I always find it interesting how when these things get revealed, nobody seems to update their priors on "conspiracy theories" going forward. A couple weeks after these stories break it's back to making fun of "tinfoil hat" people and acting like it's all a big joke. I wonder if it's some kind of deep seated coping mechanism to refuse to update beliefs on stuff like that
> I always find it interesting how when these things get revealed, nobody seems to update their priors on "conspiracy theories" going forward.
The problem with this blend of specious reasoning is that to start off these conspiracy theories do not have any prior whatsoever. These conspiracy loons build their system of belief at best around flimsy conjectures, and reinforce their baseless beliefs on any noise that they manage to overfit around those.
A broken clock being right twice a day does not vindicate conspiracies around broken clocks.
This is a good point and I don't disagree. What i'm referring to though is how this incident, snowden leaks, NSA metadata spying, MKultra, etc. etc. all are described as "nutjob" theories until they're proven. Then we just say "oh yeah everyone knew that" and go back to saying anything that doesn't sound mainstream reasonable is crazy
How many of these would you need to update in the direction of "maybe some of them do know some of what they're talking about"?
Edit: Read the question again, and try to answer it. Let me rephrase the question:
How many times do you need to find out that something the media told you was "misinformation" or "a conspiracy theory" was actually true, to start questioning them a biiiit more?
One problem here is that a lot of people don't look at the source of the supposed conspiracy theory. They think "it's a conspiracy theory, it must be like all the rest." There are several so-called conspiracy theorists who are fairly accurate about predicting the shady behavior of the US government. There are a lot more conspiracy theorists who yell about flat earth and chemtrails. As with anything else, it's a good idea to check your sources and see where the theory comes from.
The prior is not about an individual theory, but that, e.g., 5% of theories turn out to be correct. Yet people will still believe that 0% of theories are correct.
This is precisely the problem of labeling all theories the powerful don't like "conspiracy theories".
I'm pretty certain that a substantial percentage of the most ridiculous conspiracies are posted online by paid shills to discredit all theories, so any dissenter can be labeled a "loon".
There are many reasonable people who believe the moon landing and reject the theory that "the world is run by satanists" but have many legitimate questions about the Epstein story.
For example, the theory that Epstein videotaped his "friends" for future blackmail is not in any way "loony". So the label "conspiracy theory" is entirely useless, we can only talk about individual cases.
This attitude implies a wealth of fallacies, including:
- The category of things under the umbrella "conspiracy theory" are necessarily either all ridiculous or all plausible.
- There is some thread binding all conspiracy theories together such that if one is validated, the rest become more plausible (but not the other way around).
- Epstein's guilt and all of his acquaintances were considered to be a conspiracy theory in the "ridiculous" category by many.
- Baseless theories can not be true.
- If a theory turns out to be true, then any prior criticism of it is invalid or somehow "bad" and should not have been applied even at the time.
More than anything, though, this attitude insists on an "us vs them" model that antagonizes people who are, holistically taken, more reasonable than the imagined enemy.
> I’ve got no time to keep track of everyone’s baseless conspiracy theories.
Do you have time for conspiracy theories that are not baseless? Or, how about for ones that are actually true?
Or more generally speaking: do you have time to wonder about how much (genuine) interest you have in what is actually true, as well as believing only in what is actually true?
For example:
> I see those folks pat themselves out n the back when the flimsiest of “evidence” shows up.
What do you actually mean by this?
As a thought experiment...if you think of it in terms of a Venn diagram composed of:
- the entirety of all conspiracy theorists that exist
- conspiracy theorists who you have had exposure to
- conspiracy theorists who pat themselves out on the back when the flimsiest of “evidence” shows up
- conspiracy theorists who do not pat themselves on the back when the flimsiest of “evidence” shows up
...if you were to sketch these out on a piece of paper:
a) Do you think you would have difficulty drawing that diagram?
b) How would you go about deciding how much overlap for the circles?
c) How closely do you believe your diagram would match actual reality (assume that we have access to an omniscient being who knows the answers to all questions)?
For extra safety, I will also add this: "Inb4 Sealioning, JAQing off, and various other very common rhetorical/evasive techniques/behaviors that are deployed rather than simply engaging in good faith, honest discussion."
