Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

The comments are back on the first chapter of the dissertation. Most of them are good, a few them are frustrating in that I ever made the mistakes in the first place. For instance, I was told that my punctuation was terrible. That's probably because the most consistent writing that I have been doing in the last decade or so, has been blogging. I typically don't worry about punctuation when I'm doing it, but, I should. The most troubling thing is that I have to cut and entire section that I rather liked. I have to cut it because the academic world has largely disagreed with the position being taken. The position is not with specific regard to my focus on conspiracy theories. It is however the foundation for a position on conspiracy theories that a different person takes. So this leaves me with two options: either cut it, or spend thirty pages trying to resurrect a dead horse. The first, obviously appeals to my laziness. Cutting it means that it's gone and I never have ...

I’ve spoken about this a few times over the last several years, but it bears a rementioning because if we cannot figure out, in 2019, how to convince people that the world is globular then what hope do we have for any kind of progress. Perhaps the future will look back at this period and think, “good thing we got that sorted out;” but as it stands now it’s very hard for me to think that we can move forward. Flat Earth is another one of those cases wherein my conspiracy theory work and my atheism cross paths. It’s more interesting to me than just that, because flat earth has an added feature of disguising itself from it’s religious foundation. Good conspiracy theorists know how to do this, as most of them would probably be good sales people if they had turned their focus somewhere else. Alex Jones was one of the pioneers at selling things on internet broadcasts, for instance. David Icke takes care to never mention the reptoids in his marathon speeches. Why? Because people...

There is definitely a growing radicalization around the world. Mainly the driver of this is social media via the internet. Now, I'm not one to extoll the virtues of the "way it used to be"--in fact I'm largely against that kind of thinking. The internet is just a vehicle and the drivers are the problem...and the passengers for getting in these windowless vans. The growth of conspiracism over the last few decades is both difficult to explain and simple. It's simple because back in the day, in order to be exposed to conspiracy theories you had to seek them out. Perhaps, you could have accidentally checked out the wrong book in the library, but you needed to be active. Today, I can just look at my facebook feed (my twitter feed has been aggressively curated to avoid certain ideas) and see conspiracy theories and false information being posted by my family members. They in turn, probably saw these ideas on their feed, and so the cycle goes until I block/hide/unfrien...

Within the last four years or so, the academic interest in conspiracy theories, conspiracism, alternative medicine beliefs, and pseudoscientific beliefs has gained a lot of ground. I can speculate as to why this trend exists, but it would only be speculation. The first is the resurgence of the flat earth movement which is a pseudoscientific meta-conspiracy theory. That gained news coverage because it's so abjectly ridiculous that it easily makes for a puff piece in the 24 hour news cycle. The fact that it was endorsed by semi-famous people in the music world, and famous people in the basketball world gave it a popular interest in the crazy thing that some people believed. The second, was that facebook had finally reached everyone, and while we can again speculate as to who was pushing the conspiracy theories--that is irrelevant because regular people shared them all over the place. The third is probably predictable--the current US president who has endorsed Alex Jones, 9/11 conspir...

We call them "conspiracy theories" and the first part seems obvious. We have accusations of groups of people meeting in secret to concoct a plan. This is, by definition, a conspiracy. However the latter part of the term is suspicious. Are they even "theories"? The problem that we are having is that there is a colloquial definition of the word and a formal definition of the word. Formally a theory is a construct of a series of propositions, supported by evidence, indicating an explanation of an event or phenomenon. In an earlier post I indicated how we can have historical theories of conspiracy using such events as the "Pazzi Conspiracy" and the standard in the literature "Watergate." In both of these cases there is an accusation of conspiracy supported by historical evidence. They are explained in the words of Dentith that the "conspiracy" is the salient cause of the events, in other words, without the direction of a secretive group t...

My dissertation is on conspiracy theories, and one chapter of that dissertation concerns the demarcation line between science and pseudoscience. My dissertation topical defense will be within a month from now and I am working on fixing the written defense for the oral presentation of it. The demarcation chapter is, admittedly the weakest part, mainly because the connection between science-pseudoscience and conspiracy theory-theory of conspiracy isn't that clear. Also because the crux of the argument is based on a legal argument that is related to a court case regarding intelligent design in the classroom. Essentially, my fix of this chapter is to make a large justification for why it matters, which to me, is one of those things that is so obvious that I have trouble writing it down. The issue at large is that pseudoscientific thinking is conspiracy thinking. We just don't usually frame it that way. Conspiracy theories are typically thought of in stereotypes of shadow organi...

The focus of many conspiracy theories, the direct super theories are often held, by believers, to be the responsibility of those that are termed "elites." The "elites" here are usually a group of individuals that have no responsibility to anyone else but themselves, are secret, and exclusive. They go by many names: the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, etc. These are the groups responsible for ushering in a "New World Order" that will have large effects that are typically explained in two camps: the first camp is unspecified cataclysm. The downfall of civilization is always the end result coupled with a fascist/totalitarian government in charge The second camp is ultra specific and is sometimes literally camps. The subversion of the monetary system through the federal reserve, usually explained by people that have little understanding of monetary systems and the federal reserve. The elimination of specific rig...