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Joining the Conspiracy (Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre)
69 Plays1 year ago
Josh and M review Lee Basham's "Joining the Conspiracy" (Argumenta, 2018).
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Transcript
A Mysterious Beginning
00:00:00
Speaker
So, are you in? Yep, absolutely. Positively gunning for it. But... Yeah? In for what? You know. Do I? Isn't it obvious? No. Think about it. Think about all the things which have led to this moment. Think of what this means for your future. I'm thinking... So...
00:00:24
Speaker
Are you in? Yes, as long as you tell me what I'm in for. You know how you like reading comics, playing console games, and drinking Mountain Dew? Yeah. Well, it's nothing like that. It's more life-changing. I'm intrigued. Sign me up. So you're in?
00:00:44
Speaker
Yeah, I'm in. No buts, no whys, no hesitation. I am so in that people think my eagerness is embarrassing. Great. Now here's the paperwork. Hold on, there's another paper by Lee Basham. You said you were in. Yeah, but... No buts, no whys, no hesitation. That was the
Meet the Hosts: Josh Edison and Dr. Em Dentuth
00:01:07
Speaker
deal. Fine, I guess I'm in for another instalment of conspiracy theory, Masterpiece Theatre.
00:01:16
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dentuth. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Edison and in Auckland, New Zealand, they are Dr. Em Dentuth. How are you, Dr. Em Dentuth? I am Dr. Em Dentuth. I am Dr. Em Dentuth.
00:01:46
Speaker
Right. Actually, I know I'm actually quite good for reasons that will become apparent when we talk about the Patreon bonus episode. But long story short, a special issue of the journal Social Epistemology that I spent a large chunk of last year working on as editor.
Conspiracy Theory Insights: Lee Basham's Paper
00:02:04
Speaker
Those papers are slowly trickling out online and I am very pleased with both the papers and also
00:02:12
Speaker
Ego raised due to my shepherding of those papers through the process, although really the hard work was done by the writers. I just did the whole thing of prodding them to get things on time so a special issue would come out. But still, it does flatter the old ego to feel, yes, my name's associated with these great, great papers which are coming out even as we speak.
00:02:34
Speaker
Well then I guess it's appropriate we're doing a conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre episode, although of course the paper we're looking at is not one of these brand spanking new ones that you're... I'm gathering wholly responsible for. Oh yes, I mean they may have come up with the ideas, they may have written the words down, they may have responded to peer review and improved their papers, but at essence.
00:02:59
Speaker
I think we can all agree that my filthy hands are all over the text in some way, shape or form, probably making the papers worst. Well, as far as I'm aware, your grubby paw prints are not on the paper we're looking at today, although I do see your reference to a couple of times, so that's nice.
00:03:20
Speaker
We're looking at a paper by Lee Basham, who actually, to be honest, because we've had Christmases and holidays, and I've been overseas and all of that business, I can't even remember.
00:03:31
Speaker
what we most recently talked about in Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. So I don't know how long it's been since we've talked about Li Vashima. It feels like it's been a while. The last one we looked at was Keith Harris's What is Epistemically Problematic About Conspiracy Theories, or is it What is Epistemically Wrong About Conspiracy Theories, which as I noted
00:03:50
Speaker
is in the Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre series, even though I do not consider it to be a masterpiece because we're now kind of moving away from the classic papers into the newer work. I do think Lee's paper probably does belong in that older era of classic establishing papers, even though there are some things about the paper that I'm not
00:04:15
Speaker
completely on board with but we'll talk about that as we go through but this is a great paper by Lee it's the usual kind of barnstorming approach he has towards going well look actually these things are not as bad as people make them out to be and also look at the consequences of not treating conspiracy theories seriously but maybe I'm getting ahead of myself
00:04:38
Speaker
Maybe a little. Certainly, if we haven't played a chime, I don't think we've officially started talking about the paper yet. So get a chime in there, or a sting, or a hit, or whatever you call it. I'm no audio engineer. Some kind of final countdown? It'll do. Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
00:05:04
Speaker
Didn't sound that final, but I'll accept it. So we are looking at the paper called Joining the Conspiracy that Lee Basham had published in argumenta. Now, this was a special issue on conspiracy theories.
