Why You Should Believe More "Conspiracy Theories"

Bad reasoning that results in an over-rejection of conspiracy theories

The first reason(s?) is simple and conceptual.

Military operations are conspiracies. During all wars, there are military operations involving tens and hundreds of thousands of people, and secrecy is maintained regularly.

This is an important refutation of what is probably the most common general anti-conspiracy argument, which is “too many people would have to be in on it”.

Wikipedia describes the secrecy of the Manhattan Project well enough:

”Because of its relative success at keeping the story out of newspapers, Byron Price, head of the Office of Censorship, ultimately designated the Manhattan Project "the best-kept secret of the war".^[253] In 1945 Life estimated that before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings "probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved." The magazine wrote that the more than 100,000 others employed with the project "worked like moles in the dark". Warned that disclosing the project's secrets was punishable by 10 years in prison or a fine of US$10,000 (equivalent to $169,000 in 2023), they monitored "dials and switches while behind thick concrete walls mysterious reactions took place" without knowing the purpose of their jobs.”

What is called a “conspiracy theory” is basically, things like the Manhattan Project, but aren’t public confirmed to exist.

Another “brute force” refutation of “too many would have to be in on it” would be the holocaust. Whether you believe it happened or not, the holocaust narrative forces you to believe in an enormous conspiracy one way or another.

Either the largest mass murder operation in human history, successfully covered up until blown open by force of arms, or the biggest hoax in human history.

Beyond it just being a brute fact that “too many would have to be in on it” is a bad anti-conspiracy argument… why?

Well, because one loose lip doesn’t sink a ship. This transitions into “someone would say something”.

Well, what are wikileaks? Someone does say something, about a lot of things, all the time. So what?

They end up in a wikileaks dump, and… there they stay. I’m not going to go through all of them and post them. Are you? Are you going to read them? Okay, say you do - then what? Then I guess “someone should do something” - do what?

Right, it needs to GO SOMEWHERE. But whether a “conspiracy” gets “exposed” is a function of journos.

There’s plenty of posts on the concentration of information control. For “offline news”, which includes the major online newspapers and “news networks”, in 2011 it was the “big six”. Maybe it’s seven now IDK.

Then there’s the internet, so, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit. So four major websites?

Incidentally, my guess was pretty close:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites

Yahoo is pretty close to reddit, depending on how you weigh. Maybe yahoo has some news-setting power?

Point is, it’s not a lot of websites, and it’s not a lot of companies. Six major conglomerates and 4, maybe 5, websites dictate what most people hear.

So unless what you’re saying gets to Musk, Zuck, the google/youtube people, or goes just viral beyond all imagination on reddit, then any “whistleblower” on a “conspiracy” just isn’t going to be heard.

I’m not saying I know for sure that there’s some collusion among big media controllers to suppress conspiracies - maybe there is maybe there isn’t - it’s just that there are fewer people who would have to be in on it than you might think.

To positively push a piece of disinfo, you’d need the big 6 and the internet guys. Lets say you need 5 people at facebook, google, youtube, twitter, reddit, and then 5 guys are the big 6 to push some disinfo - that would be 55 people?

Lets be generous and say you need 100. I’m not going to claim any particular goings-on of how these people will gaslight, intimidate, persuade, horse-trade what becomes “the news”. I’m simply saying that fewer have to be “in on it” than you might imagine.

You’ve probably seen this clip:

This is important because it shows VERY tight coordination across multiple of the big 6 conglomerates (I believe CBS and FOX are owned by different parents).

Obviously this Sinclair episode was a major error, because it shows the capacity for such coordination. Or maybe this was a flex to show someone (?) just how much of a Phalanx the big 6 could organize their media arms into? It’s a tremendous level of coordination, in a very obvious way, and it feels quite unlikely that this is the very first time coordinating.

So if “The 100” want something said, it’ll probably be said. And you shouldn’t expect it to be anything like as obvious as the Sinclair statement.

Next you should consider “conspiracy theories” that ended up being true. Aside from the Manhattan Project, the holocaust (either the successfully hidden mass extermination program, or successful psy-op that it did happen when it didn’t), most major successful military operations, the site Political Velcraft put together a list of things that site claim to be conspiracy theories that ended up being true in 2014.

Some of the ones they mentioned were:

The Mafia, which they claim was unknown (to the public?) until “the 1960s”.

MK-ULTRA

Operation Mockingbird, whatever that was, supposedly exposed by the “Church Committee”

Operation Northwoods

COINTELPRO

They mention the Tuskegee Syphilis study. I wouldn’t call that a conspiracy, more of a form of murder by bureaucracy that was attempted to be covered up.

There’s also two things that used to be often labeled “conspiracy theories” which are now either generally accepted or at least in the realm of “respectable” opinion.

First, the “New World Order”, which is a bit vague as to what it is, and who exactly is pushing for it. There are those who go into more details about it, the World Economic Foundation, the DAVOS group, what exactly the “Great Reset” is supposed to be. However, things which used to be limited to Alex Jones are increasingly mainstream political issues which, for example, President Trump is running against (open borders, deindustrialization, proletarianization).

The second would be the “anti-white system”. This was actually the case as far back as 1965, and likely even as far back as 1865 (though there’s a lot of emotional an memetic resistance of believing blacks were systemically privileged in 1872. It sounds absurd when just stated given school system processing).

Finally, the third reason one should believe more conspiracy theories, or at least why one major argument against them is bad, would be what I call the “risk argument”. The idea is that “Agency X wouldn’t engage in Y grand conspiracy, because it risks destroying the whole organization if the conspiracy fails / is found out and punished.”

So the first problem with the risk argument is that governments engage in high-risk conspiracies all the time.

