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Patrick Brooks on the Origin of (Some) Conspiracy Theories
65 Plays1 year ago
M interviews Patrick Brooks, author of the forthcoming paper "On the origins of conspiracy theories" (Philosophical Studies: https://philpapers.org/rec/BROOTO-6).
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:00
Speaker
So, today we interview Pat Brooks, yes? Yes, well, I mean, no. Once again, we're listening to an interview I recorded last week, and I say we're listening to it, but really we're going to pretend to listen to it, but VOTE's already listened to it earlier. In fact, they haven't actually really listened to it at all. I've experienced it first-hand. You see... Yeah, regardless, this episode is an episode with Pat Brooks. Yes. Patrick Brooks. Yes.
00:00:29
Speaker
An American. Yes. Doing his PhD in Philosophy at Rutgers University. Yes. And he has an MA in Philosophy from Texas Tech University. Yes. Furthermore, he was an attendee and paper giver at the Second International Conference on the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories. Yes. Presenter of On the Origins of Conspiracy Theories, which is also forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophical Studies. Yes. And a new patron of the podcast.
00:00:58
Speaker
Yes, I mean, well, maybe. Possibly. I mean, there's probably more than just one Patrick Brooks out there in the world. No, no, there's not. I mean, there's a Patrick with two Ts, Brooks with an umlaut, three people who mysteriously died last week called Patrick Brooks, and a Derby-winning horse called the marvellous galloping Mr Patrick Brooks, but no other human known as Patrick Brooks. That's...
00:01:24
Speaker
Odd. Yes.
Podcast Format and Humor
00:01:26
Speaker
So, what do we do with this information? Well, obviously we have to interview other patrons. A new series, Patrons of the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, The Hot Takes. Uh... It is? We've already interviewed at least two patrons, actually at least three, and not because they were patrons. What? Hey, well some of our patrons produce good work. All of our patrons produce good work. We have to interview them all.
00:01:51
Speaker
But if we do, then they'll become aware that we know their role in the conspiracy. True, that would be awkward. Especially since it would shine a light on how we don't actually know what they're conspiring to do. Best not to say anything really. Just forget all about the patrons and who they are. Okay. So, who's Pat Brooks and what exactly is his deal?
00:02:19
Speaker
the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Dentth. Hello and welcome to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison. They are Dr. Em Dentth. We are in different locations because it's an interview episode. And since we're only going to have to be recording a bit before and a bit after, it's easier to just stay where we are and do it.
00:02:49
Speaker
See, Josh is claiming that's the rationale as to why we're recording separately. Actually, Josh is on the run, having committed yet another major crime, and is broadcasting from an undisclosed location somewhere in the southern hemisphere. A major crime, but I'm not going to tell you which one. I mean, there's only three possible crimes that could be. Well, it's not beretry.
00:03:11
Speaker
Well, I mean, you haven't actually quite got the skills for that, I have to say. I mean, you're pretty good, but you're not that good. Is that where you'd sink a ship to steal the... I can't even remember. I know it's a crime. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I definitely didn't do it, whatever it is. What I did do... Nor everything you read in the papers tomorrow. I mean, just do that generally. Yeah, actually, that's probably not bad advice these days.
Interview with Pat Brooks Begins
00:03:37
Speaker
But what I was segwaying into was the fact that I have listened to the interview that you recorded with Pat Brooks. Having overcome my initial surprise when you said an interview with Pat, I just assumed it would be Pat Stokes, whose work we have looked at
00:03:54
Speaker
before, but it's a whole different pat. There's more than one of them. You never told me that. There are at least two pats out in the world, but only one, Patrick Brooks. That's correct. So we kind of covered that in the introduction as to what his specific deal is, presenter of the paper on the origins of conspiracy theories, which
00:04:16
Speaker
As you'll see in the interview, it comes with a slight qualification there, but that's fine. You've got to have a catchy title. And now, forthcoming article. Soon I'm sure to be turned into a TV series and a book.
00:04:29
Speaker
Did you know they make Polly Pockets into a film on the basis of the success of the Barbie movie? I think every toy that ever existed is going to get made into a film now, thanks to the success of Barbie. It does seem like Mattel has got the wrong message from the success of the Barbie movie, which is people want well-written films. Mattel thinks they just want toy films.
00:04:53
Speaker
Have I have I get I must have given you the penguin speech before surely I penguin publishing or I can't know I read this on a blog somewhere and I can't remember whose blog it was it was remember that remember the documentary March of the penguins
00:05:10
Speaker
the Morgan Freeman narrated one year. And that came out and, you know, it was a nature documentary, essentially, and it started winning awards left, right and center and everybody loved it. And I remember one media commentator or another saying, you know, hopefully what we would like to happen is for studios to see the success of much of the penguins and say, well, this this this shows that we don't have to stick just to the the standard formats and genres that have
00:05:40
Speaker
that have been successful for us in the past, it is actually possible to do something a bit new and innovate and experiment with different formats and genres and still experience success. But the new what was actually going to happen was that all the studios are going to say, okay, we need to make more penguin movies. Which is why we got Happy Feet. Yeah, we got Happy Feet. We got there was that surfing one, surfing penguins. I can't remember. I thought that was Happy Feet.
00:06:04
Speaker
No, no, there were at least two animated penguin movies hot on the heels of that. And there's a third one as well that I can't even think of. It's yes, so basically, I'm assuming they're going to work, they're somehow going to work a Barbie Transformers connected universe already and then just get all the, in fact, wasn't this, I'm sure there was supposed to be a Transformers GI Joe crossover or something already. It's going to happen. We can't stop it. They already have been animated.
00:06:30
Speaker
GIGO Transformers crossovers, the Cobra Commander appears as a villain in at least one Transformers straight-to-VHS film.
00:06:41
Speaker
Right, I feel we may have got slightly sidetracked, which is that we're supposed to be introducing your interview with Pat, which I think, given that you discuss the details of his paper and detail in the interview, there's probably not much point in us actually introducing it right now. So maybe we can just play a chime and go straight into it. That sounds like a plan.
00:07:09
Speaker
So Pat, you've just returned from an exciting trip to the European Union. What did you do on your holiday?
00:07:17
Speaker
Okay, so first I gave a talk at the second international conference for the philosophy of conspiracy theory in Amsterdam, which was good fun. I got to put some three dimensional representations to some sort of formerly two dimensional representations of people that I've known for a while. So that was great. I heard a lot of good talks. I think my talk went pretty well. I did lose my phone, which was embarrassing, but it was fine.
00:07:45
Speaker
And you destroyed, or at least we destroyed, a podcast recording device. Because as Listen to This Podcast will be aware, the recording device I took to Amsterdam died one day. And it died halfway through a conversation we were having for this very podcast. It did. Yeah, you had just asked me a question. And I had what I think was a very good answer. And then
00:08:11
Speaker
just pop. Yeah, I think the combined strength of the question and the answer just ruined everything. Yeah, I mean, so I'm going to have to ask you, Pat, you'll need to the power of your speech last time was so powerful, it actually destroyed an electronic surveillance device. So I need you to tone it down this time, because the podcast cannot afford to buy yet another recording device. What a terrible superpower that would be, right? Just like what do you do? Like, I break people's electronics.
00:08:41
Speaker
Yeah. Can you do it on command? No, only friends. It only happens to people I like. It's very random. It's very random.
00:08:50
Speaker
Yeah, so we had the conference, and then I spent three weeks' time sort of bumming around Belgium. I rented a car, I went to Bruges, which was very nice, and I went to a bunch of sort of small towns in the south of Flanders and Malonia, to a bunch of Trappist breweries and had a lot of great Belgian beer and met some cool people and did some cool hikes and saw loads of castles. I wonder whether, so I was asking some European friends whether they care about castles as much as Americans do, because in America, there are no castles. So every time I see a castle, I'm like, holy cow, a castle.
00:09:19
Speaker
And they were like, yeah, not so much. We see them all the time. So I enjoyed seeing all the castles and stuff. Then I went to Dublin and saw a friend for a few days, and I went to Iceland for another conference workshop thing. And then finally, after a month away and sleeping in many, many different Airbnbs and hotel rooms, I made it home. So I'm glad to be back.
Conspiracy Theories Explored
00:09:40
Speaker
I never thought I would say that I missed New Jersey, but I missed New Jersey.
00:09:44
Speaker
Did you miss New Jersey or did you miss your bed in New Jersey? I think I missed my stuff. Yeah, I think I got home and I was like, my desk, my chair, but I wasn't like North 4th Street.
00:09:57
Speaker
Yeah, there is travel travel is nice coming home sometimes those even better. Now the talk that you gave at the conference on the origin of conspiracy theories, I believe is now a forthcoming paper in philosophical studies. So congratulations. Yes, thanks very much. It's my first publication. The review process was like was really fun. I was sort of nervous about it. I
00:10:23
Speaker
As anybody who's written stuff for publication or attempted to write stuff for publication will know, until you do it, you're like, I don't know. I don't know if I can do it. Then my advisor was like, just send it. Just send it in. I just sent it and then I got some great reviews and some comments that I think made the paper a lot stronger. I found myself really enjoying the process of
00:10:45
Speaker
you know, writing the letter saying like, oh, here's the things that the reviewer said, and here's the things that I did in response to those things, or here's why I don't think I should have done anything at all. It was like a cool, it was a cool process. I enjoyed it a lot, and I'm glad it worked. And yeah, it's really, it's a huge load off to have a paper forthcoming.
