Conspiracy Theories

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07kpy3x#play

Can you spot a legitimate attempt to conspire from simple paranoia? It's an interesting question.

What a load of rubbish from the BBC... "Why do people believe in conspiracies? Because of intentionality bias which mature adults learn to overcome, but children and drunks still fall into." No, powerful people don't ever get together and make plans and the clandestine services never employ stealth or deception.
 
I guess an awful lot of mature adults must be drunkards then.
If Juncker is any kind of indication, then that may very well be true. I wonder if Juncker is a conspiracy theorist, since by their logic he must be.

Btw, what an odd thing for them to say: children and drunkards. Was there a greater context for this claim?
 
What a load of rubbish from the BBC... "Why do people believe in conspiracies? Because of intentionality bias which mature adults learn to overcome, but children and drunks still fall into." No, powerful people don't ever get together and make plans and the clandestine services never employ stealth or deception.
Are they trying to say that all governments, corporation boards, all the intelligence agencies, all the....well....everyone on planet Earth are children or drunkards? Everyone conspires. Husband and I are "conspiring" to go back home for Thanksgiving. I must be a child or drunk to believe my own conspiracy.
 
Isn't the point that conspiracies happen, but when they're revealed (eg Russian athlete doping) they're rarely, if ever, the (usually convoluted) theories that repeatedly appear in pop culture?
 
Btw, what an odd thing for them to say: children and drunkards. Was there a greater context for this claim?

They are asking why people believe in conspiracy theories and cut to a psychologist who talks about how as children, we have a bias to believe that whatever happens to us was intended to happen. As we get older and more rational we learn this isn't always the case. Sometimes things are just random. Reason usually prevails over this intentionality bias with some exceptions such as when people drink alcohol.
 
Despite my typically pro-conspiracy theory position, I do recognize that we've entered the golden age of conspiracy theories where distrust of official sources is so widespread and conspiracy theories are so in vogue that there is a very real bias to put too much trust in sources that are perceived as being "alternative" or conspiracy theory based.
 
The psychological explanation was facile, I agree. How do they know small children believe people choose to trip up, when most wouldn't have a sufficient command of language to express such things? Older children don't believe people choose to trip or sneeze because they will have done both involuntarily themselves.

The retired lecturer was the archetypal all-inclusive conspiracy theorist. If anyone doubts what they have to say they conclude the doubter must be a jerk, or quite possibly in on the conspiracy themselves. Of course people conspire all the time, from local traders trying to keep out the big supermarket chain, to governments selling guns to rebels in their sphere of influence, but that shouldn't suggest all conspiracies are equal. The technology to implement the moon shot was certainly available by the late 1960s. Sandy Hook will have multiple primary witnesses, Princess Di's driver was speeding and probably intoxicated. On the other hand there's circumstantial evidence JFK's assassination had official support in some quarters. Not all conspiracies are born equal, but for a committed believer explanations offer the opportunity for more intrigue. I think conspiracies are a kind of comfort blanket that events always happen for a reason, and the world isn't completely mad after all.
 
The psychological explanation was facile, I agree. How do they know small children believe people choose to trip up, when most wouldn't have a sufficient command of language to express such things? Older children don't believe people choose to trip or sneeze because they will have done both involuntarily themselves.

The retired lecturer was the archetypal all-inclusive conspiracy theorist. If anyone doubts what they have to say they conclude the doubter must be a jerk, or quite possibly in on the conspiracy themselves. Of course people conspire all the time, from local traders trying to keep out the big supermarket chain, to governments selling guns to rebels in their sphere of influence, but that shouldn't suggest all conspiracies are equal. The technology to implement the moon shot was certainly available by the late 1960s. Sandy Hook will have multiple primary witnesses, Princess Di's driver was speeding and probably intoxicated. On the other hand there's circumstantial evidence JFK's assassination had official support in some quarters. Not all conspiracies are born equal, but for a committed believer explanations offer the opportunity for more intrigue. I think conspiracies are a kind of comfort blanket that events always happen for a reason, and the world isn't completely mad after all.

Jerk.









J/k :)

Seriously though check out Wolfgang Halbig if you think Sandy Hook actually happened.

Also, I saw Weird Al sing this in person last week... Seems appropriate here. Good stuff!! :)

 
Regarding Turkey... Thanks to Corbett and Sibel Edmonds for pointing out how quickly the mainstream western media turned into conspiracy theorists when the military coup in Turkey failed, and the media now suggests Erdogan staged it himself as a false flag for an excuse to execute the purge

 
Ask a conspiracy theorist to name a false conspiracy claim. My bet is most wouldn't be able to. They are out to get us.
 
Ask a conspiracy theorist to name a false conspiracy claim. My bet is most wouldn't be able to. They are out to get us.

I can: flat earth.

I'm not sure whether the rise in flat earthism is a natural phenomenon resulting from the poor American education system combined with the widespread distrust of official sources and YouTube or if it is a meme put out there by They as a psyop.
 
They are asking why people believe in conspiracy theories and cut to a psychologist who talks about how as children, we have a bias to believe that whatever happens to us was intended to happen. As we get older and more rational we learn this isn't always the case. Sometimes things are just random. Reason usually prevails over this intentionality bias with some exceptions such as when people drink alcohol.
Ok, got it. I was at work and couldn't watch the video.

