an actual movement than this.
I think the new strategy is just to write about any and every internet phenomenon as if it is the harbinger of a revolution. 1% of the time (Qanon, GME) you'll get it right and look like incredibly prescient. The other articles will be forgotten.
I used to think conspiracy theorists were just nuts until the Snowden NSA leaks. I still think most conspiracies are total bunk (obviously), but I admit finding out the kind (and scope) of surveillance that the NSA was engaged in had made me a little more willing to believe some things.
Conspiracies and conspiracy theories are different. People actually conspire to do all sorts of things, all over the world.
Conspiracy theories are different, though because they start with a “what if” and move to belief instead of starting from evidence and moving to belief.
Rational thinking is when you use facts and draw a conclusion.
Rationalizing is when you have a conclusion, and you work backwards to justify it with rational-sounding arguments.
Conspiracy theories start with some ridiculous conclusion, and work backwards to make it sound intelligent. It's not intelligent, but it SOUNDS intelligent.
In college we had to read Freud's Civilization and its Discontents for a literature class. The only thing I remember about that entire book was him saying that no matter what, if people wanted to do something, they would find a way to rationalize it to themselves to avoid cognitive dissonance.
That one concept has been illustrated over and over in the 30 years since!
I think two important points which distinguish many implausible conspiracy theories from real conspiracies are 1) disregard for what humans are actually capable of doing and 2) not having any reasonable motive to attribute to the purported conspirators.
Any theory which alleges that some group of people secretly controls the world falls under #1. Trying to keep just 50 or 100 people organized and getting them to all do what you want is incredibly hard, let alone the entire world.
An example of #2: Here in Zambia, when the government started offering free COVID-19 vaccines, various conspiracy theories spread on social media: some said that anyone who accepted the vaccine would turn into a chimpanzee, others said that their bodies would become magnetic and attract iron objects, while others said that vaccinated persons would become sterile and be unable to produce children.
I don't think any advocate of these theories ever explained why the government would want to turn their citizens into chimpanzees, though.
I mean, there are a lot of things that fall under the "conspiracy theory" umbrella that just straight up happened. For example, the CIA experimenting on people with LSD trying for mind control (MKUltra), the FBI assassinating prominent figures on the left like Fred Hampton, Snowden, etc. And a host of pretty reasonable ones - like the fact that there were probably multiplier shooters in the JFK assassination (the Caro bio of LBJ does a pretty good job explaining how/why the warren report needed to be rushed and needed to be simple so that the US wouldn't go to war with cuba or the USSR), the FBI assassinating MLK.
The world is obviously full of conspiracies. People have been conspiring on various topics for a long time. What bothers me is people can't separate the wheat from the chaff and you get 'Biden is a robot' instead of actual conspiracies like Monsanto & Big Sugar, Big Pharma, Military Industrial Complex etc
The Snowden leaks are almost totally information-free and conspiracy theorists simply project their prior beliefs onto them. As an exercise, take any widely-repeated conclusion drawn from the leaks and then go back to Snowden's materials and try to build a supporting case for that conclusion.
> “Yeah, they’re role-playing together. They’re role-playing the collective understanding of the conspiracy theory.”
This is how the flat-Earthers started, isn't it? But every parody eventually runs into Poe's law.
I love sarcasm. My daughter loves it too. We sometimes engage in conversation where we're both clearly being sarcastic, but we get increasingly dead pan about it till neither of us is quite sure if the other is still being sarcastic. She termed this a "sarcasm trap" a few years ago. We find it fun to see how far we can take it.
Birds Aren't Real seems way too on the nose for anyone to mistake it as serious, but there are some truly naive/gullible people in the world.
Foucault's Pendulum is a (fiction) book about some "Birds Aren't Real"-type protagonists who cross paths with people who went down the rabbit hole. They try to play their own game while staying separate from it. It does not end well.
A friend of mine works with a person who seems to honestly believe Birds Aren't Real (at least in part). I made a joke about this when we were fighting bird monsters in a video game and he groaned and told me the story.
Any time you see 'conspiracy theorist' in a media context you should stop and remember that virtually every FBI indictment ever handed down includes 'conspiracy to commit mail fraud'. In this context, conspiracy simply refers to two or more people working together to conduct a criminal activity. However, FBI agents are not generally referred to as 'conspiracy theorists' even though their job is to investigate actual conspiracies.
