uair01
Antediluvian
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2005
- Messages
- 5,509
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- The Netherlands
@mods: I didn't see a specific thread for this, so feel free to combine this with other threads.
I follow a highly intellectual blogger who has been writing a blog series on scientific theories of conspiracy theories.
It started with the Ross Douhat article:
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/17/when-are-conspiracies-real-reply-to-ross-douthat-part-1/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/opinion/misinformation-conspiracy-theories.html
Alas, Douthat’s four-part test is woefully inadequate for several reasons, which I shall discuss in detail in my next few posts. For now, it suffices to say that both the German “stab-in-the-back” myth as well as Trump’s stolen election story–indeed, most of the conspiracy theories mentioned in the chart below–would most likely pass Douthat’s four-part test with flying colors.
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/18/ross-douthats-razor/
Either way, however, what does “simpler” mean in the domain of alternate realities or conspiracy theories? Does simplicity refer to the number of conspirators? The goal of the conspiracy? The number of steps necessary for the conspiracy to succeed? Worse yet, however we answer the foregoing questions, one of the supreme ironies of many conspiracy theories is that they pass Douthat’s parsimony test with flying colors, especially when it is the truth that is often ambiguous and messy!
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/19/stochastic-conspiracies/
By way of historical example, given the anti-Semitic origins of many interwar European conspiracy theories, many people in Weimar Germany who fell for “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” hoax might be more likely to believe in stab-in-the-back betrayal myth as well. Either way, whether we classify two or more conspiracies as dependent or independent events, there is a much bigger problem with Douthat’s approach to conspiracy thinking. I shall identify this fatal flaw in my next post.
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/20/conspiracies-and-religion/
But upon closer inspection, one can make a psychological or “Kuhnian” objection to Popper’s falsifiability principle in the context of conspiracy theories. Such theories are more like religious beliefs: they are often a product of people’s deep-seated intuitions and implicit assumptions about the world, and those intuitions, beliefs, and assumptions are generally impossible to test or “falsify”!
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/22/neumanns-test/
It turns out that scholars and researchers from many different fields–including law, political science, philosophy, psychology, and sociology–have been fascinated by this very question and have attempted to answer it through a wide variety of theoretical lenses. But as far as I am concerned, the best place to start is still with Franz Neumann (1900-1954), who is pictured below, and his classic essay on “Anxiety and Politics,” which was published posthumously in 1957 in a book edited by the great Herbert Marcuse: The Democratic and Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, pp. 270-300 (Glencoe, Illinois: The Fress Press).
In his essay “Anxiety and Politics,” Neumann identifies three features that all shadowy conspiracy theories or alternate realities have in common: “intensification of anxiety through manipulation, identification, [and] false concreteness.”
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/23/neumanns-tempting-ad-hominem-trap/
Simply put, following Neumann’s lead, contemporary researchers often resort to finding some psychological fault or mental defect as the underlying source of conspiracy thinking. Ironically, however, blaming people’s mental states for holding fringe beliefs is itself a textbook example of the ad hominem fallacy.
Before going any further, it is worth asking why so many eminent scholars commit this egregious and embarrassing fallacy whenever they turn their attention to conspiracy theories? Why do so many research studies fall into this facile and tempting trap, questioning the intelligence or rationality of people who believe in conspiracy theories?
I, however, reject such ad hominem arguments out of hand. Instead of falling into the ad hominem trap, what if we were to take a more sympathetic view of conspiracy theorists and conspiracy believers? Specifically, regardless of one’s mental state, what is it about conspiracy theories that many people find so appealing?
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/24/conspiracy-theory-interlude/
Is there a fruitful way of studying conspiracy theories, one that is not ad hoc or that doesn’t pre-judge conspiracy believers as somehow mentally defective?
Specifically, we could apply Richard Dawkins’ original “meme’s-eye” view of cultural evolution to conspiracy theories, or in the alternative, we could frame conspiracy theories as a form of Foucauldian “discourse” or as a Wittgensteinian “language-game”–a separate linguistic domain, as pervasive and ineradicable like religion, but with its own logic and rules.
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/24/conspiracy-theories-as-memes/
Nevertheless, Dawkins’ “meme’s-eye” view of conspiracy theories poses a vexing question. What makes far-fetched or fringe conspiracy theories more memorable or more likely to spread in the first place?