00:11:03
Speaker
Yeah, I remember when I first submitted, when inferring to a conspiracy theory, might be the best explanation. And the sense of, I've got a PhD, but can I actually publish as an academic philosopher? And that terrible waiting period of several months of going
00:11:22
Speaker
I mean, I haven't heard anything back. Is that good? Is that bad? Because the first time you do it, you really have no idea of timetables or how these things work. And then realizing that when you get the comments back going, well, you know, it's a it's a revision, but it's the positive comments of change this, do that. I can make it and it makes the next submission so much easier. Yeah. And I think I was really lucky because both reviewers for my paper were seem to be like,
00:11:52
Speaker
I think they both recommended, like, publish, but with revisions. So I got a conditional acceptance, which was nice. And it seemed like both reviewers were sort of on my side, or like, look, I like this paper a lot, but here's some things you could do. It wasn't this, it wasn't this like antagonistic kind of thing. And that was nice. I was because I mean, as listeners of the podcast will probably know,
00:12:17
Speaker
you know, philosophers can be a little antagonistic sometimes and a little crotchety. I'm guilty of this myself. So I was expecting like a little bit more kind of, you know, like, what's this guy talking about? This is crazy. And I didn't get that and it was very nice. It was very nice to get like positive feedback and positive comments. And people who were clearly like, look, I'm looking forward to this paper being out, but here's some things you need to do. So that was, that made it nice.
00:12:44
Speaker
Yeah, there are a lot of reviewer bees in philosophy. I actually think the entire profession is made up of reviewer bees, everyone's the second reviewer. So it is actually, as you say, quite nice when you get reviews, which are, look, there are improvements you can make. But generally, I think the paper's good. I just think it could be even better.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yeah. And like, especially too, like, you know, so I'm going into my fifth year. So many of my closest friends that I've made here at Rutgers are sort of have moved on or whatever. Right. And so so I've heard I've been hearing their horror stories for years about like, oh, the reviewer could even read the paper and yada yada. So do you have all these things knocking around in your brain and then you have your own experience and you're like, ah,
00:13:29
Speaker
I don't know if this is representative, but I hope it is, because this I can deal with. Now, we're talking about the paper. We're not talking about the content of the paper. So Pat, tell me what is on the origin of conspiracy theories. What is the origin of conspiracy theory?
00:13:47
Speaker
Right. I probably should have called the paper on the origin of some conspiracy theories, but I feel like that's a less catchy title. The idea behind the paper was this. You're like, look, we've all read a lot of papers in the philosophy of conspiracy theory.
00:14:07
Speaker
There's been a lot of things written about why people believe conspiracy theories, whether they should, what the expression conspiracy theory means, but there's been very few things written about why people might initially posit a conspiracy theory in the first place. Imagine a situation in which
00:14:26
Speaker
there is no conspiracy theory and thereby no conspiracy theory, right? And something happens such that somebody goes, now wait just a darn minute, I think there's something fishy going on here. And they posit some sort of conspiracy theory. Now, whether they believe it or not, that's a separate question. Whether they should believe it, also a separate question, but there's some interesting moment where somebody goes, here's my hypothesis about this.
00:14:54
Speaker
It's an explanation for an event or phenomenon that involves a conspiracy, and I think it's a live option. So the paper is sort of asking under what conditions something like that might happen.
00:15:04
Speaker
And I argue that one way in which this happens and one way in which we've seen this happen is when you get like officialdom or sort of the experts in scare quotes or whatever, something happens and they say, ah, theory T is the explanation for this event or phenomenon.
00:15:28
Speaker
But, of course, sometimes Theory T has, you know, some problems, right? Like it will sort of entail things that seem like they can't be the case or it will fail to explain things that seem like they need explaining. And in these sorts of situations, I think very often you will have some sort of other expert or some sort of savvy person in a related field or just some generally curious person go,
00:15:54
Speaker
Well, hey, wait a minute. You know, it seems like theory T fails to explain, you know, events E1 and E2, even though it explains some other thing. Maybe some other theory T prime might do better, or maybe we should like take these anomalies seriously. And
00:16:14
Speaker
I think in general, when we have this kind of back and forth, what we expect to happen is for someone to go, ah, yes, I see that. I hadn't thought of that. Or, ah, yes, well, I see why you think those things are anomalous, but here's why they're not. But what we instead get is people sort of trying to silence people asking these kinds of questions, people sort of shouting down people asking these kinds of questions in ways that are like really kind of hubristic, if that's a word, an antagonistic
00:16:44
Speaker
And I think that leads people to wonder, hey, why is this guy acting like such a jerk right now? I just wanted to know about this anomaly. And rather than tell me why there's no anomaly or why my theory is no good, he's yelling at me. Like, what's going on with this guy? And I think there's a bunch of ways you can resolve that. There's a bunch of ways you can answer that question. And some of the ways in which you can answer that question is by positing a conspiracy theory.
00:17:13
Speaker
maybe the guy's a shill who's been hired by some company to push this official line. And the reason he's not responding to your question in a thoughtful and careful way is because he's not capable.
00:17:25
Speaker
Um, or maybe, um, you know, the person isn't sort of engaged in this, like sort of standard, um, process of giving and asking for reasons and sort of like settling on the truth kind of business that we take ourselves to be engaged in because he or she is engaged in some other kind of, uh, you know, pursuit. Uh, what kind of pursuit? Well, who knows?
00:17:46
Speaker
It's one that seems not to have the kind of norms that we're used to. So you can see that's a pretty, at least I think, or so I claim, that it's a pretty short trip from there to sort of conspiracy land. And so I think in these cases where
00:18:01
Speaker
there's sort of a tension between, you know, or there's some sort of gap, you know, between the official or sort of standard view and these alternative views and what people broach alternative views and they get sort of yelled at or made fun of or shouted down. I think like this is, this is how some conspiracy theories can get going. I don't think that's all of them, but I do think it's a significant chunk, especially like in today's day and age. So that's sort of the mediumish length
00:18:30
Speaker
summary of the paper. So it's probably useful to use some examples here to try to illustrate this. So what kind of motivating examples are kind of leading to the here are some norm violations we need to explain what's going on here. Yeah, so I think I think there's like a really great example just from like, that's still sort of ongoing. There's the conversation around the the laboratory leak versus zoom to zoonotic origin hypotheses for the origin of COVID-19.
00:18:58
Speaker
So pretty quickly, as I'm sure you all recall, there emerged a consensus that sort of the proximal origins hypothesis is the right hypothesis. And of course, like some people and not just like not David Ikes and not Alex Jones is like serious people raise some questions about, well, what about like a laboratory leak? And I don't mean what about an intentional laboratory bioweapon story that I think is
00:19:27
Speaker
a different bag of hammers. But I think people initially were like, well, couldn't have got out of the lab. There is a lab right there, after all. And I think on its face, that's a live option. And clearly, it's become a more and more live option over the last 18 months or whatever. But initially, you and your listeners both, I think, will remember that the media and
00:19:52
Speaker
high ranking people in the CDC and at the WHO were like, that's a conspiracy. It's racist. These people are crazy. We know that it's that it came from, you know, we went from rats to bats to pangolins or whatever the proximal origin story is. But it wasn't like, oh, look, we looked into it actually. And here's a bunch of reasons why that can't be the case. They just yelled at people and called them like racist and xenophobic.
00:20:21
Speaker
I think loads of people, and you could see it. Go back and listen to some podcasts of various people, and you can see it happen in real time, where people are going, hey, man, why aren't you just answering these questions? What are they hiding? I wonder if they're hiding something. I think that's an example of, I think had people responded in a more reasonable way and had the conversation been more level-headed, we wouldn't have people saying that,
00:20:46
Speaker
I think there was a coverup and that Fauci was in on it and he knew and gain a function and yada, yada, yada, right? I don't think we'd have that. I think what allowed people to start going there initially is the fact that when people were like, hey, Dr. Fauci, what about this? And he was like, that's racist. I'm the science. If you question me, you question science. And people were like, that sounds like not science. I wonder what's going on here. And so I think that's a nice example of this that's happened in recent memory.
Public Engagement and Conspiracy Theories
00:21:14
Speaker
Yeah, another example which always comes to mind is NASA's response historically to moon landing hoax theories. So for a long period of time, NASA would simply refuse to engage in talking about theories that said the moon landings were faked. And their stated rationale as to why they didn't engage is that they didn't want to give any credence to these questions by appearing to treat them seriously.
00:21:44
Speaker
So rather than engage in discourse and explain patiently, look, we went to the moon. Here's the reason why. The response was, well, we'll just ignore them because otherwise we're kind of lighting a flame under these theories because people think if you take a theory seriously, there must be something to it. So therefore we don't take it seriously to signal that we think it's a bad hypothesis to even indulge it.
