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Josh and Brian Examine the Evidence
23 Plays2 years ago
Brian and Josh look at "Conspiracy theories on the basis of the evidence", another paper from the ever-elusive Dr. M Dentith.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Discussion on Conspiracy Theories
00:00:09
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Edison and Professor Brian L. Keeley.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy here in Auckland, New Zealand. I'm Josh Addison and in Claremont, USA, it's professor of philosophy and tree falling in the woods where no one's around. Professor Brian L. Keeley. Good to see you, Josh. Glad to meet up with you again. Another week of conspiracy theories and philosophy. Indeed. So we've we've got another paper to look at this week, and it's another one by that that wacky individual in Denton.
00:00:47
Speaker
doing their thing off in Zhuhai, China. You're contemporary in my former, I would just say drinking buddy, but I don't actually drink, but we did go on a few pub crawls at university. So I guess that counts. I was having, I was on the soft drinks, but.
00:01:01
Speaker
Yes, so it's not the first time we've heard from Dr. Dentist, probably won't be the last. But this one, this particular paper is called Conspiracy Theories on the Basis of the Evidence. And it
Evidential Basis of Conspiracy Theories
00:01:14
Speaker
was a bit of a long one. I think you might have to stop me from time to time if I start flying through this too quickly because
00:01:23
Speaker
Well, I can read the abstract and get us get us going here. So yeah, conspiracy theories on the basis of the evidence. So the abstract is conspiracy theories are often portrayed as unwarranted beliefs, typically supported by suspicious kinds of evidence.
00:01:44
Speaker
Yeah, contemporary work in philosophy argues provisional belief in conspiracy theories is at the very least understandable. Interesting typo in the abstract there. Let me let me let me read that as the way I think it was meant to be written. Yeah, contemporary work in philosophy argues in the belief argues provisional belief in conspiracy theories is at the very least
00:02:08
Speaker
understandable because conspiracies occur. If we take an evidential approach, judging individual conspiracy theories on their particular merits, belief in such theories turns out to be warranted in a range of cases. Drawing on this work, I examine the kinds of evidence typically associated with conspiracy theories, showing that the evidential problems typically associated with conspiracy theories are not unique to such theories.
00:02:33
Speaker
As such, if there is a problem with conspiracy theorists' use of evidence, it is one of principles. Is the principle which guides their use of evidence somehow in error? I argue that whatever we may think about conspiracy theories generally, there is no prima facie case for a skepticism of conspiracy theories based purely on their use of evidence. It's one of these papers where they try to argue that
00:03:02
Speaker
You know, sure, conspiracy theorists have some dodgy use of evidence, but that's not unique to conspiracy theories, right? That the bad theories of all types, one of the things that makes bad theories bad theories of all types is a misuse of data or misuse of evidence in one way or another. But there is no kind of unique thing about conspiracy theories when they are bad, that they make a particular kind of mistake.
00:03:30
Speaker
And I have to say, from the abstract, I was nodding my head, thinking like, OK, yeah, I like where this is going. So I was excited to read on to see what Emma had to say.
Structure and Analysis of the Paper
00:03:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And I think there's a lot of, there's a lot familiar here going through. I think we'll see, there's a lot of reference to earlier papers that we've seen before, which is why I think maybe we can skip quickly over some of the parts as they're summarizing things we already know, but it's, yeah, so going through a whole lot of existing stuff, but all specifically through the lens of evidence and how evidence comes into play when you're looking at these things called conspiracy theories.
00:04:11
Speaker
So we have a bit of an introduction, which begins, there is, it is fair to say, a stigma about against conspiracy theories in popular discourse. After all, there are an awful lot of theories about putative conspiracies, and many of them, at least some of us think, are poorly evidenced. And then goes through the familiar, to us at least, definition of a conspiracy theory while maintaining that they should be assessed on the evidential merits.
Selective Evidence in Conspiracy Theories
00:04:40
Speaker
And then says, as will be argued in this article, the kinds of evidence conspiracy theories appeal to when proposing or defending their conspiracy theories are not that problematic when considered properly. If there is an issue with the evidence used in support of conspiracy theories, then it is an issue of principle. The evidence is being abused or just not being used appropriately. To show this, we'll examine the kinds of problematic evidence and evidential practices associated with conspiracy theories. And then just gives a bit of a rundown of the sections that we will be going through now.
00:05:10
Speaker
And then concludes the introduction of the quick little subpoint section 1.1 on conspiracy theorists, basically just pointing out, referring to Charles Pigdon's earlier work, that the term conspiracy theorist may have pejorative connotations, but we're all conspiracy theorists one way or another.
00:05:28
Speaker
The thing I like about the paper also is I'm often telling my students when they're writing papers that I think I've always heard it referred to as the public speaker's rule of thumb, which is there's three rules. Tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them, and then tell them what you told them. This paper nicely sets up the telling them what he's going to tell us, and then they're going to get into the actual telling us, and then nicely they wrap it up nicely at the end.
00:05:56
Speaker
Yes, yes, no, definitely good, good bit of structure to it. But so we move into section two, two of nine, I should say, a lot of sections, a lot of sections, but some of them are some of them are big and some of them are smaller. But two, so this first section is quite one of the bigger ones, I think it's
00:06:14
Speaker
called evidence selection and manipulation. And it starts by saying people worry about the way in which conspiracy theorists present evidence for their conspiracy theories. And it goes on to talk about the specific worry they have that we're talking about here, specifically selectiveness, which is defined as the presentation of carefully selected propositions from a wider pool of evidence
00:06:36
Speaker
to make a candidate explanation look warranted when otherwise it might not be. It goes through the examples of 9-11 truth conspiracy theories as an example of things that people say can be quite selective with their evidence, which is something I remember
00:06:55
Speaker
looking at the loose change documentary in the past. That was one where a major complaint to that is that it is quite selective with the evidence it chooses to show to us or out of all the possibility. So Em says, there are two kinds of alleged selectiveness on the part of the conspiracy theorist here. The first is the selection of snippets of the total evidence. And the second follows from the first that the framing of this evidential subset is strongly suggesting a particular conclusion.
