a conspiracy only requires a single government agent telling them to do it
Maybe I’m misusing the terminology somehow, but I wouldn’t regard a theory that says the September 11 attack was carried out by a generic terrorist group asked to do it by a single rogue government official acting alone as a “conspiracy theory”, and I don’t think that’s close to what “9-11 truthers” mostly think. (Also, I’m not sure how it would work. Most terrorist organizations don’t take instructions from random rogue government officials.)
Isn’t the usual “truther” story that the US government—meaning something like “the President, some of his senior staff, and enough people further down to make it actually happen”—were responsible, with the goal of justifying an invasion of Iraq or stirring up support for the administration on the back of fear and anger, or something like that?
(Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean by “a single government agent”?)
if your priors for the USG are sufficiently faulty as to equate it with Russia, you might be so foolish as to become a 9-11 truther.
Yes, you might. Were you expecting me to disagree? My claim isn’t that (what are commonly called) conspiracy theories are all so insane that no one could embrace them unless seriously mentally disordered. It’s that they have enough features in common, other than being disapproved of by the person mentioning them, that “conspiracy theory” isn’t a mere term of abuse.
(For my part, though my opinion of the Russian government is extremely negative, I would not at all expect it to start massacring random Russian citizens in order to manufacture outrage against “Galician fascist terrorists”, not least because they’d be likely to get caught and I’d expect them not to want that.)
when “conspiracy theories” get good evidence, they stop being called such.
I agree that there’s (so to speak) an evaluative element in the term “conspiracy theory”. But I don’t think it’s what you say it is (i.e., that the only difference is whether the person using the term wants to ridicule the theory in question). It’s more like the evaluative element in the term “murder”. You don’t call a killing a murder if you think it was justified, but that doesn’t mean that “murder” just means “killing the speaker disapproves of”. Most opponents of the death penalty don’t call executions murders. Most pacifists don’t call deaths in war murders. (Some might, in both cases.)
Conspiracy theories become pathological when absence of evidence is taken as evidence of a cover up.
And it seems to me that this is precisely part of what distinguishes “conspiracy theories” from other theories involving conspiracies.
If the NSA secretly undermining public cryptography [...] was part of your model [...] what on earth do you mean you don’t believe in conspiracy theories?
Some theories about NSA attacks on crypto would have been rightly classed as conspiracy theories, although unusually plausible ones because, e.g., doing things of that general sort and keeping them secret is the NSA’s job. Some of those now turn out to be true. So something formerly classed as a conspiracy theory is true, and conventionally is no longer called a conspiracy theory. I have no problem with any of this, and I don’t see why anyone else should have either.
I have the impression that you have a not-quite-correct impression of my opinions, so let me make some things more explicit. I think that for something to be called a “conspiracy theory” it is neither necessary nor sufficient for it to involve a conspiracy and be thought ridiculous by the person so calling it. Rather, it needs to be lacking in evidence, explain this in terms of an implausible large-scale conspiracy to keep it secret, require the people involved to be more evil than there’s other reason to think they are, and be thought untrue by the person referring to it. When a conspiracy theory turns out to be true after all, it is simply a conspiracy and belief in it is no longer called a “theory” (unsurprisingly as the word “theory” in common use is restricted to things that don’t have a convincing preponderance of evidence in their favour; this differs from scientific usage). And I think some things classified as conspiracy theories turn out to be true, but relatively few because to be a conspiracy theory something needs to involve unlikely elements and be widely thought untrue.
So, for instance, if someone believed a few years ago that the NSA was deliberately attempting to insert backdoors into widely available cryptographic software, that would have been something of a borderline case. There wasn’t a lot of evidence; for the theory to be true the activity would indeed have had to be kept secret by a lot of people, but it was actually pretty plausible that they’d do so; it would maybe require a slightly higher level of evil than a naive observer might expect from an agency like the NSA, but not much; and it was thought untrue by a lot of people. Now we have better evidence that they did it, which has raised general expectations of their level of evil, and fewer people think it’s untrue, so this has made the shift from “maybe just about a conspiracy theory” to “not really a conspiracy theory, just a plausible and probably correct theory about a conspiracy”. (The Snowden revelations have maybe pushed it in the other direction a little, by reducing our confidence in the NSA’s ability to keep such things covered up. But I think the direction of the overall effect is clear.)