00:22:12
Speaker
Yeah. I think doing that has allowed people to come up with more and more clever and interesting questions. I don't think the initial questions were about things like, wait, you're worried about the Van Allen radiation belt in 2023, but it wasn't a big deal in 1968? What's going on with that? Or people being like,
00:22:36
Speaker
just let us see the telemetry data. Oh, you don't have it anymore? That's weird. And I think it's let people get more and more clever about the things that they're asked, the questions they're asking. Whereas like, maybe if they would have just published straight away a bunch of answers to the questions they would have imagined and engaged, we would have sort of headed this stuff off at the pass.
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah, there is actually something quite interesting here to compare the reaction of NASA to moon landing conspiracy theories and the Warren Commission with respect to the assassination of JFK. Because no matter what we think about the death of JFK, one benefit of the Warren Commission is that all the data was published in a series of volumes.
00:23:21
Speaker
The volumes, however, are almost impossible to read because they lack anything even resembling an index. So you have what people think to be hidden by design. Yes, we've released all the data, but in such a way that we can say, look, it's all out there. But quite deliberately, it's almost impossible to interpret.
00:23:41
Speaker
Yeah, I remember, very similarly, I remember a friend of mine. This must have been, I was in eighth grade, president of 1999. It was 50 years after Roswell. And so they were going to release the documents from Roswell. And my friend was like,
00:23:58
Speaker
It's just so excited about this book. He was so excited for these documents. And he would be like, we skipped school and went to Barnes and Noble or Borders or whatever for him to pick up his copy of this. And you get it. And it's just there must have been 60 words in that book and everything else was just redacted. And like at that point, like why even publish it?
00:24:22
Speaker
Because all that it did was make my friend for sure that everything that was under those redacted things was like, and then the aliens told us this. And I think, yeah, so I think like, I do think we want to resolve these kinds of tensions. And I don't think that the epistemic authorities do themselves any favors by just telling us, by trying to tell us that there's no tension there or acting as if we're insane.
00:24:48
Speaker
for wondering whether that theory is the best theory. What's interesting to me is that we all know how to act like this. We know how to treat people's disagreements or their questions in ways that are productive and conducive to a good conversation that doesn't involve generating conspiracy theories because we do it all the time.
00:25:12
Speaker
We do it in the seminar room. We do it in our own classrooms. We like, if any of our students, right, said something and then somebody else was like, what are you an idiot? We'd be like, whoa, whoa, we don't do that here. That's not how we act.
00:25:27
Speaker
But when someone is like, I'm not sure that this is a thing, we do that same thing, and then we wonder why they act weird in response to that. So I think sort of the upshot of the paper is like, if we want fewer conspiracy theories, maybe we should be a little bit less antagonistic with people.
00:25:49
Speaker
And like, we know how to do it because we do it all the time. So especially like public facing people, like there's no excuse for Neil deGrasse Tyson to be out here just like making a fool of himself in tons of contexts and then wondering why people don't take science seriously. But we need more Carl Sagan's and less Neil deGrasse Tyson's. I mean, I guess this speaks to an interesting question about norms with regard to expertise because you're right in the classroom,
00:26:17
Speaker
And I'm going to say, this is an idealization because I'm sure there are some classrooms where if a student says, oh, that person's shoes idiotic, there will be some some teachers or lectures ago. Yeah, you're quite right. They are an idiot. Top marks for you. Bottom marks for you. But ideally, the norm should be.
00:26:35
Speaker
If you're going to challenge someone's view in the classroom, you can't just call them an idiot, you have to explain why they're an idiot using words, and preferably in a polite enough way that you don't actually use the word idiot in your particular phrasing. But is that the kind of norms
00:26:53
Speaker
that experts have when it comes to public science communication. Because I was having a conversation with someone who's involved in science communication in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and she was going, well, look, everyone starts off by going, yes, I'm going to take every question seriously. I'm going to talk to this person. And then a few years into their job, you realize you don't have the time to answer all those questions.
00:27:20
Speaker
And sometimes you're going, look, just a little bit of your own research would show you that this view doesn't actually work. And so you end up becoming kind of impatient or intolerant to bad questions, and you shut them down and only focus on the part of your job, which you've got the time and the inclination to do. So are we doing that philosophical thing of saying, look, these are the norms that you people are meant to ascribe to.
00:27:48
Speaker
we haven't actually established your mental scribe to them, but we're going to assert this is what those norms should be. And then going, oh, you're not obeying the norms that we told you, you were meant to obey, you're being a bad expert. Right, so I do think it's worth being really careful here. So I certainly think
00:28:12
Speaker
that they are the norms. And this is not just like philosophers asserting that these are the norms. So here's why I think they are the norms. Or at least, at the very least, these are what average lay people think the norms are. And that's, I think, probably good enough to get this going. So I think that we tend to think, and by we, I mean both academics and especially lay people,
00:28:41
Speaker
that like what scientists and historians and other sort of academic-y types and even like government officials and all these sorts of things, I think what they think they're up to is sort of being engaged in like a good-faced attempt to figure out how the world works. And now that might be naive.
00:29:08
Speaker
But I do think that people have this naive view. This is the view we learn in like grade school about what science is, right? It's just a bunch of folks just being like, hey man, once we drop this, what happens when we drop? What's going on? Let's figure it out together. Because we want to know what the truth is. And I think if you believe that what you're doing is engaging in a good faith pursuit of the truth,
00:29:34
Speaker
that that does generate certain kinds of norms. It means that you ought to be open to sort of counter evidence, that you have a responsibility to engage in an open and critical, open but critical way with your interlocutors. And like, why these kinds of norms? Because these are the kinds of norms that if implemented will help us get to the truth. And if what we're interested in is getting to the truth, then these just are the norms.
00:30:00
Speaker
Um, and so maybe those aren't in fact what people are doing, but it's what people lay people think that the people that the experts are doing. And so when they fail to do that, they're like, well, I thought you were doing this truth business, but it seems like that's not what you're doing. So what's going on? Um, so that's the first part. Do you have anything you have anything to say about that? I mean, there's also one other thing you can add to that, which is that
00:30:28
Speaker
unless you've got a weird kind of nobility thing going on, almost every expert was a layperson at some point. So presumably, they've got those norms before they became an expert. Yeah, no, that's, that's your point. Yeah. So they've, so they presumably like, wait, when they learned like, you know, when Degrass Tyson or, you know,
00:30:52
Speaker
Lawrence Krauss, or any of these people. Lawrence Krauss is the physicist, right? Lawrence Wright is the political guy. Yeah, so presumably, like these people learn about science the same way the rest of us did and probably internalize these norms, right? They got into the business because they wanted to be a part of the good faith pursuit of the truth. Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And so
00:31:18
Speaker
I think it's very important to at least demonstrate that in the main
00:31:24
Speaker
that's what we're doing. Now, in response to your friends who's a science communicator, I think they're quite right that it can get a little overwhelming. If you're made to answer the same goofy question every time you give a talk and you've given the answer before and you can just point to a URL, I answer that question right here. I think that can be a bit frustrating.
00:31:49
Speaker
And I think that it can't be the case that you always have to put on a happy face. Now, I think two things are the case here. I think if you've elected to be a public science communicator, that's what you signed up for. You don't get to opt out of that. That's just part of the gig. You don't have to keep being a science communicator. You don't have to keep being in the limelight. Being in the limelight is an active choice. And part of being there
00:32:15
Speaker
is being subjected to goofy questions from lay people. Now, I think if you're coming to my office and I'm not a public person, then you're knocking on my door and saying, I figured out consciousness. Can I talk to you about it? Like, I don't have to engage. I'd probably get to ignore you. Actually, the cleverest thing is listen to the person, tell them an idiot, and then write up their findings as your own.
00:32:41
Speaker
Yeah, so I think, so that's one thing. I think the other thing is like, of course we're all gonna have bad days, but notice that like, imagine two cases. There's a case where we are right now, and then there's the world that I'm describing where people are generally abiding by what I think these norms are, or at least what people think the norms are. The case we are now, somebody's like, screw you, you're dumb, I've answered that question, you're an idiot. They're gonna go, yeah, typical. Of course that's what they'd say.
00:33:09
Speaker
Like, these people aren't serious people. They don't want to know the answers. Imagine a world where, like, we don't do that all the time, but it happens sometimes. I think in that situation, people are gonna go, well, that was pretty shitty, but maybe they're just having a rough day, you know? Usually, this person is, like, is perfectly willing to talk about this stuff, but today, maybe, you know?
00:33:29
Speaker
They just didn't have enough coffee or maybe I was being rude, right? I think it's much easier to assume if something goes off the rails when it never does that like it's a one-off and that's a better situation, right?
Communication Challenges with Conspiracy Theorists
00:33:42
Speaker
I think then you can resolve the tension by saying, well, look, you know, everybody has an off day versus in the situation we're in now where you just resolve the tension by going out, they're in on it.
00:33:52
Speaker
So I think something like that is probably right. But I definitely like, yeah, the science communicators who are like, but I don't want to have to communicate. We're like, well, you picked the wrong day to be the science communicator then. I mean, there also might be an economic problem here, which is there also might be not enough science communicators.
00:34:09
Speaker
And thus you end up having a situation of, well, you know, I literally don't have the time to deal with this particular issue. I've got 17 other things I need to be doing today. Another question about the flat earth. I really don't have time for this.
