They would have you believe that the United States Government perpetrated a gigantic fraud on its citizenry.
Well, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that happened, by any government. The “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago.
Not defending the moon landing doubters, or conspiracy theorists in general, but: the proper response to these things isn’t to point and laugh. It’s to recognize their origins - a (often justified) loss of trust in institutions and governmental narratives - and work on addressing and fixing them.
Edit: commenters seem to be focusing on a single example, which I presented as an illustrative point for a much deeper and more important phenomenon. You’re missing the forest for the trees.
The WMD claim had plenty of holes poked through it even at the time. There were constant stories making it clear the inspectors in Iraq were not finding anything, and whistle blowers like Valerie Plame who directly contradicted the White House claims. Today, less than twenty years later, it's no longer a question that there weren't any WMDs. The fraud Armstrong is pointing out isn't really comparable.
That's not the point though. If Aldrin's implicit argument is the US government would never try and defraud its citizen, then any example of such a fraud disproves him.
Of course the Soviets were in on it. They didn't publicly humiliate the US because they feared Mad Man Nixon would start WW3 over it. IT ALL MAKES PERFECT SENSE.
The fact that it’s the US government isn’t the important bit; Armstrong isn’t asking you to trust the government, and his entire argument is explicit, no reading between the lines required.
What’s important is the “gigantic fraud involving 400,000 people” part -- clearly establishing that it would have had to be a pretty extreme effort. And rather than just saying “trust us”, he explicitly suggests asking people outside that group, such as scientists from other countries, who would be able to verify whether the moon landing was real.
And I completely agree with all of that. That doesn't change the fact that "the government wouldn't defraud you" is a horrific argument. And that is one of his points.
Armstrong's point isn't that the government would never try to defraud its citizens, and I think it's a stretch to mold his argument into that. His point is that it would be impossible to hold over 400,000 people to the same lie, without anyone breaking. Bush's WMD claims had plenty of people contradicting it at the time, and has been completely debunked now, unlike the moon landing that happened 50 years ago.
It was a weak man argument. Armstrong's paragraph was meant to be taken as a whole; but this argument just extracts one sentence and tries to establish a false equivalency with it.. And a scarecrow. Pretty impressive piece of drivel TBH.
No, that kind of is the point. The analogy doesn't work because the US put out all the evidence transparently - it was their conclusion that didn't make sense.
...so it's nothing at all like faking a moon landing.
Sure, but in a democracy it’s very difficult to defraud the public, because the government employees doing the defrauding are the public. At any given time, large swathes of those employees are politically opposed to whoever is in power. That’s why the WMD fiasco is so instructional. It failed immediately, for precisely the reasons we would expect any such fraud against the population to fail, and for precisely the reasons we would expect faked moon landings to be rapidly exposed.
> That’s why the WMD fiasco is so instructional. It failed immediately
Maybe we have a different understanding of "failed" or "immediately", but it worked well enough to get the media on board to build a case for war and carry it for long enough until the actual war started. It was solid enough that even all the doubt coming from NATO partners (and the flat out refusal to be part of it with Chirac's utterance that "France is not a pacifist country" and it's not about war itself but that war and those reasons in particular that they wouldn't be a part of it) did not stop the war. So, to me at least, it didn't fail at all, it succeeded.
It succeeded at getting us into a war, but did not succeed at silencing and neutralising criticism and counter evidence. The equivalent would be if the Apollo program was riven by controversy, doubt and criticism from the start, but nevertheless went ahead and rockets were launched but the fakery was ultimately conclusively exposed in the early 1970s, with all the astronauts coming clean and admitting to it.
There was a considerable body of evidence against the WMD story right from the start. Senior CIA personnel were crying foul at how their intelligence was being manipulated for political ends from an early stage, it's just that evidence wasn't enough to stop the war.
Nothing remotely like that ever happened with the Apollo program. There has never been any substantial evidence or testimony against it from within government or NASA, or as Neil pointed out from any foreign specialists or experts, even the Russians. Conversely the WMD story was being challenged internationally from it's conception, as you pointed out yourself.
In terms of challenges, counter evidence and controversy at the time the two cases could not possibly be more starkly utterly different, and that's why they are useful comparisons because the WMD thing shows clearly how government deceptions actually work out.
I would argue that government lies, especially ones that happen on a scale like that in the US, are not at all why we have conspiracy theorists. I think there's a more underlying human need to believe that there is something behind "it all", and when that is combined with a lack of education, political awareness, or just stubborness, you get people who will believe almost anything. That, and occasionally mental illness, is why you get people who will believe in lizard people who run the world, flat earths, and so on, not because of singular examples of wide scale government fraud.
> not because of singular examples of wide scale government fraud
I agree, but I do believe it's mostly because of many small scale lies. If there was only one example of government lies in history, but it was a big one, I don't think we'd see the same level of conspiracy theory acceptance.
The fact that there is a constant stream of lies of all shapes and sizes from the government, the media, companies etc is what contributes to it the most. Once you make people lose their trust in those institutions, they will pay more attention to anyone presenting "alternative" explanations ("this explains that thing as well, but it's not peddled by the liars, so maybe it's true"). If those explanations then also line up with their world view, it's hard to convince them otherwise.