I think the way you use “conspiracy theory” is quite a good one*, but somewhat non-standard. In particular, you state that ideas described as “conspiracy theories” are sometimes correct. I think Brillyant (to whom I was originally replying) gives a much more standard description when he calls them “ludicrous” and “absurd.” For example, wiki states that the phrase:
has acquired a derogatory meaning, implying a paranoid tendency to see the influence of some malign covert agency in events. The term is often used to dismiss claims that the critic deems ridiculous, misconceived, paranoid, unfounded, outlandish, or irrational.
If the ordinary connotation of “conspiracy theory” was “low-probability hypothesis involving a conspiracy” I would not have objected to its use.
*although I think that the “evil” part needs work.
It looks to me as if Brillyant is using the term to mean something close to “ludicrous, absurd theory involving a conspiracy”. I remark firstly that this isn’t so far from “low-probability hypothesis involving a conspiracy” and secondly that it’s entirely possible that Brillyant hasn’t sat down and thought through exactly what shades of meaning s/he attaches to the term “conspiracy theory”, and that on further reflection s/he would define that term in a way that clearly doesn’t amount to “theory I want to make fun of”.
I appreciate that you’re concerned about equivocation where someone effectively argues “this is a conspiracy theory (= theory with a conspiracy in), therefore it should be treated like a conspiracy theory (= ludicrous absurd theory with a conspiracy in)”, but I don’t see anyone doing that in this thread and given how firmly established the term is I don’t think there’s much mileage in trying to prevent it by declaring that “conspiracy theory” simply means “theory with a conspiracy in”.
(In particular I don’t think Brillyant is engaging in any such equivocation. Rather, I think s/he is, or would be after more explicit reflection, saying something like this: 1. People like to believe in conspiracies. 2. Therefore, the fact that a theory is believed by quite a lot of people is less evidence when the theory features a conspiracy than it normally would be. 3. So when someone offers up a theory that isn’t terribly plausible on its face and that involves a conspiracy, my initial estimate is that it’s unlikely to be true; the best explanation of the fact that I’m being invited to consider it is that its advocates have fallen prey to their inbuilt liking for theories involving conspiracies. -- This doesn’t oblige Brillyant to disbelieve every theory with a conspiracy in, because some actually have good evidence or are highly plausible for other reasons. Those tend not to be the ones labelled “conspiracy theory”.)
I think you misunderstand my concern; perhaps I have not been clear enough. I am not so much worried about equivocation, as I am worried by precisely the 3-step process which you describe. And I am particularly worried about people going through that process, labelling something a “conspiracy theory,” then the theory turns out to be true, and they never reassess their premises.
Let’s restate your process in more neutral language.
For reasons of specialisation, partial information, etc, I treat the fact that lots of people believe in a theory as partial evidence in its favour.
Some people have a higher prior than me for the existence of conspiracies.
Therefore if a theory involving a conspiracy is believed by quite a lot of people, it may be that this belief is due to their higher prior for conspiracies, not any special knowledge or expertise that I need to defer to.
Therefore I treat their belief in the theory as less evidence than normal, on the basis that if I had the evidence/expertise/etc that they do, I would be less likely than them to conclude that there is a conspiracy.
So if someone offers an implausible-seeming theory to me involving a conspiracy, I discount it and conclude that its advocates just have a high prior for conspiracies.
Suddenly, this doesn’t look like a sound epistemological process at all. Steps (1) and (2) are fine, but (3), (4) and (5) go increasingly off the rails. It looks like you are deliberately shielding your anti-conspiracies prior, by discounting (even beyond their initial level of plausibility) theories that might challenge it. And if, on those occasions that a conspiracy is eventually proven, you refuse to update your prior on the likelihood of conspiracies (by insisting that such-and-such a theory doesn’t really count as a conspiracy theory, even though, at the time, you were happy to label it as such), then I would say that the process has become truly pathological, just as much as that of a “conspiracy theorist.”
Consider: why do some people have that higher prior? Mightn’t that higher prior be itself part of their tacit knowledge and expertise—in the same way that a doctor’s prior on the cause of a set of symptoms is not because he ‘likes’ to diagnose people with tuberculosis, but due to his own updates on past experience to which you are not privy. Aren’t we doing precisely the wrong thing by discounting the theory in response to the prior?
None of this means that you should become a 9-11 Truther, of course. But consider the 1999 Moscow bombings. I don’t have any particular evidence about the events, but there’s a plausible case that they were an FSB conspiracy. Shouldn’t that make you more willing to believe the hypothetical in the grandparent than otherwise? In my own experience, people who are most likely to believe in conspiracy theories are those who had their formative experiences in dictatorial countries where there really are lots of conspiracies—and so they subsequently see them everywhere. But by symmetry, it follows that those of us brought up in the West will be too reluctant to see conspiracies elsewhere.