00:07:25
Speaker
So yes, again, I mean, the loose change example, when people notoriously would look at all the photographs of wreckage on the lawn of the Pentagon and pick the one of them where there isn't actually a lot of wreckage and frame and say, oh, look, where's all the wreckage? I think that's a very blatant example of it, but there are lots there.
00:07:46
Speaker
So then he refers to Kassim Kassam, who we've looked at before, and his, if you recall, his fictional conspiracy theorist, Oliver, who he used as his example in that paper of his, he says,
Gullibility and Evidence Selection
00:08:01
Speaker
Kasim Kasam, using the example of a fictional conspiracy theorist, Oliver, puts the second kind of select of this down to the epistemic vice of gullibility on the part of conspiracy theorists generally. But the answer to that is that every explanation involves selecting evidence to some extent. I mean, there's way more evidence than can ever be presented in any one particular case.
00:08:23
Speaker
So as Ian puts it, as such, the worry about the selective use of evidence with respect to conspiracy theories must center on the question of whether the subset of evidence was manipulated to suggest a conclusion that might not follow should we have access to the total evidence. And so it seems Kasam thinks that conspiracy theorists use selective evidence because they're gullible. But even if gullibility is the issue, this Oliver the fictional conspiracy theorist
00:08:49
Speaker
they're not gullible because they're a conspiracy theorist. Gullibility might be a problem, but it's not due to the fact that they're putting forward the conspiracy theory. Yeah. And we also have that line from, I think it was Charles Pigdon's response that, you know, kind of throwing that charge back in Kasam's face and saying, wait a minute, how are you just not being gullible and accepting the, you know, the official story, right? It's not like,
00:09:15
Speaker
It's not like Kasam has given us any strong evidence that he's investigated 9-11 and looked through the reports and has concluded on the basis of that careful consideration of the evidence that it wasn't an inside job, that it was exactly as the official story says. Kasam may have done that, but there's no evidence of that, which leaves him open to the possibility that, well, aren't you just simply being gullible? You're committing
00:09:42
Speaker
you're committing the exact same fallacy just in the opposite direction or in favor of the opposite conclusion. I guess it's not gullible. There's almost this idea that, well, it's not gullible if it leads you to the truth. Then we have this antecedent reason for thinking this is true and therefore, but hold on. That's just, again, begging the question.
00:10:02
Speaker
Yeah. So Em has found the point that worries about selective evidence, they're not an issue for only conspiracy theories. Any discipline needs to look out for it.
Disinformation and its Impact on Conspiracy Theories
00:10:13
Speaker
Em says that people select evidence because A, citing all the available evidence would clutter the narrative and B, only some of the available evidence is salient. And this sort of the salience of the evidence becomes the major issue.
00:10:27
Speaker
And this is actually one of the spots where I kind of take issue with M's argument, because I think as M lays it out, the historians, I mean, yes, I give him the idea that selection on its own is not the problem, right? Because as M points out, everybody selects, right? You just can't conduct life.
00:10:49
Speaker
or conduct any kind of a case without being selective. Life's too short to give all the evidence, especially when you think about the fact that you might have to wait around for some evidence. Not all the evidence is ever in because we're always collecting and things are resulting from investigations. But then M goes on to say, oh, but both are selective.
00:11:09
Speaker
And then points out, you know, here are some reasons why historians, for example, are selective, right? They don't cite all the evidence because it would clutter their narrative, and they only, you know, only some of the evidence is salient. But that then points to, I think, what is, you know, what somebody like Qasam can come back and say,
00:11:26
Speaker
Yeah, the point I was making is not that it was selective per se, but it was unprincially selective as you know, like these are some principles for for why you might be selective. And especially the worry like the example you just gave a few minutes ago of somebody who's going through the photos of the Pentagon plane crash and then pulling out specifically the ones that support their hypotheses and selectively ignoring the ones that undermine their hypothesis. It's like that's not just
00:11:55
Speaker
you know, picking things out on the element of salience and it's not just picking out things because it would clutter the narrative, that seems to be selective in a very pernicious way, right? It's actually the principle of selection is, does it make my thesis look correct? And that seems to be a form of selectivity that, you know, if any given conspiracy theorist who were to do that,
00:12:17
Speaker
or any theorist, and I think that's going to be part of him's point is any theorist that's badly selective in that way is going to have a bad theory.
Errant Data and Falsifiability
00:12:26
Speaker
Still willing to give him the point that this is not anything unique or special to conspiracy theories, but at least my impression is that when people make this selectivity argument against conspiracy theorists, it's because they are at least positing a particular trend that people are starting with their
00:12:45
Speaker
thesis, and then selectively picking the evidence cherry picking maybe as a better phrase than selectivity, as cherry picking is a very specific kind of selectivity that is problematic. Yeah, yes, I think that's going to say that
00:13:01
Speaker
the method by which you select evidence is sort of principled. Actually, I might as well just quote rather than tangle myself up in my own words. In each of these cases, there's a principle involved which explains not just why the evidence has been selected, but also what counts as evidence.
