conpiracy theories

[calimac]

Talking 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.

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

J's main reason for disbelieving most conspiracy theories is that they require an implausible number of people to keep a secret.

Indeed

[barondave.livejournal.com]

While conspiracy theories are hardly anything new, and refusal to believe official explanation goes back to the dawn of time, modern paranoia was charged up by the Kennedy Assassination. To make a long story short: The only thing we're really sure of is that the Warren Commission Report is valueless. That doesn't mean the official explanation isn't true, just that the investigation wasn't thorough enough to answer all the niggling side questions or definitively silence critics.

In college, I had a friend who was deeply into Illuminatus-type conspiracies. I liked The Illuminatus Trilogy because it was funny and made salient points about individual belief systems, not because it explained the world. I accused him of preferring the explanation which was the most unlikely. He readily admitted to it.

Your point 3 always bounced off Cold War saber rattlers. They constantly viewed the Soviet Union as a top-heavy oligarchy who controlled an unwilling army by spies and threats. Yet we had to spend trillions to prepare for Rocky IV-type super soldiers.

I don't think we know all the answers about 9/11. But we know a lot about the mechanics of the actual attack. My response to the "Cheney planted bombs" nonsense: It would have been more sphincter-clenching for the chickenhawks if the towers didn't fall, and we had half-destroyed towers looming over our largest city for months.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

That's just what they want you to think.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, most of those questions weren't raised until after the Warren Report came out.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Given a large enough number of people who would have had to keep the secret, you can usually find one who claims there was a conspiracy. I don't know if Gordon Cooper, who did not go to the Moon (though he wanted to, and might have felt there was a conspiracy to keep him out), believed in a Moon landing hoax, but he did believe that UFOs were alien spacecraft. There's always one, isn't there?

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Which shows what a bad job the Warren Commission did. And what happened to the Warren Commission? They were rewarded, and one of their least members became president, pardoning Nixon and continuing his tradition of ignoring unpleasantries and thereby raising even more suspicion.

I'm a big believer in what I have just now dubbed The Purloined Conspiracy meta-conspiracy: The biggest power grabs happen out in the open, and you just have to follow the money and trail of cronyism.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Not as bad a job as they would have done had the questions already been raised. Most of those questions are truly flaky, and would require a conspiracy theorist to think them up in the first place. I cannot blame the Commission's investigators for not having rebutted what had not yet come up. Their task was to compile the most coherent narrative of what happened, not to answer alternative ideas. That came later, and some of the Warren people were actively involved in that, including Ford.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Complex situations almost always have dangling loose ends, and by definition any situation with hundreds of people on the street is complex. In the Kennedy conspiracy theories, remember the Umbrella Man, who was seen walking away and closing an open umbrella on a bright, sunny day? Had he given a signal of some kind? I believe he surfaced in the 80s or 90s saying he had had it open as some kind of Republican protest against Kennedy.

I think there is a problem with the 9/11 report in that the committee had decided they needed to issue a unanimous report, which had the effect of concealing just what they had disagreed about or wanted further investigation into. Saying this does not mean I think the report is wrong or conceals a conspiracy; the conspiracy they document IS the one that brought down the WTC.

I'm with calimac about the implausibility of most conspiracy theories. In the case of claims about the WTC, such a conspiracy would assume the incompetence or covert involvement of the entire structural engineering profession, where a few nuts DO think the planes couldn't account for the level of damage, but there is widespread professional support for the conclusions of the various engineering investigations into what happened.

On, and one other issue that fuels the flames: the speed with which the site was cleared meant that not that much of the ruin was available for testing. I do not think the site was cleared to conceal information, but a conspiracy theorist would

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I absolutely agree with you about the biggest power grabs being right out in the open.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Just adding one or two more things. calimac's point 3 is especially important, that the supposed conspirators must be both brilliant geniuses and completely stupid at the same time. The real 9/11 conspiracy succeeded in part not because of its brilliance but because of the failure of outsiders to stop it at a number of times when the conspiracy could have been stopped. The reports of suspicious flying students; at the airports; on the planes themselves (see fl. 97) if it weren't known that most hijackings ended peacefully and with the planes landing safely.

I think Bruce Schneier has written interesting stuff about 9/11 and real security vs. security theater, but I have not read his books, only odd ends of his blog.

Oh, and re Cheney, well, I think he is an evil SOB, but not the kind of fantatic who would support an attack on his own country for personal gain. I mean, what he was able to funnel to Haliburton and the oil and defense companies as VP would suffice, you know?

[ellen-denham.livejournal.com]

Great post. One of the craziest theories I heard was that the planes that hit the towers were themselves full of extra fuel rather than passengers, to make for a bigger explosion. Ok, so what happened to the passengers that got on the planes? "They were all on the flight that went down in Pennsylvania." This would require planes landing, taking on fuel and force-marching passengers onto another plane, like air traffic control somewhere wouldn't maybe notice this?

I've also heard that the cell phone calls from that one plane that went down were clearly fake because "you can't use cell phones on a plane." Er...I don't think that one needs any rebuttal.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

In a nutshell, "can not" does not equal "may not."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The Umbrella Man claimed to have been trying to evoke the shade of Neville Chamberlain, mocking Kennedy's father for supporting appeasement of the Nazis. It does seem a rather lame explanation, I admit. But judging by the signs you see carried at contemporary "tea bag" protests, hardly uniquely so.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Ah, thank you for that clarification. I agree, that doesn't seem unusually odd.

[benjd.livejournal.com]

I see little reason to meet these types of conspiracy theories head on with rational responses. Doing so only lends legitimacy to what is patently illegitimate and absurd.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

Everyone talks about Haliburton as if it was some massive evil company that constantly beats out smaller, more worthy competitors in the area of huge overseas construction projects.

That fact is, Haliburton pretty much doesn't HAVE any competitors in that area. Very few companies have the resources to fund the transport of materials and engineers to throw up whatever construction is needed in far off international locations. And if the contract is a military one, it has to be approved by the government, and American companies get preference over foreign ones.

A long time ago, Haliburton chose to specialize in huge jobs that no one else could/would tackle. (My father worked for Brown & Root, which at the time was connected or owned by Haliburton, working in the nuclear power plant design division. There was hardly anyone else doing construction in that area.) So, basically, it became a monopoly for lack of competition. Hardly an evil plan. But it's so monolithic now, it's become an easy target for conspiracy.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Doesn't Bechtel have that kind of capability?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Corporate monopoly or near-monopoly is one of the surest and fastest roads to evil around. Halliburton deliberately chooses to make most of its money sucking at the government teat. That's why they chose a former Secty of Defense, White House Chief of Staff, and congressman as their CEO in the first place. It sure wasn't his experience in their ranks or at corporate governance.

Where I come from, this is called "corporate welfare" and passing out fat contracts to wealthy businessmen doesn't look as good as welfare which gives food and homes to, like, actual poor people.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm not addressing the glint-eyed conspiracy theorists. This is intended for innocent enquirers who may find the conspiracy theories superficially attractive and don't realize what's wrong with them. They won't learn unless it's explained.

Next up: Shakespeare authorship conspiracy theories.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

yep, yep, yep.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Bearing in mind also that the hijackers almost certainly did not have sufficient flying time and skill to land those planes and get them back in hte air.