Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

 First let's get the business out of the way: posts here have been sporadic due to some of my writing getting picked up by non-me publishers. For instance a much better version of the previous post is going to be published in the Skeptical Inquirer (a print magazine!!!). I have a different article coming out for the British skeptics society on pastel-q and how it recruits through wellness and health groups on social media. I will begin posting links as soon as I am able. The first article is embargoed for a week or so after publication.  More frequent posts are coming, it's that the other writing takes precedence. This blog is NOT dead, I promise you that. 

 Around 2015 or so; I warned a friend of mine, with whom I disagree with politically, not to take the newly named "alt-right" lightly. This person, whom I'm not going to name for obvious reasons, identifies as as conservative but was expressing some amusement at the worrywarts on the left over these people. These people, like Yiannapolis, Cernovich, Baldwin, Bannon, etc. were not just people that were disliked by the left, they were dangerous I warned. I was familiar with these people from the travesty known as gamergate. This occurred about a year before my conversation (2014) and was an organized campaign of harassment under the guise of wanting to protect the integrity of video game journalism. The entire shit show involved harassing anyone that dared to make mention of any kind of sexism in the video game industry--whether that sexism was in the games or in the industry that produced them. Paraphrasing one of the victims of gamergate in a twee yesterday, gamergate was...

  Conspiracy Theories   Problems with existing Definitions:             Too broad in which they let supported explanations in with unsupported information             Contain truth value as part of the definition (e.g. False)             Ignore the central theme of any “conspiracy theory”—which is the coverup of the truth.   My Proposed Definition:             An alternative explanation for an event/phenomenon, for which the central claim is a purposeful direct concealment of the truth by a group of actors; for which the evidence is inadequate to support the claim .   Kinds: Not all conspiracy theories are equal and it is a mistake to treat them as such.             Scope : s...

 Fortunately, as I write this, the election is over and it ended the way that it "should" have. Yet, there's a list of things that we are missing out on having dumped Trump from his office. I try not to be overtly political on this blog for a few reasons: the first being that it is tied to my course and there are certain lines that we are not supposed to cross when it comes to speech in class. We cannot tell our students who they ought to vote for, and I extend that to not telling them who I am voting for as well.  The second is that political sides do not really matter when it comes to conspiracy theories. So if you are in the labour party in the UK, you might think that all of the conspiracy theories come from the Brexit party (I refuse to call it anything else) and British Trump (I refuse to call him anything else). You would be wrong though. Just as in my country one would be very tempted to think that every conspiracy theory comes from the Republican party and soon t...

 The Anti-vaccination movement is coming back. It's going to come back strong and there is very little that can be done about this anymore.  It is going to seem reasonable to a much wider audience than before. This new movement is going to combine the pseudoscientific beliefs of the twelve year old movement with the libertarian-sovereign citizen motive that has always been around; and again, there's very little that can be done about it.  The previous movement combined a few things: a cultic milieu that came into being alongside universal high speed internet. This phenomenon did not create the distrust of experts but it hastened its growth to people that otherwise would not have this tendency. It was spearheaded by an actress with no qualifications but who seemed real earnest in what she was talking about. She spoke for a well-qualified medical doctor who published a study in a very well respected medical journal that seemed to argue that the MMR vaccine was not as safe a...

Again with the Covid thing.  Let's assume that you need to go to the store, because food is a necessity; and you encounter a person not wearing a facemask who takes umbrage with the fact that you are wearing one. Or you own a store and you refuse service to a person that isn't wearing a mask. It doesn't matter which scenario we want to pick, create your own--but the point is that you are going to engage in a conversation with a person who doesn't want to wear one.  The instinct in the conversation is to point out that there is a disease and that the mask helps to contain it. You may further want to point out that you're really not wearing the mask for you, but for everyone else. You will probably be tempted to point out that the reason that the numbers of infected have fallen is because of requirements like the mask. Let me be clear: this will not work. The person you are speaking with has already heard this and rejects it out of hand. Conspiracy theories, and this ...

When conspiracy theories get large enough they begin to get desperate. Your standard event conspiracy, such as the Titanic didn't sink theory, can rely on some errant data and then work the conclusion with winks and nods. It's not a good method of argumentation but it at least the evidence is grounded in reality. The more and more a theory grows it gets substantially more difficult to sustain some plausibility in the evidence itself. The vast super conspiracies concerning the Illuminati are going to inevitably begin claiming outlandish things, i.e. that Katy Perry's Dark Horse video is a black magic ritual. This is because a proper theory needs to make predictions and conspiracy theories have to grasp at straws to even attempt to do this.  In making the predictions or even trying for a cogent conclusion some conspiracy theories resort to an interesting tactic: using fictional narratives to bolster their claims. To be entirely honest, I'll make reference to a fictional ...