303. Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational (2)
1 (12m 58s):
The opening epigram for the book here, just next to the table of contents, comes from Stephen Pinker's latest book, Rationality. What it Is, Why it Seems Scarce, Why it Matters, Which came out in 2021 to understand is not to forgive. We can see why humans steer their reasoning toward conclusions that work to the advantage of themselves or their sex and why they distinguish a reality in which ideas are true or false from a mythology in which ideas are entertaining or inspirational without conceding that these are good things, they are not good things. Reality is that which when you apply motivated or my side or mythological reasoning to it does not go away.
1 (13m 47s):
False beliefs about vaccines, public health measures and climate change threaten the wellbeing of billions conspiracy theories inside terrorism, pogroms wars and genocide. A corrosion of standards of truth undermines democracy and clears the ground for tyranny. But for all the vulnerabilities of human reason, our picture of the future need not be a bot tweeting fake news forever. The arc of knowledge is a long one and it bends toward rationality. Close quote from Steven Pinker. What a great epigraph and start to the book.
1 (14m 28s):
Okay, so I will now read from the alogia at the beginning of the book that explains my approach to the subject in trying to understand conspiracy theories and why people believe them. Many different cognitive, social, political, economic, cultural, and historical factors are involved. So any explanation is necessarily going to be complex, possibly overdetermined the prologue that follows, outlines this volume in more detail. But allow me to briefly sketch my theoretical model of three overarching factors at work. They demonstrate why people believe conspiracy theories with an aim toward illuminating what I am calling the conspiracy effect.
1 (15m 12s):
Why smart people believe blatantly wrong things or apparently rational reasons. One proxy conspiracist, many conspiracy theories are proxies for a different type of conspiracist truth, a deeper mythic psychological or lived experience truth as such, the details and very similar to of particular conspiracy theories are less important than the Richard Truth's representative therein, which often contains self-identifying existential and moral meanings, frequently involving power, both for the conspiracist and for the perceived conspirators.
1 (15m 56s):
Two tribal conspiracists, many conspiracy theories, harbor elements of other beliefs, dogmas and adjacent or preceding conspiracy theories long believed and held as core elements of political, religious, social, or tribal identity. As such, current conspiracy theories like proxy truths may serve as stand-ins for earlier ones, having deep roots in history. This accounts for the cross-pollination of conspiracy theories and the propensity for people who believe in one to believe in many an endorsement of these theories serves as a social signal of loyalty to the tribe, then embraces them as part of that group's identity.
1 (16m 40s):
And in this case, for example, with costly signaling theory in application, the goer crazier more insane, ridiculous, irrational, the conspiracy theory that you endorse publicly, the stronger is your tribal loyalty. That's how we ended up with the whole crazy Q Andon Pizzagate rig election conspiracy theory that nobody in the G o p believes except for Trump anyway, I should say g P leadership. Apparently the rank and file do believe it. Three constructive conspiracies. The assumption by most researchers of and commentators on conspiracy theories is that they represent false beliefs, which is why the term has become a pejorative descriptor.
1 (17m 26s):
As in that's just a crazy conspiracy theory. This is a mistake because historically speaking enough of these theories represent actual conspiracies. Therefore a pays to air on the side of belief rather than disbelief, just in case with a lot at stake, especially one's identity, livelihood, or even life, which was the case during the paleolithic environment in which we evolved our conspiratorial cognition. It is often better to assume that a conspiracy theory is real when it is not false positive instead of believing it is not real when it is a false negative. The former just makes you paranoid, whereas the latter can make you dead.
1 (18m 8s):
Thus, there's a mismatch between the rational conspiracist of our evolutionary ancestry and the modern world filled as the latter is with a myriad of conspiracy theories so widespread and diverse, that discerning truth from falsehood can be exceedingly difficult. To this end, I make a distinction between paranoid conspiracy theories involving ultra secret and uber powerful entities for which there is little to no evidence in which are largely driven by paranoia and realistic conspiracy theories pertaining to normal political institutions and corporate entities that are conspiring to manipulate the system to gain an unfair, immoral, and sometimes illegal advantage over others.
1 (18m 54s):
That's my definition of a conspiracy because both history and current events are brimming with real conspiracies. I contend that conspiracist is a rational response to a dangerous world, thus in the common computer analog, it is a feature of not a bug in human cognition. The apparently rational reasons, in my definition of the conspiracy effect are doing a lot of work. We will explore those reasons in depth in this book. Layered on top of these three overarching factors are a number of additional psychological and sociological forces at work. In reinforcing a belief in conspiracy theories, these include motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance, teleological thinking, transcendental thinking, locus of control, anxiety reduction, confirmation bias, attribution bias, hindsight bias, my side bias, oversimplification of complex problems, patternicity, agenticity and more.