I see that in a friend who still reads the news. He no longer trusts anything he reads, so it's a constant state of "they are probably lying, but why are they lying about this" and he's more susceptible to conspiratorial theories imho. He's not "there" yet, because he'll also research those theories and often come back to me and say "yeah that was bullshit" and share what he found, but the threshold for looking into and considering it an actual possibility is much lower.
I was making a meta point about institutions and conspiracy theories, not commenting on one in particular. I specifically said this in my initial comment.
Wasn't the wmd not a fraud? It was just overselling a truth. IIRC the claim was that Saddam Hussein had ceased reporting the location of stockpiles of nuclear material that the UN used to keep track of. The sin of the bush administration was that they sold it to the public that this was a national security threat even though they knew it was very lightly enriched and counted on the public not knowing or caring (remember the Chapelle skit about yellowcake). The yellow cake was subsequently located in exactly the location where the un thought it was (Hussein hadn't bothered moving it) and it was likely that he was refusing to let UN inspectors in a misguided attempt to bluff the US into not invading due to deterrence?
I guess the question could hinge on if yellowcake is truly wmd or not, but regardless the administration openly claimed it was, and that's what they based their argument on, and iirc that yellowcake was found.
Don't let a few facts get in the way of that good story:
The yellowcake removed from Iraq in 2008 was material that had long since been identified, documented, and stored in sealed containers under the supervision of U.N. inspectors. It was not a “secret” cache that was recently “discovered” by the U.S, nor had the yellowcake been purchased by Iraq in the years immediately preceding the 2003 invasion. The uranium was the remnants of decades-old nuclear reactor projects that had put out of commission many years earlier: One reactor at Al Tuwaitha was bombed by Israel in 1981, and another was bombed and disabled during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Moreover, the fact that the yellowcake had been in Iraq since before the 1991 Gulf War was plainly stated in the Associated Press article cited in the example above:
No. Uranium recently shipped from Iraq to Canada was left over from Saddam Hussein’s defunct nuclear weapons program and had been in sealed containers, under guard, since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. Claims that this material is "vindication" for President Bush’s WMD claims in 2003 are completely false.
> IIRC the claim was that Saddam Hussein had ceased reporting the location of stockpiles of nuclear material that the UN used to keep track of.
And
> The sin of the bush administration was that they sold it to the public that this was a national security threat even though they knew it was very lightly enriched and counted on the public not knowing or caring (remember the Chapelle skit about yellowcake).
In any case, the WMD thing was not a coverup/fabrication. It was stretching the truth and stretching reasonable definitions of things, but I think that sort of lie is not in the same category.
The US never convince the rest of the world their evidence was strong even though Powell tried his best.
That is why the United Nations Security Council never past a resolution authorizing the Iraq invasion and instead the US had to settle for the "coalition of the willing" as the their base of support.
Apollo looks nothing at all like the WMD lie. There is more evidence available today that the Apollo landings happened than there was at the time, such as photos of the landing sites taken by later Lunar probes. Lies generally degrade over time, not strengthen, and the WMD lie has collapsed.
Nobody believes the WMD lie any more. Even the Republicans are now admitting that. Many knew it was a lie back then.
I remember as it was happening getting the impression that nobody believed it, that it was universally understood to be a straw man placeholder for the real reason for the Iraq invasion.
Now as for what that was... that's the real mystery as far as I'm concerned. A large number of America's political class of both parties believed invading Iraq was important enough to burn massive amounts of money, trust, and reputation. Why?
The only even marginally plausible speculation I have is that some sizable contingent really believed the catastrophic collapse peak oil scenario that was popular back in the 2000s and that the invasion was rammed through damn-the-torpedoes to get exclusive access to that oil so America could weather the impending apocalypse.
> Now as for what that was... that's the real mystery as far as I'm concerned. A large number of America's political class of both parties believed invading Iraq was important enough to burn massive amounts of money, trust, and reputation. Why?
* 9/11 and the shock/bloodlust that stemmed from it
* Powerful lobby groups, like the military-industrial complex and oil companies
* the Saudis (local rivals, not fans of Saddam, and old friends of the Bush family)
* the Israelis (also local rivals, not fans of Saddam, and capable exerting heavy influence on the W Bush administration)
* Probably the Iranians (who bankrolled Ahmed Chalabi and his INC group, also not fans of Saddam)
None of this should be new or surprising -- the interests of most/all of these groups were known at the time.
> The “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago.
Yes, and not even twenty years since it happened we know a lot of details. Compare that to Moon landing, where conspiracy theorists can at best switch to another accusation after they've got the first one explained.
> It’s to recognize their origins - a (often justified) loss of trust in institutions and governmental narratives - and work on addressing and fixing them.
People should maintain healthy distrust of institutions and governments - after all, as you say, it's not the first time when such mistrust was justified. Too much distrust is however a problem. Similarly one can hardly expect to solve all origins of conspiracy theorists - some people are just bored and want to believe in unicorns, and even if you'd create a more interesting life to them - a big "if" - they could choose to believe what they want.
History teaches that our understanding of history is lacking, sometimes sorely.
> In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.
> And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted.
Selected quotes from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
As other's have mentioned, the lies about WMD where rather quickly dispelled, and doesn't compare to moon landing conspiracy. As far as I understand the WMD fraud was successful insofar that the administration was able to use it as a pretext to go to war, but it was also quickly debunked.