Just recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a high-risk conspiracy (that was largely kept secret, at least from most of the public, until it happened). On the military side, high-risk conspiracies happen all the time. Including failed conspiracies that led to the end of regimes.

But also, things like MKULTRA, mockingbird, COINTELPRO - these things were actually uncovered. Which goes back to the “so what” problem. If a “blown” conspiracy just ends up in a wikileaks dump, or ends up on an online forum 30 years later, how big is the risk of failure really?

Moreover, even if the organization is recognized, what is the fate of the actual people involved? Mostly they get away with it, so the risk to actual people is minimal even in the case of fully blown conspiracies.

None of this is to say that you should just accept all conspiracies. It’s merely to say that the main evergreen arguments against conspiracy theories go against everything we know about actual conspiracies.

=== Probability ===

So finally, one thing that I think is happening in peoples’ minds is that instead of evaluating the likilihood of conspiracies with sensible starting probabilities, they engage in a series of implicit fallacious thought processes that leads to excessive rejection of conspiracies.

First is that their starting probabilities are too far against the conspiracy theories, as we’ve been over. When a major conspiracy theory is proposed, the odds of it being real, in practice, are usually higher than the baseline odds of such a conspiracy happening.

For example, the COVID vaccine had several suspicious things surrounding the lead up (the 2016 ramp up in anti-vax articles and entertainment), the wet-market right next to the virology lab, and the extremely rapid vaccine for a cold, using a vaccine that targeted the spike protein part of the virus instead of using a deactivated whole virus. The point here is not to convince you one way or another, it’s simply to say that once something becomes a “going concern conspiracy theory”, there are usually things going on that should make you more likely to listen.

However, in practice, the anti-conspiracists are usually even worse than just having unrealistically low starting probabilities in their minds, and it has to do with independence vs. intersectionality.

Say a “conspiracy theorist” believes in 5 conspiracy theories, which all form into a singular conspiratorial narrative.

The anti-conspiracist, lets say he gives each theory a 5% chance of being correct. What the anti-conspiracist will then do it multiply the odds of each conspiracy theory being correct to determine the odds of the whole web being correct - which leads to 0.00003125% chance of the whole web being correct in the anti-conspiracist’s mind.

You may have already spotted the fallacy. The anti-conspiracist treats each theory as independent. In reality, if MKULTRA is true, then it’s more likely that COINTELPRO is true, and if both of those are true, then ANY conspiracy theory regarding the CIA or FBI is now more likely to be true.

In reality, the odds of the whole web being correct is closer to 5%, or the odds of any one proposition being correct. Obviously someone can make unwarranted leaps, so this is a rule of thumb. But if one of the conspiracy propositions is true, then the probability of every other proposition goes up.

So at first, it’s 25% chance that any one conspiracy proposition is true. Lets say that you’re satisfied that one of the propositions is true. This then raises the remaining 4 propositions to 10% chance of being true in light of a related conspiracy proposition being true.

So now, you’re at a 40% chance that one of the remaining 4 propositions is true. Lets say you’re satisfied that ANOTHER of the propositions is true.

Okay, there are 3 left, and they’re each at 20% (being re-evaluated in the new context of 2 of the propositions being true), so you have a 60% chance of continuing to advance down the chain.

Advance again, there are 2 left, each now at 40%, 80% chance to advance.

Advance again, 1 left, at 80%. 80% chance to advance.

So with this thought experiment, you’re actually at a 3.84% chance of the whole conspiracy web being true, based on a starting probability for each proposition being 5%.

I’m using made-up numbers here just to illustrate “how” this actually works, not necessarily that you should double the probability of the remaining propositions each time one proposition is confirmed. It depends on how linked they are, and of course, the nitty-gritty of the theory.

In practice, what you actually do is find one piece of evidence that gets you to ~99% for one of the propositions in the web. Like “it was the wrong gun”. Then you find, say, it was the gun of some other guy who supposedly had an alibi, then you look into the supposed alibi etc. etc.

This is also a problem faced by any heterodox position. For example, I claim that British rule over India improved India relative to the alternative of no British rule, that there was no Belgian Congo genocide, that European rule over black Africa generally improved the lives of black Africans, that chattel slavery did not limit, and actually enhanced, black economic prospects following slavery (in a relative sense - the civil war reduced everyone’s prospects after 1865), and that they were not systemically disadvantaged from 1865-1965.

Aside from the emotional resistance, which I myself started with (I went to middle school too, I’m not any more inherently “racist” than you. I didn’t just come out of the womb hating black people or anything like that.), there’s that fallacy of multiplying each of these propositions by each other instead of considering that - if one thing is off, then ALL of the probabilities for ALL of the propositions have to be re-examined.

If, for example, the Belgian Congo didn’t have 10 million people during the time in which 10 million people are said to have been killed, this then makes it more likely that the entire claim of mass murder is false. It also shows that such an idea spread very quickly among Europeans at the time, which calls into question the idea that European institutions were going to systemically lie in their own favor about the effects of their rule at the time.

But the Belgian Congo is an instance where really, your starting probability should be close to zero in the first place.

This also gets into imaginary evidence, evidence-by-title, the assumption of due diligence, which are related problems that conspiracy theories also face.

However, this article has gone on long enough, and the specific goal of the article was to make the case that you should believe more conspiracy theories in general, without defending any one in particular. The purpose is of course to strip away bad arguments against conspiracy theories so that I may impress upon you some conspiracy theories I believe are true than that you should believe, along with things which aren’t conspiracy theories, but suffer from similar problems of bad priors preventing revision of “core religion”.

“Where are you going with this” - nevermind where I am going!