00:34:24
Speaker
That's totally fine. I think another thing that would be good, given that there probably aren't as many science communicators as there are dumb questions, that's almost certainly right. The history of humanity is one dumb question after the other. I feel like that's true. What would be good, though, is if
00:34:46
Speaker
if there were enough people who were doing the sort of thing that I recommend in the paper, which is just sort of engaging in a kind of non-antagonistic, non-dogmatic kind of way, that people could then say, well, look,
00:35:01
Speaker
I've answered that question before. I'm happy to talk about it again at the craft service table or whatever. But if you want, you can just look up where I've talked about this online or whatever. Then you'd have a community of
00:35:21
Speaker
science communicators that can point to one another and go, that's an interesting question about climate change. I can't really speak to that, but you know who can? This person who has engaged with these people and their video is on YouTube and whatever else, or you can read it in this article where they have a dialogue written up. I think the inspiration for this paper, this is years ago, inspiration,
00:35:46
Speaker
was there was a show called the Larry Wilmore Show on Comedy Central. It was like after Colbert went to the Tonight Show or whatever, the Late Show, whatever he is doing now. It was when they were trying to do a entire spin-off universe from the Daily Show.
00:36:02
Speaker
That's right. That's right. And it was a good, it was a good show. I liked that show. But it was like the flat earth was getting more popular. So like, I think this must have been 25th, 2014, 2015, so eight, nine years ago. And Neil deGrasse Tyson goes on and he's, he's got like five minutes on national TV to like make a point. And what does he do? He just makes fun of people who think the earth's flat.
00:36:32
Speaker
He does like a five minute stand up routine about how dumb these people are. Um, and of course everybody was like, whoo. But I was like, that's not good. Cause I have a friend who is earth shape agnostic, right? He's not sure what shape the earth is. You told me about this in Amsterdam and it still blows my mind, not just
00:36:54
Speaker
of Flat Earth, and he agnostic as to, I mean, there are many shapes it could be. I'm not quite sure which one it is. That's right. Yeah, he is. He's an interesting character. You can listen to him on a podcast at the Blythe Hole podcast if you would like. They don't talk about the Flat Earth. They did in their first episode and pretty quickly they were like, we got to stop talking about this man.
00:37:16
Speaker
I remember him saying, look, man, if we're so dumb and I'm so wrong, then why didn't you just take the no time it would have taken to show me how dumb and wrong I am instead of just making fun of me for five minutes? I think all that that segment served to do was to calcify people's anti-expert views.
00:37:42
Speaker
It was a real missed opportunity, and I think it did more harm than good. And I've heard many a conspiracy person sort of point to that and go, why didn't he just say? Why was he just preaching to the choir instead of trying to reach people? That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that a serious person would do.
00:38:02
Speaker
And so I eventually, like seven years later, wrote the paper. But it was sort of thinking about that question. I mean, imagine if he if he instead said, well, look, you know, we know that you can show the Earth's round with the sun and three sticks. So let's go outside and do it. It was it was what you know, President Obama used to call a teachable moment in which no teaching was done.
00:38:25
Speaker
And I think that was, uh, that's why, that's why I think that the sort of, you know, the communicating part of science communication is like, you can't just communicate to people who already agree with you. That's not interesting. There's always going to be people who are like, I'm not so sure about that. Those are the people you need to convince and maybe it's tiring and maybe it's, uh, overwhelming. But I think if the community of experts was such that they understood that that was part of their missive, then it would be, they can spread, they can share the load a little bit more.
00:38:54
Speaker
I guess is like what I'm, but I would think I would say to that. He's also an interesting, I mean, if we're focusing on communication, of course, the old, the tried added communications are two, two ways straight. And because there are going to be some situations.
00:39:09
Speaker
where you are communicating adequately and according to this lay-know. And the person you're communicating with is refusing to listen to what you're saying. And I mean, I've had this experience a few times where I'll get people who email me and they go, oh, you're one of those academics who's always poo-pooing conspiracy theories. Here's a conspiracy theory I think would be reasonable to believe.
00:39:31
Speaker
And I write back going, well, I think you'll find in my book, I say blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm not as good. And they'll just respond with it, you know, but you're one of those skeptics. Okay, so no, I just gave you a representative sites, and a citation and a quote saying exactly the opposite. But you're
00:39:49
Speaker
you're reading what you want to read, you're not actually listening to what I'm trying to say, and maybe that's the worry that some communicators have, which is, yeah, but it doesn't matter what I say, they hear something different.
00:40:05
Speaker
Yeah, look, that's a real problem, I think, just in general. I was just watching a YouTube review of a video game in which the guy on the YouTube video says one thing, and then everyone in the comments thinks he said something else.
00:40:22
Speaker
So this happens all the time, and I totally agree that it's a worry, but I think what you have to hope is that like, maybe this is naive, maybe this is too rosy-eyed, but I do think you have to hope that most people aren't like that. The kinds of people you're gonna be engaging with are the kinds of people who really do wanna know, and they really do have genuine questions, and they really are genuinely curious, and that that will be the greater number than are these people who are just looking to pick a fight.
00:40:52
Speaker
and not have a real conversation.
00:40:55
Speaker
I mean, it's an empirical question as to whether it's one group or the other group. And then I think, pursuant to the empirical answer, it's just a cost-benefit question. Is the cost of engaging with what I think is probably a small number of really obstinate people who just want to fight, is that higher or lower than engaging with everybody and getting to engage with a lot of people who do want to learn and know stuff?
00:41:23
Speaker
given that I think most people really do want to learn and know stuff and that the obstinate people are the minority, that's why I think we should engage, because we're going to reach more people than we don't. But if the numbers are otherwise, right, if it turns out most people are just obstinate assholes, then there's no point, right?
00:41:39
Speaker
probably engaging is going to be really frustrating. I mean, say your paper is on the origin of an invisible bracket, some conspiracy theories here. So we're not a sort of paper on how to deal with conspiracy theorists. It's a paper saying, well, look, given these norm violations,
00:41:57
Speaker
It's understandable that in some situations people go, well, the norm's been violated so often, there must be something behind that. One rationale might be coming up with their covering up the existence of a conspiracy.
00:42:12
Speaker
Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, the paper has like the last bit is like an upshot of like what we can do, which is what we've just been talking about. But yeah, I think the meat of the paper is saying like, yeah, yeah, just just what you said. Yeah. I think sometimes when experts act in these kinds of ways, the best thing to do is go or maybe not the best, but a permissible thing to do is to go. I think they're hiding a conspiracy here.
00:42:38
Speaker
I mean, a simpler way to deal with this would be to put microchips in the back of everybody's head to make them just think and act the same way. Wouldn't you agree? That is true. I mean, isn't that what wasn't that the plot of the the Red Sun comic book? Did you read the read this? No, no.
00:42:56
Speaker
It's where Superman's capsule lands in Soviet Russia rather than the U.S. I know. It was a period of time where they were doing kind of those elseworld things. They got John Cleese to write one where Superman lands in the Midlands in the U.K. I would read a British Superman comic. That'd be great.
00:43:19
Speaker
Um, but yeah, and this like, yeah, like Superman, like through the help of Brainiac, like engineers, a chip that can control subversives. Yeah. So you, Batman is not a fan. No, no. Wasn't it written by Frank Miller by any chance? What sort of sounds like a, I don't think so.
00:43:39
Speaker
It's been a long time since I've read it, but I just watched, they had a animated movie version of it that was pretty good. I watched over. But yeah, it's certainly easier to put a chip in. Not, I think, easier to just outlaw it or to restrict it, because then you're just gonna have a bunch of like, you know, conspiracy sleeper cells. And that's not gonna be great.
00:44:06
Speaker
Well, I mean, that gets us into that fascinating paper by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vimal where they go, you know, just infiltrate the conspiracy theory for and tell them they're wrong. Now, that's the best way to do it. Infiltrate groups of conspiracy theorists, engage in a conspiracy against them and then just make the problem disappear. And definitely don't ferment the idea. There's a state run conspiracy to suppress conspiracy theories.
00:44:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's like, look, I think Cass Ornstein is very good usually on philosophy of law and stuff. I don't know any of Adrian's other work. Well, he's gone quite right wing and Trumpest in recent years. I had heard that. I had heard that he'd kind of gone off the deep end a bit in that regard. He's the capital L in libertarian these days. Okay.
00:44:59
Speaker
So he's like to the right of like, it's like people like Jason Brennan and Mike Huber. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty far. That's pretty far over there. Yeah. But I remember reading that paper and going, wait a minute. Are you suggesting that we have a conspiracy to get rid of conspiracy theories? Like this isn't going to work at all.
00:45:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of those classics from the mouths of babes. It's one of these things where you're like, alright, so conspiracy theorists, you know, as a general rule, I think are pretty skeptical and fairly clever. Like, they're gonna catch you. They're gonna find out this is what you're up to. But Pat, they very cleverly hid their plan in a paper which is very easy to read online.
