The phrase "conspiracy theory" has been used to great effect to silence criticism and shut down real investigative journalism. It's a simple guilt by association technique: if you think anything other than the official line, then you are engaging in "conspiracy theory" which means you are like those people who think the queen of England is a reptile.
We are actually in worse shape than Soviet Russia. In the USSR, educated people knew that quite a bit of what was in Pravda was a lie. In the West, an attitude of malfeasance-denialism has been encouraged in the educated and upper crust elements of society to the point that erudite people tend to almost deny the existence of elite deviance or official criminality. Given the higher-educated demographic of HN, you can see it around here. Just try arguing that, say, widespread financial shenanigans have anything other than prosaic and innocent explanations.
Garbage. Conspiracy theorists are frequently ridiculed because they have dreadfully low standards of evidence, exhibit poor logical reasoning, or engage in obvious bias (the number of judgmental adjectives employed by the theorist is often a good proxy for bias). I will give any theory the time of day if it put together properly, but most 'conspiracy theories' are not.
Yeah, problem is I remember clearly how a bunch of British plane spotters were ridiculed when they worked out that the US were flying strange flights in and out of the UK with ragged looking Arabs on board. Only when non UK and US people got implicated and involved. Today we know this as extraordinary rendition.
The other problem is that official types use ridicule instead of reason to slam people with ideas that contradict theirs. It seems that some people like evidence and some dont.
"low standards of evidence, exhibit poor logical reasoning, or engage in obvious bias"
I don't disagree with any of this. Unfortunately these are the only muckrakers we've got. Everyone else just smiles and nods until the muck is shoved in their face.
A conspiracy theorist seems to be an investigative journalist or a social critic with poor epistemology.
I have noticed over the years that the concretes reported upon and the trends pointed out by conspiracy theorists -- even some of the wackier ones -- have a pretty good hit rate. The paranoid are often very perceptive. It's in the theory department that they fall down, imagining wild and unlikely scenarios to account for things that boil down to simple elite deviance, oligarchy, political opportunism, and corruption.
Most of them also have a political, religious, or ethnic bone to pick and try to ascribe all the wrongs of the world to some hated group.
But as I said... they're often right about the concretes.
It's sad times we live in when unstable nutjobs are the only ones pointing out our obvious descent toward naked plutocratic oligarchy and gangster-statism.
Well nutjobs and comedians... what was that quote about the state of a society when only comedians can tell the truth?
Comedians have, throughout history been the acceptable dissidents of society. This can be seen from ancient Greece, through Shakespeare and through to people like Bill Hicks and George Carlin.
They have the unique position of being able to say what they think, and then let the audience decide if it was satirical or serious.
I think "the state of a society when only comedians can tell the truth" is known as "normal". I've never seen any evidence of some fabulous bygone age where the people in charge were cool with political dissidents who didn't frame things in terms of comedy.
People always think that "conspiracy theory" is about conclusions, when it's actually about methodology.
It doesn't matter that certain conspiracy nutjobs happened to be correct about something. That's inevitable. The breadth and scope of conspiracy theories is such that some of them are bound to be correct purely by random chance.
What makes something a "conspiracy theory" isn't claim being made, but how that claim is backed up. "9/11 was an inside job" is not automatically a conspiracy theory, but 9/11 truthers fit the mold because they use decidedly irrational techniques to support their claims. "The moon landing was faked" is not automatically a conspiracy theory, but the people who believe it universally use bad reasoning to do so. Likewise, "the government is spying on everyone" is not automatically a conspiracy theory, but if people use conspiracy-style reasoning to support the claim, it's a conspiracy theory even if it ends up being correct.
Conspiracy theories involve massive application of various logical fallacies, such as ignoring the fact that unlikely events still occur due to chance, focusing on successes and ignoring failures (i.e. Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy), ignoring any explanation of facts that does not fit the desired conclusion, and just plain non sequiturs.
A lot of people who were talking about government surveillance back in the day fit this pattern. The fact that they were right does not change the fact that their reasoning was bad.
Many people were talking about it without fitting this pattern, by using sanity and reason. Those are the ones to pay attention to.
When you see somebody labeling something as a "conspiracy theory", look at the mechanics of the argument being made, rather than the conclusion. For example, in this case we have a comment that states, "Dangerous political prisoners/personalities dying in mysterious circumstances at opportune times is not coincidence." Well, that's classic conspiracy thinking. Coincidences can and do happen, all the time. Do people get assassinated sometimes? Yes. Do important people die at extremely convenient times purely due to natural causes? Also yes. Thus, while the fact that somebody died at a convenient time can be suggestive, it is not conclusive.
Even if Arafat was assassinated, it can still be a conspiracy theory to say it if the argument is done in a certain way. Saying that Arafat must have been assassinated because he died at a certain time is nonsense. Saying that Arafat must have been assassinated because his bones were filled with Polonium is reasonable.
To shut down complaints about the first kind of argument because the second kind of argument also exists in parallel is awful.
Trouble is, without evidence it's hard to distinguish between plausible-but-true and plausible-but-false theories, and Occam's razor usually finds the prosaic explanations simpler.
Absolutely. That's why we need real investigative journalism. The problem is that this is very, very hard and expensive to do well and nobody seems willing to pay for it.
We are actually in worse shape than Soviet Russia. In the USSR, educated people knew that quite a bit of what was in Pravda was a lie. In the West, an attitude of malfeasance-denialism has been encouraged in the educated and upper crust elements of society to the point that erudite people tend to almost deny the existence of elite deviance or official criminality. Given the higher-educated demographic of HN, you can see it around here. Just try arguing that, say, widespread financial shenanigans have anything other than prosaic and innocent explanations.