00:13:19
Speaker
That is, the theoretical underpinnings of our inquiries informs our judgments about what even counts as salient evidence in these cases. So I think maybe the accusation of someone being selective really needs to be the accusation that someone has applied to the wrong principle to the method of selecting evidence. They're being selective in the wrong way, such as cherry-picking. But this section finishes up with the paragraph.
00:13:46
Speaker
What seems to motivate our worry about the conspiracy theorists use of selective evidence is our belief that conspiracies are unlikely or irrational to believe. That is to say we judge the evidential merit of conspiracy theories on the principle that evidence for such theories must be hard to come by. Thus the apparent and compelling evidence for a particular conspiracy theory must be the product of some
Influence of Past Conspiracies on Current Perceptions
00:14:06
Speaker
kind of misrepresentation.
00:14:07
Speaker
Yeah. And I think my, I mean, I agree with the ultimate conclusion that M comes to here. I just, I just find this, I mean, maybe it's because we've got nine sections and M is trying to get through a variety of different points. It just seems to me that a little bit, a little more, a little more argumentation would need to be required to really nail down this point that I think ultimately can be nailed down. But
00:14:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's my takeaway on this. I'm not too bothered because I think ultimately the conclusion is right, but I think there might be still a little bit more of the dialectical back and forth would have to be explored to show, really nail down the point. Yeah, so there's another little section 2.1, a little little addendum to this bit on checks and balances, which just basically brings up the point that
00:14:54
Speaker
um there is you can guard against um evidence which has been badly selective however you define badly um but certainly by the fact that it's possible theoretically at least to check the entire body of evidence yourself and you know it is possible we can say that say the the photographs of the
00:15:18
Speaker
Pentagon lawn and loose change were cherry picked and badly selected because we can ourselves go and look at all of the photographs and say, oh, hang on, they've only picked the ones that suit their case. So there is a possibility of a balance against that unless there isn't, which there is. There is then the case that, you know, sometimes things are classified sometimes when you're talking about stuff where the the total body of evidence isn't actually available to the general
Fortuitous vs. Fortunate Data
00:15:44
Speaker
public.
00:15:44
Speaker
And in that case, you can possibly have a problem. But that's just a little side point. In the past, we've seen bits and papers where there's a little section added that seems a little bit out of place. We're not quite sure where it's there. I've since been told that basically any time you see something like that, it's because it's to shut up a reviewer, essentially. That's my understanding. It's a response to reviewer number two. Somebody here made a point. So maybe this one first.
00:16:14
Speaker
At any rate, the paper continues on to talk about Europe's data, referring to some fellow called Brian L. Keeley, I think. Not sure. That loser again. Okay. Well, let's see what they say. Sounds like an interesting fellow. Talking about
00:16:30
Speaker
errant data, in particular, two kinds of errant data, the errant unaccounted for data, namely data which supports one explanatory hypothesis, which is unaccounted for, is not mentioned or explained by some rival, and then errant contradictory data, which is data cited in favor of one explanatory hypothesis, which contradicts another rival hypothesis. And so this basically goes, essentially goes through your papers when you talked about the stuff in the past.
00:16:59
Speaker
But I think they do a pretty decent job laying it out. And I think it largely agrees with me. So I agree with everything here. Yes. Yep. Excellent. Yeah. I mean, it says that in most cases, theories which are rival to one and rivals to one another, conspiracy or otherwise, will cite some data which is errant to each other. So the citation of errant contrary data is no, to quote Hugh Mark of The Incredible,
00:17:22
Speaker
It is. I was just going to point out this in the paper he's talking about. I mean, part of my part of my argument for bringing that up was exactly the kind of point that M is making in this paper, that there's nothing unique to conspiracy theories. We, you know, it's it's you know, it's.
00:17:39
Speaker
It's the strange location of Mercury with respect to the planet Mercury with respect to Newtonian mechanics.
Secret Evidence and Its Justification
00:17:45
Speaker
That is the piece of errant data that then you start kind of pulling on that string of like, why isn't, you know, Newton tells us to expect the orbit of Mercury to be this, but it's slightly off.
00:17:57
Speaker
hmm, why is that? That seems errant with respect to the theory. And then that then ends up becoming one of the major pieces of evidence in favor of Einsteinian relativity, because that's the bit that leads you away, whereas the Einsteinian theory largely agrees with Newtonian theory, except on when you're really close to a large gravitational object, the way that Mercury is so close to the sun.
00:18:21
Speaker
And yeah, which I think is the kind of point that M is making in this paper of like, yeah, this sort of, this sort of evidential work is the same work that non-conspiratorial theories do all the time. Yeah. I mean, M does say that contradictory data can be a problem, saying normally if we discover evidence which contradicts a particular explanatory hypothesis, then that is reason enough to reject it. But then the point is that, as you say, that's not an issue that's specific to conspiracy theories.
00:18:50
Speaker
in any way at all. It's an issue, but it's not something that would allow you to say and therefore conspiracy theories are a suspect in and of themselves. And so then this
Viability of Large Conspiracies
00:19:01
Speaker
then leads into a discussion of a topic which I believe is a favorite of the ends, disinformation, which is defined as the activity of presenting fabricated or manipulated information to make some explanatory hypothesis look warranted according to the evidence when it might not be.
00:19:17
Speaker
And Ian does point out that it need not just be the product of institutional corruption or conspiracies undertaken by members of influential institutions, individuals, for example, can disinform others. So it gives an institutional example of the dodgy dossier, as it was called, to justify the Eurasian of Iraq in 2003. But you can have, yeah, they need not be as as earthshaking as that.