00:45:45
Speaker
Yes, highly cited that paper. Hmm. Yeah. For possibly the wrong reasons. Yes, that's right. But yes, so I think like, I do think I do think look, I mean, I think you'll be sympathetic to this. And I think that you know, people like you and I and Charles pig den and Curtis Hagen and like, other sort of the come to our reading group. Look, I think that these people are often unfairly maligned. You read this to you, Cassine Cassam and Sunstein stuff and a lot of the generalist stuff and it's like,
00:46:15
Speaker
Even the Olivia, I think, is fairly bad in this regard. These people are just crazy idiots. They're epistemically vicious and psychologically pathological. It's like, look, man, I have my dad believe some of this stuff. He's very smart.
00:46:31
Speaker
I have really close friends who believe some of this stuff, and they're very smart. They're not epistemically vicious, and I think in many ways they're doing just as well, if not better, than other people. They're not schizophrenic or otherwise pathological. They're just normal folks who are like, I'm not so sure about this.
00:46:56
Speaker
You know, this paper is, I think, in many ways like an attempt to go, okay, so a lot of the work proceeds from like, given that these people are crazy, what else can we say? And I wanted to write a paper, I think, in sort of this very similar spirit to you and Charles and so on. Like, given that these people are not crazy, what could we say?
00:47:15
Speaker
Supposing these people are just normal functioning people, what can we say? Why might it be the case that someone would think that the government lies given that the government's lied a whole bunch of times? It turns out once you start thinking about that way, it's pretty clear. I think a lot of these people are just straight ahead Bayes rational. That's the motivation. You have enough uncles and cousins and friends who are like,
00:47:45
Speaker
What do you think they're up to? What are they building in there? Yeah, right. And I do think, look, I mean, we both read the Hofstadter paper. I think a lot of people take the lesson from the Hofstadter that we're all paranoid and delusional. But I think the real lesson to take is that we don't like secrets.
00:48:04
Speaker
As a species, it turns out, we don't like secrets. It's not just Americans, it's everybody for all time. In the paper, I use this example of, suppose your partner is acting very strangely, and they're getting more and more texts and phone calls, and you're like, hey, what's going on with these texts and phone calls? And they're like, what are you talking about? I'm not getting any texts and phone calls.
00:48:27
Speaker
Like you're not going to think, oh, I bet they're going to do something nice for me. No, you think like I bet there that something's going on and it's not good. And that's just people. That's just how our brains brain. Yeah, I do think we've taken a lot of bad lessons from other other papers, not we others who do this research.
00:48:49
Speaker
Let me put my soapbox away. No, no. I mean, there are some really interesting and very questionable assumptions operating in conspiracy theory theory. And as you say, if we actually take a kind of bottom up approach and go, well, how are people inferring to the existence of these theories in the first place? There are all sorts of evidential cues, which we're all primed
00:49:14
Speaker
And that means a good question here, whether it's nature versus nurture, but no matter which way we come down on it, we're all primed by our positions in societies and cultures to be suspicious about particular things. And so it's not unusual that when you see or apparently see some weird behavior, you might end up going, hmm, I mean, there might be a conspiracy involved there.
00:49:42
Speaker
I mean, sometimes there might be and sometimes there won't be. Yeah, I think that's right. Yes, I totally agree with that. And I think like the more you look as we were talking about sort of earlier on, like the more you look at the historical record, I just think you'd have to be just profoundly unaware of what things are going on. And in fact, I actually think people just are.
00:50:07
Speaker
I would imagine you've been following this proximal origin lab leak business a bit closer than your average person, given what we do for a living. I get all these, I get the stuff from The Times, and I get the stuff from Matt Taibbi, and I get the stuff from these people. I was thinking, nobody else is doing this.
00:50:29
Speaker
Like, for the vast majority of people, it's just like, oh, that's over. We're just moving on. Whereas there's still an ongoing conversation and ongoing senatorial hearings and ongoing investigative journalist reports about this business. But I think for the vast majority of people, we're just on the next thing. And they will say this thing when you bring it up. They'll go, well, if that were true, I'd have heard about it. It's like,
00:50:55
Speaker
That's not a general principle. A lot of times, people just don't know. I think that includes people who work in academic settings. They just think, well, look, if there was this ongoing debate about this business, I'd have heard about it, but maybe not if you don't make it your business to look into it.
00:51:20
Speaker
So I do think, yeah, it's just a lot of people, a lot of this stuff just passes people by and then they go, wait, what? I hadn't heard of that.
00:51:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think it also speaks to kind of interesting thing about the speed in which some scandals are covered versus uncovered in that sometimes the news cycle isn't very well designed to cope with the notion that some things take a very long time to investigate and settle. And we've seen this historically with Watergate. Many people were kind of poo-pooing.
00:51:56
Speaker
the Watergate story because it took so long for it to actually gain traction. If Nixon didn't admit to it on the third day, there's really no point to following this story at any particular length. And we're seeing it to a certain extent with what's going on with all the Trump stuff. So Trump
00:52:17
Speaker
faces charges in court over the classified documents stuff and then caseable the trials probably not going to be until august or september and the net trial is probably going to be about 12 weeks in length which means we probably won't be getting any kind of verdict until the beginning of next year and people are going it's just too long it's just too long i want answers now
00:52:43
Speaker
Yeah. And I think, I think especially like, you know, when we learn about history, right? Like everything appears so flat, right? It just appears, look, it happened in this window. You know, they broke into the Watergate hotel. Someone saw the lights, deep throat, you know, blew the whistle. And then at the end of the week, it was all, it's all done. It feels that way. And Nixon was dead. Yeah. It feels that way when you read it.
00:53:09
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. It especially feels that way when all you have is like sort of the cultural osmosis, that event in your brain. But as you say, like, right, like this took, the timescale is much different. I mean, remember the Utah massacre that Steve Clark talked about? Yeah, the Mountain Meadows massacre. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like this is the timescale of what, 150 years before like we, people were finally like, yeah.
00:53:38
Speaker
This is the official story. It was nonsense. And all the people who were like, no, I don't think so. We're right. And actually, the serving thing about the Mountain Meadows massacre is that some of the people who were insisting that actually, I think this was a false flag,
00:53:56
Speaker
will have been quite dead by the time that the Mormons went, oh, yeah, definitely was a false flag. Actually, in retrospect, definitely a false flag. So there are people who, to their grave, insisted the official theory was incorrect, and would probably be branded as conspiracy theorists by members of their community, who are only vindicated in death, which is the only time I ever think maybe an afterlife should exist.
00:54:25
Speaker
And because I also think that Henry Kissinger deserves to go to a very, very fiery pit upon death. And as an atheist, it kind of disturbs me that actually when he dies, that's just it. Yeah, I remember like that was. Excuse me, it's funny you mentioned Kissinger. I think watching the documentary version of Christopher Hitchens, the trials of Henry Kissinger, I think was like one of the first things I watched. It made me think like, OK,
00:54:55
Speaker
There's a lot going on that we don't really know about because I think I watched that in like 2009. We had like 9-11, the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis. I was pretty jaded already. Then I saw this documentary that I read the book version and I was like, holy moly, this is not great.
00:55:16
Speaker
Um, yeah, he's not, he's not good. I can't believe he's still alive. He's what, a hundred now? Yeah. There was a, so I've gotten the name of the director who did reanimator as the name will come back to me eventually. He didn't do the sequel to reanimator or the third film.
00:55:36
Speaker
no it's uh he did ant head reanimator from beyond oh it's terrible i i can listen to this filmography i can't actually his last name is gordon sure gordon yeah
00:55:52
Speaker
yeah Stuart Gordon and he joked about when 9-11 happened and then the invasion of Iraq happened he wanted to make a new reanimator film because he was going he was shocked after 9-11 and then the invasion of Iraq that Kissinger was still hanging around the White House he thought Kissinger had died years prior he said wouldn't it be great
00:56:16
Speaker
if it turns out that the new White House Chief of Medical is one Herbert West. And suddenly all of these political advisors that you think have been dead for quite some time suddenly reappear on podiums giving speeches. So he wanted to make a a political satire about the invasion of Iraq.
00:56:40
Speaker
using Herbert West to explain why these ideas had been resurrected with zombie politicians. That would have been great.
00:56:51
Speaker
So, yeah, would have been an absolutely wonderful idea. Unfortunately, it never got made. And sure, Gordon is now dead, so it probably will never be made. Until, you know, until Disney run out of things to remake, and then they're like, we can just remake these old horror movies and make them terrible. No, but Disney is now remaking films that they made 10 or 12 years ago. They can always just remake a remake. I know. Like, when I heard they were doing a live action of Moana, I was like, that just came out.
00:57:18
Speaker
Yeah, I never quite understood making live action versions of animated classics, but I could kind of see where you want to keep the IP alive, so something you made 20 or 30 years ago, you do a live action one, but something which has been made in the last decade.
00:57:37
Speaker
I don't quite understand. Yeah, it's a wild world, that's for sure. Yeah, the Kissinger stuff was very, very troubling. And as again, like stuff you just never learned about in high school. They were like, and then some guy just decided to do a bunch of essentially clandestine stuff all over the world. I mean, this has always been one of my bugbears about
00:58:06
Speaker
when people respond to claims that we should take conspiracy theories seriously where you don't really believe all these conspiracies occur and I go well I kind of do because there's no punishment in at least in the west with respect to engaging in conspiracies. Tony Blair and George W Bush are free men despite the fact that they colluded in creating a plot
00:58:32
Speaker
to invade a country under false pretenses. Kissinger's list of war crimes is really quite astounding and yet he's friends to both Republicans and Democrats when it comes to running for president kind of disturbed me when Hillary Clinton was talking about taking advice from one Henry Kissinger in her presidential run.
