What I always found "fascinating" about conspiracy theories is how educated, smart people can be convinced by some of them. It's just something that I can't understand.
Well, after many conspiracy theories turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg of truly heinous government actions it's not hard to understand why previously skeptical people now think twice about immediately dismissing crackpot ideas.
Some of us have also worked, through ignorance I will add, for heinous government contractors and sat with people having discussions on how best to kill lots of people efficiently without a thought as to any ethical consequences of their actions.
What seems to happen is that you come across a compelling set of evidence. The evidence is faked, or skewed heavily, but it might be hard to know this. And, as presented, the cases are usually pretty good. If you're unable to immediately dispute them, it isn't totally irrational to think they might be real.
This is the reason I don't watch documentaries on modern "issues". The story presented is all very manipulated and you're certain to get an incorrect set of evidence.
What is boggling is how smart people _stay_ convinced by conspiracies, after contradictions are pointed out. But changing your mind is a hard thing to do, so perhaps it's not that surprising?
An effective tactic to prevent people from looking into something is to promote obviously false information, bonus if it's offensive, and associate it with information that can be verified. Another related tactic is for people who have a long track record of promoting false information promote something that's verifiable. That way people will dismiss real information that has been associated with bs. There is a paper, by a good friend of mine on this "Discrediting By Association: Undermining the Case for Patriots Who Question 9/11", and links to much more info in my profile.
And I agree, there are many documentaries on modern issues that are pure junk.
> This is the reason I don't watch documentaries on modern "issues". The story presented is all very manipulated and you're certain to get an incorrect set of evidence.
That's true of essentially any source but I don't know that becoming ignorant of anything that happened during your lifetime is the right answer.
>> educated, smart people can be convinced by some of them
I love this implication that you're probably dumb if you think the government sometimes engages in conspiracy. Like mass surveillance. Or bacterial experiments in San Francisco.
No, you're dumb when you turn and twist the available evidence to considerable degrees to get to your crazy conclusion. Snowden is an educated and smart man with the proper evidence to back his claims (mass surveillance). What was exposed in this case is proper evidence (bacterial experiments in SF).
What is dumb is seing a few bright pixels in a New Horizons image and saying "that's a swarm of alien space ships", when in fact it's just a cosmic ray distorted by the JPG lossy compression algorithm.
Sometimes the more you know, the more possibilities could be out there. We are not in a 100% transparent world. A single signal could mean a lot that one is not able to see. So based on some signals we could observe, there come related explanations. We could label a category with different tags. Conspiracy theory is one of them. Though I do believe that conspiracy theories weigh people's motivations more, which is not quite fit to most of mainstream perspectives. Hopefully, I won't get downvoted too much with this comment;p
Yeah, I think you are kind of circling around a central issue. Some evidence emerges of something untoward happening and the conspiracy nuts jump on it. There ends up being a lot of noise on top of a little bit of signal. People who fancy themselves rational dismiss it while the nuts keep amplifying it. Then much later more/most of the story comes out and sometimes it's a lot worse than the nut jobs even speculated.
I have read somewhere that conspiracy theories are the pattern matching algorithms in our brains running wild, seening connections where there aren't any. The thing is, our brains are really good at detecting patterns. So good, that sometimes, in fact, we will see patterns where there aren't any. And that's where paranoia and conspiracies and conspiracy theories come in.
For my comment I received many downvotes and also many upvotes (net change was downward, but my karma has been jumping around for about 5 hours now), for pointing out a fact that I find baffling, without criticizing anyone in particular. I'd like to understand why this happened, if possible.