1 (19m 54s):
There's a lot of psychological effects going on here at once, interacting with each other in addition to my three different conspiracists theoretical constructs. So this takes many chapters to deconstruct all that. And there's a lot of research, really super interesting experiments that I review finally, because so many conspiracy theories represent real conspiracies. The second part of the book is largely focused on determining their truth or falsity. As such, my more objective scholarly voice in the first half of the volume will be layered with that of my day job as head of an organization, a skeptic society and publisher of a magazine skeptic, tasked with opining on the very similar to of the claims people make it is, I'm gonna posit that there is a way to determine the truth value of most conspiracy theories.
1 (20m 46s):
And I will my opinion on many of the most popular ones found in both history. And today. My approach in this book, as it has been in most of my writing, is that of Charles Darwin from a comment he made in a letter to a friend who had just informed him that critics have accused him of being too theoretical in his revolutionary 1859 book on the origin of species in that he should have just put his facts before us and let them rest. Darwin replied about 30 years ago, there was much talk that geologists on only to observe and not theorize. And I well remember someone saying that at this rate, a man might as well go into a gravel pit and count the pebbles and describe the colors how odd it is that anyone should not see.
1 (21m 34s):
That all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service. Close quote from Darwin, I call the final clause of this observation, Darwin's dictum and it bears repeating all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service. So ultimately, although my book is pretty scholarly in nature, it's published by Johns Hopkins University Press, one of the most respected university presses in the world. I really, I can't help but give my opinion. And in fact, following Darwin's dictum, I feel obligated to, and I think other authors should as well. I mean, you can outline what other people should do to decide which conspiracy theories are true or false, but what do you think?
1 (22m 19s):
Okay, well I tell you what I think, I'm sure JFK was assassinated by a loan gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald, right? And Obama was not born on foreign oil. And nine 11 was not an inside job by the Bush administration. Anyway, I spent three different chapters just on those three right there, explaining why, but, and not, but not just how to think about conspiracy theories, although I do that. But also, what do I think? And I tell you what I think. So that's the book. It's, it's pretty thick. It is what, what are we talking about here? I forgot to even look at my total imagination here all the way to the end of the index at 355 pages.
1 (23m 3s):
So very respectable. We have a lot of graphs and charts like here's some of the graphs from the coda of my research on a 29 different conspiracy theories and what people believe about them and why. But also I'm, I'm grateful to Johns Hopkins University press, the editors and designers and book production people there for producing such a beautiful book. I mean, I, I'm often commenting about this other people's books. I am grateful to them that they did so with my book. You know, it's a beautiful binding here, silver and black. The dust jacket is really nicely designed and laid out. And I won't tell you what I had in mind for a cover cuz I'm not an artist, so what do I know?
1 (23m 46s):
So fortunately they rejected my crazy ideas and came up with this fabulous cover. But the typography, the layout, the design is all really, I mean, it's just beautifully done, easy to read. And they used high quality papers. So the thought, so the, even the the kind of blurry photographs like I reprint here, the headshot from the Zab brewter, well this is frame 2 47 with the next shot. And then I have a nice illustration there that was done by Pat Lindsay, again, my partner above me there for our special issue of skeptic on the 50th anniversary of the JFK showing how the so-called magic bullet, was it magic at all? It's just the single bullet theory.
1 (24m 27s):
And we ex explain in great detail exactly how that bullet went through all those different, two different people and all those different body parts without any magic, supernatural, paranormal or anything like that going on there. And so, and then I have here the headshot from the Zapruder film in which you can, So here's the actual bullet that was supposedly pristine. It's not so again, nice that we have high quality papers. So the photos are clear and you can actually see right there in the headshot of the brain matter and blood and stuff's splattering going up and forward, not back into the left, like in Oliver Stone's JFK film where his Jim Garrison character played by Kevin Costner says, you know, back into the left, back into the left.
1 (25m 19s):
And you watch that and you go, Yeah, yeah, there's a shooter in the front. No, no, no. If you actually watch, this is a bruter film in high definition at in slowmo. The bullet comes from the back. You can see the brain matter going up and forward as if the shot came from behind and up, which it did by Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas School Book Depository Building. And anyway, that's just a few hints there of, of what else is in the book. I'm super proud of this one. I think it is. I know I say this about all my books, but I really think this is my best one. It's probably the best written one. Hopefully I get better as a writer through practice and I try to improve my writing vocabulary set and structure, overall narrative flow of the text.