00:58:54
Speaker
There's no punishment to being involved in large scale political conspiracies. And thus there's no mechanism to kind of stop these people from doing it again. Yeah. And it's like, you know, it's like George Carlin said all those years ago, you know, it's a big club and you ain't in it. Yeah.
00:59:14
Speaker
If only we were Pat though, if only we were. Yeah, we could be, you know, get some of that adrena crown, live forever. What we need is some of that sweet, sweet Soros money. Yeah, I mean, it is like, it is wild when you think about like, I think the fact that the rule of law in the West, I mean, especially like in the UK and the US applies so much differently
00:59:43
Speaker
to people who, as you say, seem to be perpetrating conspiratorial things. You can't say the financial crisis wasn't the result of a bunch of conspiracy. People knew, right? The opioid crisis resulted in a conspiracy. Many wars we've been into for no reason, result of a conspiracy. And these people, as you say, are just like,
01:00:10
Speaker
George Bush is probably having an art opening for his weird paintings and people go and they're like, man, he was great. You could have had a beer with him. It's like, no, you should be in jail. These people are terrible. I mean, it also doesn't help that because of the succession of subsequent Republican presidents or potential Republican presidents, people go, well, you know, George W. Bush, he may have committed some war crimes, but he's not as bad as the current guy.
01:00:38
Speaker
Yeah, but no punishment for the politicians, no punishment for any of those bankers. Jamie Dimon and company are still gazillionaires. I think people see this, and this is just more grist for their conspiratorial mill.
01:00:58
Speaker
Yeah. Why wouldn't it be? Yeah. Like, it's interesting. Like, if you look at like, there's this, um, there's a series of measures and you and I both know that like these sort of these empirical measures are kind of
01:01:11
Speaker
You should take them with a grain of salt, probably. But there's this thing, the world governance indicators, do you know of this? One of the things that they look at is control of corruption and rule of law in a country. It's the idea, it's people who live there and other experts
01:01:33
Speaker
evaluating these kinds of things. So countries where they reckon that the rule of law is real good and the control of corruption is real good, a place like Denmark, where 98%, 99% of people are like, yeah, it's great.
01:01:50
Speaker
The extent to which people believe in conspiracy theories in those places, very low. Go to a place like the US or Romania or some African countries where, I think Nigeria is a good example here, Turkey, places like this, where these metrics rate a little bit lower. In the US, we're 70th percentile for corruption and rule of law stuff.
01:02:16
Speaker
Turkey and Nigeria and Romania, I think, are all a bit lower, but not super lower. Well, surprise, surprise, the extent to which people believe conspiracy theories, they're way higher. Like, well, of course it is. They fundamentally distrust these institutions.
01:02:34
Speaker
Yeah, and it gets back to the norms here. So in places like Denmark, the norm is we expect that our politicians, I say ours if we're Danish here, the Danes expect their politicians to be open, transparent and honest. And due to the structure of their government, they're mostly open, transparent and
01:02:58
Speaker
and there are a few problematic cases from time to time but by and large everyone's content with the kind of communication and the the direction of flow of information from the top to the bottom. The U.S.
01:03:13
Speaker
not so good. Romania actually very very bad as someone who lived there for almost two years and so those norm violations inform why people end up going I mean they're meant to treat us better than this.
Institutional Competence and Conspiracy Theories
01:03:29
Speaker
The fact they're not treating us the way that we should be indicates they're probably covering something up and in Romania they often are. Well yeah I think
01:03:40
Speaker
One comment I got from my dissertation committee was, why is this different in Russia? Does my story about conspiracies apply to places like that? Well, no, because the norms are different. The people in Russia, I think, expect
01:03:59
Speaker
that the Kremlin are lying about things. This is sort of par for the course, but I think in countries that are like purported to be free and open societies,
01:04:13
Speaker
There's this veneer, right? They're like, well, no, no, we don't do things like the Russians do. We're very different, you see. Here, you know, the rule of law applies equally to all citizens and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they see that not happening. They're like, what the hell? What is this? Whereas people in Russia know better.
01:04:33
Speaker
I think we know better too, but we have this idea in our minds that like you say, they're meant to be doing better than this. Why are they not doing better? I don't know how much time we have left, but I want to run this by you. I've been working on this paper about this trust business.
01:04:58
Speaker
And I think that conspiracy theorists get a lot right. I think they're right to be distrustful of certain institutions. And I think that makes them sort of right to maybe reckon there's a conspiracy theory going on. But I wonder whether here might be an area where conspiracy theorists even by our lights are criticizable more often than maybe not.
01:05:25
Speaker
do you think that they maybe think that the institutions that they rightfully distrust for like sort of character reasons, do you think they overestimate the competence of those institutions? Oh, it's a very good question because I think generally, we overestimate the competence of institutions, whether or not we think they're engaging in conspiracies. And I think in part is because we have
01:05:54
Speaker
We have notions of norms with respect to how we think an institution should respond to a particular crisis. And those norms actually don't usually reflect how institutions are structured. So I've been having an ongoing dispute with Emirates due to a problem on my return flight from Dubai to Auckland. And what's interesting about this ongoing dispute
01:06:16
Speaker
is that because of how compartmentalized Emirates is, I can get parts of Emirates to admit to one particular problem. But when we get to the second problem, they transfer me to a different team who don't ever want to respond to the question at hand. And that seems to be the way Emirates customer service has been structured, to ensure that
01:06:42
Speaker
When you get an awkward question, you pass it on to another department, and then they'll elect to respond to part of that question, but not all of it, and keep moving you along, which is what leads to the antitrust case in the US with respect to Microsoft, where small developers were going, look, we keep on contacting Microsoft because they say we should have access to the APIs. Every time I try to contact Microsoft to get the API information I need for my software to work,
01:07:11
Speaker
they just bounce me around the Microsoft organization. And this seems like a conspiracy. A conspiracy by Microsoft to claim to be open to working with small developers, but actually designing a system such that small developers cannot get any ingress. And Microsoft's response, and this is the Chomsky-style response, was it's not intentional.
01:07:33
Speaker
It's just that this is how large institutions work. They're compartmentalised. And when we can't answer a question, we give you it to another person. And they think they've answered the previous question. So it's not a conspiracy. It's incompetence or a cock up that's going on.
01:07:50
Speaker
And I think we do have this kind of mismatch between how we think institutions, especially large institutions, should work. I expected Emirates to simply go, yep, we're at fault. Here's a refund versus the way that institutions actually work, which is, well, no, we're quite large and no one person or one department deals specifically with the kind of issues that you're asking about.
01:08:16
Speaker
So it has to be dealt with multiple departments, and they all have different norms as to how they respond to these things. So I think it's not just conspiracy theorists here. I think it's the general population and our relationship with these monolithic entities that we just can't conceptualize working the way that they actually do. Yeah, no, that's good. That's good. Because then it's the thing we're all guilty of.
01:08:43
Speaker
which is probably fine. Well, I mean, it's not fine. I still have a huge issue with Emirates. Yeah. But I mean, you know, I do think, um, I think David, I, I mean, you've watched some of these like 12 hour David, like things you've been to him. Yeah. Oh man. I've only watched the video. My earth shape agnostic friend was like, you got to watch this man. This is like 15 years ago. Um,
01:09:09
Speaker
And yeah, I think he talks about compartmentalization a lot as like government compartmentalization as a cover. Yeah, which is, I mean, the whole premise of the sitcom Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister is that the civil service actually quite deliberately works in a compartmentalized way to control the information that ministers have access to.
01:09:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think like probably, you know, we ought not cite David Ike as an example of getting it right. But I do think like probably this is something that's true. I do think like if you imagine like a very clever person organizing a thing and going like, well, you know, look at the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. We have coverage here. So you could imagine it happening that way. You can imagine it happening very organically, too. So the question is like,
01:10:00
Speaker
When should we think it's organic and when should we think it's not? Yeah, and I think that's the really interesting question, because that was the when Microsoft said, oh, it's just a, you know, it's not by design. It's just we're a large organization. I think some people quite rightly went, I mean,
01:10:17
Speaker
it might just be an accident or this could be a very convenient excuse you've come up with to explain why you've been conspiring against small developers whilst expressing the idea of being open to working with them. So, oh no, no, we definitely weren't actually deliberately
01:10:37
Speaker
preventing you from accessing the API. It was just we're a badly structured organization. Yes, that's the explanation we'll go with. We're just very badly run. And I think that speaks to the competence thing. We expect these organizations to be run well.
01:10:56
Speaker
They might be, but they're not run well according to the norms that the public expects. Yeah, I mean, I think like, I do think it's like, it's the kind of beggar's belief, right? Like, you're telling me you're a gazillion dollar company, and you're and you're run this poorly? Like, geez, how much how much money would you have if you were run well?
