Stock response to conspiracy theorists

In which Christopher Butler deals with conspiracy theories really quite superbly. Original thread :
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChristopherButler/posts/862PCsRM3S8

His comment (shared with kind permission) :


I'm going to put this as kindly as I can: your brain has been hijacked by what might best be described as an aggressive virus of the mind.  And I understand this very well because to be really honest, I used to be very deep into to this kind of shit.

And it is very well polished, very rehearsed, very attractive mounds of obfuscating bullshit.

Consider this a kind of confession to the people who follow me on G+.  They may be a little surprised by this, but in much the same way that the testimony of an ex-holy roller/faith healer who finally sees reason can be illuminating, maybe this will help somebody understand why the conspiracy-bullshit paranoia is so hard to shake off once it takes hold of an otherwise sound mind.

Long story short(er): I was very into and excited by all things conspiracy, weird, paranormal, etc.  For years and years.  I read everything. I watched everything.  I talked to everyone.

Skipping to the end...

Back in the earlier days of podcasting, I had a short lived but popular little podcast called The Noosphere, and it dealt with aliens, UFOs, monsters, demons, conspiracy, etc.   We had pretty solid guests (people you've heard of in the 'conspiracy' genre) and despite it being a ridiculously long show (around 2 hours), people seemed to love it.

You have no reason to believe me (because skepticism rightly dictates that if I make a claim, you're not really compelled to just take my word for it), but the truth is that I'm fairly confident that there is no 'new world order facts' or 'history' (including what you posted above) that I haven't encountered.  You've no obligation to believe it, but I've probably forgotten more of this Alex Jones/ Jim Marrs / "they're comin to get us!"  bullshit than you're ever going to know.

In other words, you're not going to "out-conspiracy-nut" me...or at least what I used to be.  *I have heard everything you can imagine.* Not a word of your above comment was new to me.  At all.

Talking to a lot of people who believe a lot of very strange things, I slowly developed a kind of model in my head that I called "The Conspiracy Pool" (or sometimes "the Paranormal Pool").  This Pool is fun to hang out in.  The people who hang out around the pool are surprisingly genial to everybody else at the pool...because if you're at the pool you feel like you have access to or awareness of some hidden agenda of the government/the universe/god/the devil/whatever that makes you special and makes you the underdog.  Its like a brotherhood. Everyone not at the pool is a muggle.  Its a marketplace of ideas and theories and interconnecting gobbledeegook.  I remember one guy claimed he was a dolphin/human hybrid, for fucks sake.  Its a blast and all seems very serious when you're in the pool.

But what it also does is slowly chip away at your critical thinking skills.

The beginning of the end for me was talking to a geologist who insisted that there was evidence that there were nuclear weapons being used in ancient times.  This was a man with a doctorate in geophysics.  His evidence didn't make sense to me (I'm not a scientist, but I've been a very enthusiastic amateur my entire life and I'm more than a little informed when it comes to general science)  Who am I to argue with an expert in his field?

But it turns out he was dead fucking wrong.  I did the homework, and not a single thing he said did not have an infinitely better explanation than some high tech ancient society lobbing nukes at each other.

So the choice was to believe that there was an elaborate conspiracy of science to mislead me...or this guy had a deeply felt conviction so strong that he allowed it influence his ability to use logic.  It was the latter, of course.

 Here's the thing, man:  there are actual conspiracies.  History has shown that people conspire for nefarious ends.   People suck sometimes.  And a stopped clock is right twice a day.  Yes, Project Paperclip brought Nazis into the US after WWII.  The choice to do that is...arguable.  And should be debated.  On one hand, the Soviet Union...our political rival on the global stage...would almost certainly have snapped up the minds behind some really powerful technology. On the other hand...these people were part of a war machine that remains the gold standard for evil on Earth.  Its a hard subject. I still don't know what was right. But then...its a rung bell, anyway.
  But what conspiracy theorists don't choose to understand is that its all too easy to take some uncovered truth like Project Paperclip or MKULTRA and allow their collective imaginations to spin ghosts and demons out of the shadows there.  Its easy for some fuckhead like Alex Jones to weave little bits of fuzzy data into a grand tapestry of demonic/illuminati/newworldorder panic (and I know that a lot of hardcore conspiracy people try and distance themselves from Jones...but it doesn't matter.  He's the Patron Saint of your particular religion.  That man is the fuckhead to end all fuckheads.) The world is forever ending.  The NWO is forever coming.  The demons are always just moments away from stealing your soul and your liberty and your guns.  We're forever almost there and then we'll be sorry for not listening to your words of wisdom.