I think you're missing the point that Armstrong tries to make. While he indeed starts with your selective quote, he then goes on to say that it is rather unlikely that the government would get away with a fraud of that scale. If nothing else, then simply because of the amount of people involved in the moon landing, and third parties that then and still to this day are able to confirm that the moon landing actually happened.
My experience is also that people who trust the tales of a conspiracy over a wide array of substantial counter arguments are simply not open to actual counterfacts from others. It's like fake news, the conspiracy supports their believe system, and rational arguments to the contrary simply isn't effective.
Still I agree that conspiracy nuts need to be confronted. Perhaps though, not so much in an attempt to convert the believer as to stop them from spreading the conspiracy to others.
This needs to be weighted though: while the US government had, is, and will be lying on some stuff to its citizenry, it's unlikely that it's constantly lying, and most of the time it's telling the truth.
A massive lie, with no holes nor whistleblowers for decades, is even less likely. This is exactly Armstrong's main point: go and actually do real research and cross-reference
As I said, I’m not defending the moon landing doubters. But it seems obvious to me that the recent increase in conspiracy theories is a direct result of unethical institutional and government actions coming to light.
It's actually the result of a natural civilization cycle where falling living standards and increased intra-elite competition and conflict erodes the public trust in its institutions and leads to political unrest. America is now in the thick of it (starting around 1970 and culminating in the last decade), and so trust will remain low and conspiracy theories high for years to come yet (not to mention the riots).
I think conspiracy theories fill the same void as religion does. It’s for people who want to believe in a higher truth, that someone more powerful is constantly pulling the proverbial strings and the universe isn’t just a chaotic series of random events. And I believe, like religion, that those who love conspiracy theories are less interested in researching those facts themselves because they’ve come to rely on their assumptions for comfort and their peers for unity.
In short, it’s less about the actual conspiracy and more about the individual needing something more in life.
Like flat earth and anti-vax? To me, it seems more obvious that that's the effect of attention and manipulation in media, both "classic" and social.
A suspicious attitude institutions has always existed: from the government down to the grocer, who pushes the scales down while weighing. The more the attention is drawn towards it, the greater the suspicion gets, and I feel that especially divisive attention feeds suspicion. When behavior of an institution, such as the Trump administration, is not beyond reproach, it feeds the attention cycle.
The Flat Earth thing makes no sense to me, but regarding Anti-Vax: again, not defending them, but it’s trivially easy to find examples of governments (worldwide) deceptively giving people medicine which had a negative effect on their health, whether as experimentation, sterilization, or otherwise. The fact that vaccines are scientifically known to be safe is just lost in the noise.
I attribute the rise of conspiracy theories to an overabundance of information; doing the research on each individual topic is just overwhelming to the average person and subsequently a simplistic conspiracy theory has appeal.
My pet theory on the flat Earth is that it's been pushed in order to compile lists of extremely gullible people by scraping social media so that these lists can be used later. For what? Who knows. Targets of scams, marketing, propaganda...
I am not too familiar with either, but in my view they are definitely associated with ‘authority’ whether then be mainstream media, government, institutions, etc.
Sure, but where I live, these are still held in high regard, yet anti-vax and flat earth spread here too. I don't think the institutions are the direct drivers of conspiracies.
Perhaps I should have made clearer that it was in particular the word "direct" that I was responding too, not the fact that unethical or shady behavior from a government can trigger long-lasting distrust.
Did it come internally? Didn't it just become obvious once they got there and nothing was there? Apologies, I'm not from the US so I didn't follow that closely
Armstrong's exact argument about the vast numbers conspirators that would be required to keep perfect secrecy is exactly what I use when people try to claim that the coronavirus is some kind of hoax or that there's some kind of conspiracy about vaccines.
Have you ever tried to get thousands of people to cooperate on anything, let alone perpetuate a massive lie, when they have nothing to gain personally from doing so?
They don't have to lie. You can have 90% of those 400k people do legit work, but still fake the landing. Maybe they built the rocket but encountered some technical bottleneck and had to fake the landing. Not a skeptic myself, but the argument that 400k people needed to keep a secret is pretty weak.
If the moon landing was indeed infeasible from a technical perspective at that time, those people would know, that their designs were inadequate or flawed. The "some people might think they do legit work" argument doesn't really hold, because they would either know it was an impossible feat, or it would possible and no need to fake the landing.
Even faking the landing would require cooperation from parties with nothing to gain, since independent parties were able to bounce a laser off the mirror that they placed when they landed.
> Not a skeptic myself, but the argument that 400k people needed to keep a secret is pretty weak.
That's unless you start looking closer. Those people, they aren't universally fools, they think by themselves. Maybe not all 400k, but a sizeable non-reducible chunk of them do.
It could be a half lie too. 400k people built rocket, they saw the launch but the rocket didn’t actually make it to moon. The actual moon shots were in a studio.
Half lies are the best lies because you can argue half a truth is good enough for the whole truth.
Yeah, people have been selling an invisible product since thousands of years (religion), so it is quite possible to get billions of people to lie to themselves and to others.
The "product" being sold is a doctrinal basis for group cohesion, the same basic constitutive role that the following ideas play: "property is theft", "LOTR is the best book ever written", "transwomen are women", etc. (<- this is not a comment on the truth of these, only their social function).