The sociocultural use of the phrase 'conspiracy theory' is of course quite different. It's much more like a critique of religious belief - i.e. the notion there's an all-powerful, all-seeing force behind all events. Could it be the UFO aliens? Black helicopter-flying government agencies? The ancient gods and goddesses of Greek and Egyptian and Hindu theology? The more recent avatars of the Abrahamic traditions?
Now, today's media probably consists mostly of people for whom (Frank Herbert quote here) "religion is a kind of puppet show to amuse the populace and keep it docile, and who believe essentially that all phenomena - even religious phenomena - can be reduced to mechanical explanations."
Even so, it's unlikely that the Guardian would describe the religious beliefs of millions of their readers as 'conspiracy theories' as the phrase is perjorative and intended to belittle or disparage.
Regardless, some large-scale 'conspiracy theories' seem to have quite a bit of truth to them. For example, consider the notion that there was a deliberate conspiracy to fabricate evidence of WMDs in Iraq c. 2002-2003 run by the American and British governments in collusion with corporate media outlets from the NYTimes to FOX News and the BBC. Is that a 'conspiracy theory' or a credible allegation that still deserves serious criminal investigation?
The track record on “conspiracy theories” is recently very poor. So the current use of the phrase has an immediate stink to me now.
For every vocal “5G causes cancer idiots” there are a thousand silent “well, with my own eyes I am watching a video of Hunter Biden smoking crack sitting on a bed talking to a naked prostitute explaining about how people stole his last laptop during an 18 day bender and are now black mailing him, so, no, I don’t think this whole laptop thing actually “Russian Disinformation””… but it seems the practice is just lump both of those things together now.
Something I learned early is that character means the things you do when no one is looking (pay attention here to the reaction). People that still want to hide the Hunter Biden stuff here and elsewhere don’t believe it’s a consultancy theory, they just want to censor it. Still call it the same thing because achieves the goal.
Funny how dumb theories are always get attention while actual theories that might affect people lives are ignored, ridiculed, discussion banned, fact checked...
What actually causes Flat Earth/Qanon/Lizard People/5G coronavirus/whatever?
Is it a manifestation of mental illness and therefore some defect in brain chemistry or structure, in which case they need psychiatry more than fact checking?
Is this not some kind of schizophrenia variant but maybe a pseudoreligion which fills the hole that in an earlier era might have been filled with fire and brimstone Baptist bible thumping or End Times theology, except Alex Jones got to them before the preacher did?
Is it an information problem? Did their fourth grade science teacher just not do a very good job of explaining how Foucault's pendulum works and now they are into Flat Earth and all the rest but they can still be saved if we can just get them to read the Snopes article debunking it?
How many are doing this just to be edgy (while possibly attracting some followers in the above three groups in a symbiotic relationship), because it's a pretty easy way to get media attention right now? Come up with some ridiculous stuff about the Flat Earth 5G Dead Internet Bird Hoax and The Guardian/NYT/WaPo/etc will write a bunch of hand-wringing articles fretting about the latest disinformation campaign which has been debunked six ways to Sunday by all right-thinking people. How else can you be transgressive and shocking in the 2020s?
I keep thinking about the old poster in Fox Mulder’s office from the show “The X-Files”, the one that said “I Want To Believe”. I suspect that the reason it featured so prominently in that film set is because showrunner Chris Carter was making a statement about the mentality of conspiracy theorists.
The phrasing of that poster is very specific. These people aren’t objectively and dispassionately weighing the evidence both in favor of and against a certain theory. No, that theory is their pet theory, and whether consciously or subconsciously, their thumb is on the scale in favor of proving it true. The reason being that an implication of most conspiracy theories is that there is a conspiracy of powerful people to keep the truth from being revealed.
I’ve come to believe THAT is the important component of any conspiracy. The specific “truth” which is being hidden, whether it’s aliens or lizard people or pedophiles running a pizza shop, is almost a McGuffin. The reason people believe conspiracy theories, and backwards-rationalize their perceived truthfulness, is that it helps them believe in some all-powerful, malevolent cabal whose agenda includes keeping down the “little guy”. It’s a way for them to justify the failures in their lives without having to take responsibility for those failures. It’s the oldest story in the book.
It doesn’t help that there are real-world examples of conspiracies that have been proven true, but I suspect it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for these people even if that weren’t the case.
111 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadIn reality, the truth is always somewhere in the middle.