 What it comes down to is this:  its easy to feel harder than we think.  But some things require thinking more than feeling.

 There are mysteries in the world.  To be frank, I'm still fascinated by UFOs as a topic, but not to the point of making assertions without facts. And I think that a lot of what our government does sucks and is sometimes even suspicious as hell.  For all I know, there may even be people who think they control the world.  But even if they do, they don't.  Reality does not work that way. There is no demonic conspiracy that I need to fear. Aleister Crowley was just a perverse guy with money who wanted to bone women and pretend he was magical.  Jack Parsons too. Reagan was just a guy.  Obama is just a guy. Bush is just a guy.  Everybody you've ever heard of is just another human being like you and me. They can be very rich or very powerful and even draw up grand designs...but they're just flesh and bone and wisp of spirit for a few brief years.  In all my searching, I've never found any compelling reason to believe otherwise no matter how scary the monsters under the bed are reputed to be.  And if there are monsters and grand conspiracies...so what?  What can I do but deal with reality as I find it? That's what Alex Jones-types always leave out: what the fuck do you expect to do about it, really?  Nothing.  Just talk and talk and talk and fear and panic and surly posts on the internet about how people are "sheep" (oh, the irony).  That's why all the bullshit conspiracy videos are just hosed down with dramatic, frightening music and scary graphics and edited like a Roland Emmerich movie.  Its theater. Its a big show.  Its fun to think you live in a scary, pre-apocalyptic horror story that you're gonna pew-pew-pew your way out of.

If and when a monster emerges...I'll deal with it with as clear a head as I can manage.  If you swing your sword in the dark just because you're afraid , you're going to do more harm than good.

But so far, the biggest monster I've found is the fear and paranoia we make for ourselves.

Maybe there's boogiemen out there, maybe not.

But I'm not going to live in terror of the dark like a fucking child because you copy/pasted quotes that you find scary.

The Visit

"Though we would be curious about the aliens, some humans would rather attack them than surrender our grip on control and knowledge. This, Madsen says, is one of the things that struck him the most when making The Visit—the thin line between civilization and chaos. “If people are afraid, it’s scary how easily the varnish of civilization can be penetrated,” he says. “So little has to happen before things go into Armageddon.”"

One of the things I love about Doctor Who is that aliens arrive and everyone just goes, "meh" and gets on with life. But this looks interesting.

http://www.popsci.com/visit-explores-what-would-actually-happen-if-aliens-came-to-earth

Economic witchcraft

"After the Holy Roman Emperor forbade the confiscation of property in 1630, witchcraft persecutions declined noticeably in some places. Bamberg, Germany, which had seen an average of a hundred executions a year from 1626 to 1629, burned that year only twenty-four; none were executed the year after. The city of Cologne, which had from the outset prohibited the seizing of property, experienced the fewest executions of any region of the Empire. "

More to this than straightforward zealotry, then.

Originally shared by Assia Alexandrova

The witchcraft trial industrial complex looms large in 16th century Germany:

“Witch hunting,” wrote the historian Rossell Hope Robbins, “was self-sustaining and became a major trade, employing many people, all battening on the savings of the victims.”  ... Far from the conventional image of a penniless hag, a significant proportion of accused witches, especially in Germany, were wealthy and male.
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/gold-and-silver-coined-human-blood

Academic writing is needlessly complex

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/complex-academic-writing/412255/

Protecting the critics who save us from ourselves

Originally shared by Meg L

A game changer. The European Parliament has adopted a resolution declaring Edward Snowden a "human rights defender," and calls on EU member states to give him legal protection.

https://t.co/aIervMUKNR

Scientific paradigms keep changing, almost by definition

Via Winchell Chung. The short version is here :
http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/if-you-think-science-is-the-enemy-you-dont-know-what-science-is

"When Newton said: ‘If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’, he wasn't merely being modest; rather he was emphasising the extent to which science is cumulative, mostly building on past achievements rather than making quantum leaps."