00:19:42
Speaker
So this one has a few, a few subsections, the disinformation discussion, starting with, let me ask you though, I was kind of struck by the the line that him has about yeah individuals for example can just inform others you might just inform friends about your own activities in order to ensure
00:20:00
Speaker
that they do not know what you've been up to. And I kind of bumped on that a little bit because I think of disinformation as being importantly different from simple lying and what what him describes about individuals. Yes, individuals do lie to mislead others, but
00:20:16
Speaker
I always, and maybe I'm just wrong about this, but I've always thought of the term disinformation as being more involved than that, right? It's not this simply testifying falsely, but things like the Dajidasiye, right? Where you actually generate, like as it says, presenting fabricated or manipulated information, right? Where you present the testimony of others that has been fabricated or manipulated in particular way or other evidential sorts of things.
00:20:44
Speaker
I found it odd to think of disinformation in the more kind of day-to-day situation. Like I said, I just bumped on that. I don't know if anything really important follows from that, but it just hit me as odd to say that when I lie to you about where I was Tuesday night because I don't want you to know that I was hanging out with another podcaster behind your back, that that is disinformation. It's like, no, I was just lying to you.
00:21:07
Speaker
I was misleading you. But if I were to create, you know, if I were able to, if I, I guess I could imagine if I created fake receipts and left them for you to find so that you would have fake evidence that I wasn't, I don't know how, I don't know what the hell, I don't know. I don't know if I can follow this story out, but I feel like it would have to be more involved in a case of disinformation.
00:21:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think you might just inform your friends about your own activities. I think you probably just plain lie and you'd need to do something a bit more intricate for it to count as disinformation. But yeah, moving on to the section on counter-effects and falsifiability. So this is talking about papers we've seen before from Susan Feldman and also your good self.
00:21:51
Speaker
The relationship between errant data and falsifiability. So if he was looking at Feldman, she says that quoting explanations which rely on errant data are unfalsifiable and thus irrational to believe by default. Whereas you argued in an earlier paper that falsifiability isn't so much a problem, that if there really is a conspiracy in existence, then it's not unreasonable to suspect disinformation might be produced to cover it up.
00:22:17
Speaker
I think a footnote refers to the works of Steve Clark and Lee Basham as well, making similar points. I know we've talked about this before, that you get the case where, this almost is a case where conspiracy theories are a special case, but it works in their favour, I think, rather than being against them just because
00:22:38
Speaker
If we believe conspiracy, conspiratorial activity is taking place, then part of that activity could very well be coverups and disinformation and deception and so on. So it's not irrational to encounter that. And then also there's the point simply that not all conspiracies involve disinformation.
00:22:56
Speaker
Em says, as such, Feldman is wrong to claim that conspiracy theories which suggest the production of disinformation are automatically irrational to believe, given that
Toxic Truths and Social Impact
00:23:05
Speaker
errant data, both contrary and contradictory, can be a feature of any explanation. We have to assess claims about said data on a case-by-case basis. Good old particularism.
00:23:15
Speaker
There we go. But then this leads on to section 4.2, the disinformation section of probabilities, which is, Em introduces it by saying, this leads us to an interesting worry. If you think the government has used disinformation in the past, then it's not unreasonable to suspect they might still be producing it now. And this gets into the discussions we've seen before in various places on sort of the nature of society, the open society versus the closed society. And
00:23:42
Speaker
What would a society in which we could be certain that this sort of conspiratorial activity isn't going on would look like and it doesn't appear to look like the society we currently live in? Yes, yes. So M wraps this up by saying, the history then of past conspiratorial activity cannot be easily swept away. The principle at stake here is that if we're going to dismiss claims of disinformation and the like,
00:24:04
Speaker
And we need some argument to the extent we have good reason to think the past incidents of conspiratorial activity tells us little about the possibility such activity is occurring here and now. And it doesn't seem entirely true that we can. So again, as I said before, I'm sort of zipping through these things fairly quickly because they're things we've talked about before. But moving straight on to the last subsection here, which is section 4.3 fortuitous and fortunate data.
00:24:30
Speaker
And now we're looking at the Boonting and Taylor paper, which I think that's the one that introduced particularism and generalism as turns to this film. It is, but this is probably what they thought they were introducing, this idea of fortuitous data. I mean, the thing that shows up in the title of their paper. So it's nice to be reminded that that's what those two authors thought they were talking about. Yes.
00:24:56
Speaker
Yeah, so they talk about their fortuitous data, which defining fortuitous data is something which one, supports the official story, but two, fits the official story too well, is too good to be true. And finally three, the lucky nature of the data is left unexplained by the official story.
00:25:16
Speaker
So in this case, fortuitous data is purported evidence for a particular theory, which is lucky in the sense the luckiness of the data suggests it has been fabricated or tempered with. But data which is lucky might just turn out to be fortunate, and fortunate data as we define it is
00:25:32
Speaker
Data that one supports some theory and two is lucky. And the problem is it's kind of hard to distinguish between the two because the sort of the missing bit that isn't fortuitous is just this idea that it's too good to be true, which is a little bit vague how you determine whether something is too lucky to have simply just be good luck and whether it counts as evidence of something dodgy happening in the background.
00:25:58
Speaker
I thought this was one of the more interesting parts of the paper in terms of raising some new ideas. This distinction
Conclusion: Reassessing Conspiracy Theories and Evidence Use
00:26:07
Speaker
between fortuitous and fortunate is not something that I think I've seen anywhere else, and it's an interesting distinction.
00:26:14
Speaker
Also, it led me down a bit of a rabbit hole because when I saw fortuitous versus fortunate, I thought, well, aren't those just synonyms? Then I poked around and it turns out that actually M is correct, at least historically and etymologically, at least according to my Apple dictionary, there's four fortuitous, it defines it as happening by accident or chance rather than design.