These ideas constitute groups around them, forming a bedrock of a social belief system.
Ironically, this is exactly how conspiracies function: "we never landed on the moon".
This does not apply to people with material goals, rather than social(/epistemic) ones. The goal, "let's poison everyone with 5G" isn't an essentially meaningless doctrine ie., whose only impact is on belief, not on the world.
Goals to change the world, rather than to regulate belief, require actual self-awareness, coordination and a desire to realise that end-goal. In this case, i'd require >1mil+ people absurdly committed to poisoning everyone around them (and not least, to have some magical ability to induce a virus with a wifi signal).
I take issue with your "quite". Did you try to establish a new religion? Star Wars had some success on that, but even them - with all modern might of persuasion - didn't get billions - or tens of millions - of followers, and those who they did are arguably at least partially follow in jest.
Adding a new qualification of "not major enough" is a no true scotsman argument, which is not compelling. They are religions by any measure but your arbitrary goalposting.
>> people have been selling an invisible product since thousands of years (religion), so it is quite possible to get billions of people to lie to themselves and to others.
The "billions" qualification comes from your specific interpretation of this statement to mean a single religion. This is not the assertion. Nor is the specific count relevant to the point, as billions can be read to mean all relgions combined. Large groups of people can deceive each other and themselves. Full stop.
> They are religions by any measure but your arbitrary goalposting.
The argument was "people are believing in imaginary things, in billions and for centuries". For billions - or so - and for centuries - or so - arguments to apply, the religion ought to be major.
> The "billions" qualification comes from your specific interpretation of this statement to mean a single religion.
Oh, so now goalposting mean not a single example, but a combined group :) in comparison to one specific - and rather located in time and geography - government program.
Frankly, at this point I don't see much sense in more hairsplitting. Points were made, anyone can think for oneself from these.
I think OP is being reductive, but at the same time, people do make new religions. We usually call them cults. Christianity didn't get a billion followers overnight, it took literally 2000 years of proselytizing. Who knows, the scientologists of today might be the mainstream religion of tomorrow
The point was that there are illusions which hold lots of people for long time. Religions are a good example. However to keep really lots of people for a really long time, religion should survive itself - and outcompete others, and that's not easy. So the argument "religion" shouldn't be brought every time a government is suspected in doing something... conspirological.
Pascal's wager never made sense to me. There are infinitely many possible belief systems. The odds of picking the right one are infinitely small.
Picking the wrong one may even come with greater loss than picking none of them, because praying to false gods may bring upon me the wrath of the true gods more so than simply keeping an open mind.
I read about homeopaths on arstechnica the other day and I have to say that it shock me. How did we ever get to a society where people are injecting mercury to fight diseases? The worst part about it is that some of these people are the same who fear vaccines. It just doesn’t make any sense.
The evidence about vaccines causing harm is piling up. The question of whether there is a conspiracy at least motivated by greed is also piling up. I personally think there is a even higher conspiracy, one on a spiritual level that is also involved in orchestrating the overall deception and harm caused by vaccines but I have no solid evidence for that.
Yeah that was me. If I can get enough people to use them I will get enough spirit energy to be able to buy a magic sword off a ghost. Then with the sword I can fight the magic photocopier to get the pendant to open the door....
The best way is to use the Socratic method, if you have a lot of time. If you throw enough wilful ignorance, compliments, kindness, genuine interest and an endless amount of questions at someone, you’ll eventually get them arguing with them selves. It’s really the only way to move someone, because you’re not really convincing them of anything, they are doing that themselves.
Of course in the modern day and age, such a conversation is rarely going to happen.
> The best way is to use the Socratic method, if you have a lot of time. If you throw enough wilful ignorance, compliments, kindness, genuine interest and an endless amount of questions at someone, you’ll eventually get them arguing with them selves. It’s really the only way to move someone, because you’re not really convincing them of anything, they are doing that themselves.
That's probably the most succinct description of rhetoric using the Socratic method I have seen to date; highlighting the way its used in effective discourse is as a guide to a conclusion rather than an argument. Very well put.
> Of course in the modern day and age, such a conversation is rarely going to happen.
Agreed. But even in Plato's time this was rare, too. Which is why The Republic was written the way that it was: a Philosophical discourse approached with this method in mind told via (hypothetical?) dialogue(s) amongst other Philosophers and eventually members of the State to reveal a premise that most could arrive on their own with enough inquiry as to the onerous Nature of the State--even in it's ideal portrayal of the coming Golden Age of the Hellenic Era ushered in by Alexander--and 'good.'
It could have been written merely as proofs with the elucidation of its applications and usecases, as was typical of the time, but instead it took the time to navigate the reader on the likely rebuttals and discourses one may encounter when exploring the Nature of the topic.
To this day I think it stands the time as the most seminal work(s) on Anarchism, it took me 5 readings of all of the books: the first being when I was a sophomore in High School still exploring the ideology and the last being after the death of Grothendieck. Which is probably contrary to what Plato wanted as he himself was an aristocrat who benefited greatly due to his status and standing in Athenian Society that was only possible because of the centralized power of the Athenian-Polis.