He probably wasn't being modest at all - he was saying it as an insult against a shorter colleague. Just because you're a genius doesn't mean you can't be a jerk as well.

"Caffeine was also bad, a verdict that has been increasingly reversed – but only up to a point. Wine, especially red wine? Bad. Well, actually – good. So long as it’s not overdone. Sugar? First OK, then not. And now, so-so. And don’t get me started on gluten.... Some of these unseated certainties will not be missed, at least not for long: it is relatively straightforward (although not always easy) to keep changing our diets."

Well, not so much. People are creatures of habit. Plus the "paradigms" of nutritionists seem to be changing so rapidly it's hard to see them as paradigms at all. Seems more like a disparate set of ideas that haven't really converged on a consensus yet. At least that's how it feels to me as an outsider. On the other hand, public education is usually many steps behind the forefront of research. I bet you could still find textbooks showing that different parts of the tongue are sensitive to different tastes.

" A mere hint of such anthropomorphism was a kind of third rail in animal behaviour research: touch it and you might not get electrocuted, but you certainly wouldn't get a research grant, or tenure. ...Once denied by science, animal minds are now legitimate subjects of research, under the rubric of ‘cognitive ethology’."

An unfortunately good example of a closed-minded academia. Yes, the paradigm shifted eventually, but really, how hard is it to accept that animals can think ? Answer : not at all, it's bloody obvious. It's not something that requires a billion-dollar space mission and a team of 200 people to answer. You just need a dog and a stick and about five minutes of spare time.
http://aeon.co/magazine/science/why-scientific-paradigms-keep-changing

Spacecraft sterilisation may be a waste of time

“If Earth life cannot thrive on Mars, we don’t need any special cleaning protocol for our spacecraft; and if Earth life actually can survive on Mars, it most likely already does, after four billion years of meteoritic transport and four decades of spacecraft investigations not always following sterilization procedures.”

Originally shared by Universe Today

The recent announcement by NASA confirming the presence of liquid water on Mars pulls planetary protection into the spotlight and is causing some serious head-scratching in the scientific community. On the one hand, having existing liquid water on the Red…
http://www.universetoday.com/123029/the-puzzle-of-planetary-protection/

Waste not, want not

I don't normally care much about food stories, but the scale of the problem demands attention.

"This kind of near-criminal waste of good fresh produce is, unfortunately, very much the norm. Approximately one-third of the food we produce in the UK is never eaten. Take a minute to think about that - millions of tonnes of good food, and all the resources that go into producing it, squandered. Bonkers, isn't it ?"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34647454

Political horseshoes

Originally shared by Lilith Dawn

Just leaving this here....
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHorseshoeEffect

How to prevent a false consensus

Another long and rambling article I'm afraid. Concision isn't my strong point. There's just something about the idea that scientists are closed-mined that really winds me up the wrong way.

This time I look at the idea that a scientific consensus doesn't mean anything because scientists all want to / have to agree with each other. In astronomy at least, this isn't true. There's an abundance of examples, past and present, of people publishing very non-mainstream ideas in reputable journals. One reason it might appear so is that there is a media obsession with making things exciting. This tends to happen at the slightest provocation without good evidence. It's great for generating enthusiasm, but that turns sour if astronomers have to keep saying, "nope, that's not true" all the time.

There's nothing wrong with being excited, it's just that scientists hate getting excited about things which aren't true.

On the other hand there are some scientific trends which should start warning bells ringing. Astronomy is a competitive subject made of many different small groups each trying to outdo the other. This means there's very little incentive for everyone to agree and lots of incentive to claim new, unexpected discoveries. With projects that requires hundreds of people, this rivalry is by necessity much reduced. We don't need to eliminate huge project groups by any means, but it would be a mistake to rely exclusively on large groups.