00:26:43
Speaker
But then as a secondary meaning, it says, happening by a lucky chance, fortunate. But then you go down to usage and it has this nice passage where it says, the traditional etymological meaning of fortuitous is quote, happening by chance, close quote, a fortuitous meeting is a chance meeting, which might turn out either good, a good thing or a bad thing.
00:27:05
Speaker
In modern uses, however, fortuitous tends to be more often to be used to refer to fortunate outcomes, and the word has become more or less a synonym for lucky or fortunate. This use is frowned upon as not being etymologically correct and is best avoided except in informal contexts.
00:27:24
Speaker
I think in this particular more formal philosophical discussion, it's actually making nice use of these, even though synonymous in terms of colloquial usage, we treat them as synonyms, but instead points out that there actually is two different words that have two slightly different meanings, and that's what M is trying to capture with this particular distinction.
00:27:49
Speaker
Yeah. And what Boonting and Taylor were trying to get forwards in the original paper. So the two of them use the example of the 9-11 hijackers passport, which was found in the debris, which is something that people do jump on a lot and say, you know, that's a little too convenient, isn't it? Surely. But
00:28:10
Speaker
And this I'm sure this has come up before I specifically relating to this one claim that it's that that passport is too lucky to be true. And almost that particular claim to me seems meaningless without a wider context of evidence, because it's always that's the only thing people talk about as being recovered. But
00:28:30
Speaker
And if it were the only single artifact that came out of that airplane that managed to survive the explosion and land on the ground, then that would be really weird. But if it were the case that a bunch of debris ended up there and that just happens to be the notable one, then it would be a lot less.
00:28:46
Speaker
a lot less, quote unquote, lucky. But I don't, I honestly don't know whether or not that's the case. But anyway, M's M's reaction to this is that once it's true, the survival and discovery of El Sugami's passport is fortuitous in the sense that the survival of the passport given the surrounding circumstances is very lucky indeed.
00:29:05
Speaker
It is the fact the survival and discovery of the passport supports the official conspiracy theory of 9-11, which speaks to this admittedly unlikely event being so lucky as to be suspicious, i.e. fortuitous. That is, it is the fact the lucky nature of the data ends up supporting the official theory, but not the rival conspiracy theory that is doing the epistemic work here.
00:29:28
Speaker
So yeah, it's as it gets down into it, it's more patterns of data that you distinguish between something being fortunate and fortuitous and all comes back to probabilities, which I think we'll be talking about, which we sorry, which we just did talk about in the previous section.
00:29:45
Speaker
He says, as such, characterizing some piece of evidence for or against a particular conspiracy theory is either fortunate or fortuitous will tend to rely upon claims about just how unlikely or likely we think conspiracies are in a given context. So, yeah, any one particular bit of information that's
00:30:02
Speaker
It's almost impossible to say whether a single thing is too good to be true. You need to look at the wider context of what else is around and the sorts of things that the people you're making claims about have got up to in the past. I know I've had conversations with people before who've said they thought 9-11 must have been an inside job. And the reasoning was because it's the kind of thing they do, the government, they get up to dodgy stuff. That's all the evidence they needed. Right. Right.
00:30:29
Speaker
Anyway, moving on, we now go to a different kind of evidence in section five, which is secret evidence, which gets defined as some piece of purported evidence with a justification for the belief that the information presented as evidence is not just unexpressed, but is stated as being deliberately withheld. So this is the case where people tell you the evidence is there, but we can't tell you what it is. You've just got to trust me because it's classified or secret or bad things could happen if it went out.
00:30:56
Speaker
So in particular, in the paper uses the example of secret evidence cited as a reason to go into the war in Iraq in 2003. The end says, the problem with, talks about the problem with secret evidence saying, now, if such evidence is not supported with other non-secret evidence, then we should remain agnostic about its eventual weight. If the attempt at debunking of any claim, conspiracy theory or otherwise relies upon secret evidence,
00:31:22
Speaker
then it's reasonable to treat it with suspicion. Even in cases where the person citing such secret evidence appears credible and trustworthy, there's always the possibility that they are acting insincerely, unmistaken, or have been misled by someone else. So, yeah, sometimes there's good reason for keeping evidence secret, but that just, that then moves the question now onto, rather than is the evidence good, it becomes, is the reason for keeping the evidence secret good.
00:31:49
Speaker
Yeah. And I think also just another way in which it shifts things is that, I mean, if you wanted to be hard headed about it, you could just say secret evidence is never evidence, right? If, cause it's secret evidence is just evidence that has not been made available to you. The evidence in the case of secret evidence is the test, the public testimonial evidence from the person who claims to have seen the secret evidence. So, uh, you know, the, you know, so I either trust or distrust Colin Powell, uh,
00:32:17
Speaker
as they make, as they testify as to their knowledge of a situation. They know things that I don't know, but ultimately I judge the testimony of the person testifying, not the evidence itself. And I think in some sense, again, that's not very different from other cases. In the case of eyewitness testimony, I did not see it.
00:32:38
Speaker
I mean, maybe instead of calling it secret evidence, we should talk about occult evidence, evidence that is not available to me. It's occulted for me. I can't see it, but somebody else could see it. And the eyewitness tells me, I saw such and such happen on this particular time.