All of Plato's work before or since were not comparable and Diogenes, who Plato referred to as 'Socrates gone mad' but also one of the most dedicated Moral Ethicists to have ever existed in my view, was there to remind him of the futility of it.
For sure. If you genuienly want to convince someone of something, you must be willing to engage them in the details.
Trivilizing the disagreement is a defense mechanisim. If I am unwilling to engage with someone, I'll still be polite to them. If one is so sure they are misguided, trivilizing it will re-enforce their position. It's counter-productive; we all live in the same universe.
Text breaks this a bit, often it's clear to one of the participents that there will be no reply, and you are not really speaking to them. But IRL, in person, and especially in private, it really matters.
That sounds like a good method, given the time. But I'd like to argue that some people are simply not smart enough to have enough reflection and thoughts about anything.
They need someone else to feed them a theory that fits their view on the world. And that's that. No going back from it.
...obviously this isn't scalable to do one-on-one. That's why it's better to broadcast it. Have a televised debate where you convince someone with this method - so you can link-share to anyone online you meet with the same idiocy.
I find the best option is simply asking someone (or yourself for that matter) 'what evidence would you need to see for you to change your opinion on X?'
I actually did. Not for the moon landing though. It basically frustrates the person to the point that they begin questioning their own conspiracy theory. Sometimes you need to hold a mirror in front of people to see themselves.
But from their point of view, were you totally serious, or was it obvious that you were just taking an absurd stance for the sake of an extreme counter-example, tongue in cheek?
I had to sound serious. I argued the whole night that New York is not a real city, and is a fictional place created by Marvel, like Gotham is created by DC.
Nothing would convince me otherwise. Satellite images? Fake! Maps? Obviously fictional, like maps of middle earth. Videos? All filmed in Toronto!
In case you were wondering why? My aim was to make the other person do some actual “research” to prove to me that I was wrong. Once you learn how to do that, you will find your way out of your own conspiracy theories as well.
What gets me most about these fools is they completely ignore how much such a huge fake job would cost. It would be so expensive that you could cut the budget in half and just...go to the moon.
What it really comes down to is these people severely lack in critical thinking, so while it is surprising that they fail to account for other, seemingly obvious externalities, it really shouldn’t be.
This critical thinking critique is pretty tautological. In effect we are saying "these people with wrong ideas, the problem is they are not good at getting ideas right".
But that isn't useful/actionable knowledge. WHY are they bad at getting ideas right? Is it innate to the average human biology? Is it something that has gotten worse as more people have gotten onto the internet where they are exposed to non-curated data more?
True. I think the actual cause is definitely multi-faceted, and expect a big cause is education. Both quality of that received (eg state funding), and level attained.
Others have also mentioned other salient factors (psychology, etc)
I think it is an natural personality trait gone haywire. Just as there are some people who are pure herd creatures, completely trusting of authority, there are others who are inherently skeptical as a genetic trait. Humanity benefits from a certain degree of skepticism but since it's a spectrum, some people possess it in excess. In antiquity such people may have been heretics who questioned the Church, and they led us to the Reformation and to scientific progress. In the more recent past, they believed in alien landings and the Bermuda Triangle. Nowadays they're anti-vaxxers or flat Earthers, viewing the government or scientific orthodoxy as windmills to tilt against.
Perhaps our current environment is to some extent conducive to runaway skepticism. Consider, obesity is rampant because human beings evolved in relative caloric scarcity, but in today's plentiful, carbohydrate rich diet, we find it hard to self-regulate our food intake. Perhaps conspiracy-theorism is rampant because humanity evolved in an environment where people were much less free to pursue their "alternative" urges, but the shackles have been loosened in the modern world. Freedom for better or worse also means freedom to hold fringe points of view.
We are naturally far better at identifying what's plausible instead of sorting out what is likely, and we're better at giving kudos and recognition for the former than the latter even though it's easier. That makes some people hyperdevelop "theorizing" without working on "validation."
We are dangerously good at making up stories to explain data. Talk to anyone about a spurious correlation[0] and they can provide you a just-so story that explains it as a real correlation in under a minute.
Provide anyone with two competing theories that each account for some but not all of the available data, then ask them to rank the two based on likelihood. You'll make people visibly upset. (Our ability to invent new theories to fit any circumstance might partly explain why, for a while, explorers forgot how to cure scurvy.[1])
And it's easier to "look smart" the first way. No one can immediately determine whether you're good at the second unless you make a long series of predictions evaluated over time while constantly gathering more data. Everyone can see if you've connected a few dots in a clever and unexpected way. Talking heads are regarded as experts for going on shows and making vague predictions based on a few recent events, but are never called back to scrutinize their predictive track record.[2]
Conspiracy theorists are generally just arguing something is plausible, and ignoring the messy step about what's more likely, with the implication you should just leap from plausible immediately to unwavering conviction.
Some of this is just, well, one of these things is hard and the other is easy. But I'm confident both can be learned to some extent, based on personal experience of getting a better sense for these over time.
So to the extent this is "fixable" at all,[3] maybe greater education about meta-cognition (esp. cognitive biases), the history of analytic philosophy, a humility about what one knows, and/or Bayesian reasoning earlier in education might help.
Sidenote, this itself is arguably just another just-so theory too. Maybe I'm wrong about it all. :)
[2] This is Phillip Tetlock's whole area of research.