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/25/the-social-construction-of-conspiracy-theories/
On this Foucauldian view, then, conspiracy theories are just a special type of socially constructed discourse: a subversive form of social knowledge existing alongside many other competing forms of knowledge.
Further, this Foucauldian view of conspiracy theories contains an epistemologically novel and revolutionary insight, one that is especially relevant to the murky and shadowy world of secret plots and concealed cabals: truth is a subjective and contested concept. That is, “truth” is rarely, if ever, an absolute value; the truth is always up for grabs.
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/26/conspiracy-theories-as-language-games/
So, why not add “conspiracy theories” and “alternate realities” and “political myths” to this already extensive list of language games? Although we can only wonder what Wittgenstein himself would have thought of this possibility, it turns out that conspiracy theories and conspiracy thinking generally seem to resemble many of the specific language-games in Wittgenstein’s long list, such as speculating about an event, making up a story, or reporting an event, depending on the use a specific conspiracy theory is being put to.
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/29/the-law-of-conspiracy/
Given the fact that conspiracies are, in fact, quite ubiquitous–and given that my area of expertise is law–, why don’t we try to look at conspiracy theories through the eyes of the common law and the modern crime of conspiracy? Specifically, instead of asking whether a given conspiracy theory is simple or falsifiable or instead of trying to measure the level of orthodoxy of a given discourse, we should be asking the following series of practical or legal-inspired questions:
3. Posner also mentions that some of the most serious crimes, like the crime of insurrection, can only be committed by conspiracies.
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/30/i-object-conspiracy-theory-fake-news-edition/
According to our classical liberal tradition and John Stuart Mill (see below), the best test of the truth of an idea depends on its direct competition with other ideas, not on the opinion of a censor or a “reality czar” or a secret algorithm or whatever.
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/31/three-critiques-of-the-marketplace-of-ideas/
Claudio Lombardi (2019), for example, explains how the marketplace of ideas is distorted by the advertising revenue business models of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. These platforms treat news as a “product” and readers as “consumers” and distort the marketplace of ideas by lumping reliable sources of news together with fake news.
Note: He doesn't mention network effects as scientific theory of conspiracy theory. That's a big ommission I think.
I follow a highly intellectual blogger who has been writing a blog series on scientific theories of conspiracy theories.
It started with the Ross Douhat article:
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/17/when-are-conspiracies-real-reply-to-ross-douthat-part-1/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/opinion/misinformation-conspiracy-theories.html
Alas, Douthat’s four-part test is woefully inadequate for several reasons, which I shall discuss in detail in my next few posts. For now, it suffices to say that both the German “stab-in-the-back” myth as well as Trump’s stolen election story–indeed, most of the conspiracy theories mentioned in the chart below–would most likely pass Douthat’s four-part test with flying colors.
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/18/ross-douthats-razor/
Either way, however, what does “simpler” mean in the domain of alternate realities or conspiracy theories? Does simplicity refer to the number of conspirators? The goal of the conspiracy? The number of steps necessary for the conspiracy to succeed? Worse yet, however we answer the foregoing questions, one of the supreme ironies of many conspiracy theories is that they pass Douthat’s parsimony test with flying colors, especially when it is the truth that is often ambiguous and messy!
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/19/stochastic-conspiracies/
By way of historical example, given the anti-Semitic origins of many interwar European conspiracy theories, many people in Weimar Germany who fell for “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” hoax might be more likely to believe in stab-in-the-back betrayal myth as well. Either way, whether we classify two or more conspiracies as dependent or independent events, there is a much bigger problem with Douthat’s approach to conspiracy thinking. I shall identify this fatal flaw in my next post.
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/20/conspiracies-and-religion/
But upon closer inspection, one can make a psychological or “Kuhnian” objection to Popper’s falsifiability principle in the context of conspiracy theories. Such theories are more like religious beliefs: they are often a product of people’s deep-seated intuitions and implicit assumptions about the world, and those intuitions, beliefs, and assumptions are generally impossible to test or “falsify”!
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/22/neumanns-test/
It turns out that scholars and researchers from many different fields–including law, political science, philosophy, psychology, and sociology–have been fascinated by this very question and have attempted to answer it through a wide variety of theoretical lenses. But as far as I am concerned, the best place to start is still with Franz Neumann (1900-1954), who is pictured below, and his classic essay on “Anxiety and Politics,” which was published posthumously in 1957 in a book edited by the great Herbert Marcuse: The Democratic and Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, pp. 270-300 (Glencoe, Illinois: The Fress Press).