The Concept of Toxic Truths
00:05:17
Speaker
So I have my paper, The Problem of Conspiracism, also appears in the series. But of course, we don't cover my papers in conspiracy theory, Masterpieces, because it would be inappropriate for me to review my own work, let alone claim that they are Masterpieces.
00:05:33
Speaker
Yes, it would be a little bit weird. Maybe one day we'll come up with some way of discussing your papers. But I've had a microwave device. I can just erase the last 15 years of my life. And then you explain to me what a podcast is. Then maybe I can review my own papers. That would be quite fascinating. Would I like my own work?
00:05:53
Speaker
or if you mind wiped me, would I turn into a generalist? Oh, that's starting to sound like you're practicing philosophy there and I don't approve. Let's get back to this philosophy paper. It has an abstract which I choose to read
00:06:07
Speaker
Now, accompanying the accusation of malevolent political conspiracy is the accusation of cover-up of these conspiracies by leading institutions of public information, mass media and national law enforcement. A common response to this accusation is that these institutions of public information will reliably reveal such political conspiracies, not cover them up.
00:06:26
Speaker
Unfortunately, the best arguments for this hope are now widely recognized to fail. Further, cover-up does not require descending control of the media by conspirators. The problem is much more complex and one endemic to our information hierarchies. This includes the mechanisms generating the epistemic problem of toxic truths. Toxicity is the likelihood that some conspiratorial scenarios, even if well-evidenced,
00:06:48
Speaker
are too toxic for our usual institutions of public information to disseminate to the public or even investigate. Cover-up by intentional neglect, not descending control, is the easily predictable consequence. The threat this poses to a functioning democracy is significant." Indeed, the quote-un-till from Stargate SG-1. And also one episode of Stargate Atlantis, but not, strangely enough, any guest appearance in Stargate Universe.
00:07:13
Speaker
You know, I don't know if I've ever watched a full episode of Stargate of any series. I saw the movie, the first one, with James Spader in there. And Kurt Russell. Don't forget Kurt Russell. No, I never forget Kurt Russell. Anyway.
00:07:26
Speaker
So that's your abstract. We go straight away into section one, the introduction, which begins, what if our institutions of public information do not always have the ability to expose malevolent conspiracies, worming their way through our society with vast consequences? What if worse, even given this ability, these institutions often have compelling society regarding reasons not to publicly reveal these conspiracies?
00:07:52
Speaker
Just in general, this paper seemed more sort of a development of stuff that Lee has talked about in the past than introducing a lot new. There was a lot of themes that have come up before in his papers. He's talking about these two things that have come up before. One is the idea of the public trust approach.
00:08:12
Speaker
The PTA. A PTA, which is valuable, he gives to the claim we should be confident that institutions of public information can and will reliably reveal ambitious or momentous conspiracies. And not a reference to the Parents Teachers Association, which is a or the Post Primary Teachers Association. PTA has a different meaning in Aotearoa, New Zealand. It does, yes.
00:08:37
Speaker
But we can put that aside for now because as well as his particular PTA, he's also talking about the idea of toxic truths, which he defines as follows. Toxicity is a set of truths or at least well justified or warranted assertions or a temporal pattern of such that if convincingly revealed by mainstream use outlets and national law enforcement within a certain relatively proximate timeframe to the events in question,
00:09:02
Speaker
a. Would with some significant probability, not restricted to 50% or more, but often higher, be extremely socially and or politically disrupting, and b. In many cases, this consequence is easily foreseeable by any reasonable person conversant with the current civilization at the person on the street criterion. There were a lot of qualifications in that one definition there.
00:09:24
Speaker
Yeah, and as we'll see, toxicity is a very interesting concept, and I think Leah's pointing towards something which is valuable here, which is that you can live in a society where it turns out there are pressures to not reveal disastrous information about what's going on within that society.
