[marginalia_nu]

Can you demonstrate why this is?

It seems to contradict historical observations. We've had societies based on strong sense of doctrinal orthodoxy before, and this was very limiting. Introducing a sort of right to be wrong has been instrumental to improving society and science.

[kthejoker2]

Because if the earth is flat or aliens are in Area 51, then there is a power structure dedicated to perpetuating a global lie.

In fact, these conspiracies spring up backwards, from the desired outcome:

* white supremacists need a scapegoat to justify their own power aims. They choose Jews.

* to convince others, they invent wild conspiracy theories about Jews having a secret Zionist global power structure, controlling banks, markets, governments, media, etc.

* they realize they can bind this group to even benign but wild and fanciful fantasies for 12 year olds like "the earth is flat" and "aliens exist"

So it doesn't matter what the actual "big if true" fantasy is - just that the rest of the world has already accepted it's not true, so if it is true, someone is hiding it from you, and what else are they hiding?

The same "open" mind that comes to "accept" the earth is flat - or even just lowers their "dogmatic" trait as a result - becomes more "open" to the idea someone is controlling the narrative.

It's extremely unscientific, because it is not based in objectivity, but purely power dynamics of the narrative.

2 + 2 can be made to equal 5.

[marginalia_nu]

> It's extremely unscientific, because it is not based in objectivity, but purely power dynamics of the narrative.

Neither the conspiracy theorists nor the scientific dogmatists are scientific.

Science is based on doubt. It's based on not accepting anything as true until you are convinced. To call questioning what you are being told unscientific is just bizarre. It's the most scientific thing you can do. The basic posture of science is skepticism, not conviction. You don't know until you're convinced.

If anything, the conspiracy crackpots are gaining a foothold because science is reduced to mere dogma. They may be wrong, but it's a mistake to think they are idiots.

Both the scientific dogmatists and the conspiracy theorists essentially make the same mistake. They're skeptics with regards to other peoples' convictions but refuse to consider challenges to their own beliefs.

A big reason why for example the covid conspiracies got such traction was that the official narrative was inconsistent and self-contradictory. It was presented as much more certain than it could have been. Good science takes a long time to produce. Preliminary results may take several quarters, good confidence comes after a couple of years. What we had in 2020 was mostly educated guesswork.

The most scientific thing would have been to stand in front of the press and say "honestly, dunno, come back in six months or so and we may have some workable data for you". But that's not what happened. Instead, their confidence was overstated (by governments, media), and official messages kept changing.

Countries all over the world were all confidently sticking to their strategy, claiming it to be scientific, yet at the same time they were opting for contradictory strategies with regard to high-visibility interventions like mask mandates and lockdowns.

It's also somewhat questionable how scientific this could have been, given scientific confidence typically comes after the data, and this was the first time such strategies has been implemented at a societal scale.

The most damning of all is that politically inconvenient hypotheses were confidently dismissed as fake news and crazy conspiracy ramblings without proper investigation, some of them later turned out to actually have credibility (such as the lab leak hypothesis[1][2][3] which was considered in the same tier as flat-earth at some point). Again, the scientific thing would be to say "I don't know if this is true, let's go and investigate".

All this looked bad specifically because a lot of things that weren't scientific at all were constantly paraded around under the banner of scientific certainty, which in turn fanned the flames of all manner of conspiracy theories because the doctrine was visibly self-contradictory and kept changing.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3 [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656 [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-lab-leak-hypo...

[kthejoker2]

COVID is the perfect example, though, because your post posits the "conspiracy ramblings" are about the origin of the virus or the potentially overly conservative protocols in the face of uncertain risk.

But COVID conspiracies are

* the "jab" sterilizes you, implants chips inside you, turns you gay, gives you cancer, etc.

* the whole disease is a hoax ("plandemic") to instill social control, remove freedoms, eliminate churches and Christianity, manipulate the economy ("LIBERATE MICHIGAN!"), give Joe Biden a way to steal the election, let socialism take over ... (guess who's doing all this, by the way!)

* the disease is real, but deliberately spread by China (at the behest of the reverse vampires and the Rand Corporation) to decimate the West and do the same things above

One set of these "hypotheses" are potentially worth investigating - and the US Senate, House, the CDC, both Presidencies, and world agencies galore did investigate those.

The others are not. Not all "crackpot theories" are equally cracked.

[marginalia_nu]

How can you know if a scientific hypothesis is worth investigating before you've investigated it? It can of course be more or less plausible, but unless you've actually done the work, you don't know.

Jumping to the conclusion that because there is no evidence, that this in itself means something is true or false, that is committing exactly the same category of logical error the flat earthers and ancient aliens people are doing. In the absence of evidence is uncertainty.

[maxbond]

I think there's a really important distinction between ideas that are simply wrong like phlogiston or perpetual motion, and things like antisemitic/white supremacist conspiracy theories (if you look into this subject you'll find that they're one in the same, with antisemitism being the foundation of white supremacist conspiracy theories) that have evolved to spread virally though a population and perpetuate bigotry and motivate violence. It's a pretty literal form of "mind virus," and they're subject to selective pressures that cause them to literally evolve to be very difficult to discard once you've accepted them. Phlogiston isn't a closed system of ideas that absorbs all criticism of it and inverts it into evidence that "they" don't want you to know about the ideas.

Consider flat earth conspiracy theories (which are not nearly as harmful as white supremacist ones and I don't mean to equate them, only to pivot to a different example that's a less touchy subject); it's trivial to debunk FE arguments, and people have, exhaustively. But unlike phlogiston, that didn't make the FE stop having currency in our discourse. It's not just something wrong which will lose out in the marketplace of ideas. In the documentary "Behind the Curve," several of the flat earthers come up with really compelling experiments that debunk the flat earth. But they aren't actually convinced by their own results. A conspiracy theory or system of conspiracy theories survives by being an endless font of explanations that paper over the inconsistencies. Those that are unable to do this either die off or are incorporated into a larger system of theories that have more explanatory power.

As a matter of free speech it shouldn't be illegal to hold or to discuss these views, but unlike ideas that are simply wrong they create and enhance hazards as they spread. They isolate people within these communities; I don't know if you've ever spoken to someone who is a hardcore conspiracy theorist, but it can be really difficult to connect and interact with them because they will have really strong responses to seemingly innocuous things, and constantly insist that you're a rube for not thinking along the same lines. This often erodes their relationships with people outside the culture of the conspiracy theory (which are often very loving & supportive places). These communities form a millieu which hate groups and fascist movements can be drawn from, not because these individual people are especially hateful, but because they've been indoctrinated into a cult-like setting where a proposition like, "there are children being held in the basement of this particular pizza parlor, someone needs to step up and save them" is taken quite seriously. You don't have to be a hateful person to show up to a pizza parlor with a gun (or commit other acts of violence) once you've developed the sincere belief that children's lives are at stake and that it's your personal responsibility to defend them.

How to properly counter this phenomenon is largely an unsolved problem, and I'm not suggesting that a dictatorial approach is warranted (that'd pretty obviously backfire by seemingly validating the conspiracy), but there's more nuance here than orthodoxy vs. free exchange of ideas. We need to find a way to continue the free exchange of ideas while addressing these dangerous, emergent phenomenon.

I'm currently working on software to help people create a personal epistemology, to compare theirs with others, and to collaborate on a shared epistemology. There's various reasons I think this is a good idea, but one of them is that I think being able to demonstrate what you believe and why would be beneficial to our discourse and hopefully counteract conspiracism.