(I’m not sure that #2 is the right formulation. A lot of people don’t think in terms sufficiently close to Bayesian inference that talking about their “priors” really makes sense. I’m not sure this is more than nit-picking, though.)
I agree that #3,4,5 “go increasingly off the rails” but I think what goes off the rails is your description, as much as the actual mental process it aims to describe. Specifically, I think you are making the following claims and blaming them on the term “conspiracy theory”:
That when someone thinks something is a “conspiracy theory” they discount it not only in the sense of thinking it less likely than they otherwise would have, but in the stronger sense of dismissing it completely.
That they are then immune to further evidence that might (if they were rational) lead them to accept the theory after all.
That if the theory eventually turns out to have been right, they don’t update their estimate for how much to discount theories on account of being suspiciously conspiracy-based.
Now, I dare say many people do do just those things. After all, many people do all kinds of highly irrational things. But unless I’m badly misreading you, you are claiming specifically that I and Brillyant do them, and you are laying much of the blame for this on the usage of the term “conspiracy theory”, and I think both parts of this are wrong.
Mightn’t that higher prior be itself part of their tacit knowledge and expertise
Yup. But the answer to that question is always yes, and therefore tells us nothing. (Mightn’t a creationist’s higher prior on the universe being only 6000 years old be part of their tacit knowledge and expertise? It might be, but I wouldn’t bet on it.)
But by symmetry, it follows that those of us brought up in the West will be too reluctant to see conspiracies elsewhere.
I don’t think the symmetry is quite there. People brought up in totalitarian countries who then move to liberal democracies see too many conspiracies. No doubt people brought up in liberal democracies who then move to totalitarian countries see too few, but it could still be that people brought up in totalitarian countries who stay there and people brought up in liberal democracies who stay there both see approximately the right number of conspiracies.
I wouldn’t regard a theory that says the September 11 attack was carried out by a generic terrorist group asked to do it by a single rogue government official acting alone as a “conspiracy theory”,
I remember September tenth, and if you’d said that to me then, I’m not sure I would have called it a conspiracy theory (I might have), but I certainly would have thought you were wildly overconcerned.
But you’d probably have said the same if I’d said that al-Qaeda terrorists were about to take over lots of planes and fly them into buildings, with thousands of lives lost. And yet that does in fact appear to have happened, and no one calls it a “conspiracy theory”.
So the fact that saying the day before that terrorists asked to do it by a single rogue government official were about to take over planes and fly them into buildings would have sounded wildly overconcerned and conspiracy-theory-ish can’t make believing now that that’s what happened a conspiracy theory.
(For the avoidance of doubt: I do not in fact think that the people who flew planes into buildings on “9/11” were asked to do so by any official of any government, rogue or otherwise.)
Maybe I’m misusing the terminology somehow, but I wouldn’t regard a theory that says the September 11 attack was carried out by a generic terrorist group asked to do it by a single rogue government official acting alone as a “conspiracy theory”, and I don’t think that’s close to what “9-11 truthers” mostly think. (Also, I’m not sure how it would work. Most terrorist organizations don’t take instructions from random rogue government officials.)
Isn’t the usual “truther” story that the US government—meaning something like “the President, some of his senior staff, and enough people further down to make it actually happen”—were responsible, with the goal of justifying an invasion of Iraq or stirring up support for the administration on the back of fear and anger, or something like that?
(Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean by “a single government agent”?)
Yes, you might. Were you expecting me to disagree? My claim isn’t that (what are commonly called) conspiracy theories are all so insane that no one could embrace them unless seriously mentally disordered. It’s that they have enough features in common, other than being disapproved of by the person mentioning them, that “conspiracy theory” isn’t a mere term of abuse.
(For my part, though my opinion of the Russian government is extremely negative, I would not at all expect it to start massacring random Russian citizens in order to manufacture outrage against “Galician fascist terrorists”, not least because they’d be likely to get caught and I’d expect them not to want that.)
I agree that there’s (so to speak) an evaluative element in the term “conspiracy theory”. But I don’t think it’s what you say it is (i.e., that the only difference is whether the person using the term wants to ridicule the theory in question). It’s more like the evaluative element in the term “murder”. You don’t call a killing a murder if you think it was justified, but that doesn’t mean that “murder” just means “killing the speaker disapproves of”. Most opponents of the death penalty don’t call executions murders. Most pacifists don’t call deaths in war murders. (Some might, in both cases.)
And it seems to me that this is precisely part of what distinguishes “conspiracy theories” from other theories involving conspiracies.