[3] To be fair, maybe we've already "fixed" this pretty well, we tend to attribute far fewer things to witchcraft than a few hundred years ago, maybe normal everyday education and expansion of literacy is enough and there will always be a handful of outliers and trolls. See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
The real issue is that they are disproportionately loud. Since they spend no time researching, they can spend all of their time being as loud and obnoxious as possible.
...and many of them make a living from the entertainment value of their conspiracy theories.
What compounds their out-sized impact is the attention the media pays to them. Every time they they are featured by some reporter, social media site, or local media channel, they receive a fresh new set of subscribers.
Rather than feeding these beasts, we need to learn to IGNORE idiocy.
It's not all lack of critical thinking. It's also that it can be kind of fun to make out you and your friends are the ones who know the truth and the rest of the world are idiots. I mean many conspiracy theorists would be capable of researching the kind of stuff Armstrong uses in refutation but don't want to go there.
Isn't this the joke? That if Kubrick really was going to be employed by the US Government to "fake" a moon landing that, with his penchant for realistic set design, he would've filmed it on site.
I think actually you could cut budget much more than in half, and go to the Moon.
It's surprising how - comparatively - easy is - and was - to go to the Moon. Do you realize that for today technologies it's a walk in the park? It was done half a century ago. But that's not enough - even then in many aspects it was quite doable. Remember, the Moon race started as a calculated idea to win - all crucial requirements were approximately achievable, erring on "more likely than not". For example, F-1 first stage engine had a rather modest characteristics, except the size (which already provided a plenty of problems). The whole architecture was decided in favor of a single bug launcher - because docking was considered "risky", even though one docking (after liftoff from the Moon) and even one-half more docking (after translunar injection, when Apollo CM detached, turned over and docked with LM) eventually remained. Problems were being solved with size, not with smarter decisions - because the latter required time and were riskier.
So... Rocket science isn't a rocket science. Yes, Moon landing is one of the greatest technological achievements up to now. But it was done then, and for that much.
Why would faking it with a soundstage and some actors in a room, and some small models, cost so much more? A big budget Hollywood film like James Bond Moonraker (1979) was 1/1000th the cost of the Apollo program, and with no famous actors/actresses, simpler script, TV quality, surely a fake would be cheaper than that?
If someone thought it was fake, they ought to be asking where the budget really went and whose pockets it lined.
Because you still need to build and launch a rocket, even if it doesn't go to the moon or carry the actual crew, it needs to at least go over the horizon convincingly enough.
All that design and construction still needed to be paid for.
Presumably faking the capsule return is cheap enough if you drop the capsule out the back of an aircraft.
Faking lunar return samples, returning signals from orbit for the various ground stations around the world, and a variety of other things also required a lot of deception, too.
Then, ofcourse, you have to hope that the Russians didn't put out a headline of "Americans fake lunar landing". Since they kept a close eye on things.
Because all of the technology and machinery necessary to go to the moon was designed and built. The massive and massively expensive Saturn V rockets(many of them) were designed, built and launched to witnesses. The LEM, CSM, suites, computers, and etc were all built. The simulators were built and simulations run. Etc and etc and etc; hundreds of thousands of people invovled.
So, pretty much all the cost of going to the Moon and now add on the cost of faking it and maintaining that lie for 50 years.
And they would know that "maintaining that lie for N years" would prove useless as soon as the powerful cameras in lunar orbit would photograph the landing sites. Who would participate in such a lie knowing 100% it will be exposed, eventually...
I remember reading an article years ago, saying that it’d have required the invention of electronics that did not exist yet to slow down the footage (simulating 1/6th g) and pull off a live broadcast that lasted hours and hours. So in essence, it’d have been the more impressive thing to do technologically speaking. Having seen the new 1 hour documentary on Apollo 11 and how rickety everything looked and barely worked, I’d agree with that assessment.
Because it's a lot more than just a movie. Millions of people witnessed aspects of the program in person over a 10-year period. The workers, their families, and the public. You'd have to spend enough money to fool all of them.
There are always people that actually believe it, but there are good reasons to suspect it's not entirely organic. If one made a list of times the "fake landing" thing was used, the vast _minority_ would be arguments agreeing with this skeptic; in reality, it serves a different purpose.
> The most effective way to prevent people from looking into something is to poison the well. Attach the thing to something else obviously false, bonus points if evokes a negative emotional response.
But then what is the end goal of all this? Anti-US propaganda?
To cause the desired effect. It's the most effective technique to stop people from looking at something. Consider why this purely technical, on-topic and perfectly NIST sourced comment was flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23419760
I assume it was flagged because unless you're already a true believer, "look! this falling building is falling according to the laws of physics" is not a very strong argument.
"Study finds political bias skews perceptions of verifiable fact"
7 @ g for 2.25s is a verifiable fact from one of the most prestigious standards making bodies on the planet. There are tutorials on reproducing that NIST measurement.
You seem to be not surprised it's flagged, and you bring up belief. Why?
not sure why I feel the urge to reply :) but Zack is the very opposite of that teacher. Zack is asking questions and wants to learn. That teacher just tries to push her opinion on someone, leaving to room for reply, no room for a conversation, exactly what no teacher should do, no one in general but especially someone who should promote discussions, questioning and argumentation
The worst part about this is that it's a teacher who's believing the fake Moon landing conspiracy theory. I had a teacher in primary school who, one day, filled our heads with nonsense by Erich von daniken. When you're young and a teacher does that it tends to stick in your head.