This comment is great because it is a Rorschach test, and you can see it in the replies. Some people read this as "conspiracy theorists will continue to believe despite being proven wrong" and some read it as "conspiracy skeptics will continue to disbelieve despite this one being vindicated".
Part of the issue is that after a while we tend to forget that the cases that turned out to be true were dismissed as conspiracy theories at the time. In recent memory for example, a lot of claims about the capabilities and application of the US signal intelligence apparatus abroad (especially in allied coununtries) were dismissed as conspiracy theories prior to Snowden. If you talk to a lot of people today, they will tend to remember it more as a "we kinda' always knew, but just didn't have confirmation" situation than a "I'm sure the NSA is doing _something_, but there is no way it would be this extensive" situation.
The idea that Ghislaine Maxwell was one of the most powerful mods on Reddit, with close connections to the founders and admins, was widely derided at the time, but is probably true.
MkUltra, COINTELPRO, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Project Mockingbird, Project Sunshine... There are thousands of conspiracies that have been vindicated, including ones that sounded completely insane at the time. You can just Google to answer your question with further examples.
Gulf of Tonkin, Iraq WMDs, Syria chemical weapons false flag, Hunter Biden's laptop, FBI setting up the mentally deficient to create terrorists, to name a few.
Which conspiracy exactly are you referring to in this case? (Genuine question, I'm not up to date on anything to do with this.)
In general, I don't find that the specifics of conspiracies that come out were known before. It's not like people have been theorizing for years about X, then we find out that X is actually true. It's usually completely unrelated to the big conspiracy theories people are talking about.
So when a "conspiracy" comes out (and there's a question what we mean by conspiracy theory here,) when something like this comes out, I definitely update in the direction of "lots of things are happening in the world which I don't know about and might alarm me." But those things are usually far less impressive than real conspiracy theories make things seem.
I also update in the direction of "these kinds of things are hard to keep secret," since, after all, I'm hearing about them! Although I wonder how many things are never heard about?
In any case, the fact that it turns the FBI ran crazy programs in the 60s and we all know about it now does not cause me to update in the direction of "the moon landing is fake," or "9/11 was an inside job," or most conspiracy nonesense.
> I always find it interesting how when these things get revealed, nobody seems to update their priors on "conspiracy theories" going forward. A couple weeks after these stories break it's back to making fun of "tinfoil hat" people and acting like it's all a big joke. I wonder if it's some kind of deep seated coping mechanism to refuse to update beliefs on stuff like that
Me too, but despite having thousands of threads containing millions of comments on this topic over the years, we seem to never make any forward progress on these things. Maybe this approach is not optimal, perhaps not even remotely?
Something very common I've noticed in threads like this: notice how many people make what appear to be factual statements (they are stated in the form of facts), for which there is quite literally no way to acquire the knowledge in the first place. And also consider: these conversations are taking place on Hacker News, and presumably, the intelligence level (actual knowledge, capacity to execute logic with skill, etc) here is much higher than one would find in more normal communities.
As a though experiment: what if a way could be found to coerce the people in a community to behave differently than is being done in here? So, rather than each person imaging what is true (and then proceeding to believe that what they have imagined is actually true), what if people instead wondered what was actually true. This is much closer to how things work in science/engineering/software, and those domains tend to very reliably produce good results, and if this approach works there perhaps it could also work in this area as well.
Do you think this "way out there" theory may produce better results? (And if you have any recommendations for even greater improvements, I am all ears.)
Generally what actually happens is small parts or details are confirmed and others aren't so there's still a 'conspiracy theory' about some facts while others are just facts.
It’s a noisy world. There are people feeding the conspiracy theories, not because they want answers, but because it’s a business. Keep gathering facts and build the case.
This is a classic example of a fallacious argument. Just because (whatever about Epstein, an n of 1) is true doesn't mean that JFK was assassinated by the mob or anti-Communists, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that US elections are routinely rigged, or that lizard people secretly run our government from inside of the hollow Earth or whatever. There's no connection between these claims- they still have to be evaluated separately
Right, but if you find yourself (like me) dismissing MANY stories that sound "crazy" or like "conspiracy theories" but then turn out to be true at what point do you change your priors? I'm not saying you should update to "all conspiracies are true" I'm personally not sure how much I should update but it does seem like there is a hole in my world model that I keep making this mistake over and over (like everyone else)
>> I always find it interesting how when these things get revealed, nobody seems to update their priors on "conspiracy theories" going forward. A couple weeks after these stories break it's back to making fun of "tinfoil hat" people and acting like it's all a big joke. I wonder if it's some kind of deep seated coping mechanism to refuse to update beliefs on stuff like that.
