Honesty and truth telling are too high a price to defeat conspiracy theorising

Over the past six years, there has been a mainstream media or chattering class tendency to deploy the accusation of conspiracy thinking as a weapon to be brandished against Republicans and conservatives.  From an epistemic point of view, that is interesting given how many conspiracies have ended up being proven.  

But there is a real underlying question.  Is conspiracy thinking more prevalent on the left or right.  My working hypothesis is that inclination towards conspiracy explanations is not so much a partisan issue as it is a balance of power issue.  The more secure a party feels, the less inclined to indulge conspiracy thinking.

You can predict that one party or the other might have greater sympathy to conspiracy thinking than the other, not because of their underlying philosophy but based on whether their position is strengthening or weakening.  Weakening parties are more  prone to conspiracy thinking.  

Two pieces from this morning that tie into the debate. The first is Americans face a rapidly encroaching 'emergency' CBDC power grab by Jordan Schachtel.  The subheading is The ruling class may pursue a Hail Mary pass to restore their control over the system.

The American financial system is threatening to come apart at the seams, and for the people who control the levers of power, the only way to patch things up may involve the installation of a monetary Social Credit Score system. In recent years, America’s fiat fractional reserve system has transformed into a faith-based credit system, and the people who use the dollar are losing confidence in a system that relies entirely upon their complete and total trust. Should our collective faith in the system continue to decline, the American ruling class will decide that their path forward involves regrasping full control of their confidence scheme through the implementation of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

A U.S. CBDC would do much more than simply implement a fully digital version of the U.S. dollar. This system could provide authorities with an almost unlimited digital toolkit to both surveil and censor citizens. A CBDC is advertised as making the system more “efficient” and helping to deliver monetary power to the unbanked. However, it would also give shadowy bureaucrats the power to swipe a “criminal’s” life savings, instantly distribute funds to allies of the system, among an almost infinite series of additional authoritarian instruments.

I have never heard of Schachtel before.  I would not have read the article except for this post.  It sounds very conspiratorial. 

However, the experience with Canada and Covid demonstrates that governments are perfectly comfortable with abridging human rights when it suits them.  Protest the lockdowns and your bank account gets shut.  

In addition, when something feared does actually happens, it becomes more difficult to dismiss as a loony conspiracy.  When factions within the regulatory agencies begin to illegally coordinate with private sector banks in order to abridge civil rights laws (such as the second amendment right to bear arms), then the wilder positions taken on a sheen of legitimacy.

The second piece I note this morning is also supportive of the legitimacy of conspiratorial thinking.  From It's OK if the King does it by Yassine Meskhout.  

Remember Seattle's CHAZ/CHOP? After the place was cleared, a bunch of local businesses and property owners sued the city and recently all reached a settlement. One part that definitely didn't help Seattle were tens of thousands of deleted text messages:

The city of Seattle has settled a lawsuit that took aim at officials’ handling of the three-week Capitol Hill Organized Protests and further ensnared the former mayor and police chief, among others, in a scandal over thousands of deleted text messages. The Seattle City Attorney’s Office filed notice of a settlement Wednesday in U.S. District Court, just three weeks after a federal judge levied severe legal sanctions against the city for deleting texts between high-ranking officials during the protests and zone that sprung up around them, known as CHOP.

[...]

Attorneys for the more than a dozen businesses that sued the city, led by Seattle developer Hunters Capital, sent a series of letters to the city in July 2020 — after another lawsuit over the violent police response to the protests — demanding that any evidence pertaining to the city’s alleged support and encouragement of the zone’s creation be retained, according to the court docket and pleadings.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly concluded last month that officials ignored the notifications, sending the so-called Hunters Capital lawsuit to trial on two of five claims and dismissing three others. In doing so, Zilly issued a blistering order that leveled crippling sanctions against the city for the deletion of tens of thousands of text messages from city phones sent between former Mayor Jenny Durkan, former police Chief Carmen Best, fire Chief Harold Scoggins and four other ranking city officials during the protests.

The judge found significant evidence that the destruction of CHOP evidence was intentional and that officials tried for months to hide the text deletions from opposing attorneys.

Meskhout goes on chapter and verse where government entities basically abuse citizen rights and then escape scot free.  Did Seattle city government collude with Antifa against the interests of citizens and the Cities obligations?  That sure sounds like a conspiratorial position but apparently it was also the reality.  The evidence being the effort of City government to hide the evidence.  