01:11:15
Speaker
Well, and actually, I think a nice example of that, which is very newsworthy, of course, the writers strike and the actors strike in the US. The film companies go, oh, but we're very poor. We're very, very poor, say, these organizations that bring in hundreds of billions of dollars a year and are paying their CEOs hundreds of million dollars a year.
01:11:39
Speaker
I don't know, we're very poor and why are they poor? Because they engage in really interesting accounting practices that ensure that films make a loss no matter how much money they make. And apparently that kind of open secret of creative accountancy allows them to go, yes, we're very rich and also at the same time we have no money.
01:12:02
Speaker
Yeah, I heard a very... I'm trying to remember where I heard this, but there was somebody and they were trying to hire an accountant and they said, like, I made this much last year. The accountant goes, no, no, no. How much do you need to have made last year? Yeah.
01:12:18
Speaker
There's always a way to then go, oh, we'll just write off these Grecian urns we just bought against how much you made, because they're a weirdly depreciating asset, so just buy these urns, it's fine. Suddenly, you'll get a refund from the government if you buy these urns.
01:12:37
Speaker
That would be hilarious if you were like, man, the sets on this were really good. And they were like, well, we did that because like it was all original, a true skin, you know, stuff. And now it's a write off. Yeah. And now it's never going to be seen ever again.
01:12:53
Speaker
When I worked for the oil and gas company between dropping out of undergrad and then later finishing in the late 2000s, and into the 2010s, we were independent contractors. The game was to be like, what all can I write off?
01:13:12
Speaker
You just get paid $10.99 and then you're on the hook for all the taxes. You're just like, okay, home office, all my mileage, I wore this tie to a meeting once. Everything you can write off, your accountant's job is to get your net income or whatever gross income as low as possible.
01:13:37
Speaker
If that's true for a couple of oil and gas people making a good but not insane living, then how true must that be if you make a billion dollars a year? It's a scary proposition. I think that sounds like a really interesting project there. We can then generalize it to, this is not just a problem for conspiracy theorists, it's a problem for everyone.
01:14:08
Speaker
Yeah, because I do think it's important for people like us to... Well, I mean, I wonder what you think about this. I feel like we sort of do defend conspiracy to a large extent because I feel like it needs defending.
01:14:24
Speaker
But of course, I think we want to say that these people are criticizable on some metrics, or that these things are criticizable on some metrics. But I think we've spent so much time, rightfully so, sort of setting the stage to be like, look, it's not that bad. These people aren't crazy. These views aren't nutty sometimes. They're like Kasam in that recent paper being like, tsk, tsk.
01:14:47
Speaker
you should know better. And so I wonder if like, it'd be beneficial for us to at least be able to say, well, look, here's a reason you might criticize these people. You edit to the kind of lexicon of, you know, Charles has talked about the problem of defectability.
01:15:04
Speaker
Brian talks about the notion of maturity. Lee Basham and Yuhau Reicher talk about the notion of fantasticalness. I've talked about recurrent narratives. And so you find features that go, look, this license, this license is a limited suspicion, which then needs to be developed by going, well, look,
01:15:24
Speaker
maybe these conspiracy theorists are attributing too much competence to an organization and then going because they're acting in an incompetent way the best explanation is well they can't be incompetent they're competent therefore they're engaging in conspiracy and you go well actually how do we distinguish between the competence of an all organization and the expectation of competence by the lay public it's a really interesting question
01:15:53
Speaker
And yeah, it might be the case that conspiracy theorists go in one direction, and other people go in another direction. Because of course, the converse here is people excusing conspiracies by large organizations by going, oh, no, no, no, it's just incompetence on their part. So you get the reverse issue.
01:16:15
Speaker
of there are going to be some people who refuse to see conspiracy and go on a much better to assume it's a cock up in case of why is it always much better to assume it's a cock up? Yeah, no, that's a very good question. And I think one that like they haven't really given a good answer to. And like another thing too, like even if right so like you get you get this a lot like, well, conspiracies are unreasonable, because so many people would have to keep the secret, right? We hear this all the time.
01:16:45
Speaker
But look, I mean, if Microsoft really were arranged in such a compartmentalized way on purpose, like the compartmentalization makes it so that only a very small number of people have to keep the secret. It's not as though everybody who works at Microsoft is in on it.
01:17:05
Speaker
And so there's 10,000 people keeping it secret. No, there's a very compartmentalized. It's a top-down compartmentalization. Eight people have to keep it secret. All you need is the managers of the various divisions to go, look, the reason why we don't have free-flowing communication between all divisions is actually would enable small developers to get the information they want. But I don't need to tell the people on the phone system that.
01:17:33
Speaker
I just need to tell the people in the phone system, if you're asked this particular type of question, send it through the system to this person over here. Yeah. Yeah. So I do think like, yeah, it would be interesting to see like, if the nature of compartmentalization, even if it's organic,
01:17:52
Speaker
sort of, you know, humiliates against this claim that conspiracies require like large scale secrecy on the part of like loads and loads of people. That could be a kind of cool angle to take.
01:18:08
Speaker
Yeah, and it speaks to the kind of structure of organizations, which is something which Martin or and I talked about in our paper secrecy and conspiracy, which is no sometimes, sometimes conspiracies are entirely controlled by, I think at the top, controlling everyone going down through the kind of pyramid. And sometimes, sometimes they're diverse. So it's actually one set of people controlling multiple
01:18:36
Speaker
all organizations and depending on what structure you think the conspiracy has you have a different reaction to how easy or hard it is to maintain the conspiracy given the the different types of moving parts you might have in your organization. Yeah that's that's good I should I need to read that paper it's it's funny like I've read I've read a lot of the papers in the literature but it just seems like there's eight more like
01:19:05
Speaker
every month. So when I did my PhD, literature was delightfully small and very easy to consume in the case for a week. But yeah, now the literature is I mean, in philosophy alone, it's now quite big. But if you start going into sociology, religious studies, political studies, cultural studies, social psychology, the literature is is unbelievably, unbelievably large.
01:19:32
Speaker
Yeah, because now there's like a Rutledge handbook and there's like, I think there's the Rutledge handbook, I think there's another handbook. There's like edited volumes. I mean, I'm pretty up on the philosophy side of things, which I guess is pretty good. And I feel like you keep us abreast of the social psychology and things in the reading group, which is helpful. Yeah, although sometimes also quite infuriating. I think most times. Yeah.
01:19:58
Speaker
Yeah, so my roommate is doing a, he's a philosophy PhD student, but he's a very math savvy person. He's taking a load of statistics grad classes. And I was running one of these papers by him and he was like, wait, what? They did what? It's just like, I can't remember exactly what it was. He was very surprised by sort of the
01:20:21
Speaker
the quantitative methods that were getting used. There's some interesting work coming out of social psychology, but let's not end this by hammering down on the fault of social psychologists, but rather celebrating the successes of philosophers. Do you know when your paper is going to be publicly available?
01:20:44
Speaker
I will release the preprint at some point soon. I'm meeting with my advisor tomorrow, and so I will talk to him about what next steps are because I don't really know what next steps are. A celebratory drink. I've done that.
01:21:07
Speaker
I did bring home a really nice bottle of Irish whiskey from the duty free in Dublin. So that's my news. It's in my desk right here. Yeah. So I think I need to make a website. I've been told, um, which will, which will probably be made in large part from help from my RCA diagnostic friend. Um, and, um, um,
01:21:32
Speaker
I need to, like, finish my fill papers profile, I suppose. But when will this podcast come out? Probably next week. And for people who are listening, that's the end of July. Okay, in that case, like, maybe I will, I will at least have it on fill papers so I can send you a link if you want to include a link to the paper. That would be great.
01:21:56
Speaker
Yeah, it'd be great for me too. It's just sighted. Even if you're not just sighted a lot, even if you're a biologist and you're writing about T-cells, just slip in the sight to pass. If you're a rotating engineer and you're writing a report on the new roundabout, just
01:22:18
Speaker
put it in the citations. No, absolutely. Absolutely. As my friend Adam Givens said about one of his papers, just today, actually, he was like, just cite it, man. Like just put a slip of citation on a footnote. Nobody reads those anyways. Yeah, yeah. And it does a lot of work to a person's age index. Yeah, so I will. But yeah, I'll definitely get you a link to the paper for the show notes. As soon as I have one, I think uploading it to Phil papers will be like
01:22:47
Speaker
This should take me one second, so. Yeah, it's pretty much a dot all these days. Yeah, so very exciting. I hope people enjoy the conversation. I don't think I rambled too much, hopefully. No, it was great. It was great.
Entertainment vs. Information in Interviews
01:23:04
Speaker
Good, good. Well, thank you. That has been an informative conversation, and hopefully we'll talk again soon. In fact, we will talk again soon in about two weeks' time. Yep, looking forward to it. Thanks, Sam.
01:23:19
Speaker
And there you have it. Let's pretend we just listened to that interview and talk about it now. I find myself a bit more cynical, I think, than Pat. Your whole discussion about what you should actually do in his talk of teachable moments and so on, like...