[1] https://googlethatforyou.com/?q=are%20sources%20important
[2] https://poop.is/elementaryly-rapid
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCIS_(TV_series)
[4] https://poop.is/raggedly-anguished
[5] https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/m...
I've always held that lizard people control some of the government, and that the moon landing was fake but obviously shot on location.
Stanley Kubrick is nothing if not a true auteur. Also probably eats mice whole.
This is a dumb take in the context of outlandish conspiracy theories.
A lot of conspiracy theorists think they’re in the middle. They identify some crazies in their group but still hang out with them and use their presence to justify their own, still extreme, opinions as the moderate view.
Calling it a "dumb take" however is more likely to invite fighting rather than discussion.
Is there any historical evidence that the conspiracy theorists were ever half-right (or right at all)? To be sure, there have been conspiracies in the past but our inability to keep a secret seems to have always trumped attempts to conceal (but IANAH, I am not a historian).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
You should not assume views have merit by default.
But subliminal messaging is considered a conspiracy theory. Maybe it's not as obvious as messages played backwards, but if it's not happening already, there are definitely people working on it. The UK Government has a "nudge unit". I suppose arguably it's not a conspiracy theory any more because we all just assume it goes on.
Are the vaccine conspiracies really that outlandish, in a world where the US government once intentionally infected black people with syphilis and let them die in the Tuskegee syphilis study? (I'm triple vaxxed, just pointing it out.)
At one point before Snowden, the whole NSA thing was considered a conspiracy theory by many.
World governments have done some really crazy things in the past and kept it secret for a long time. Why do we assume now is any different?
They didn’t infect them afaik. They didn’t treat them in order to study the progression. Only slightly less monstrous.
But yea, most of the vaccine conspiracies are outlandish. Like the number 666 being in some patent number means it’s the end times, etc.
Clearly the vaccine conspiracy theories are mostly nuts, but I think what GP poster was getting at is that the truth is often somewhere in the middle. Yeah there are no microchips from Bill Gates in there, but.. I don't know.. will we end up finding that a bunch of safety data was fudged to get a vaccine out quickly? Maybe. That happens anyway, so it wouldn't surprise me that much. Certainly in the UK, some of the data was technically correct but presented to the public in a misleading way.
Point is, I'm sure our governments are up to all sorts of shady stuff, just as they always have been, and in the future we'll find out that some of the conspiracy theories were not completely incorrect. The fact that they have done so much shady stuff in the past is what drives many of these conspiracy theories.
And back to the original point, does it really seem that outlandish that CIA psyops might be intentionally seeding these groups with nutty beliefs because they were getting uncomfortably close to something actually true? We'll find out in 50 years, I suppose, if we're still alive...
Not that outlandish but my own experience has shown that people can come up with crazy all on their own. Time will reveal, or it won’t.
Believing the vaccine has microchips in it is bottom percentile stupidity.
What is the theory you’re wondering about?
Call me a conspiracy theorist if you wish, but I am not so sure these people actually exist. Except of course the occasional nut case that goes out yelling on the streets and you would simply ignore IRL.
But my question still stands, if not the microchip thing, what is a conspiracy theory about the vaccines that has merit worth considering given 5 minutes of critical thinking and research? None, as far as I’m aware.
Like a klein bottle but also not.
Few people tell their stories with full fidelity anyway, we gloss over our mistakes and make everything better and less banal by instinct.
There are some real nut cases out there, like the whole "Q" thing. But I think that the true believers and the most fervently vocal ones are a fairly small minority and the rest look at it the same way as Santa and the Easter bunny.
Ha ha, as an atheist, I chuckled at where you stopped. After unraveling the Santa Conspiracy as a child I began to question all of our other "cultural lore".
Like the Easter Bunny.
It is human after all.
has illegality been proven? From what I could find they performed surveillance under FISA warrants. There are obviously greater conspiracy theories, but are they supported by evidence?
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=illegal+surveillance+nsa
that being said, in 2020:
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000174-4f61-de4a-ad7d-ffeff...> perhaps unsurprisingly it is still being fought in court, because the US government is very slow to investigate itself.
Perhaps, it is slow because it is complicated topic, which is not clearly described in constitution: where to draw the line for personal privacy.
What government programs unrelated to Snowden's disclosure collect millions of Americans telephony metadata?
Check page 13. They directly reference Snowden. I'm getting a strong sense that you are a troll.
I sometimes make mistakes, I was not aware that Snowden leaked this program too.