Likewise with the current case over Harvard discrimination against Whites and Asians in which a judge has sought to hide the joking communication between the federal regulator and the admissions officers where they are joking about the absurdity of just how talented are Asian applicants.

We are all trying to navigate what is real, or at least usefully true, information.  And we keep finding that government, the academy, and the mainstream media are perfectly comfortable trying to censor or suppress information which does not conform with their interests.  If trust were greater, and more warranted, we probably would not have so many conspiracy theories.  

But when bad actions are increasingly prevalent and the propaganda against truth more persistent, the harder it is for responsible citizens to discern reality and the more prone everyone becomes to entertaining conspiratorial thinking.  Not because they are conspiracy fanatics but because epistemically it is warranted.

Finally, there is a good discussion at This Just In: Conspiracy Theorists Not Quite as Kooky as Previously Reported by Jesse Walker.  The subheading is Greetings from the second International Conspiracy Theory Symposium, where one of the most cited findings in the field has been debunked.

If you believe that Princess Diana was assassinated, you almost certainly do not also believe that she is secretly still alive.

That may sound obvious, but there are parts of the academy where it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. In 2012, a much-cited paper in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science seemed to show that people willing to reject the official story of Di's death—that she had been killed in a car accident—weren't very choosy about which alternative they embraced: "the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered." 

[snip]

The press couldn't resist the idea of a kook so divorced from common sense that he thinks someone could be both alive and dead. The study became a staple of pop-science pieces on conspiracy theories, and of pop-intellectual writing by figures such as Cass Sunstein. And when other experimenters followed up on the paper, they replicated its results.

"Journalists love it," declared Jan-Willem van Prooijen, a psychologist from VU Amsterdam, as he addressed the International Conspiracy Theory Symposium at the University of Miami this past weekend. "It's a cool finding. There's just one problem: It's not true."

Van Prooijen is not the first scholar to challenge this idea. Last year, for example, the philosopher Kurtis Hagen noted that the original study did not measure people's beliefs so much as the degree of credence they gave to different possibilities: Rather than simply endorsing or rejecting each theory, participants were asked to rate each story's plausibility on a seven-point scale, an approach that gave room to entertain the ideas as suspicions without embracing them as full-fledged beliefs. But van Prooijen was discussing a more fundamental problem. The whole phenomenon, he told the Miami audience, could just be a statistical artifact.

Most people, after all, don't believe that Diana was assassinated or that she faked her death. If you're just looking at the overall numbers, that huge correlation between the participants who disbelieve both stories could create the illusion of a correlation where participants believe both. So van Prooijen and four colleagues ran their own series of experiments, this time paying closer attention to who was endorsing and rejecting each yarn.

The results, which will soon appear in the journal Psychological Science, showed that people who endorsed one conspiracy story were generally less likely, not more likely, to endorse an apparently contradictory narrative. There were a few exceptions, but these involved questions where, on closer examination, the theories weren't necessarily contradictory after all. For example: After the first experiment showed people maintaining that pharmaceutical companies were both obstructing research to find a cancer cure and withholding a cure they already possessed, the authors realized that these could be reconciled if you believe Big Pharma is hiding a cure for one type of cancer and blocking research on another. Whatever else you might think of that belief system, it is not as irrational as the Schrödinger's Princess scenario.

Interesting throughout.  I would add that there is a framing issue.

There is some controversial issue and I think the most likely explanation might be X.  That belief that X is the most probable explanation might contradict an equally held belief in Y on some other issue.  

This overlooks that I may not be particularly wed to explanation X.  It may be the most likely explanation but still not be a likely explanation.  

For example, I might consider four explanations for the current inflationary and banking crises.  1) They are happening because President Biden is no longer mentally competent and the administration is drifting; 2) The crises are due to rank incompetence of Yellen; 3) The crises are the basis for Democrats to seize more executive power and control over the populace; and 4) It is just a coincidence that these crises are happening at the same time.  

I don't think any one of these is a viable explanation.  I suspect that there are elements of each in play at the same time as well as additional causal factors.  If I were asked to rank each by probability of being true, it might look like 1) 25%, 2) 30%, 3) 15%, and 4) 10%.  I don't think these are good explanations but if I were to choose a single cause I would go with Yellen's incompetence caused the problem.  Even though I think there is only a 30% chance of that explanation being true.  

Am I conspiracy thinker?  I would argue not.  I look for facts and where we are dealing with a complex, evolving, and chaotic system, I recognize that there might not be a comprehendible causal explanation.  All there might be is a range of causal scenarios which have some probability of being an accurate explanation and all of which have some possibility of being true.