Losing Faith in Conspiracy Thinking

Is there anyone here who “lost their faith” in a conspiracy theory? How did that change happen? How deep were you, what made you change your mind?

When I was a wee lad, around 14 or 15, I believed in conspiracies…
I also thought California was going to fall into the ocean, before I moved here,
If there was a conspiracy book out there, I bought it…of course, this was the
mid- seventies and there were a lot of conspiracies out there…I lost my belief
in conspiracies once I could reason it out…however, the one conspiracy I still
believe in, is the UFO and the government holding spacecraft in some air force base…

other theories I held and no longer hold includes new age theories of Velikovsky
and Sitchen…vampires, New world order, end of world theories…
but I grew up and lost my childish beliefs in conspiracy theories…

a conspiracy theory is easy to hold when one is a child because it seems to,
just seems to explain some of the mysteries I we see as children…

or to put another way, I lost my faith in conspiracies once I was old enough to
grasp the truth…

Kropotkin

What specifically changed your mind? Or what generally changed about your mind that made you change your beliefs?

I’ve often been conspiracy-adjacent. I’m a Mulderite: I want to believe. But I can’t recall any that have fully convinced me. I briefly entertained 9/11 conspiracy theories, but abandoned them as inadequately defensible (there is a strong presumption against them, and the evidence looks like noise in a messy event). UFOs are a given, but alien visitors are still unlikely (though less so with the recent Pentagon release).

But I get the impression that full on conspiracy thinking rewrites ontology in such a way that it makes being convinced otherwise very difficult. Maybe that’s not such an issue in childhood, when your ontology is still in flux?

Do you think that conspiracy thinking is a style of thought, or is it more like an article of faith, where everyone has their own and finds everyone else’s facially absurd?

K: I lost my faith in conspiracy theories once I grew up… I no longer needed them to make sense of the
world…conspiracy theories are a means of understanding the world and placing oneself within that
world… quite often those who believe, will call other who don’t believe, as being naïve…
which is a way of saying those who believe are not naïve. it is a means of justifying one
place in the universe… for example, let us say, I hold pretensions as to being a genius
or someone who could run a corporation or company… but the reality is, I am a low level
hack… I can justify my position by holding to conspiracy theories about the Jews for example…

I use conspiracy theories to explain why I am at the low level I am at…

it is a justification theory meant to justify my own standing in life…

if only there weren’t immigrants or aliens or the “elite” or the Jews or
secret societies, I would be rich and famous and powerful and have titles
and fame…people with greater desires then talent use conspiracy theories
to justify their place in life…

I outgrew conspiracy theories when I was young because I didn’t have the ego
or vanity to justify my current standing in the universe…

I didn’t care that I was poor and without titles or fame…it didn’t matter to me…

and thus I had no use for conspiracy theories…

a person who still needs conspiracy theories is a weak person…
they use the conspiracy theories to justify their low position in life…
if only there weren’t …I would be …

conspiracy theories come from the weak and helpless…

and as an adult, I didn’t need them anymore…

Kropotkin

That’s an interesting theory of conspiracy thinking. I find the causal story compelling, though I disagree with the moral assessment.

I had thought of it as something more like teleology, a kind of pareidolia where one sees intent and deliberate action in noise. But that’s assuming that beliefs are mostly about accurately describing the world, and these beliefs are the edge cases of an otherwise reasonable belief-forming heuristic.

The way you’re describing it, conspiracy thinking might be rational towards a different end: as protective of a person’s sense of self or worth, or a form of learned helplessness that dampers risk taking. Adaptivity must be a primary function of belief formation; accuracy is only instrumentally valuable. Goddamn that’s depressing.

But I think that means it’s not a moral failing. It could be rational to believe even if the belief is false, and to the extent it’s selfish, it’s taken in defense against the low status put on a person by others.

I had a while when I was susceptible to conspiracy theories, UFOs and 9/11 occupied me most, but the UFO thing went away when I realised that the universe is expanding and the chance of finding us in the vastness of space seemed unrealistic. Added to that, I became aware of how reliant we are upon our planet, vegetation, warmth, love and people, even if we sometimes imagine ourselves to be independent of all these things. We are a part of the planet, not just “on” it.
The 9/11 thing went away quite quickly when I realised how much had to fall in place to make something like that work. There still remains a lot of unanswered questions, but that is really only because the authorities keep tight on the issue. If they would explain away the things that people can’t understand, it would go away completely.

I think people who conspire are idiots.

There are certainly idiots in life.

9/11 is straight forward — jet fuel does not melt metal (obviously, since planes are made of metal)

However, thermite does melt metal.

Bob, it sounds like you experienced the change as simply being susceptible to reason. I think I experience it that way too, and it’s blinkered me to the possibility that other people aren’t similarly susceptible to reason.

But Peter’s got me wondering if the way I experienced it is actually the way it happened. It’s true that I believe them less and less as I’ve grown into the good graces of the status quo.

This deals with most of them for me. They define the conspiracy after they’ve already seen what happened. There’s no public information about motives, so whatever happens merely reveals the motives of the conspiracy, so it’s always a conspiracy to make exactly what just happened, happen.