Anyway, illegality of this program is not proven yet, all collection happened under FISA warrants as I initially said, I think this was the topic?
> Your understanding, based on ignoring the linked document?
I obviously didn't go through all 60 pages of court document, I believe it was your burden to provide exact citation to support of your point for the sake of discussion.
That does kind of sound like a punishment of the future: you have to do 'manual labour' - which people are so unwilling to do, that it also happens to be the highest paid.
White collar workers make TikToks for lattes, Blue Collar workers are the high income earners.
It's already kind of happening.
Alberta Oil workers are 1% 'petrochemical' Engineers. They are 'everything else'. Cooks, drivers, daycare workers, maintenance, carpenters, electricians, managers, team leads etc. etc. and earn about $120-200K, and while at the camp everything is provided for them in quantity (food is amazing if you like 'Denny's' kind of food).
I can say, anecdotally, when I lived in Silicon Valley the blue-collar guy down the street had his own house painting business and did alright as near as I could tell. I know he got in a few hours of golf during most days.
Also on the golf course, realtors in the area.
Another is if you take millionaire to mean “feel well off or rich” then being in a lower wealth industry will help that vs having everyone around you also be wealthy.
I remember hearing research about these in 2012. I went to school right next to the Air Force Research Laboratory which controls a $2B+ budget, and there were research projects around biomimicry, etc. As your link shows, miniature drones that look like birds and mimic actual bird movements definitely exist.
IIRC, there has been similar research devoted to small burrowing ground animals as well.
How prevalent these are in the wild, and where and what they are used for is a whole other topic, but their existence is crystal clear. I wonder how many people outside of engineering fields actually know about this vs think it is some sort of science fiction.
https://www.thedronebird.com/aves/
That's neither an accurate nor a very charitable interpretation of what I wrote, but I suppose I expect no less from HN.
"Right wing sociopaths exist" != "All republican voters are sociopaths"
The fact that he occasionally does sincere interviews and then goes on to (back in character) deny that the interview took place seems a little unhealthy. I know it's all a big joke but it just feels like real people could fall into this satire conspiracy theory when he attacks the credibility of legitimate journalists.
I'm sure many people are ready to point out that there are actually people that believe the satire, but that's true of most satire.
The people quoting Bible verses to "prove" a flat earth are generally unironic
https://youtu.be/6hGcUUM2DkQ
Flat earth is also interesting because it tends to be correlated with strongly religious.
>Flat earth is also interesting because it tends to be correlated with strongly religious.
I think it would be more interesting to see how many of them haven't been on a plane and how long ago they last read non-fiction literature.
I think the new strategy is just to write about any and every internet phenomenon as if it is the harbinger of a revolution. 1% of the time (Qanon, GME) you'll get it right and look like incredibly prescient. The other articles will be forgotten.
Conspiracy theories are different, though because they start with a “what if” and move to belief instead of starting from evidence and moving to belief.
At least, this is the way I define the terms.
People aren't rational. They are rationalizers.
Rational thinking is when you use facts and draw a conclusion.
Rationalizing is when you have a conclusion, and you work backwards to justify it with rational-sounding arguments.
Conspiracy theories start with some ridiculous conclusion, and work backwards to make it sound intelligent. It's not intelligent, but it SOUNDS intelligent.
In college we had to read Freud's Civilization and its Discontents for a literature class. The only thing I remember about that entire book was him saying that no matter what, if people wanted to do something, they would find a way to rationalize it to themselves to avoid cognitive dissonance.
That one concept has been illustrated over and over in the 30 years since!
Any theory which alleges that some group of people secretly controls the world falls under #1. Trying to keep just 50 or 100 people organized and getting them to all do what you want is incredibly hard, let alone the entire world.
An example of #2: Here in Zambia, when the government started offering free COVID-19 vaccines, various conspiracy theories spread on social media: some said that anyone who accepted the vaccine would turn into a chimpanzee, others said that their bodies would become magnetic and attract iron objects, while others said that vaccinated persons would become sterile and be unable to produce children.
I don't think any advocate of these theories ever explained why the government would want to turn their citizens into chimpanzees, though.
Understanding the capabilities and motives of others depends on haaving developed a theory of mind.
Going by Keagans developmental stages, people are getting stuck in stage 3.
This is how the flat-Earthers started, isn't it? But every parody eventually runs into Poe's law.
