303. Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational (1)
303. Michael Shermer — Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational
1 (9s):
You're listening to the Michael Schimmer Show. Welcome to the Michael Schimmer Show. It's your host, Michael Schimmer.
Wondrium (19s):
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1 (2m 31s):
All right, here's our episode. As you know, this is a largely book driven podcast and so today I have no guest. I'm gonna tell you about my own book. My new book just came out. Well, when you're listening to this, we'll be releasing it on the pub date, which is Tuesday, October 25th. For some quirky historical reason, books are always released on Tuesdays. I'm not sure if it's similar to the voting issue or whatever back in the day, but this is my 15th book depending on how you're counting some of those early ones.
1 (3m 14s):
But if you begin with why people believe Where Things Conspiracy is my 15th book, it's subtitled, Why The Rational Believe The Irrational. We toyed around with the title and subtitle as publishers and authors who want to do and came up with, you know, just the shortest title. We could Conspiracy, Connecting the dots on the cover, which I really love. Some people not only find conspiracy, but also CIA is in there and Soros, S O R O S and a few others found in the vein of Patternicity, other patterns in there.
1 (3m 54s):
But they, the problem to be solved in the book is in the subtitle, Why is it that rational, smart, intelligent, educated people believe the most irrational, ridiculous, untrue conspiracy theories. So that's the problem i I set out to solve in the book. It is 13 chapters, of course, lucky number 13 plus a Coda, which presents the results of the scientific study I conducted along with my colleagues and collaborators at the Skeptic Research Center. And that's at a coda. So I guess technically it's 14 chapters, but we like 13.
1 (4m 35s):
Anyway, it comes in three parts. Part one, why people believe conspiracy theory. So part one is about the psychology, sociology, anthropology, behavioral economics, et cetera of conspiratorial beliefs. That is who believes conspiracy theories, Why, what even constitutes a conspiracy theory? How do you define a conspiracy theory? What's the difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory and so forth. There's out, there is a vast deep rich literature in scholarship and in social science on conspiracy theories and why people believe them. So I summarize all that but also add a lot of my own original thoughts and research on the subject.
1 (5m 16s):
Cuz I've been studying this really since probably I was in college as an undergraduate, reading books about, well the Lake Great Planet Earth is kind of religious conspiracy that the world was gonna end to non dare call it treason and all those kind of conspiracy theories in the seventies that I got interested in rate. But in at skeptic, we've been studying this really since the very beginning. So you could say for 30 years I've been reading and writing and researching about this. So, and it's actually good that I didn't write this book until now, till the last couple years. Took me three years to write it because had it, it come out earlier, we would've missed the whole Pizzagate Qan on rig election.
1 (6m 1s):
Big lie conspiracy theory and all the craziness that has gone totally mainstream. So many people in the media I have found over the decades think of conspiracy theories as just kind of this goofy, lame fringe, you know, tinfoil hat wearing belief system. But it's not, it's never been fringe, it's always been mainstream. It's just been harder to see it that way until it got into the White House. And then we saw what happened on January 6th. That's actually where I began chapter one or the prologue with that event, that insurrection of people who sought to overturn the United States government based on a false conspiracy theory.
1 (6m 49s):
And people act on their beliefs. And this is why the truth matters. Anyway, that's the first section, part one, why people believe conspiracy theories too. How to determine which conspiracy theories are real. Okay, as I'm gonna share with you in a moment, one of my tenets of conspiracies is that enough conspiracy theories are true, that it pays to air on the side of assuming more of a more mature than probably are making more type one errors, false positives. So the question then becomes, well, which ones are true? Which ones are not? How do you know? So riffing off Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit, I created my own conspiracy detection kit and then, and so I have a dozen different questions you can ask about that a any particular conspiracy theory and then apply kind of a ba and reasoning, you know, update your priors.
1 (7m 43s):
You start with your priors and then update 'em with new information and then adjust from there your credence in whether the conspiracy theory is true or false. And then I apply it to the truthers and the birthers and the JFK assassination conspiracy theory to, again, QAN on the rig election and on and on, all the big ones. And, and then, and then I actually have three different chapters on real conspiracy theories that is conspiracy theories that turn out to be true, that is real conspiracies. They are rampant, they are historical, they are current, they are deep in the US government, the cia, I have much discussion about CA's involvement in attempts to overthrow foreign countries, assassinate foreign leaders, dose our own citizens with mine altering drugs, MK Ultra Project Paperclip.
1 (8m 39s):
And you know, the old Groom Lake area 51, I mean this is just endless activities by the cia without the approval of, of Congress, certainly without the knowledge of Congress or public until just recently, in recent years, these documents were declassified. So now we know what our government agencies were up to in the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, even into the nineties, even in the two thousands as WikiLeak is exposed in the same way that the Pentagon Papers exposed to an extent the US government in the highest levels was lying to its own citizens about the Vietnam War in this case.
1 (9m 21s):
And then part three, talking to Conspiracists and rebuilding trust and truth. So I begin with the premise. You've heard me on the show ask a lot of my guesses. How do you talk to a conspiracy theorist? What if you're at Thanksgiving dinner and you know, weird Uncle Bob, you know, blurts out that the, you know, the, that the 2020 election was rigged or that, you know, covid 19 is, is a hoax made up to either concoct vaccines so that big pharma can make a lot of money or to control the world population or for Bill Gates to chip everybody or in conjunction with 5G to, you know, kind of control the masses and information and so on. How do you talk to somebody who thinks that, right?
1 (10m 3s):
I mean, you can't just say you're an idiot to, to believe that that's not gonna work because nobody thinks that they are, are, are believing something that's false. I mean, if, if it was false, you just wouldn't believe it, right? So people come to think that what they believe is actually true, but is it, Okay, well, so part two you can apply the conspiracy detection kit criteria to that. But in part three, well what do you say? I mean, what kinds of questions do you ask or statements do you make really? You just have to ask questions and listen and ask what's the source of that? Where did you hear that? How reliable is that source? How good is that information? What's the evidence for it?
1 (10m 43s):
How does it fit with the way the rest of the world works? And so on the criteria from the conspiracy detection kit, you can sort of apply by just asking questions, right? And then, and then the final regular chapter, How to rebuild trust and truth, reason, rationality and empiricism in reality based communities. This is my assessment of the current problem in society. That is kind of a breakdown in trust in the media, in journalism, in science, in the judicial system, in government, in Congress. I mean nobody trusts anybody anymore. What are we gonna do about that? Because if there's no trust, then we can't have a civil society. So I outlined some steps I think we could take there.
1 (11m 25s):
And then as I mentioned in the coda, I present all the original data and findings of the Skeptic research Center study on conspiracy theories and what people believe about them, which I conducted with my colleagues at the SRC Skeptic Research Center, Anonde and Kevin McCaffrey. And so if you're a professional scholar who studies conspiracies, you'll be interested in that chapter. And if you want the raw data, you know, we can share that with with you. The book is dedicated to my late partner, who I've mentioned many times on this podcast who is right above my right shoulder there when we put her on the cover of Skeptic who passed away one a little over a year ago.
1 (12m 9s):
So the dedication reads to Pat Lindsay, co-founder of the Skeptic Society and Skeptic Magazine, colleague, Confidant and friend, who embodied the maximum and mission of the Skeptic Society adopted from the 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule not to be, not to sco human actions, but to understand them. And I do try to apply that in this book in a rational, emotionally neutral way cuz as I said, if you offend people by being disrespectful and you, if you ridicule them, they're not even gonna listen to what you have to say.
