sundin13 said:
While most of this post is just hilarious, I someone agree that the conspiracy theory crowd isn't just individuals who don't do their research. Most of the individuals I have spoken to who have been involved in conspiracy theories have known quite a bit about the topics they are speaking on (the quality of that information though is questionable). The issue however, I think is two-fold: This leads into a sort of positive feedback loop where the individual finds a piece of information which goes against the mainstream knowledge, then snowballing into more and more pieces of information, with the individual putting less and less effort into verifying each one that agrees with them and going to greater and greater lengths to justify disbelieving the pieces that disagree with them. As such, conspiracy minded individuals often accept poor sources of information that validate their beliefs and refute strong sources of information that contradict them, because at the crux of this whole issue is the fact that what matters is not the truth. What matters is the conspiracy. At some point, the end becomes the means. I think it was a different forum, but not too long ago I was discussing I believe the Kavanaugh confirmation with someone who was more than a little conspiracy minded. They then unloaded a conspiracy on me which stated that the accuser's father was not only tied to the CIA, but was also coordinating with Russia (as per Russian sources) to bring down Trump (or something along those lines). Needless to say, it seemed a little farfetched to me, so I looked into the individual who wrote the article (it was on some fringe website that looked like it was out of 1999). In doing so, I found an article by this individual who stated that their Russian sources had confirmed that there was a big conspiracy involving Pluto, where it was removed as a planet to hide the religious symbolism to keep people from realizing that it was soon going to crash into the Earth (I wish I still had that url. It was glorious). I then pointed this out and laughed him out of the conversation. What had happened is the conspiracy became the means of explanation here. It was no longer the end result of "skepticism". Because really, what skepticism was put into that information? None. It was something which fit into the conspiracy, so it was blindly accepted. And I think this is common in conspiracy minded individuals. They will do research and find information that no one else has even looked at, but will not apply their so called "skeptical" principles to that information as long as it fits the narrative. |
The problem is that if there is an actually conspiracy, then by definition, the evidence is being hidden. If the evidence is hidden, you can't access it, or at least can't confirm it, so you can have no justification in believing it.
If there actually is verifiable evidence, then you can present it, and it's not actually a conspiracy theory.
I think it is by definition impossible to have sound reasoning for believing a conspiracy theory. Even if it winds up being true (which has happened in the past), that doesn't mean there was good reason to believe it before the evidence came out.
