Yet we get things like the mass surveillance conspiracy mentioned by other commenters, the Iran Contra scandal, Things like MK-Ultra, where, even up here in Canada, a friend of my dad's mother was actually put through experimentation on the CIA's behest and wasn't acknowleged by the Canadian government for decades.

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.

By using this word you already presumed the likelihood of it being true is very low, so why do you at the same insist the likelihood of it must be high?

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.

> 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

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.

What is the urge to keep the ambiguity? We can do better. Let's use a different word when we mean something different. This should be easy to do, if there is evidence use word A if there isn't sufficient evidence use word B. I'm perplexed why a mainly engineer crowd on HN would put up with this type of bs.

Who's being vague here though? "Conspiracy Theory" is made up of two words with relatively precise meaning. That you decide to attach your own meaning or lack of meaning to it doesn't make everyone else's usage of the term a failure.

Are you aware that conspire is a word?

"Probability" is sometimes a matter of opinion/implementation though.