conpiracy theories
Nov. 7th, 2009 07:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacTalking recently with a friend who believes that the WTC towers were brought down by a secret controlled demolition, and believes this mostly because it sounds like something Dick Cheney would do, I thought of a few criteria to evaluate conspiracy theories. These overlap, but they're different approaches.
1) Judge the theory by the theory's plausibility, not by the "received explanation"'s implausibility. Conspiracy theories generally derive their energy from beliefs that the facts as presented officially don't make sense. Often this doubt is driven by the Argument From Personal Incredulity. Or the conspiracy theorists have a bank of experts who sound really convincing so long as you have no idea what the arguments are against them. (This applies both ways, but take note which side actually rebuts the other's arguments, and which prefers to repeat the original claims.)
The question is, if perceived implausibilities generated the theory, what happens if the theory requires greater implausibilities than those it seeks to explain? Maybe the received explanation isn't as impossible as one side's experts say; or maybe that A is false doesn't mean that B is correct, as there may be a C. Matt Taibbi ran up against denialism on this when he interviewed a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Taibbi kept asking about the holes in the conspiracy theory, and the theorist kept replying that he didn't care about the holes in his theory; he was only interested in the holes in the official explanation. They went around on this several times, because it was a good question that the theorist had no answer to.
2) Watch out for conspiracy giveaways. Does the conspiracy theory require the conspirators to act in a way that would reveal the existence of the conspiracy? The 9/11 conspiracy theory argues that the towers were deliberately demolished because the plane fuel wasn't hot enough to weaken them, and they wouldn't have pancaked straight down if they had collapsed. These are actually "dueling experts" questions. But let's make the assumption, and see what happens.
First we must assume that Bush/Cheney and their minions either controlled the hijackers (which requires a degree of finesse they never otherwise showed) or knew precisely what the hijackers planned to do (which requires a mastery of intelligence gathering they never otherwise showed, and a surprising faith in the hijackers' competence), and allowed it to go ahead to stampede the American people into war. Now, look at it from their point of view. First, they must have decided that merely crashing the planes into the buildings wasn't horrible enough to achieve the desired effect; the buildings had to collapse. So then they had to have snuck the heavy explosives into the buildings without anyone noticing. (I asked my friend when this was done. The reply was, "The previous night." Uh-huh. See point 1 above.) But if they wanted the maximum destruction, wouldn't having the buildings topple over sideways been even more impressive by that standard? And if it's impossible for a naturally falling skyscraper to pancake, isn't that a sure giveaway that would spoil the plan?
So if it was a conspiracy, it took a mindbogglingly stupid risk in collapsing the buildings at all, and even more in having them pancake, and something is seriously wonked in your account of that conspiracy. Or maybe the official experts are correct and it was possible for the buildings to collapse under the conditions and in the way they did, in which case you've lost your proof that there was a conspiracy at all. You can't have it both ways.
3) Watch out for theories that require the conspirators to be simultaneously master planners and complete morons. My favorite example here is the Moon landing conspiracy theory. One of the major arguments that it was a hoax is that no stars appear in the photos taken from the surface. So we are asked to believe that NASA fired rockets into space, convinced everyone the astronauts were on them, generated reams of fake telemetry data that held up through the most careful examination, carefully calibrated the increasing transmission delay in communications, and so on - and yet somehow forgot to paint fake stars on the ceiling of their Moon surface sound stage. Oops.
Actually, the explanation is simple. The Moon's surface is very bright in daytime, and the camera's exposures were turned down to a level that was too low for the stars to appear. If there had been stars in the pictures, that would have been the sign of a fake - and even today with the finest CGI, it's hard to make fake stars that look like the real thing.
1) Judge the theory by the theory's plausibility, not by the "received explanation"'s implausibility. Conspiracy theories generally derive their energy from beliefs that the facts as presented officially don't make sense. Often this doubt is driven by the Argument From Personal Incredulity. Or the conspiracy theorists have a bank of experts who sound really convincing so long as you have no idea what the arguments are against them. (This applies both ways, but take note which side actually rebuts the other's arguments, and which prefers to repeat the original claims.)
The question is, if perceived implausibilities generated the theory, what happens if the theory requires greater implausibilities than those it seeks to explain? Maybe the received explanation isn't as impossible as one side's experts say; or maybe that A is false doesn't mean that B is correct, as there may be a C. Matt Taibbi ran up against denialism on this when he interviewed a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Taibbi kept asking about the holes in the conspiracy theory, and the theorist kept replying that he didn't care about the holes in his theory; he was only interested in the holes in the official explanation. They went around on this several times, because it was a good question that the theorist had no answer to.
2) Watch out for conspiracy giveaways. Does the conspiracy theory require the conspirators to act in a way that would reveal the existence of the conspiracy? The 9/11 conspiracy theory argues that the towers were deliberately demolished because the plane fuel wasn't hot enough to weaken them, and they wouldn't have pancaked straight down if they had collapsed. These are actually "dueling experts" questions. But let's make the assumption, and see what happens.
First we must assume that Bush/Cheney and their minions either controlled the hijackers (which requires a degree of finesse they never otherwise showed) or knew precisely what the hijackers planned to do (which requires a mastery of intelligence gathering they never otherwise showed, and a surprising faith in the hijackers' competence), and allowed it to go ahead to stampede the American people into war. Now, look at it from their point of view. First, they must have decided that merely crashing the planes into the buildings wasn't horrible enough to achieve the desired effect; the buildings had to collapse. So then they had to have snuck the heavy explosives into the buildings without anyone noticing. (I asked my friend when this was done. The reply was, "The previous night." Uh-huh. See point 1 above.) But if they wanted the maximum destruction, wouldn't having the buildings topple over sideways been even more impressive by that standard? And if it's impossible for a naturally falling skyscraper to pancake, isn't that a sure giveaway that would spoil the plan?
So if it was a conspiracy, it took a mindbogglingly stupid risk in collapsing the buildings at all, and even more in having them pancake, and something is seriously wonked in your account of that conspiracy. Or maybe the official experts are correct and it was possible for the buildings to collapse under the conditions and in the way they did, in which case you've lost your proof that there was a conspiracy at all. You can't have it both ways.
3) Watch out for theories that require the conspirators to be simultaneously master planners and complete morons. My favorite example here is the Moon landing conspiracy theory. One of the major arguments that it was a hoax is that no stars appear in the photos taken from the surface. So we are asked to believe that NASA fired rockets into space, convinced everyone the astronauts were on them, generated reams of fake telemetry data that held up through the most careful examination, carefully calibrated the increasing transmission delay in communications, and so on - and yet somehow forgot to paint fake stars on the ceiling of their Moon surface sound stage. Oops.
Actually, the explanation is simple. The Moon's surface is very bright in daytime, and the camera's exposures were turned down to a level that was too low for the stars to appear. If there had been stars in the pictures, that would have been the sign of a fake - and even today with the finest CGI, it's hard to make fake stars that look like the real thing.