And the systems they’re supposed to have moved like marionettes are chaotic. Look at how well we predict the weather and then imagine a conspiracy trying to manipulate the vast mesh of global government and commerce with an ability to predict what will happen as accurate as the best weather forecasters.

Ecmandu, are there beliefs you do think of as discredited because they are conspiracy theories? Do you recognize that as a failure mode and just think it doesn’t apply to that particular belief, or do you reject it as a failure mode?

What do you think about flat earth? Lizard people? Moon landing?

Carleas,

Your reply was somewhat bizarre considering my post was only in response to 9/11.

Some ideas out there are just that. Ideas, not theories. You certainly know about the Flying Spaghetti Monster !?

Conspiracy theories are largely a replacement for a feeling of lack of agency.

Why the moon landing? Infinite space scares the shit out of people!

Why lizard men? Life can’t be chaotic! That’s scarier than lizard people!

Why the flat earth? Certainly god is good!

I don’t think a conspiracy theory is necessarily a theory, it’s a compound noun. But I’m curious about the distinction between an idea and a theory. I have used “conspiracy thinking” to refer to a general type of thinking that is behind conspiracy theories more generally. That has the character of a theory, as distinct from the ideas of the specific events and the who did what why.

Continuing on the above, one characteristic of conspiracy theories is the institutional distrust: the system isn’t just taking our agency, it’s also lying to us about it, and it’s using lies to get the sheeple to keep it going. That pattern fits a large number of beliefs I would call “conspiracy theories”. Do you agree?

Do you see the pattern in the moon landing, lizard men, and flat earth? Does 9/11 break that pattern, or does it fit the pattern but it’s just a coincidence?

Carleas wrote

Yes.

So you don’t believe the history books that Julius Caesar was murdered by means of a conspiracy?

It also fits all sorts of events at local to national and international levels that are generally accepted by people who are not labeled conspiracy theorists. I have been not responding to this thread, which is a kind of generalized ad hom, though to the ether and not any individual person, since my responses would be off topic, but I think the self-congratulatory nature of the thread would be better served if you were also making it clear why a vague term that is essentially irrational - since there are conspiracies - and I think in some ways the general evidence that what gets categorized as a conspiracy theory cannot be true is based on unfalsifiable premises. LIke, if it were true it would come out to general knowlege. There’s a lot of intuition in that estimation, but further, it is not possible to find counterevidence of that.

As I said to Ecmandu, “conspiracy theory” is a compound noun: it has a meaning distinct from the parts of which it’s composed. Something can be a ‘theory’ about a ‘conspiracy’ and not be a ‘conspiracy theory’.

And as someone who rejects basically all of them, I see that as a meaningful category characterized by a pattern of rational failures. But as KT points out, there’s a lot of intuition baked into that claim and it may break down on analysis; for someone who accepts conspiracy theories as true, or some of them, or even one of them, I can see taking the position that there’s “no there there”. Thus my interrogation of Ecmandu and, now, you: do you accept as true something that others label a ‘conspiracy theory’? Do you reject as false something else that you or others would label a ‘conspiracy theory’? Is there a there there, and, if you answered yes to the previous questions, do you distinguish the conspiracy theory you believe as not fitting the pattern, or as fitting the pattern but being an exception to the rule?

And a related question, if you do see a pattern in ‘conspiracy theories’, do you think that it is or relies on certain common cognitive biases or failures of reasoning?

Against who?

That’s true, and then it wouldn’t be a conspiracy theory. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t currently conspiracy theories that most people reject and that some people believe fervently. And, I assume, people who once believed and no longer do.

Carleas, was the Roman senate involved in a conspiracy to kill Caesar as it is evidenced in our history books, meaning that conspiracies do happen in theory and fact? Answer the question, either you believe that that conspiracy in fact happened or you don’t.

Also, conspiracies are supposed to remain theories never to be fleshed out with beyond a shadow of a doubt evidence as designed by the conspirators.

Do you still believe in Russiagate Peter, or have you outgrown it?

I use to believe Saddam Hussein had ties with Al Qaeda and WMDs,
Turns out he never did.
I was deep into that one, most of us were.
After that I became more skeptical of conspiracy theories my government and MSM peddle.

Here’s a more recent example of a conspiracy fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident

People in other threads considering or directly believing in what get called conspiracy theories. I used to be immature, irrational (like those guys in thread X or in the world in general) and whatever other adjectives were used here, but then I outgrew it.

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘that’ in ‘that’s true.’ If you mean that if a conspiracy theory were correct it would come out in general knowledge, that is precisely what I was referring to as an unfalsifiable (or as a rule confirmable) hypothesis.

What sets a “conspiracy theory” apart from a “theory about a conspiracy”?

A “theory about a conspiracy” can be shown to be true or false based on some reasonable evaluation of evidence. It’s abandoned when evidence against it is presented.

“Conspiracy theories” are not falsifiable.

Evidence that confirms the theory is the truth being revealed.

Evidence that undermines the theory is fabricated by the conspirators and shows the extensiveness of the conspiracy.

K: I don’t know what “Russiagate is?”

Kropotkin