I love sarcasm. My daughter loves it too. We sometimes engage in conversation where we're both clearly being sarcastic, but we get increasingly dead pan about it till neither of us is quite sure if the other is still being sarcastic. She termed this a "sarcasm trap" a few years ago. We find it fun to see how far we can take it.
Birds Aren't Real seems way too on the nose for anyone to mistake it as serious, but there are some truly naive/gullible people in the world.
Foucault's Pendulum is a (fiction) book about some "Birds Aren't Real"-type protagonists who cross paths with people who went down the rabbit hole. They try to play their own game while staying separate from it. It does not end well.
The sociocultural use of the phrase 'conspiracy theory' is of course quite different. It's much more like a critique of religious belief - i.e. the notion there's an all-powerful, all-seeing force behind all events. Could it be the UFO aliens? Black helicopter-flying government agencies? The ancient gods and goddesses of Greek and Egyptian and Hindu theology? The more recent avatars of the Abrahamic traditions?
Now, today's media probably consists mostly of people for whom (Frank Herbert quote here) "religion is a kind of puppet show to amuse the populace and keep it docile, and who believe essentially that all phenomena - even religious phenomena - can be reduced to mechanical explanations."
Even so, it's unlikely that the Guardian would describe the religious beliefs of millions of their readers as 'conspiracy theories' as the phrase is perjorative and intended to belittle or disparage.
Regardless, some large-scale 'conspiracy theories' seem to have quite a bit of truth to them. For example, consider the notion that there was a deliberate conspiracy to fabricate evidence of WMDs in Iraq c. 2002-2003 run by the American and British governments in collusion with corporate media outlets from the NYTimes to FOX News and the BBC. Is that a 'conspiracy theory' or a credible allegation that still deserves serious criminal investigation?
For every vocal “5G causes cancer idiots” there are a thousand silent “well, with my own eyes I am watching a video of Hunter Biden smoking crack sitting on a bed talking to a naked prostitute explaining about how people stole his last laptop during an 18 day bender and are now black mailing him, so, no, I don’t think this whole laptop thing actually “Russian Disinformation””… but it seems the practice is just lump both of those things together now.
Something I learned early is that character means the things you do when no one is looking (pay attention here to the reaction). People that still want to hide the Hunter Biden stuff here and elsewhere don’t believe it’s a consultancy theory, they just want to censor it. Still call it the same thing because achieves the goal.
Trump Is Right About the Deep State. Thank God! https://slate.com/culture/2022/04/ukraine-ambassador-marie-y...
Is it a manifestation of mental illness and therefore some defect in brain chemistry or structure, in which case they need psychiatry more than fact checking?
Is this not some kind of schizophrenia variant but maybe a pseudoreligion which fills the hole that in an earlier era might have been filled with fire and brimstone Baptist bible thumping or End Times theology, except Alex Jones got to them before the preacher did?
Is it an information problem? Did their fourth grade science teacher just not do a very good job of explaining how Foucault's pendulum works and now they are into Flat Earth and all the rest but they can still be saved if we can just get them to read the Snopes article debunking it?
How many are doing this just to be edgy (while possibly attracting some followers in the above three groups in a symbiotic relationship), because it's a pretty easy way to get media attention right now? Come up with some ridiculous stuff about the Flat Earth 5G Dead Internet Bird Hoax and The Guardian/NYT/WaPo/etc will write a bunch of hand-wringing articles fretting about the latest disinformation campaign which has been debunked six ways to Sunday by all right-thinking people. How else can you be transgressive and shocking in the 2020s?
The phrasing of that poster is very specific. These people aren’t objectively and dispassionately weighing the evidence both in favor of and against a certain theory. No, that theory is their pet theory, and whether consciously or subconsciously, their thumb is on the scale in favor of proving it true. The reason being that an implication of most conspiracy theories is that there is a conspiracy of powerful people to keep the truth from being revealed.
I’ve come to believe THAT is the important component of any conspiracy. The specific “truth” which is being hidden, whether it’s aliens or lizard people or pedophiles running a pizza shop, is almost a McGuffin. The reason people believe conspiracy theories, and backwards-rationalize their perceived truthfulness, is that it helps them believe in some all-powerful, malevolent cabal whose agenda includes keeping down the “little guy”. It’s a way for them to justify the failures in their lives without having to take responsibility for those failures. It’s the oldest story in the book.
It doesn’t help that there are real-world examples of conspiracies that have been proven true, but I suspect it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for these people even if that weren’t the case.