[pacificmaelstrm]

Interesting information but his key point wasn't really presented with any evidence. He didn't make a good case that octopus don't believe in conspiracy theories.

How would we know?

Instead he assumed they don't because they learn somewhat complex tasks and exhibit a level of forethought in their activities.

But do they hold beliefs that are not true about things they don't understand well? (the basic building block of a conspiracy theory)

What do they think about the scientists and the aquarium they are in?

Why do they prefer one scientist to another or try to escape?

We don't know.

Saying they don't fall into "conspiracy theories" kind of comes out of nowhere.

So the author exhibits exactly the same trait of assuming we can know things without evidence that produces the kind of thinking he labels as "stupidity".

Personally I often find a reference to "Dunning-Kruger" to be associated with a tendency to argue with rhetoric rather than fact. Maybe someone should do a study.

[chiggsy]

The actual DK study is far less assertive about it's conclusions, from what I can recall. People who think they don't suffer from it love to prove that they do by raising it almost to the level of physical law.

Octopi are intelligent, but we see them reacting to their environment the vast majority of the time. We do not see them engage in behaviors that result in bad outcomes. They seem to spin up a mental model to assist them in their day to day, which is very different than having a dogmatic belief that harms or even inconveniences them. They seem very direct. I'd want to see some documented behavior such as cyclical motions, or returning to a spot repeatedly, disregarding danger, that kind of thing. Our intelligence models the world imperfectly, via metaphors we encounter in the world itself. We use the mental space we gain from using a portion of our working memory, as well as our exectutive control functions to not react as we create our narratives, which we use to persuade others socially via language. Sociality is baked in.

Quite possbily octopi use their 9 brains in a genetic algorithm for problem solving. The camo they use gives them advanced signalling for free. The redundancy their multiple brains give them might let them just compute solutions who knows?

Finally, it's important to remember that people who never change their mind often propogate their worldview to more malliable people. That constancy is comforting to many, and the emotional machinery is millions of years older than the rational system we cobbled together out of our excecutive control function we got from our cortex. That's why advertising is not just somebody reading the benefits of a product.

After all, smart people get scammed just as easy and dumb ones. In fact, it's better. Once their emotions are subverted, the story they tell themselves will be utterly plausible.

You also don't need to be a genius to sense when somebody is manipulative, and contemptuous of you. So you stick together with your peeps and crowdsource a heuristic of distrust of the eggheads. You can't really trust people smarter than you, right?

[Log_out_]

9 is also a ideal voting number for a state switch between interested, neutral, fleeing. A octopus having voter deadlock with 8 brains would freeze up in some scenarios.

> You can't really trust people smarter than you, right?

You can not. They are out to get you by means of hacking parasitism. Then again, society is the biggest game plan, and when a large part of society votes for a parasite purge, howling and screaming it all goes. Game theory and free market noises non withstanding..

[kayo_20211030]

True. Maybe they're all a bunch of paranoid, misguided wing-nuts. Who knows? Genetics means nothing apart from an ability to chemically copy something. Am I smarter than a Chimpanzee, given that we share 99% of our DNA? Considering that I'm here and they're there, the answer is probably "yes". It's just an observation, but seems solid enough as a conclusion with the evidence I have. Are Octopuses smart? Who knows. But, I'm still here, and they're still there. Of course, nothing lasts forever. Maybe they're playing the long game. Same goes for whales, porpoises, dogs, ponies and elegant rocks. Were they all super smart, they'd be here and we'd be there.

[nicklecompte]

I think the subtlety is that cephalopods/corvids/etc probably don’t hold false beliefs about the following:

a) things they care about

b) things they are cognitively capable of understanding to be false, and

c) things they can plausibly falsify for themselves by obtaining the relevant information.

So an octopus can have all sorts of misconceptions: indifferently making false assumptions about a cave they aren’t going to explore themselves; bizarre pseudo-magical explanations about human technology far beyond their understanding; incorrect guesses as to another octopus’s mental state. But what makes a conspiracy theory more than a mere misconception is the effort spent reinforcing the falsehood, using tools and methodologies which reflect a theoretical capability to understand why the conspiracy theory must be false[1]. (In particular the problem of people who cynically spread conspiracy theories without believing them.)

Conspiracy theories and other misconceptions motivated by politics or ideology are unique to humans because language + complex social organization + some intangible “humanness” means that abstract ideas and information can have great social power, and hence power in the real world, regardless of whether these ideas reflect reality.

[1] Note how many modern conspiracy theories are “backed up” by a slew of “evidence” which takes great analytical effort to refute line-by-line.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Conspiracy theories are a bug in Human Space - a problem that only exists because we exchange information with other humans, and we rely on informal systems of narrative logic to do it quickly and efficiently.

And we're most impressionable when emotionally agitated, which is why conspiracy theories are a combination of nonsense narratives and powerful emotional triggers.

If you're an octopus you're going to have misbeliefs and poor assumptions, but they're your own work. It's not clear that octopuses share much - if any - information in the way that (for example) corvids do.

[pacificmaelstrm]

Octopus are a tricky case. We just don't know. On the other hand we can confidently say clams don't believe in conspiracy theories. Neither do jellyfish.

[petsfed]

I agree with the rest of the post, its hard to say one way or another if octopuses believe in conspiracy theories, and the conclusion drawn seems, at best, orthogonal to the data presented.