In his essay “Anxiety and Politics,” Neumann identifies three features that all shadowy conspiracy theories or alternate realities have in common: “intensification of anxiety through manipulation, identification, [and] false concreteness.”
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/23/neumanns-tempting-ad-hominem-trap/
Simply put, following Neumann’s lead, contemporary researchers often resort to finding some psychological fault or mental defect as the underlying source of conspiracy thinking. Ironically, however, blaming people’s mental states for holding fringe beliefs is itself a textbook example of the ad hominem fallacy.
Before going any further, it is worth asking why so many eminent scholars commit this egregious and embarrassing fallacy whenever they turn their attention to conspiracy theories? Why do so many research studies fall into this facile and tempting trap, questioning the intelligence or rationality of people who believe in conspiracy theories?
I, however, reject such ad hominem arguments out of hand. Instead of falling into the ad hominem trap, what if we were to take a more sympathetic view of conspiracy theorists and conspiracy believers? Specifically, regardless of one’s mental state, what is it about conspiracy theories that many people find so appealing?
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/24/conspiracy-theory-interlude/
Is there a fruitful way of studying conspiracy theories, one that is not ad hoc or that doesn’t pre-judge conspiracy believers as somehow mentally defective?
Specifically, we could apply Richard Dawkins’ original “meme’s-eye” view of cultural evolution to conspiracy theories, or in the alternative, we could frame conspiracy theories as a form of Foucauldian “discourse” or as a Wittgensteinian “language-game”–a separate linguistic domain, as pervasive and ineradicable like religion, but with its own logic and rules.
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/24/conspiracy-theories-as-memes/
Nevertheless, Dawkins’ “meme’s-eye” view of conspiracy theories poses a vexing question. What makes far-fetched or fringe conspiracy theories more memorable or more likely to spread in the first place?
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/25/the-social-construction-of-conspiracy-theories/
On this Foucauldian view, then, conspiracy theories are just a special type of socially constructed discourse: a subversive form of social knowledge existing alongside many other competing forms of knowledge.
Further, this Foucauldian view of conspiracy theories contains an epistemologically novel and revolutionary insight, one that is especially relevant to the murky and shadowy world of secret plots and concealed cabals: truth is a subjective and contested concept. That is, “truth” is rarely, if ever, an absolute value; the truth is always up for grabs.
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/26/conspiracy-theories-as-language-games/
So, why not add “conspiracy theories” and “alternate realities” and “political myths” to this already extensive list of language games? Although we can only wonder what Wittgenstein himself would have thought of this possibility, it turns out that conspiracy theories and conspiracy thinking generally seem to resemble many of the specific language-games in Wittgenstein’s long list, such as speculating about an event, making up a story, or reporting an event, depending on the use a specific conspiracy theory is being put to.
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/29/the-law-of-conspiracy/
Given the fact that conspiracies are, in fact, quite ubiquitous–and given that my area of expertise is law–, why don’t we try to look at conspiracy theories through the eyes of the common law and the modern crime of conspiracy? Specifically, instead of asking whether a given conspiracy theory is simple or falsifiable or instead of trying to measure the level of orthodoxy of a given discourse, we should be asking the following series of practical or legal-inspired questions:
- Is there an agreement between two or more conspirators?
- Who are they and when did they reach this agreement?
- And is their agreement an illicit or immoral one?
3. Posner also mentions that some of the most serious crimes, like the crime of insurrection, can only be committed by conspiracies.
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/30/i-object-conspiracy-theory-fake-news-edition/
According to our classical liberal tradition and John Stuart Mill (see below), the best test of the truth of an idea depends on its direct competition with other ideas, not on the opinion of a censor or a “reality czar” or a secret algorithm or whatever.
https://priorprobability.com/2021/03/31/three-critiques-of-the-marketplace-of-ideas/
Claudio Lombardi (2019), for example, explains how the marketplace of ideas is distorted by the advertising revenue business models of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. These platforms treat news as a “product” and readers as “consumers” and distort the marketplace of ideas by lumping reliable sources of news together with fake news.
Note: He doesn't mention network effects as scientific theory of conspiracy theory. That's a big ommission I think.