- They think "questioning everything" makes them smart even though many questions are answered to a point where being contrarian is irrational.
- They're generally just anti-intellectual. They enjoy talking about stuff without introducing any rigor.
- Probably the most interesting to me; they tend to have rather isolated jobs. I suppose they haven't been exposed to incompetence at scale.
You're right, it's not correct to just lump everything into one bucket. But when they seem to be pushed by a different incarnation of the same person every time, I get desensitized. Especially because, when I do bite and ask some follow up questions, I never seem to get any answers.
I wonder if we label the irrational or maybe unverifiable beliefs of unfavorable groups as conspiracy theories but we label similarly unverifiable beliefs in a conspiracy as 'lived experiences' or 'perspectives' when they likewise have no evidence. The only difference in how we treat the beliefs is based on the racial/religious/political preferential status of the group that has the beliefs.
So conspiracy theories are probably pretty common and uniform and not confined to certain groups.
What do you mean by this?
You have me wondering because in my experience 'conspiracy' is the norm - every business decision I've seen has been the product of a private discussion between a handful of decision makers. The alternative is harder to believe - that decisions are made unilaterally or off the cuff in front of the public.
The first time you find out a billion dollar corporation relies on handful of dodgy Excel files, you recoil and wonder how such a company got so successful doing such idiotic things.
The second time you discover this, you marvel that you found the two companies that are successful in spite of such bad decision making.
By like the fourth or fifth time, you realize that this is the norm and no one really has it any more together than anyone else.
Example of the first is the horrible billing for cloud products, designed to make it easy to get huge bills and apparently that is impossible to fix.
Incompetence wouldn't correlate this strongly with company interests if incompetence actually was such a huge problem for fixing things. Sure companies often fail at doing some stuff, but those things then are usually very hard to do, they never fail at relatively simple things unless failing at it helps them.
Real conspiracies are made to work around that incompetence, either by compartmentalizing and limiting the internal flow of information (intelligence agencies), by being decentralized and resilient to people messing up (eg class warfare still happens even if upper-class people don't all work to further the interests of the upper class), or by not being a conspiracy in the first place (eg if two rich people meet to discuss mutually-beneficial business deals, it doesn't have to be a conspiracy).
Imaginary conspiracies just magically work perfectly, with no whistleblowers, no accidental leaks, with thousands of agents invisibly affecting every facet of life to cover up what really happened during 9/11 or whatever.
You may be asking the wrong people.
That's a problem. And I think that's more on you than anyone else. Ignoring something with potentially significant consequences just because its proponents are annoying doesn't actually make it insignificant.
then Snowden happened
In other words, while those two examples were true, many are likely not.
I hope everyone here can internalize that. We need engineers in these communities.
Up until then the “party van” parked outside your house taping your conversations was a joke perpetuated by schizos. Turns out they didn’t need a “party van” parked outside of your house.
I think it not only makes sense, but it was a brilliant strategy, the results of which can be seen on Reddit and even here, if the topic is other than a direct abstract discussion of conspiracy theories that is: it is a powerful subconscious heuristic, it has been very widely deployed, and can be activated when necessary.
Many of which are psyops.
The more I read about any topic, the more I realize how true this is. I used to think in absolutes but now I realize how nuanced everything is.
You can think of it as humid weather vs rain. That’s just a spectrum too. And yes the world is grey but when it rains I’ll be damned not to know the difference.
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/brainwashed-mkultra
I mean, just do a quick search about conspiracy theories that turned out to be true and you'll quickly see the kinds of things that have actually occurred throughout history, and how many times the crazy conspiracy theorists were right.
If you believe there are conspiracy theories that turned out to be true then maybe they weren’t actually conspiracy theories but instead theories held by a group of people based on evidence (evident possibly just to them) that turned out to be true.
If your question is how do we discern between the two without the benefit of hindsight I’m afraid the answer is in the negative, we can’t, unless you want to just give undue probability of events occurring based on how you feel on one day instead of what evidence you have been provided.
Where do you get this idea that conspiracy theories can't be based on evidence? It seems like you've preemptively defined "conspiracy theory" to mean ungrounded bullshit. Some conspiracy theories have plenty of evidence, and some don't.
There's also an amplifying effect where only unpopular people voice unpopular ideas - either they don't pick up on the social cues, or lack a sense of shame, or simply aren't very bright. Its a feedback loop adding to the stigma.
Not sure what qanon qed is supposed to mean.. Qanon wasn't on YouTube and I don't think he ever had as large a following as the media made out. I've never met one or seen a qanon post, and I don't think his supposed demographic could actually navigate 8chan.
Things like flat earth conspiracies have now inexplicably been lumped into the likes of those who believe in things like.
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...
Or just question in general the motivation behind the decisions made by those in charge.
There are some very obviously dumb conspiracies that have no basis in reality, there are some possibly far out there conspiracies that could have some merit and then there's conspiracies that seemed ridiculous but actually turned out to be true.
The world is not black and white...it's very grey.
Again, I find it odd these things tend to all be labeled under one giant 'conspiracy theory' label. Much like any theories, some are possibly valid, others very obviously not.
Categorizing these things together as has been done in recent years makes no sense.