> This is a classic example of a fallacious argument. Just because (whatever about Epstein, an n of 1) is true doesn't mean that JFK was assassinated by the mob or anti-Communists, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that US elections are routinely rigged, or that lizard people secretly run our government from inside of the hollow Earth or whatever. There's no connection between these claims- they still have to be evaluated separately
This is a classic example of a human being perceiving/describing reality in a way that is clearly and objectively not true....like, not even close.
Here you are explicitly making a claim that someone has argued something that they have not actually argued.
Your claim IS FALSE. And yet, you are criticizing the other person for "a fallacious argument". You do not only have it wrong, you have it BACKWARDS.
My intuition is that you are not intentionally being deceptive, but rather have done this accidentally. I am curious to know whether believe my intuition to be correct, or have any other comments about what is taking place here today?
Reading the article, there is little being revealed here? A good part of the documents are about victims. Others reveal that.. a billionaire socialite had some acquaintances?
This. If the documents were "thank you for inviting me to the island and introducing me to the very young girls" notes from famous people, I think the individuals involved would be fighting different court cases.
We've already got pics of him acquainting himself with two former POTUSes, I'm not sure docs referencing considerably less famous individuals in ways a judge considers to be largely already public information or innocuous detail are going to reveal much or add much more to the rumour mill. Though frankly, since it's Epstein people would read stuff into his pizza delivery orders.
> One of the eight individuals is Tom Pritzker, a billionaire executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels, who said the release of documents connecting him to the controversial financier would cause reputable harm, according to Insider.
> [Judge] Preska mostly disagreed with his concerns, saying many of the documents were already available in other legal challenges and that their contents did not specify malicious actions.
It's possible that there's nothing damning about Pritzker or others who raised objections, but there's still dirt on some of the other clients who didn't challenge this.
I wonder if the judge realises that people don't care about context, just shaping information to fit their current opinions. People don't care about facts unless they fit their confirmation bias. As Epstein purposefully cultivated friendships with as many rich & powerful people as possible, a lot of names were on his contact list but that implies no wrongdoing by those people. But the "no smoke without fire" brigade will claim them all as supervillains and part of the blood sucking illuminati, or whatever.
Epstein wasn't some one-dimensional cartoon villain who spent 100% of his time on his private island managing his evil enterprises.
He also had a pretty successful career in banking/finance/investing which made him a ton of money and was pretty active with that money as a philanthropist. He had a bazillion connections to leading businesspeople, politicians, celebrities, scientists, universities, and religious leaders due to those activities.
Because of that there is nothing really suspicious about someone being acquainted with Epstein. That's why there was not much of a stir previously when his contact list and the logs of passengers on his plane were leaked and widely distributed.
It looks like Epstein was in the business of creating and selling, or using for his own purposes, compromising material on powerful people. So I would prefer this is released without redaction.
The harm in Epstein's "work" is that it makes governments subject to manipulation and degrades representation. The only way to get past this problem is to reveal all and get compromised people, even if you like them, out of positions where they can be manipulated.
Well, do not look for those dangling in the webs of compromat, look at who pulls the strings.
So whose issues are voting senators for that were implicated with the Epstein case. Whoever it is, organizing those snychronous direction changes, holds the harddrives.
Who inherited the effect Jeffrey Eppstein had on his surroundings?
When someone dies, that person may have a beneficiary, like a son inheriting his father's wealth. If you inherit his business as well, that is like inheriting the effect he had on the world.
"Pulling the strings" is a puppet metaphor. The puppet represents a figurehead who does not make the real decisions. The puppeteer pulls the strings, and it looks like the puppet has agency. Using a puppet and "pulling the strings" is a way to camouflage one's actions and identity.
The "noted pathologist" is expert witness Dr. Michael Baden, of George Floyd fame (or infamy), who routinely confirms whatever the paying party requested[0].