But I disagree with what you said here:

>But do they hold beliefs that are not true about things they don't understand well? (the basic building block of a conspiracy theory)

Facilely, this is a tautology. Everyone necessarily holds untrue beliefs about things they incompletely understand. The scientific method taught to school children is a framework for identifying and removing them. Your statement is akin to "the fundamental building block of conspiracy theories is knowledge gained from empirical observation"

But less glibly, untrue beliefs held by individuals with incomplete understanding are insufficient building blocks of conspiracy theories. The issue doesn't arise from incomplete understanding, nor is it dismissed by efforts to expand understanding. You need an untrue belief, certainly, but you also need to approach that belief with a confirmation bias.

[pacificmaelstrm]

"conspiracy theory" is usually defined narrowly so that it is invariably something "only other, stupider people believe"

I think that's hypocritical.

[petsfed]

That's why I drew attention to the confirmation bias portion of it.

Very intelligent people still buy into conspiracy theories, and its always the same: the conspiracy theory lies about certain things, so as to preserve the illusion of the truth in other things.

The lab leak conspiracy theory mainly appeals to the audience's desire that bad things be, in principle, preventable. Take that away, and people end up feeling like they have less control over their own safety, which is considerably more troubling than just the fear of some disease.

We should not try to understand any given conspiracy theory in the context of "what information are people getting wrong?", because (like I said previously), everyone, regardless of intelligence, will always be wrong about something. We should instead try to understand why the conspiracy theory is more emotionally satisfying than the truth.

[kelipso]

Lab leak is such a bad example here since it's now officially considered the most probable explanation. Labeling something as a conspiracy theory especially when the explanation is the simplest and most probable explanation just screams politics or groupthink. A lot of conspiracy theories are just plain true but they get labeled as questionable because it goes against official narratives, interests, etc or are associated with kooky people. Well that's how the world works I guess.

[petsfed]

I am completely unable to find any official source claiming that the lab-leak hypothesis was more credible than the wet-market zoonotic transmission hypothesis. Can you provide some support on that front?

The closest I get to an official US position is the "summary" of hearings from the House Oversight Committee, as published on oversight.house.gov. But the way that report is written (and the way the whole of the website is structured) casts a pretty dark shadow on the reliability of the whole thing (at the bottom of the page, there's some quick links that are, verbatim "Press Releases, The Overview, Biden Family Investigation, The Bidens’ Influence Peddling Timeline, Biden's Border Crisis, COVID Origins". Considering that Biden impeachment hearings around some of that have been repeatedly rebuffed by republicans, the fact that those are on the main page reveals a pretty seriously bias.

The WHO is pretty silent on the subject, as is the CDC and the NIH. This makes sense, both within and without the conspiracy theory context, so the silence is not damning for either conclusion.

More tellingly, the closest I get from the scientific literature is that we cannot definitively rule out a leak as the cause, but that's adequately explained by the Chinese government's historic silence on internal issues. That silence is not an argument in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. If the PRC had been an open book about everything else, but suddenly clammed up about the origins of COVID 19, then I guess, sure, but even then, more "open" governments have denied more over less damage.

That's pretty much how it goes for every piece of "evidence" that supports the lab-leak hypothesis: the whole thing is based on circumstantial evidence that is most readily interpreted as innocent or inconclusive. For instance, its true that 3 scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill with an unidentified respiratory illness in December 2019. But only 3, while quite a few more people became ill around the wet market. Sure, the scientists could've become ill at the lab, then carried it to the wet market. But why didn't more at the lab become ill? The simpler explanation is that the scientists went to the wet market in the city they lived in, and were exposed to the virus there.

And this is all for the best-supported version of the lab-leak hypothesis, that does not assume deliberate weaponization via genetic engineering or anything of that sort.

The point I'm making here is that while the conspiracy theory is the more emotionally satisfying explanation, you have to massively overemphasize certain bits of data, and massively underemphasize others, to arrive at the conclusion that its even as likely as the non-conspiracy theory.. That's the very definition of confirmation bias.

[kelipso]

The silence of WHO and CDC speaks volumes since they were the ones saying lab leak was a conspiracy theory.

US Dept of Energy which funds many biological labs was the one that said lab leak was most probable. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/us/politics/china-lab-lea...

Opinions are split among many organizations but considering the politics involved in admitting fault from labs and the emotional satisfaction resulting from keeping the same opinion as before (lol), lab leak is the most likely culprit.

[pookha]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story

[verisimi]

The Dunning-Kruger effect is auto-correlation. From the article:

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...

> The irony is that the situation is actually reversed. In their seminal paper, Dunning and Kruger are the ones broadcasting their (statistical) incompetence by conflating autocorrelation for a psychological effect. In this light, the paper’s title may still be appropriate. It’s just that it was the authors (not the test subjects) who were ‘unskilled and unaware of it’.

[Galatians4_16]

When it comes to the term "Conspiracy Theory", the stupidity is baked in, as a theory is something proven, not assumed.

Hypothesis > (test) > Theory

The conspiracy among three Physicists, now known as the Manhattan Project, with hundreds of thousands of unknowing participants, with whole new sectors of industries, and supply chains, brought us new medicine, nuclear power, and peace through mutually assured destruction, yet people seem to think of conspiracy as some harebrained concept spun up by halfwits.