01:23:34
Speaker
I definitely I have felt frustrated from things like the Daily Show and stuff like that when they have that have a person give an obviously wrong theory, and whoever was interviewing them would just sort of give a sideways glance to the camera. And that would be it. And it was entirely just about
01:23:53
Speaker
It was purely just entertainment. It was just, let's laugh at these people and their silly views. It was purely for the benefit of the audience who they knew did not share the views of these people. So yeah, I can see, especially in cases when, like that Neil deGrasse Tyson example he gave, that wouldn't take very long to say exactly, this is why we know these views are nonsense.
01:24:16
Speaker
And then you could get on with laughing at them. But on the other hand, sort of the talk of teachable moments, I do have to feel that in a lot of cases, they're not really teachable moments. We've seen so many cases of people where you try to
01:24:37
Speaker
debate them to try to sort of calmly and non-judgmentally introduce facts and they're just plain rejected. I'm sure some people, it seems to be a case by case but thing, I'm sure some peoples are actually interested in finding out what things really are but seems like so many people
01:24:59
Speaker
It's just, it's more a matter of identity or anything, and they have no actual interest in having their minds or opinions changed at all. See, I worry that you may be generalising about conspiracy theorists there, because they want to go, but not all conspiracy theorists are the salient point here. Case by case. I mean, I think it's fair to say, if you are having a debate with Alex Jones or David Icke,
01:25:26
Speaker
you're probably not going to have much success in shifting their views no matter what evidence you present, because they have a particular job to do, which is to sell a message because they're merchandising themselves as a kind of character in the culture wars.
01:25:45
Speaker
but I think Pat's more interested in people like his friend who aren't actually immersed in the culture wars themselves with a kind of political identity based around I am presenting the fact that the woke is the most dangerous thing to the world ever, but people who are simply going
01:26:02
Speaker
Look, there's a debate going on here, and one side is better at explaining why they hold their position than the other side does, and those are the people we need to be thinking about when we're engaging in these public discussions.
01:26:19
Speaker
And of course, as Pat pointed out, I mean, there's no obligation to be a public intellectual or communicator of ideas. So if you are going to do it, you need to be thinking, not just about the person you're talking to, but the people who are listening to it. Because sure, in some situations, maybe 80% of the audience listening to you agree with you and agree the other 20% are just lunatures.
01:26:49
Speaker
But you can't guarantee that, and you do need to be thinking about, if I just spend a few more minutes describing a particular position, maybe that 20% becomes 15, and that's probably worth it.
01:27:08
Speaker
I have two minds about the scenario that you mentioned of the, I think you're talking about specifically in the context of a science communicator and Pat makes the fair point that if you have chosen to be a science communicator, then yes, you are just going to have to debunk the same points over and over and over and ad infinitum. But I do
01:27:34
Speaker
I do sort of wonder sometimes if there's an element of pointlessness to it. I mean, I've talked in the past about how many years ago when I had more free time on my hands than I knew what to do with, I would hang around sort of not actually intelligent design websites, but the websites of people debunking intelligent design. And yeah, it was just depressing how often the exact same argument
01:28:03
Speaker
exact same arguments, which had been debunked decades previously, would just come up every time. And every time it's like, no, we've been through this, this is the answer, but then the next person comes up. And you do start to think, look, if these people are really curious, the answers are there and not hard to find. So the fact that they're
01:28:26
Speaker
Choosing to argue with you does make me wonder sometimes whether it is about truth or whether it's about just the argument.
01:28:34
Speaker
I mean, I think there's another issue here, which is that sometimes what we think is a knockdown argument to a point actually doesn't appear obviously to a knockdown argument to the person you're delivering that point to. And I think that kind of speaks to the epistemic luck, which plays a huge role in just why we have the positions we do. If you're having a, I mean, I'm thinking here about how
01:29:00
Speaker
David Icke's entire epistemic framework is about going, well, look, if my intuitions match my experience of the world, then that tells me my beliefs are true. So essentially, intuitions are a kind of veristic thing that tells you what's true about the world. And of course, if we go to Icke with David Icke, we're not going to go, well, but David, my intuitions are different from yours. We're going to try to persuade him with the evidence. And he's going to reject the entire epistemic framework we're using.
01:29:30
Speaker
So the arguments we give are not knocked down to him because we're not arguing along the same lines. And I think that's a serious concern here, that we kind of assume that there's a living, living, living, living, as in the bread rises, a level playing field of we all know how arguments work and how evidence works. But I don't think that's the case.
01:29:56
Speaker
And I think that's the bigger issue and that some of these people are not being obstinate and they're not just avoiding looking for answers. They literally do not think the answers they're finding in books or increasingly online match how they think the argument should actually look. Yeah, so I think
01:30:18
Speaker
I think possibly, yeah, the problem sort of shifts back from being, again, coming back to Pat's idea of the teachable moment. I think the problem shifts back to figuring out what's a teachable moment and what isn't. And, you know, when it's worth
01:30:40
Speaker
worth or potentially worth, you know, when there is a chance and how big a chance again is another question that arguing back is going to have some impact and when you're just wasting your time and working out the difference between those two situations sounds like a trickier job, unfortunately.
01:31:02
Speaker
Unfortunately, indeed.
Publication and Podcast Editing
01:31:05
Speaker
So, pets, pets, paper is going to be coming out soon-ish, do we know?
01:31:13
Speaker
So he has sent us a link to the archived version up on Phil papers, which is the open repository that philosophers use to host their papers online. So you can put preprints up there. So it will be available for listeners of the podcast to experience and read for themselves. Experience is a weird way. Experience the article on the origin of conspiracy theories now available as a mosaic.
01:31:43
Speaker
So yes, there'll be a link in the show notes which will allow people to download the paper if they want to read it. As is fairly common with academic articles, they get accepted for publication and then the period of time between accepted for publication and actually appearing on the website as a forthcoming article can be anything from three weeks to three months.
01:32:07
Speaker
So at some point, it'll be available with a DOI, but it is available to read now. Well, there we go. I would recommend it, quite frankly.
01:32:20
Speaker
So yeah, a good talk. I'm assuming that when you actually edit the interview together, you're going to cut off the first 15, 20 minutes of the two of you talking about movies and stuff, because what sort of responsible podcaster would get sidetracked into discussions of popular culture?
01:32:40
Speaker
when there are philosophical debates to be made. It's up to you to work out whether you're going to slip that discussion in at the very end of the podcast or make it disappear or just put it up as a patron bonus special. It's up to you. You have the power.
01:32:57
Speaker
That's an interesting point because I'm not currently in a position to be editing podcasts, but I should be in a few days from now. And given that as the recording of this episode, I don't think last week's episode is actually up yet.
01:33:14
Speaker
Is it, or have you published it and I haven't seen it? We had a bit of fiddling around last
Lighthearted Discussions
01:33:20
Speaker
week, so things happened late, so I think we can be excused for putting out this one, slightly later than normal, which is my excuse for how long did it take to edit it? Indeed, I know it's out because Drew reacted to the intro in the way Drew was meant to. Oh, actually good. Right, well, I think we're done.
01:33:40
Speaker
I think we're done with this main episode. Oh, because it's not publishing to Twitter anymore, because, you know, that's probably why I didn't get the notification. Right. Anyway, and also it's not not even called Twitter. It's not even called Twitter anymore. So it has not been so I'm not on Twitter or X anymore. Are they cool? How are they pronouncing it? Because I want to say it to you think
01:34:07
Speaker
I have no idea how they're pronouncing it and I don't care at all. I'm just assuming Twitter will either be dead soon or they'll drag it screaming out of Elon Musk's hands and put everything back the way it was, or at least go back to calling it Twitter anyway. I myself am not going to be calling it anything but Twitter until, again, it goes back to being called Twitter or I just leave it when it collapses entirely. Anyway,
01:34:37
Speaker
What was I saying before I got sidetracked? We're talking about the bonus episode. Yes. So in our bonus episode this week, we're going to sort of continue the conversation a little bit regarding the interview by talking about an instance of a theory which is not particularly conspiratorial in itself, but which gets conspiratorial when people talk about why people, other people don't take this theory seriously, which leads again into that discussion of
01:35:07
Speaker
do you do more harm than good by simply writing off theories that you believe to be nonsense and refusing to discuss them, a la what you were talking about with Nessa not wanting to dignify certain conspiracy theories with a response, or is it
01:35:24
Speaker
better in the long run to actually engage. I'm not going to say what the theory is. I think it can be a surprise for our patrons. If you want to be in on the surprise, you'll have to become a patron, thereby gaining access to all of our bonus episodes. All I'm going to say is, Josh, they stole my apes. They stole my apes. All your apes? What about your slip juice? They stole all my apes. Oh, no. What about Jimmy Fallon's apes?
01:35:52
Speaker
What about Paris Hilton's? Those apes, I think, was about 50 cents each now. Yes, most likely. I mean, I see, I about to say Elon Jack Dorsey's first tweet, which was sold for tens of millions of dollars and is now worth 40 bucks or less on the EST marketplace. Ah, schadenfreude. Who doesn't love it?
01:36:17
Speaker
But now, enough, enough. Enough with the schadenfreude, enough with the teasing of the bonus episode, lets you and I go and record the bonus episode, and let the people listening to this main episode go about their respective businesses. Indeed. Goodbye. Latitude. The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, Associate Professor M.R.X. Dantas.
01:36:46
Speaker
Sorry, producers aren't Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.