Will this inform us to whether or not he was able to execute his plan to "seed humanity" he told so many people about? Does Jeffrey Epstein have dozens or more secret kids via this eugenics plan of his?
I suspect him to be involved with the gcc steering committee (via financing) and some disastrous decisions, like moving gcc code to c++ (aka destroying for good sane mainstream opensource software bootstraping). Hope nobody with interests to sabotage critical opensource software was in the acquaintances of this trash (cf GNU drama at the MIT, if I recall properly).
We know via the GNU drama from a few years ago that this trash was involved to some extend in financing GNU at the MIT (then very probably having some significant weight on some technical steering decisions).
How deep the rabit hole goes? That avoiding conspiracy stuff.
Readit News
The problem with this blend of specious reasoning is that to start off these conspiracy theories do not have any prior whatsoever. These conspiracy loons build their system of belief at best around flimsy conjectures, and reinforce their baseless beliefs on any noise that they manage to overfit around those.
A broken clock being right twice a day does not vindicate conspiracies around broken clocks.
Edit: Read the question again, and try to answer it. Let me rephrase the question:
How many times do you need to find out that something the media told you was "misinformation" or "a conspiracy theory" was actually true, to start questioning them a biiiit more?
This is precisely the problem of labeling all theories the powerful don't like "conspiracy theories".
I'm pretty certain that a substantial percentage of the most ridiculous conspiracies are posted online by paid shills to discredit all theories, so any dissenter can be labeled a "loon".
There are many reasonable people who believe the moon landing and reject the theory that "the world is run by satanists" but have many legitimate questions about the Epstein story.
For example, the theory that Epstein videotaped his "friends" for future blackmail is not in any way "loony". So the label "conspiracy theory" is entirely useless, we can only talk about individual cases.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
Recent enough for you?
I’ll update with more federal government conspiracies when I’m not in mobile.
Anyone that denies conspiracies exist knows no history…
- The category of things under the umbrella "conspiracy theory" are necessarily either all ridiculous or all plausible.
- There is some thread binding all conspiracy theories together such that if one is validated, the rest become more plausible (but not the other way around).
- Epstein's guilt and all of his acquaintances were considered to be a conspiracy theory in the "ridiculous" category by many.
- Baseless theories can not be true.
- If a theory turns out to be true, then any prior criticism of it is invalid or somehow "bad" and should not have been applied even at the time.
More than anything, though, this attitude insists on an "us vs them" model that antagonizes people who are, holistically taken, more reasonable than the imagined enemy.
I see those folks pat themselves out n the back when the flimsiest of “evidence” shows up.
Most conspiracy theories these days are a moving targets, involve innuendo, or incoherent.
Do you have time for conspiracy theories that are not baseless? Or, how about for ones that are actually true?
Or more generally speaking: do you have time to wonder about how much (genuine) interest you have in what is actually true, as well as believing only in what is actually true?
For example:
> I see those folks pat themselves out n the back when the flimsiest of “evidence” shows up.
What do you actually mean by this?
As a thought experiment...if you think of it in terms of a Venn diagram composed of:
- the entirety of all conspiracy theorists that exist
- conspiracy theorists who you have had exposure to
- conspiracy theorists who pat themselves out on the back when the flimsiest of “evidence” shows up
- conspiracy theorists who do not pat themselves on the back when the flimsiest of “evidence” shows up
...if you were to sketch these out on a piece of paper:
a) Do you think you would have difficulty drawing that diagram?
b) How would you go about deciding how much overlap for the circles?
c) How closely do you believe your diagram would match actual reality (assume that we have access to an omniscient being who knows the answers to all questions)?
For extra safety, I will also add this: "Inb4 Sealioning, JAQing off, and various other very common rhetorical/evasive techniques/behaviors that are deployed rather than simply engaging in good faith, honest discussion."
https://www.gizmosphere.org/inb4-origin-rise/
In general, I don't find that the specifics of conspiracies that come out were known before. It's not like people have been theorizing for years about X, then we find out that X is actually true. It's usually completely unrelated to the big conspiracy theories people are talking about.
So when a "conspiracy" comes out (and there's a question what we mean by conspiracy theory here,) when something like this comes out, I definitely update in the direction of "lots of things are happening in the world which I don't know about and might alarm me." But those things are usually far less impressive than real conspiracy theories make things seem.