There's also a "publish or perish culture" which is potentially more serious. You cannot sensibly evaluate someone's abilities in a multifarious subject like astronomy using only the number of papers they've published. If your ranking as an astronomer depends only on this, there's a strong motivation to publish a lot of mediocre papers rather than a few good ones. Which encourages you to go for small, easy, boring projects.

Finally, the "research grant" funding system. It doesn't exactly encourage a false consensus, but it comes close. Grants typically expect a certain number of publications relating to their given topic. This is hardly a sensible way to encourage original thinking and innovation. The postdoctoral system (which is where most of the research is done) is ever-more reliant on this model of funding, and that's dangerous.

Scientists are prepared to break the law to access papers

"In many countries, it's against the law to download copyrighted material without paying for it - whether it's a music track, a movie, or an academic paper. Published research is protected by the same laws, and access is generally restricted to scientists - or institutions - who subscribe to journals. But some scientists argue that their need to access the latest knowledge justifies flouting the law, and they're using a Twitter hashtag to help pirate scientific papers."

"...Elsevier wouldn't comment on the case, but did give a statement to BBC Trending saying that they recognise that access and publishing options are key for researchers. The company says it provides open access journals, rental options, individual article purchases and other means of disseminating research papers."

They do, but open access is much more expensive for authors than the standard license (>$1000-2000). Individual article purchases are not a sensible alternative : it's rare to read a paper in its entirety, far more often you just need to know one particular measurement or conclusion. It's not expensive per paper but it very quickly adds up since most papers cites >~30 papers each (currently I'm working on one that cites 90, which would come to $2700 at $30 per article EDIT : And that doesn't even begin to count the number of papers I had to look at to determine that they weren't relevant, which at a minimum would double this).


The great thing about astronomy is that we have http://arxiv.org/ which provides free access to pretty much everything these days, regardless of journal license.
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-34572462

Chewbacca versus Worf

[This was a poll run by the BBC Focus magazine on Google Plus.]

Who would win in a fight between Chewbacca and Worf? This question has really been troubling us today...

Witness Theresa May shooting herself in the foot

What, you mean like those who think refugees should all be turned away ? Irony, thou name art May.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34568574

A friendly reminder

Found on the internet.

When it's okay to be closed-minded

I know I usually harp on about the value of doubt in PoS posts, but this time I look at the cases when it's OK to say, "LA LA LA I'm not listening !". If you doubt everything, you end up learning absolutely nothing.

I personally am never going to conduct any tests to see if the Earth is flat because I know it's round. Uncounted numbers of people have already done tests to prove it's round, the only way to get around (ha ha) this is to say, "they're all lying". If you have so little trust in your fellow human beings that you think this many people are lying, one wonders how you're able to get out of bed every morning. You're not in a healthy state of doubt, you are simply paranoid.

I am not a climate scientist, but I believe global warming is likely mostly the result of humans. I am not a biologist, but I believe vaccines work. I am not a surgeon, but I know surgery works. Nor am I a chemist, but I'm pretty sure dynamite works. And I'm not an electrician but I can still use the internet. Is it dogmatic of me to trust the experts on so many issues about which I'm genuinely no better informed than the average man on the street ? No, because I do understand how the scientific method works.

Farewell to cows

Ah, a report that recognises just how significant lab-grown meat could be :

"An independent study found that lab-grown beef uses 45% less energy than the average global representative figure for farming cattle. It also produces 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions and requires 99% less land."

Bye bye cows !
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34540193

Open peer review gives higher quality results

I'd be wary of disclosing the identity of reviewers. There's a risk that they won't want to be seen as supporting unconventional research, thereby establishing a false consensus. However I do think that publishing the author-reviewer correspondence as well as the research itself might be a good idea.

I'm surprised that the difference in quality is so low (5% better using the alternative method), but I haven't read the original report yet.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/open-peer-review-better-quality-than-traditional-process

The point of worthless knowledge

Keep 'em coming, Jim...