Some theories about NSA attacks on crypto would have been rightly classed as conspiracy theories, although unusually plausible ones because, e.g., doing things of that general sort and keeping them secret is the NSA’s job. Some of those now turn out to be true. So something formerly classed as a conspiracy theory is true, and conventionally is no longer called a conspiracy theory. I have no problem with any of this, and I don’t see why anyone else should have either.
I have the impression that you have a not-quite-correct impression of my opinions, so let me make some things more explicit. I think that for something to be called a “conspiracy theory” it is neither necessary nor sufficient for it to involve a conspiracy and be thought ridiculous by the person so calling it. Rather, it needs to be lacking in evidence, explain this in terms of an implausible large-scale conspiracy to keep it secret, require the people involved to be more evil than there’s other reason to think they are, and be thought untrue by the person referring to it. When a conspiracy theory turns out to be true after all, it is simply a conspiracy and belief in it is no longer called a “theory” (unsurprisingly as the word “theory” in common use is restricted to things that don’t have a convincing preponderance of evidence in their favour; this differs from scientific usage). And I think some things classified as conspiracy theories turn out to be true, but relatively few because to be a conspiracy theory something needs to involve unlikely elements and be widely thought untrue.
So, for instance, if someone believed a few years ago that the NSA was deliberately attempting to insert backdoors into widely available cryptographic software, that would have been something of a borderline case. There wasn’t a lot of evidence; for the theory to be true the activity would indeed have had to be kept secret by a lot of people, but it was actually pretty plausible that they’d do so; it would maybe require a slightly higher level of evil than a naive observer might expect from an agency like the NSA, but not much; and it was thought untrue by a lot of people. Now we have better evidence that they did it, which has raised general expectations of their level of evil, and fewer people think it’s untrue, so this has made the shift from “maybe just about a conspiracy theory” to “not really a conspiracy theory, just a plausible and probably correct theory about a conspiracy”. (The Snowden revelations have maybe pushed it in the other direction a little, by reducing our confidence in the NSA’s ability to keep such things covered up. But I think the direction of the overall effect is clear.)
Thank you for an interesting reply.
I think the way you use “conspiracy theory” is quite a good one*, but somewhat non-standard. In particular, you state that ideas described as “conspiracy theories” are sometimes correct. I think Brillyant (to whom I was originally replying) gives a much more standard description when he calls them “ludicrous” and “absurd.” For example, wiki states that the phrase:
If the ordinary connotation of “conspiracy theory” was “low-probability hypothesis involving a conspiracy” I would not have objected to its use.
*although I think that the “evil” part needs work.
It looks to me as if Brillyant is using the term to mean something close to “ludicrous, absurd theory involving a conspiracy”. I remark firstly that this isn’t so far from “low-probability hypothesis involving a conspiracy” and secondly that it’s entirely possible that Brillyant hasn’t sat down and thought through exactly what shades of meaning s/he attaches to the term “conspiracy theory”, and that on further reflection s/he would define that term in a way that clearly doesn’t amount to “theory I want to make fun of”.
I appreciate that you’re concerned about equivocation where someone effectively argues “this is a conspiracy theory (= theory with a conspiracy in), therefore it should be treated like a conspiracy theory (= ludicrous absurd theory with a conspiracy in)”, but I don’t see anyone doing that in this thread and given how firmly established the term is I don’t think there’s much mileage in trying to prevent it by declaring that “conspiracy theory” simply means “theory with a conspiracy in”.
(In particular I don’t think Brillyant is engaging in any such equivocation. Rather, I think s/he is, or would be after more explicit reflection, saying something like this: 1. People like to believe in conspiracies. 2. Therefore, the fact that a theory is believed by quite a lot of people is less evidence when the theory features a conspiracy than it normally would be. 3. So when someone offers up a theory that isn’t terribly plausible on its face and that involves a conspiracy, my initial estimate is that it’s unlikely to be true; the best explanation of the fact that I’m being invited to consider it is that its advocates have fallen prey to their inbuilt liking for theories involving conspiracies. -- This doesn’t oblige Brillyant to disbelieve every theory with a conspiracy in, because some actually have good evidence or are highly plausible for other reasons. Those tend not to be the ones labelled “conspiracy theory”.)
I think you misunderstand my concern; perhaps I have not been clear enough. I am not so much worried about equivocation, as I am worried by precisely the 3-step process which you describe. And I am particularly worried about people going through that process, labelling something a “conspiracy theory,” then the theory turns out to be true, and they never reassess their premises.
Let’s restate your process in more neutral language.