Didn't they come back with lunar soil samples? Armstrong reply was brilliant, but I would have also added: "here's some samples we took by ourselves, feel free to meet us at xyz lab and analyze them".
And btw, who the heck allows a negationist like that one to teach children?
You know that they are people who dismiss the theory of evolution and say something like: "God sprinkled the Earth with the dinosaur bones to test our faith"...
Most men would have soiled myself if they were put into a position of having to reboot the rocket and make it back to Earth. And then seeing how one of the astronauts kept his cool when one of the components for redeparture failed. Just incredible!
>Two men were about to land on the moon, and Mission Control in Houston was thrumming with tension. In the science-operations room, Gerald Schaber, a geologist, needed something to do while he waited for the lunar module to touch down. Schaber had come from northern Arizona, where engineers had warped the desert with dynamite to make a cratered landscape where the astronauts could train. His job didn’t start until Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out of the lunar module and began to explore the slate-colored surface. And the wait was getting to him.
>“Our hearts were beating [fast], of course, everybody’s was,” Schaber told me recently. “So I figured I might as well watch theirs.”
>Schaber switched his monitor to the channel displaying biomedical data for the astronauts. Armstrong seemed calmer than some of the folks in Mission Control. The commander’s heart was ticking along at 75 beats per minute, a remarkable rate for someone who was about to, you know, land on the moon. An adult’s normal resting heart rate is between 60 to 100 beats per minute. My heart rate right now, writing this story, is 75, according to a fitness tracker.
The whole thing seems like instant death every moment. Perhaps as test pilots they all got used to just trying to get on with things, but maybe they really did soil themselves like us mortals?
It’s true that we shouldn’t just follow dogmas, but skepticism isn’t about simply being contrarian. It’s about only accepting evidence based claims and scrupulously and accurately evaluating the evidence. Conspiracy theory types typically fail badly at this because they usually don’t actually know how to evaluate evidence.
These people aren't skeptics. They aren't simply questioning and doubting accepted opinions; they are absolutely certain in their contrarianism. That certainty means they produce no actual value.
This isn't being skeptical, this is straight denial. The useful aspect of a skeptical approach would be to not be convinced until a very high level of confidence in a result is shown. The skeptic would be saying 'hmm, the evidence is mounting up, but i'm still not convinced'. Having people like this about when decisions are being made can be very useful, as they can help avoid expensive mistakes.
Unfortunately we're now using the word skeptics for 2 totally different things
- questioning dogma with sound reasoning and reasonable first principles
- trusting one's own belief against overwhelming evidence of the contrary.
Galileo squarely belongs to the former, while flat earthers and moon landing 'skeptics' belong to the latter. Let's not conflate the two.
I suspect you don't realize how firmly people at the time believed in revealed truth and the evidence of their own eyes that the sun revolved around the Earth.
There's intelligent skepticism, and then there's skepticism for the sake of skepticism. It's not that hard to tell apart the Galileos from the Kyrie Irvings. Skeptics deserve legal protections, but they don't deserve attention if they say things like the Earth is flat.
> It's not that hard to tell apart the Galileos from the Kyrie Irvings.
Easy to say that today since you've been taught from birth that Galileo was right.
Just the other day I confronted a person who insisted that Edison electrocuted an elephant. He dared me to look it up. I did, and presented irrefutable evidence that Edison did not. He was unconvinced - after all, it's common knowledge that Edison did the dirty deed.
We don't laugh at skeptics who doubt something because they have evidence to the contrary. But to believe in a conspiracy that, as Armstrong writes, would require hundreds of thousands of people to lie, without any evidence at all, is delusional.
Again, there are specific, identifiable evidence based reasons you should listen to those theories, and you can do so without equating every lunatic with a pet theory to the popular image of Galileo.
There is a difference between, on one side, questioning one's understanding of the universe, which is how science works and progress and, on the other side, being unable to accept facts, which is where moon landing skeptics are.
This guy isn’t a skeptic though, he’s a true believer. It’s just that his beliefs happen to be the opposite of established consensus, instead of being in line with it. That’s especially dumb, because if you’re going to blindly believe things you might as well blindly go with the flow, you’ll be wrong sometimes but right more often.
Actual skepticism requires a lot of intellectual effort and honesty. An actual skeptic on the moon landing/holocaust/global warming/Loch Ness monster/whatever would start from a position of genuine skepticism and curiosity, wedded neither to one side nor the other, and then carefully line up all the evidence on one side versus the other. That’s a valuable service; we don’t all have time to be genuinely skeptical about everything so it’s good to know there’s genuine skeptics out there doing the hard work for us; once in a while they’ll discover that the evidence for some popular belief actually isn’t as overwhelming as everyone believes, and that’s incredibly valuable. Genuine skeptics should be cherished and nurtured, but idiots who blindly take up contrary positions because they align with their worldview are of no value to anyone.
Thank you. Finally a sane comment, while other people only bashing the skeptics. I am not saying he is right or wrong, I am saying this are complex and we should not dismiss any theories.