"The stubborn critic would say : 'What is the benefit of these sciences ?' He does not know the virtue that distinguishes mankind from all the animals : it is knowledge, in general, which is pursued solely by man, and which is pursued for the sake of knowledge itself, because its acquisition is truly delightful, and is unlike the pleasures desirable from other pursuits. For the good cannot be brought forth, and evil cannot be avoided, except by knowledge. What benefit then is more vivid ? What use is more abundant ?”

-Al-Biruni, c.1000 A.D.

Make yourself an enemy

Another great quote I found in Jim Al-Khalili's "The Golden Age of Arabic Science" :

“The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.”

— Ibn al-Haytham, c.1025 AD.

Cameron being a dick, as usual

Nice one Cameron. Your opponent calls for a kinder politics with less personal attacks, completely ignores the allegations of your sexual depravities... and you respond by saying he hates Britain and sympathises with terrorists. Good job !

Originally shared by Garry Knight

How to troll like a sociopath

Here's the truth about what Jeremy Corbyn actually said. It's a comment on earlier news that David Cameron Called Corbyn a “security threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideologue”.

These words were spoken out loud at the Conservative Conference but if they had been posted straight away on the Internet it would be an extremely good example of the worst kind of trolling anyone can stoop to. Here's how it's done:

1) Take just a few words that someone has said, and take them entirely out of context. The fewer the words, the easier it is to coerce them to mean what you say they mean.
Example: He thinks the death of Osama bin Laden was a “tragedy”.

2) Take something else that person has said and make it look like a) you said it first, b) it supports your argument, c) it doesn't support your opponent's views, and d) it can be used to make him look bad.
Example: No. A tragedy is nearly 3,000 people murdered one morning in New York.

3) Get to know all of the logical fallacies such as the straw man argument (raising an issue as if it came from your opponent rather than arising in your own head) and the ad hominem attack ("my spurious use of fallacy shows that he is therefore a bad person").
Example: My friends – we cannot let that man inflict his security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideology on the country we love.

There are plenty of other tactics you can use. Just look up 'logical fallacies' and think about how you can use them to trap those who haven't been on the Internet as long as some of us.

Oh, and it helps if you have an extremely high level of sociopathy.

Here's a report on what Cameron actually and shamelessly said to the Conservative Conference:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/oct/07/david-cameron-attacks-jeremy-corbyn-conservative-conference

The link below reveals not only what Jeremy Corbyn actually said and believes but also shows up the underhanded tactics that Cameron used and uses all the time.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/oct/07/david-cameron-attacks-jeremy-corbyn-conservative-conference

Let's keep the nukes... for now

I don't want us to give up the nuclear deterrent juuuuust yet.

"We do not have nuclear weapons so that we can wipe out the planet in the case that someone launches a nuclear strike against us. All that would do is turn an awful situation into a total apocalypse. Rather, we have them so that that situation can't happen in the first place. The threat of our nukes prevent others from using theirs."

Political networking

So, yeah, I was wrong. He is indeed going for bottom-up politics. Which the SNP don't quite get (or rather, would prefer to deliberately misunderstand, for obvious reasons).

""After days of chaos and infighting, [umm, no] Jeremy Corbyn must use his trip to Scotland to make clear whether he is leading Labour - or whether Labour is leading him."

Well, no, because establishing a consensus isn't supposed to be about anyone leading anyone.

I suspect it may be more difficult to persuade the media that he's willing to work with people he disagrees with than it is to actually work with people he disagrees with.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-34405505

Feynman on the scientific method.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw&feature=share

No news is indeed often good news

The Nirvana fallacy is a powerful one. No, the world isn't perfect, but that is not to say it isn't very much better than it once was. No, those improvements haven't been occurred everywhere, but that is not to say they haven't happened at all. The future is not hopeless, no matter what Noam Chomsky might think.

Originally shared by David Strumfels

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/opinion/nicholas-kristof-the-most-important-thing-and-its-almost-a-secret.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/opinion/nicholas-kristof-the-most-important-thing-and-its-almost-a-secret.html?_r=0