For reasons of specialisation, partial information, etc, I treat the fact that lots of people believe in a theory as partial evidence in its favour.
Some people have a higher prior than me for the existence of conspiracies.
Therefore if a theory involving a conspiracy is believed by quite a lot of people, it may be that this belief is due to their higher prior for conspiracies, not any special knowledge or expertise that I need to defer to.
Therefore I treat their belief in the theory as less evidence than normal, on the basis that if I had the evidence/expertise/etc that they do, I would be less likely than them to conclude that there is a conspiracy.
So if someone offers an implausible-seeming theory to me involving a conspiracy, I discount it and conclude that its advocates just have a high prior for conspiracies.
Suddenly, this doesn’t look like a sound epistemological process at all. Steps (1) and (2) are fine, but (3), (4) and (5) go increasingly off the rails. It looks like you are deliberately shielding your anti-conspiracies prior, by discounting (even beyond their initial level of plausibility) theories that might challenge it. And if, on those occasions that a conspiracy is eventually proven, you refuse to update your prior on the likelihood of conspiracies (by insisting that such-and-such a theory doesn’t really count as a conspiracy theory, even though, at the time, you were happy to label it as such), then I would say that the process has become truly pathological, just as much as that of a “conspiracy theorist.”
Consider: why do some people have that higher prior? Mightn’t that higher prior be itself part of their tacit knowledge and expertise—in the same way that a doctor’s prior on the cause of a set of symptoms is not because he ‘likes’ to diagnose people with tuberculosis, but due to his own updates on past experience to which you are not privy. Aren’t we doing precisely the wrong thing by discounting the theory in response to the prior?
None of this means that you should become a 9-11 Truther, of course. But consider the 1999 Moscow bombings. I don’t have any particular evidence about the events, but there’s a plausible case that they were an FSB conspiracy. Shouldn’t that make you more willing to believe the hypothetical in the grandparent than otherwise? In my own experience, people who are most likely to believe in conspiracy theories are those who had their formative experiences in dictatorial countries where there really are lots of conspiracies—and so they subsequently see them everywhere. But by symmetry, it follows that those of us brought up in the West will be too reluctant to see conspiracies elsewhere.
(I’m not sure that #2 is the right formulation. A lot of people don’t think in terms sufficiently close to Bayesian inference that talking about their “priors” really makes sense. I’m not sure this is more than nit-picking, though.)
I agree that #3,4,5 “go increasingly off the rails” but I think what goes off the rails is your description, as much as the actual mental process it aims to describe. Specifically, I think you are making the following claims and blaming them on the term “conspiracy theory”:
That when someone thinks something is a “conspiracy theory” they discount it not only in the sense of thinking it less likely than they otherwise would have, but in the stronger sense of dismissing it completely.
That they are then immune to further evidence that might (if they were rational) lead them to accept the theory after all.
That if the theory eventually turns out to have been right, they don’t update their estimate for how much to discount theories on account of being suspiciously conspiracy-based.
Now, I dare say many people do do just those things. After all, many people do all kinds of highly irrational things. But unless I’m badly misreading you, you are claiming specifically that I and Brillyant do them, and you are laying much of the blame for this on the usage of the term “conspiracy theory”, and I think both parts of this are wrong.
Yup. But the answer to that question is always yes, and therefore tells us nothing. (Mightn’t a creationist’s higher prior on the universe being only 6000 years old be part of their tacit knowledge and expertise? It might be, but I wouldn’t bet on it.)
I don’t think the symmetry is quite there. People brought up in totalitarian countries who then move to liberal democracies see too many conspiracies. No doubt people brought up in liberal democracies who then move to totalitarian countries see too few, but it could still be that people brought up in totalitarian countries who stay there and people brought up in liberal democracies who stay there both see approximately the right number of conspiracies.
I remember September tenth, and if you’d said that to me then, I’m not sure I would have called it a conspiracy theory (I might have), but I certainly would have thought you were wildly overconcerned.
For sure.
But you’d probably have said the same if I’d said that al-Qaeda terrorists were about to take over lots of planes and fly them into buildings, with thousands of lives lost. And yet that does in fact appear to have happened, and no one calls it a “conspiracy theory”.
So the fact that saying the day before that terrorists asked to do it by a single rogue government official were about to take over planes and fly them into buildings would have sounded wildly overconcerned and conspiracy-theory-ish can’t make believing now that that’s what happened a conspiracy theory.
(For the avoidance of doubt: I do not in fact think that the people who flew planes into buildings on “9/11” were asked to do so by any official of any government, rogue or otherwise.)