Fwiw, I find it interesting that reason holds such high priority in our society. Sure, it works well for navigating the world on a day to day basis, but who says reality, whatever it is, has to follow reason or logic? Reason and logic are human constructs. There's no law that says it's anything more than that.

And there's just as much validity to believe everything does happen for a reason as there is to believe it doesn't. Just because we, as humans, are too intellectually and temporally deficient to even begin to grasp the big picture of reality, to see all of the infinite connections that link events and people together, doesn't mean those connections aren't there.
 
who says reality, whatever it is, has to follow reason or logic? Reason and logic are human constructs. There's no law that says it's anything more than that.

My favorite subject... The Logos and the Abyss. :)

I don't think reason and logic are merely human constructs. I think they are the method of all construction. They are the structure of reality. But yes, I think this structure floats on nothing, the Abyss, by faith alone. Call it faith, truth, love, or a persistent inclination towards sanity... Whatever holds the logical structure of reality together cannot be logic itself.
 
Is flat earth a conspiracy or a belief system? I can't see what a shadowy Bilderberg/Illuminati/Lizard people have to gain by promoting global earths over disc planets. I read somewhere that the Flat Earth Society has a growing membership after years of decline.

Modern Flat Earthers generally accept every conspiracy theory and also believe the powers that be are deliberately hiding the true shape of the earth from us. Presumably the benefit for the shadowy elite lizard people is that the globe earth belief keeps people from trying to find the wall of the dome (beyond the South Pole) and run away like Truman in The Truman Show.
 
My favorite subject... The Logos and the Abyss. :)

I don't think reason and logic are merely human constructs. I think they are the method of all construction. They are the structure of reality. But yes, I think this structure floats on nothing, the Abyss, by faith alone. Call it faith, truth, love, or a persistent inclination towards sanity... Whatever holds the logical structure of reality together cannot be logic itself.
I can get behind that if....IF, the abyss could be construed as the antithesis to logic. I lean very heavily toward a balanced view of reality. That nothing can exist without its opposite.

But even logic itself is situationally dependent. What might seem illogical given limited information could be completely logical if one was capable of seeing the whole picture. I won't delve too far into it here since its been hashed out to death, but even the nature of evil can be logical given a broad enough perspective. We humans are basically capable of seeing only a few hundred peices of a puzzle made up of infinite pieces.

Even these flat earther's referenced above employ a certain level of logic. I've read their seemingly bizzare theory, and I couldn't really say it was wrong, empirically, since I admit, my view of the Earth as a sphere, along with all of the physics that go along with that, are entirely faith based. I'm not a physicist, I've never been to outer space and I've never so much as performed a single experiment that could prove to me first hand that the earth is a sphere. But I believe that it is. Why? Because it makes sense. Because I default toward the position that hundreds of scientists over hundreds of years aren't all lying to us. Now, could the earth actually be flat? It's within the realm of possibility. Again, I've never been to outer space and seen first hand that the earth is a sphere. I've never travelled to the ends of Antarctica to find out. But it seems highly implausible. But again, that's entirely based on faith.

It's interesting, really, to sit down and really inventory your beliefs and why you hold those beliefs. For as much as faith is a dirty word in our modern "scientifically based" culture, the vast majority of our beliefs rely specifically on faith. Faith in a creator is just one more. Though, I'd argue that there may actually be more reason to believe in a creator on a personal level than there is to believe the earth is a sphere. And that is because the belief in God often seems to be one of those things that are based on personal experience. Science, to a great extent for the majority of people, is not. It is something we are taught in classrooms, through boring lectures and sterile textbooks, through pop-science television shows and preached to us by "the experts". Not that science cannot be experienced first hand, given one has enough time and money, it often isn't. We have faith that the experts are telling us the truth.

Then, when we find out that, maybe...sometimes...they lie. Is it any wonder that after years of this scientific renaissance, where we are told "trust us, we know the truth" only to find that so often those truths were lies, we have a certain level of mistrust? That the publics faith has been damaged by years being given misleading information and promissory technologies that never seem to pan out?

When the experts start behaving more like clerics, we've got a problem. When questioning, the cornerstone of science, is disallowed, we've got a problem. When the golden rule of science, repeat until verified, is abandoned, we've got a problem.

Somewhere science as an institution lost its way. And the public is losing faith. Yes, faith, in science. So, then you get those who start to believe everything is a lie, which, I'll admit, is easy to do. That's how you get theories of lizard people, flat earths and intergalactic UN-type organizations. That, and I think on some level there is a sort of romanticism in the conspiracy. Day to day life can be boring and repetitive. Conspiracy theories awaken within us a sense of mystery, a way to break out of the mundane. I think some, not all, are fantasies that start to become reality for some people.
 
Is flat earth a conspiracy or a belief system? I can't see what a shadowy Bilderberg/Illuminati/Lizard people have to gain by promoting global earths over disc planets. I read somewhere that the Flat Earth Society has a growing membership after years of decline.
Does it matter whether it's a theory or a belief? There really isn't any difference. We all believe theories. Theories are the basis of all of our belief systems. I've yet to come across any aspect of life or so-called reality that isn't, at its heart, just a theory.
 
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