Conspiracy Theorists are like Addicts

Conspiracy theorists are like addicts...

A recent glance through of a post over on Richard Hoagland's blog has led me to the notion that for many, once you start to "believe" in vast conspiracies, you become addicted. The post that inspired me to write this...

http://www.enterprisemission.com/weblog/2005/07/war-of-words.html

Now I actually like Mr Hoagland, although I have never met him. I think some of the points about certain things like Iapetus and the "face" on Mars deserve serious inquiry although I do not hold to his more grand interpretations. I happen to bookmark a bunch of sites that I group under a heading called weird stuff. I find some of this interesting at least from an entertainment pov.

But what I find annoying are these constant attempts to fit historical things with fairly straight forward explanations like the Kennedy assasination, 9/11 or the Columbia explosion into the grand conspiracy.

Take the Kennedy assasination for example, looked at with respect to possible conspiracies

Human beings are primates, and if you don't accept that where did that primate tailbone come from? Primates, especially the higher order ones, tend towards exclusive organizations. This tendency predominated and aided in driving evolution for millions of years, producing and refining a species which is capable of paranoia.

The average member of homosapiens, possible individuation aside, needs instinctually to associate in groups. Not only that, or as an out growth, these members tend to feel that others are in groups and a thought process arises from those unexplored primordial urges which rapidly takes the derivative of 2+2 but does not come out with zero.

So the fact that most people cannot shoot someone with pinpoint accuracy at several hundred to several thousands yards, makes them uninclined to accept the fact that a miitary trained sniper can. This of course makes spurious leaps of logic possible, in a certain famous assasination.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Ha...9s_marksmanship

People not only believe in big false conspiracies but in little ones. Santa and his helpers, parents deliberately trying to embarass their children, etc. It is a natural by porduct of our species evolution. It is in part what makes us such wonderful skeptics, as one actions also tends to produce the delevopement of compensatory mechanisms.

As to "real conspiracies" like communism or secret military missions, of course these events occur, and if we as a species did not possess the means to ferret these things out, we would have no need of intelligence classifications or the NSA.

The funny thing is that when a particular theory either does not come true, the explanations become, rarely, "it was thwarted" or, more commonly, "they were on to us knowing so they changed their nefarious plans". I was listenting to coasttocoastam last night, Thursday.

www.coasttocoastam.com

The show had on some guy named Sean David Morton who claims to be an expert in remote viewing, which is purported to be a psychic ability that lets one perceive eventss without actually being there. He also seems to be a radical leftist and is one of those with a visceral hatred of President Bush. He claimed that President Bush and his cadre will be attempting to turn the U.S. it a fascist dictatorship.

What is the explanation when neither occurs? Well as I have said, either we thwarted them or they changed their nefarious plans.

In science, for a theory to be true it must not only be demonstrable but have those demonstations be reproducable by others, and it must make successful predictions. Einstein's Relativity is not only constantly validated through reporducable experiments, reused machinery (the GPS system for instance) but several of its predictions have been proved true. But these facts that are validated are not themselves truths. The truth proved is that the facts are real and recorded as such or more specifically that the people involved in origin were honest and correct.

In one were to hold any conspiracy theory to these same standards, most if not all would fail the test. A serious of predictions which have a magical caveat like, "we thwarted them" is not a theory but an outlandish collection of unsubstantiated claims.