Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

I know, I should be updating this more but dissertation writing is hard work...and then there's the plague. Which should have made this blog easier to write but there's just so much. It's the paralysis of choice, what exactly do I talk about: 5G, Bill Gates (for some reason), vaccines? The list just goes on and on.  However there's a larger issue that I see developing and it's best to talk about that. One of the draws of conspiracy thinking is that it gives a reason for an event that is personally frustrating. If something occurs that is beyond the control of an individual, that the individual is personally affected by, a conspiracy theory provides the answer. Let's be clear: it doesn't give a person any more control than they had before, but it does give them an answer to why it is occurring which provides some level of comfort. If you have a perpetual shoulder ache, one of the frustrating aspects is not knowing where it comes from. If your doctor tells...

Political ideology has always permeated conspiracy theories. From the belief in an almighty native chief that threatened colonists in the 17th century to the modern Q-Anon, the belief in conspiracy theories has always had a tine piercing the status quo. Socialists conjured up the belief in the machinations of capitalist subversion of the legal system (they weren't always wrong about this either). The belief that secret societies were quietly turning the population against the status quo seems to have been the domain of conservative angst over the populous' revolt against their values. We have to look no further than the ubiquitous belief in the Illuminati. Even the original, actual Illuminati that merely sought to spread the philosophy of the Enlightenment was vilified as seeking a coup against the theocratic Bavarian government. This belief spread during the French revolution as it was understood (though never proven) that they had infiltrated Free Mason lodges, Jacobin grou...

The dissertation is progressing rather well. I've had one chapter approved and another sort-of approved. The second chapter is the one where I lay out the categorization of the types of conspiracy theories. I have them separated as to scale, focus, and obviousness. The wider the scale of a conspiracy theory the more unlikely it actually is: a conspiracy theory that is about a single event is, prima facie, more plausible than a conspiracy theory that involves the global control by the Illuminati. Too many moving parts, too many people to keep the secret, etc. The focus is important because there is a difference between political theories and ones that cover just knowledge. The people on ancient aliens are conspiracy theorists--they're not just putting forth an alternative view (which is incorrect) of history but are making a claim that there position is being rejected because it threatens the establishment. Climate change denial is as much a conspiracy theory as believing MI6 ...

Ultimately the question of the legitimacy of a conspiracy theory comes down to evidence. It comes down to the question of whether or not the claim is supported by facts external to the belief of the claimant. Conspiracy theories are the products of a desire. A person wants an explanation then sets out to find anything which supports it to the exclusion of any kind of contradictory evidence. This is problematic in that the desire will have the effect of pushing what would normally be a tenuous link to being conclusive evidence. "...all the devils are here." Let's take my personal favorite conspiracy theory: the claim that William Shakespeare was a fraud. The evidence for this theory is presented like a checklist of things that we all kind of knew but no one pointed out to us. For instance, why do we study this guy's work in PhD programs while he, himself, had no education other than elementary school? More familiarly it's posted like this: how could the son of ...

Here's what I think really happened. Employed at a low-level position in Los Alamos, Bob Lazar applied for a job with the government hoping to work on alien spacecraft and didn't get the position either lacking education or work experience and was denied entry in Area 51. Perhaps he was psychologically screened out, or he flubbed the interview--I am only speculating. Instead of just returning to his other job or doing something else, he decided to make up a story about working there and is now famous for that. The general story that Lazar will eventually tell is nothing new. He repeats the same stories that UFO enthusiasts have been saying for years. There are two important innovations from Lazar. The first is that he identifies a location for the UFO research. Lazar didn't invent Area 51 as the location of the UFO research sites, but he made it famous. The second is that his entire claim hinges on element 115 and this is very important, and we'll get to it later. ...

On this 50th anniversary of the Moon Landing I thought it was a good time to tackle this conspiracy theory. If you want to read a debunking of the evidence of the conspiracy theory, there are a number of places that you can check for point by point refutations. I don't want to do that here because those other places do it so much better and I will only be offering a distillation of their points. Nevertheless, there are some important points to be made about the moon landing conspiracy theory that are more important than just arguing over the anomalous datum that conspiracists use to drive their point. Even when I was a conspiracy theorist, this was one theory that I could never swallow. Though I would love to claim that the believer in me was hiding an idealistic skeptic that could not square the evidence with the claims due to an innate epistemological understanding--I cannot honestly do that. I mean, it didn't make sense and I could see that much, but there was something ...

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 ...