I also update in the direction of "these kinds of things are hard to keep secret," since, after all, I'm hearing about them! Although I wonder how many things are never heard about?
In any case, the fact that it turns the FBI ran crazy programs in the 60s and we all know about it now does not cause me to update in the direction of "the moon landing is fake," or "9/11 was an inside job," or most conspiracy nonesense.
Me too, but despite having thousands of threads containing millions of comments on this topic over the years, we seem to never make any forward progress on these things. Maybe this approach is not optimal, perhaps not even remotely?
Something very common I've noticed in threads like this: notice how many people make what appear to be factual statements (they are stated in the form of facts), for which there is quite literally no way to acquire the knowledge in the first place. And also consider: these conversations are taking place on Hacker News, and presumably, the intelligence level (actual knowledge, capacity to execute logic with skill, etc) here is much higher than one would find in more normal communities.
As a though experiment: what if a way could be found to coerce the people in a community to behave differently than is being done in here? So, rather than each person imaging what is true (and then proceeding to believe that what they have imagined is actually true), what if people instead wondered what was actually true. This is much closer to how things work in science/engineering/software, and those domains tend to very reliably produce good results, and if this approach works there perhaps it could also work in this area as well.
Do you think this "way out there" theory may produce better results? (And if you have any recommendations for even greater improvements, I am all ears.)
Deleted Comment
Remember the Seth Rich “conspiracy theory“?
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/24/938545344/fox-news-settles-wi...
> This is a classic example of a fallacious argument. Just because (whatever about Epstein, an n of 1) is true doesn't mean that JFK was assassinated by the mob or anti-Communists, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that US elections are routinely rigged, or that lizard people secretly run our government from inside of the hollow Earth or whatever. There's no connection between these claims- they still have to be evaluated separately
This is a classic example of a human being perceiving/describing reality in a way that is clearly and objectively not true....like, not even close.
Here you are explicitly making a claim that someone has argued something that they have not actually argued.
Your claim IS FALSE. And yet, you are criticizing the other person for "a fallacious argument". You do not only have it wrong, you have it BACKWARDS.
My intuition is that you are not intentionally being deceptive, but rather have done this accidentally. I am curious to know whether believe my intuition to be correct, or have any other comments about what is taking place here today?
We've already got pics of him acquainting himself with two former POTUSes, I'm not sure docs referencing considerably less famous individuals in ways a judge considers to be largely already public information or innocuous detail are going to reveal much or add much more to the rumour mill. Though frankly, since it's Epstein people would read stuff into his pizza delivery orders.
Protesting that is pointless. The old saying, you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas, applies here.
> [Judge] Preska mostly disagreed with his concerns, saying many of the documents were already available in other legal challenges and that their contents did not specify malicious actions.
Looks like nothing damning is about to come out.
Not super likely though.
Deleted Comment
He also had a pretty successful career in banking/finance/investing which made him a ton of money and was pretty active with that money as a philanthropist. He had a bazillion connections to leading businesspeople, politicians, celebrities, scientists, universities, and religious leaders due to those activities.
Because of that there is nothing really suspicious about someone being acquainted with Epstein. That's why there was not much of a stir previously when his contact list and the logs of passengers on his plane were leaked and widely distributed.
The harm in Epstein's "work" is that it makes governments subject to manipulation and degrades representation. The only way to get past this problem is to reveal all and get compromised people, even if you like them, out of positions where they can be manipulated.
So whose issues are voting senators for that were implicated with the Epstein case. Whoever it is, organizing those snychronous direction changes, holds the harddrives.
Who inherited the effect Jeffrey Eppstein had on his surroundings?
"Pulling the strings" is a puppet metaphor. The puppet represents a figurehead who does not make the real decisions. The puppeteer pulls the strings, and it looks like the puppet has agency. Using a puppet and "pulling the strings" is a way to camouflage one's actions and identity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21399034
The "noted pathologist" is expert witness Dr. Michael Baden, of George Floyd fame (or infamy), who routinely confirms whatever the paying party requested[0].
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Baden
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
How deep the rabit hole goes? That avoiding conspiracy stuff.