00:32:55
Speaker
And the evidence there is not the actual seeing of the person, it's the testimony of the person seeing it and I can judge their testimony. Are they likely to be lying to me? Are they in a position to have, you know, were they wearing their glasses if there's somebody who normally wears glasses and so forth. And the fact that it's secret is, I mean, yeah, I guess I don't see why necessarily this is any, you know, again,
00:33:16
Speaker
along with Em's main point here, this isn't very different from other cases. If it's evidence that I don't personally have access to and I have to rely on the testimony of somebody else, then we evaluate the testimony. I think it's not that much different from eyewitness testimony in the sense that they saw something that I can't see either because it happened in the past and therefore it's no longer to be seen or it is a cult for some other reason.
00:33:42
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So this section finishes saying, if there's a problem with secret evidence with respect to conspiracy theories, then it is to do with the patent of secret evidence used in support of such theories. However, given that secret evidence is found both in pejoratively labeled conspiracy theories and their rivals, and arguably is used more potently by public officials, we cannot claim the citation of secret evidence as an issue for conspiracy theories alone.
00:34:08
Speaker
which seems to be pretty much the theme for most of this paper. All these worries that people claim are things that make it so we can be suspicious of conspiracy theories actually apply all over the place. Now section six is another one of those I assume here to respond to a reviewer sections. It's a very short one. It's called the worry about evidence.
00:34:28
Speaker
It basically says that we assume conspiracies are rare or non-existent, which makes us evaluate evidence for them more harshly than we would if it was evidence for another sort of theory, or at least some people do. But it introduces this worry and then basically says that there are still worries about the way in which we talk about evidence generally.
00:34:49
Speaker
some of which suggest that our attitude towards evidence when it comes to conspiracy theories is problematic in a wider sense. So yes, it might just be a little side point to put in there to cover a particular gap. But now we're going to section seven, which is size and number, starting with
00:35:08
Speaker
sometimes it is claimed belief in conspiracy theories invokes conspiracies which are so big either with respect to how long they've been said to exist or the number of people involved that evidence for the conspiracy should be readily available and such the lack of said evidence is taken to be evidence against it. We might think of this as some claim like it's too big to be true and so here we're looking at Michael Barkan and David Grimes who've talked about this stuff before so we have
00:35:32
Speaker
Bakun talks about the classification of event systemic and superconspiracies, where he would say that theories about event conspiracies are rational, but theories about systemic and superconspiracies are not rational due to
00:35:50
Speaker
essentially, to their size in the unfalsifiability. The paper by David Grimes, which this is the one where he gave the mathematical model for why conspiracies of a certain size are prone to fail, and thus why belief in big conspiracy theories is irrational. I heard about that outside of academia, that particular paper, I think, because people love it when you can put numbers on something, I think.
00:36:18
Speaker
I mean, you can have an equation and say, you know, I remember at the time and say, you know, according to this, if this thing were really a conspiracy, it would have been found out in, you know, three months or this one could only couldn't have lasted more than a year before it was found out and so on and so forth. And yes, people like numbers, even when the numbers are really bad numbers, but they're numbers. Yes. Lovely, lovely, comforting, controllable numbers.
00:36:42
Speaker
So this Eames paper goes quickly runs, gives a quick overview of Grimes' paper, why it essentially doesn't work so well. Grimes' particular model assumes that conspiracies fail because of leaks, essentially either because someone within the conspiracy decides to be a whistleblower,
00:37:03
Speaker
and expose it, or someone within the conspiracy messes up and accidentally leaks information that gives up the game. And so, you know, his model is basically the more people there are, the more chances there are for someone to mess up, or the more chances there are for someone to become disaffected and decide to deliberately leak information. But the problem is the examples he uses in his paper, Grimes used
00:37:29
Speaker
Talking about the NSA's mass surveillance program, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the FBI forensics scandal. In all of those cases, the conspiracies were exposed by concerned outsiders, by journalists or investigators, not actually by people within the conspiracy. So the model that he's applying didn't even apply in his own examples. Yes. A case of selective use of the app? Yes, exactly.
00:37:59
Speaker
Yes, and yeah, questionably selective of that. So Em says, there is then a mismatch between Grimes' chosen examples and his theory about how leaks over time revealed and made these conspiracy theories, conspiracies redundant. His examples fail to capture the very thing he wants to measure. This is a problem for both his probability estimates and his subsequent predictions about the putative viability of alleged ongoing conspiracies here and now.
00:38:24
Speaker
As such, Grimes claimed that big conspiracies are unviable, and thus conspiracy theories about them are irrational, fails to get off the ground. Yet it's still instructive to look at how his model would fail to work, even if he had captured the right ideas to start with. And this leads him to section 7.1, which is conspiracies now.
00:38:42
Speaker
And so Grimes, having talked about those three examples previously, he went on to apply his model to conspiracy theories of the time, in particular, moon landing conspiracy theories, anthropogenic climate change, conspiracy theories around vaccines causing autism,
00:39:00
Speaker
and conspiracy theories around the covering up of potential cures for cancer. But even says that there's still a problem here saying the problem is that Grimes fails to distinguish between claims about the size of a conspiracy versus its putative structure. Grimes does not distinguish between different kinds of conspirators, let alone conspirators and whistleblowers.
00:39:20
Speaker
A conspiracy can look big, yet only a small number of people involved in it might know its full extent or aim. Some members of the conspiracy will be lackeys, goons, or even unwitting conspirators. Not everyone in the NSA may necessarily know that the data they are collecting and processing has been illegally obtained.
00:39:35
Speaker
and FBI agents who were using forensic evidence to secure convictions may not have been informed by senior personnel that the kind of evidence they were relying upon was of dubious merit. It's even possible to be involved in a conspiracy without realizing you're conspiring. Such size only really matters once you take into account the structure of the purported set of conspirators. Once you take that into account, you account the problem of information hierarchies.