I admire Armstrong for taking the time to write such a thoughtful letter. With the exception of people who are close to me, I usually calculate that it's not worth my time to engage and try to refute a conspiracy theory.
As he finished up a video call with his parents who were stuck in Europe, he knew he was right. The wold was so naive.
He dictated the last few words on his latest iPhone to save time before telling Siri to send the email - magically connecting himself to the fraudulent spaceman, bits of data flying over air in an instant.
"We are still thousands of years away from having the technology to fly to the moon", he chuckled. He turned his lights off, sank back into his bed. Content.
There is something extremely funny about someone wanting an accomplished astronaut to swear that the most important event in their lives actually happened on a Bible, which we all know is an accurate representation of historical facts...
I think the sad part is there are people who still fall prey today to this and many other conspiracies, anti-vaxx just to name one.
But this is a core tenant of freedom of speech and information, so not matter how objectively wrong, I'll defend the teacher's right to say it.
There will always be those who fall into fringe ideas regardless of how disprovable they are because they choose to believe the moon is made of cheese. The tool of critical thinking not being applied well can easily end up here.
I can't see the parallel between the willful ignorance displayed and the "Dark Ages." Do you think the migrating tribes just refused to believe those aqueducts existed?
I'm thinking of things like the destruction of the library of Alexander, the religious fanaticism of the late Empire, and the destructive effects of continuous wars from the mid-200s AD. It's pretty easy to wipe out scientific progress if you put your mind to it. It was not just invading Germans, though that certainly did not help.
The first two really didn't happen, and though the Crisis of the Third Century hampered Rome, it wouldn't wipe out knowledge. Plus, who wanted to wipe out progress? The West lost their connection to Greek, and the knowledge was largely Greek.
I would look up the Arian Controversy before asserting there was no religious fanaticism. There were many such disputes in the late empire, some attended by considerable bloodshed.
Early Christianity had some splits, but they primarily happened in the Eastern Mediterranean. Some Germanics were still Arian, they were usually tolerant though.
Religious fanatics were around, but there wasn't a strong wave of fanaticism in that period. Losing access to Greek did far more damage than losing Arian theology.
The rise of the Church made most of the ancient culture to be believed false of demonic. Philosophers were the first put to the fire. Temples were destroyed, along with the books inside them. With the end of the Roman state, there was nobody left in Europe to maintain the engineering knowledge acquired by the ancient.
That doesn’t really sound like a good summary of centuries of Roman and post-Roman history.
History is complicated, but I would say that the Western European dark ages of 500-1000AD were caused neither by moon landing skepticism (or the 6th century equivalent thereof) nor its opposite.
While there was some persecution of the pagans, they mostly just gradually became Christian. The West lost it's Greek tradition, and with it much of the millennia of knowledge it contained.
No single event led to the Dark Ages. It was the result of centuries of economic and intellectual decay, combined with catastrophic invasions and wars. By 536 the Western Roman Empire was already some 60 years in its grave. (Though some argue about the actual end date.)
If the Roman Empire had collapsed without the volcanic eruption, would it have led to anything as deep as the "dark ages" or just a political reshuffle?
France has been through like four governments in the past 200 years. The US is only 200 years old and has endured one civil war.
You never know with history because it's not possible to conduct experiments. However, I'm very sceptical of arguments about the lasting effect of volcanic eruptions on world history during the last 2000 years. Known eruptions last 2-3 years, which is bad but of limited duration. [1]
Pandemics and disease in general have had far greater impact on humans. The Bubonic Plague epidemic of 1348-1350 wiped out at least 1/3 of the population of Europe according to reputable sources. [2] It affected medieval societies for decades by changing the cost and availability of labor. Destructive wars like the 30 Years War had effects of similar magnitude. (This relevant for the Roman Empire, which suffered continuous invasions starting from 406AD onwards in the West.)
I would think that the craziness that led to the Dark ages would be the polar opposite - an unquestioning acceptance of all dogma, or at the very least, being scared to question
Honestly, it really does. Nothing about that suggests they are making up anything. It's throughly organic; off the top of their heads. None of the body language or vocalization suggests deception to me. They include esoteric details and caveats without hesitation. It's fun to watch, thanks for posting.
Saw a video of him responding to another skeptic by beating the shit out of him [0]. Honestly when people are that deluded a good knock on the head might be a more persuasive argument...
I'd imagine Buzz would be pretty mad if he found out you were mistaking Neil for him, given that Buzz has lived most of his life in Neil's shadow.
As for me, I credit them bothequally for being the first men on the moon. They both landed at the same moment. Whether the bootheel or the landing gear hit is not relevant.
He's already knocked one dude out. Might as well add me to the list ;)
I agree with your sentiment. My mind honestly can't wrap itself around the terrifying sense of wonder and vulnerability those guys must have felt being up there and looking back at earth. Incredible.
Well, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that happened, by any government. The “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago.
Not defending the moon landing doubters, or conspiracy theorists in general, but: the proper response to these things isn’t to point and laugh. It’s to recognize their origins - a (often justified) loss of trust in institutions and governmental narratives - and work on addressing and fixing them.
Edit: commenters seem to be focusing on a single example, which I presented as an illustrative point for a much deeper and more important phenomenon. You’re missing the forest for the trees.