Conspiracy theories, truth and rhetoric

From Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories by Maggie Koerth-Baker. An interesting subject but an anemic article.

The first misstep is in failing to define what constitutes a conspiracy theory. Wikipedia uses "A conspiracy theory is an explanatory proposition that accuses a person, group or organization of having caused or covered up an event or phenomenon of great social, political, or economic impact" as their definition and that appears fairly mainstream.

Being of an empirical and rationalist bent and having worked for years in large organizations in which it is exceptionally hard to maintain secrecy even when there is significant commercial incentive to do so, I have long been skeptical of conspiracy theorists and regarded such theories as primarily a function of poor data, bad mental hygiene and gullibility. The more people involved and the longer the time frame, the more difficult it appears to me that a conspiracy can actually be the underlying explanation. Perhaps true on rare occasions but not nearly as frequently as suggested.

But age is a constant reminder to be more tolerant and less judgmental.

Koerth-Baker also fails to situate conspiracy theories on an epistemological continuum. We all make assumptions and impute some given amount of faith into those unproven assumptions. What distinguishes the faith points of a conspiracy theorist from, say, a church goer, a political ideologue, etc.

For example, there are many phenomenon that are upsetting to some but which are thoroughly documented and empirically explained but which maintain a popular currency despite being disproven. For example, many people believe that there are malevolent forces at play which discriminate against women in terms of compensation. This is commonly popularized in some form of the claim "Women only earn 70% of what men are paid". This misreading of data has long been put to bed here in the US and across the OECD. When you take into account full time versus part time employment, continuity of employment, chosen career fields, education attainment, etc. the nominal difference of 30% disappears completely. Yet people insist on discussing the pay gap as if it were a real phenomenon being caused by mysterious interests.

Similarly, more parochially, in the book world, every year, there is a wailing and gnashing of teeth in some quarters about the disproportion of awards going to males or the low representation of minorities. When you dig into the numbers, it appears that winners are roughly proportionate to the number of full time, continuous participants in the field (which does not match the demographic distribution). None-the-less the conviction that there is some sort of systematic discrimination on the part of awards committees is an article of faith. Is it also a conspiracy theory? It meets the definition of such but we don't identify that article of faith as a conspiracy theory because of the implied negative connotation of a conspiracy theorist (ignorant, foolish and gullible).

So what gets identified as a conspiracy theory contains a degree of judgmentalism as well. A conspiracy theorist becomes someone who holds a view different from our own, based on unproven assumptions with which we disagree. The characterization of a belief as being a conspiracy theory becomes a means of pushing one's opponent beyond the bounds of acceptability.

And yet some of those beliefs pan out.

Within the past five years or so, I can without research, think of a number of beliefs which I initially dismissed as improbable to the point of ridiculous and which could have been characterized as being a conspiracy theory but which turned out to be accurate. The last couple examples I think most people would properly have dismissed as absurd up until this past month.

Conspiracy theory example 1: Claim: That East Anglia University would not share its foundational global warming data model with critics because it was flawed and they didn't want their critics to know that. When the model was eventually leaked, it turns out that they had good reason not to have shared it earlier; they had normed data over the years without keeping track of what changes had been made in which ways to which data sets. Consequently, their model failed the most basic of scientific scrutiny and they were seeking to keep the record-keeping failure from being uncovered.

Conspiracy theory example 2: Claim: That there was a cabal of global warming researchers coordinating with one another to prevent contradictory research from being published and discrediting the authors whenever such research did manage to get published. To me this was your classic delusional theory: too many people not to be eventually uncovered and therefore, to me, unlikely that it was occurring. But sure enough, the climategate email scandal documented that there was exactly such a coordinated effort underway to prevent publication where possible and to discredit when not possible to prevent.

Conspiracy theory example 3: Claim: That there was a concerted effort on the part of liberal journalists to coordinate media messages consonant with the goals of the administration. Yes, the media is empirically far more liberal than the American electorate (documented via party affiliation, campaign contributions, self-identified in surveys, etc.) but a coordinated effort? Ridiculous. Enter the Journolist scandal. Probably less there than was made of it, but still exactly the type of effort predicted by the crazy-eyed theorists.

Conspiracy theory claim example 4: Claim: Academics concoct data to support their own world views and pass it off as research. Absurd. But then again, there are those serial retractions of papers, non-replication of results, and the multiple instances of wholesale fabrication of psychology research out of the Netherlands.

Conspiracy theory example 5: Claim: That the administration was seeking to use the coercive power of government to penalize and suppress opponents for partisan gains. Again, ridiculous until the evidence of Gibson Guitars, IRS and Tea Party applicants, etc. starts coming out.

I'll stop. Regardless of your affiliations and positions, once you start thinking about it, there are too many examples where bad faith actions were attributed to murky groups of actors working against the commonweal and which turned out to be true.

So perhaps conspiracy theories have a life of their own because enough of them turn out to be true.