00:39:58
Speaker
And this is a line that Lee Basham has pushed on many occasions. He gets cited in the next section on the toxic truths we're about to go into.
00:40:10
Speaker
Yeah, this kind of line, you just can't simply treat everybody as equal as Grimes wants to do and just say, you know, everybody from janitor to the head of NASA are, you know, equally in a position to divulge the conspiracy of the moon landing hopes.
00:40:29
Speaker
If you're in an organization where there's informational hierarchies and need to know basis, there may be a rather large organization, but only a small number of people within that organization are aware of the full story, or at least the relevant parts of the story.
00:40:46
Speaker
Yes. So unfortunately, it turns out that things are always more complicated than you'd like them to be when you want to boil it down to nice predictable little algorithms and beautiful numbers. But yes, as you say, this leads us into section eight, the final section before the conclusion, which is on toxic truths and those ideas introduced by Lee Basham
00:41:11
Speaker
where a toxic truth is evidence of a conspiracy that no one will touch or disseminate because of fears, negative social consequences. And so this is, yes, the idea that there could be evidence for a conspiracy theory that might even be widely known, but which nobody will touch or acknowledge, because if we were to accept it to be true, that that could be just have consequences that we don't want to suffer. You know, if you have
00:41:37
Speaker
evidence which shows that the entire government is criminals and working horribly against our interests. Maybe that's just too much, but maybe people just don't want to know that. Maybe things will just work a lot neater if we all just assume that actually things are fine or I'm not sure if this also evidence that could be suppressed for the good of everyone. I'm not sure if this comes into
00:42:01
Speaker
I'm not sure whether it counts as a toxic truth, the sort of thing where people are worried about it because of the effects it could have on them or their careers. I'm thinking of things like, I don't know, the old case of Jimmy Savile, where everybody had heard the rumors about the horrible things he was up to, but nobody, including like the press, seemed to want to publish it. I'm not sure if that counts as a toxic truth or not, but it seems an analogous sort of thing anyway.
00:42:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's it's it's funny. Also, this the what's interesting because I actually I've been I was just working on a paper chapter recently in which I wanted to also talk about toxic truths. And it's a bit frustrating because Lee has spoken a lot in like verbal presentations about toxic truths. But he has, as far as I can find, he hasn't published it very much. The paper that gets cited here, this paper from 2011 from Lee has the word toxic in it once.
00:42:57
Speaker
never uses the phrase toxic truth, although it's clearly the idea that, and I think the idea should be credited to Lee. It's just a little frustrating to lay it out as Lee himself wants to present it, because he's only, at least like I said, as far as I can tell, he's mostly given it in talks and so forth.
00:43:18
Speaker
But one of the ways in which he talks about toxicity in general is this idea that things that would threaten the bedrock of society itself, like no good would come up with this. Sure, we could throw one particular bad person in jail for doing some really bad thing, but if it leads to the downfall of civilization or the downfall of democratic government,
00:43:42
Speaker
maybe that's a price that I'm unwilling to pay, so I'm going to look the other way on this and not expose it. The Jimmy Saville case, yes, is one where lots of people know it. I mean, I just don't know how threatening it would have been. I don't know British culture enough to know whether, because maybe a lot of people would have been brought up in it, royal family and members of the government on both sides. Maybe lots of heads would have rolled
00:44:12
Speaker
because it had been covered up for so long, that maybe it really would have been threatening to the very fabric of society. Yeah, that particular case is one thing I never really understood either, why people were so reluctant to countenance the idea, and to the extent that I remember there was an interview with him by the Independent, I think one of the British newspapers,
00:44:37
Speaker
where they actually brought up the fact that surely any newspaper would love the scoop of outing this guy as a sex offender. And therefore, the fact that no newspaper has was used as evidence that, OK, there must be nothing to these allegations. It was very strange. But anyway.
00:44:55
Speaker
Moving more on topic to section 8.1, the next bit of this discussion on toxic truths is the polite society. And this is sort of a way that toxic truths can remain hidden by things that are polite fictions, that idea of a thing that everybody knows isn't true, but everybody acts as though it is true because it makes life a lot easier. I'm getting a lot of sirens going past my window. I don't know if you can hear that. Yes, I heard that one. That's the first one I've heard. Something exciting must be happening.
00:45:25
Speaker
Anyway, Em says that politeness and toxicity are all a matter of degree and context. Some things are politely ignored, giving the example of things like institutional racism and sexism. And some things are kept secret because letting the public learn the truth about them would be damaging. And he gives the example, which actually is an interesting one, of the unfortunate experiment, so euphemistically called here in New Zealand, which was
00:45:50
Speaker
It was similar to the Tuskegee experiment where it was a case that in this case, rather than syphilis, it was cervical cancer where women who had been diagnosed basically weren't told that they were being within part of a clinical trial and were deliberately undertreated to sort of examine this.
00:46:12
Speaker
I'm unfamiliar with this case. Was there anything that unified the women? Were they indigenous women, Mary? I imagine that wealthy folks probably weren't a part of this.
00:46:28
Speaker
Quite possibly. I don't know the demographic details. I just know that they essentially conducted an experiment without telling the people that they were involved in an experiment and some women were given less treatment than others so that they could see what happened. And so they're talking about this
00:46:48
Speaker
the suggestion could be that this is some sort of a toxic truth, because if the truth of it came out, that would lower the public's trust in medicine and the health institution as a whole. And that could have lots of bad flow on effects of people no longer trust the health system. That could be a defense for keeping it secret, but obviously it was
00:47:10
Speaker
brought to light as I believe it probably should have been. And may have had that effect. At least I know in the Tuskegee case, it had that effect on people trace the distrust of communities of color in the medical services exactly as a result of the Tuskegee experiment.
