I feared that if I used an example, it would be the only thing that people would remember. Or worse the only thing they would comment on.
When I think of “conspiracy theories” I think of ones connected to JFK’s assassination or 9/11. The official line is already that these “bad things happen because bad people cause them to happen.” In the case of 9/11, the official line is that it was a conspiracy theory—the disagreement is just about which bad people!
When I think “conspiracy theories” I think Illuminati are ruling the world and this is why my life sucks or that chemtrails are sterilising us or the notion that the Apollo Moon landing was faked or that the US government is concealing information regarding extraterrestrial intelligent life. ect. ect. I generally think the “no! It was the other guy.” conspiracies are better explained by the group dynamics I didn’t want to tackle in this post.
If you are wondering about the process I used. Well I was procrastinating online and ended up reading a bunch of wikipedia articles on conspiracy theories. I had some ideas about why people would find them appealing or plausible and I cross-checked that with some LW material. After that I set out to systematically read some more conspiracy theory summaries (again on wikipedia). I did some thought and a few days later jotted down my ideas in the linked comment. I then proceeded to uhm… acquire ….a book on conspiracy theories. After reading it I mostly forgot about the subject until reading the notes from Peter Thiel’s class. They got me thinking about scapegoating. I wrote something up, edited it a bit, polished and posted.
Then gwern told me it could be better and I started editing it to polish it up more.
This wasn’t serious academic research by any stretch of the imagination. Generally speaking posts generated by similar algorithms seemed well liked in discussion and comment section so I assumed it was ok if I approached this the same way I would writing a blog post.
I feared that if I used an example, it would be the only thing that people would remember. Or worse the only thing they would comment on.
When I think “conspiracy theories” I think Illuminati are ruling the world and this is why my life sucks or that chemtrails are sterilising us or the notion that the Apollo Moon landing was faked or that the US government is concealing information regarding extraterrestrial intelligent life. ect. ect. I generally think the “no! It was the other guy.” conspiracies are better explained by the group dynamics I didn’t want to tackle in this post.
If you are wondering about the process I used. Well I was procrastinating online and ended up reading a bunch of wikipedia articles on conspiracy theories. I had some ideas about why people would find them appealing or plausible and I cross-checked that with some LW material. After that I set out to systematically read some more conspiracy theory summaries (again on wikipedia). I did some thought and a few days later jotted down my ideas in the linked comment. I then proceeded to uhm… acquire ….a book on conspiracy theories. After reading it I mostly forgot about the subject until reading the notes from Peter Thiel’s class. They got me thinking about scapegoating. I wrote something up, edited it a bit, polished and posted.
Then gwern told me it could be better and I started editing it to polish it up more.
This wasn’t serious academic research by any stretch of the imagination. Generally speaking posts generated by similar algorithms seemed well liked in discussion and comment section so I assumed it was ok if I approached this the same way I would writing a blog post.