00:47:29
Speaker
The other thing about the Tuskegee experiment that was particularly insidious is that when the experiment started, there was no treatment for syphilis. It started out as, let's watch these people over time to see how syphilis naturally moves along. Then within a couple of years of the experiment starting, penicillin was discovered and discovered that it was actually a good treatment for syphilis. Instead of stopping the experiment at that point and treating the individuals,
00:47:59
Speaker
failed to pursue that option and in order because they didn't want to interrupt their experiment partway through because they had already dedicated a couple of years to it. And the fact that the that gave you an idea of how they felt about their actual subjects in these experiments that that they would be willing to use them in this particular way.
00:48:17
Speaker
Yeah, yes, no, definitely. So this finishes up. So we sort of toxicity and politeness are different, but very much intertwined things. And so M says the principle behind both toxicity and politeness is secure. There are certain truths about society which might be considered unspeakable, whether that be by edict from on high or by popularity. We cannot expect that evidence of a conspiracy or indeed any kind of wrongdoing
00:48:41
Speaker
will be automatically the subject of popular opprobrium. Indeed, given the continuing tendency to downplay the seriousness of sexual assault, the unwillingness by governments to acknowledge the lone address shocking inequalities in our societies, this shows that a certain amount of politeness or aversion to toxicity is still effective in society today. We do not need to talk about conspiracies or conspiracy theories to illustrate that.
00:49:01
Speaker
And that leads us into the conclusion. So Ian's now gone through a bunch of different kinds of evidence which have been suggested as being problematic for conspiracy theories. And I think as we saw, generally the answer was either it's not a problem or it's not a problem that's specific to conspiracy theories.
00:49:17
Speaker
So it all ends up in the conclusion, which I think is short enough that I could just read the whole thing. It goes, when looking at how evidence gets used, both in the support and condemnation of conspiracy theories, it turns out we cannot justify the claim conspiracy theorists have lacks evidential standards compared to the rest of us.
00:49:34
Speaker
Indeed, the kinds of evidence cited in support of conspiracy theories are also routinely found and cited in supportive theories which are not considered conspiratorial. It's interesting that we do not typically find such evidence or evidential practices to be problematic in those cases. We seem to have introduced a high evidential threshold for conspiracy theories that we do not typically apply to other theories.
00:49:54
Speaker
Yet when we consider the principles behind the seemingly suspicious kinds of evidence associated with conspiracy theories, we find that the evidentiary practices of the conspiracy theorists are not necessarily fallacious. None of this is to say that conspiracy theorists are exemplary reasonants. No one denies that there is furious or fallacious belief in some conspiracy theories. However, if we are to investigate belief in conspiracy theories, we cannot start from a position of assuming conspiracy theorists are automatically at fault when it comes to evidential concerns that, as we have seen, goes against to the available evidence.
00:50:24
Speaker
Nice little tag there at the end, yes. Yes, got to have a little play on the words there at the end. Right, right. So yeah, I mean, this, yeah, I certainly agreed with Em's conclusions here and the way it went through. I thought that this seemed to be one of those papers now that the feel, you know, this, I don't think I actually said at the start, did I? This paper is from 2017. And at this point, the literature has grown enough that you can get articles like this, which
00:50:52
Speaker
didn't really seem to introduce much new but did a very good, you know, good job of collecting all of the literature about a particular topic and presenting it all in one place. So I thought it did a good job of that. Yeah, just kind of collect the assets. It's a nice kind of overview
00:51:10
Speaker
and introduces some new distinctions and follow, pursues some ideas and also connects it to the then recent literature. This was, I think this might be the first paper, certainly I think the first paper from M or talking about Kasam's work and as somebody who was a pretty prominent critic of conspiracy theories with this particular made up Oliver character to illustrate the point.
00:51:37
Speaker
So yeah, it's nice. It's bringing things up to date and kind of bringing it all together in one location, which is nice. So interesting, interesting to see what comes. It's also, yeah, it was interesting to see just the choice to focus on one particular issue. Whereas a lot of what we've seen previously is sort of, you know, here's the sort of stuff people say about conspiracy theories, but just looking at specifically, here's what people say about the evidence used in conspiracy theories and why that isn't a problem.
00:52:07
Speaker
Yes, it was an interesting angle to see. Definitely. So yeah, I think I got good paper to read. I think that's about all I have to say. Do you have any closing thoughts before we wrap things up for another week? No, no. I think we've pretty much candled it all. And I suspect we're going to see more from this young scholar. Yes.
00:52:31
Speaker
Yes, we'll see. If things go according to plan, I might be able to jack up another bonus episode interview with you. We've managed to leverage my past connection to get a bit of commentary afterwards, so possibly we'll do that. But in any case,
00:52:49
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you for listening. And if you're one of our patrons, thank you for being one of our patrons. You'll have a bonus episode winging your way. And with any luck, it'll be yet another interview with the elusive Dr. Dentist. If you would like to become a patron of the podcast is going to the conspiracy, you can just go to portrayal.com and search for the podcast is going to the conspiracy and you'll sign yourself up. And if you don't want to be a patron, well, that's just fine because
00:53:12
Speaker
You have once again listened all the way to the end of an episode discussing a philosophical paper on conspiracy theories, and that's not nothing. We are satisfied if you are just merely edified by our discussion, or at least not extremely annoyed by it. We certainly are. So until next week, I think it's simply goodbye from me. And totally pipped to you. Excellent.