00:09:47
Speaker
And I think generally that idea is a good one. And I think it also is evidenced by certain responses
The Trust Dilemma in Science and Media
00:09:54
Speaker
to things. One of the longstanding debates that is going to be going on post the pandemic is were certain Western nations aware
00:10:04
Speaker
that their health and economic policies were in fact deleterious to the public good but have kept information from the public because they want to engender a certain degree of trust in the institutions which delivered those decisions. i.e. is it going to turn out that after the pandemic has ended and inquiries are made people are going to go but you knew economically this wouldn't work
00:10:29
Speaker
And you also knew that these people were going to be kind of discarded by your health response. And you did it anyway, which would be information which would be very destabilizing or cause distrust in in authority. So he's pointing towards something really interesting there. But yes, I agree the criteria here.
00:10:50
Speaker
that's it's kind of in one case is putting numbers on things and you should always be suspicious of philosophers if they start putting numbers on things because we're not very good with numbers historically and also the person on the street criterion which people which straight
00:11:09
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, having read ahead, things like this, the requirement of within a certain relatively proximate timeframe to the events and things like that, there do seem to be a reason for all of them. He talks through a lot of all of this stuff. But yes, something more together like that does seem like there's quite a bit of
00:11:26
Speaker
a bit of hedging going on. But he continues, we will explore and defend the following thesis. Contrary to the PTA, toxicity predictably and in crisis scenarios powerfully constrains publicised mainstream media investigations as well as those of national law enforcement.
00:11:43
Speaker
is also met. For instance, in the hypothetical case of a false flag massive attack on civilians, this is the inversion of the public trust approach. This is clearly an important thesis for social epistemology and for further research, both analytical and empirical. And he goes on to use examples such as the lead up to the 2003 war in Iraq and to the Vietnam War, specifically the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to that, uses them as examples of apparently true
00:12:12
Speaker
institutional conspiracy theories regarding the US government. He says, we must ask how much unrecognized and so unchecked power derives from the very existence of such institutions, and even if recognized, how are our institutions of public information, media and law enforcement likely to respond?
00:12:31
Speaker
And so his sort of point there, especially regarding the Gulf of Tonkin one, is that the truth of that incident was toxic. And so at the time was suppressed. I don't actually know if that's how true that is or not. We've talked about the Gulf of Tonkin, but I don't recall that. We had three minutes out. There are two incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin, one of which was
00:12:55
Speaker
an event which was presented to the American public in such a way that didn't actually resemble what happened on the water that day. And so when people talk about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, they're usually talking about that second institute, which was Institute?
00:13:12
Speaker
I was about to creep myself and then go institution. What I meant to say was incident. They usually talk about that second incident and the way that the military and then the government of the United States of America use that to then license police action in Vietnam.
00:13:34
Speaker
That's I mean, the Vietnam War is one of those one of those awkward bits of American history. Very, very awkward for a bunch of reasons, including what appears to be the precipitating event, which caused conflict on that peninsula. Vietnam's peninsula.
00:13:51
Speaker
No, or I think Korea is a peninsula, and Vietnam is not really actually a peninsula-like at all. My sense of geography fails me at this point, but yes, I think you're thinking of Korea. I am thinking of Korea. South Korea. Anyway, Vietnam I think just has a coastline. But I didn't write.
00:14:08
Speaker
So that's the setup. That's where we're going. And so he goes through these two different things. The idea of the public trust approach and the idea of toxic truths that makes up the body, the main body of this paper. So starting in section two, we look at the public trust approach. And again, a lot of this stuff was quite familiar. This goes all the way back to his earliest papers where he was arguing against Brian Elkely.
00:14:32
Speaker
sort of saying that Brian takes the public trust approach and he was arguing against that. And we've kind of pushed back upon that by going, Lee's not really showing the most charitable interpretation of Brian. Now, admittedly, as we've discussed numerous times in this series, there is a problem with Brian's paper, which is that
00:14:54
Speaker
He moves from talking about
Media's Role in Conspiracy Reporting
00:14:56
Speaker
mature and unwarranted conspiracy theories in the first half to a kind of what appears to be sui generis discussion of conspiracy theories in the second half. It's clearly clear if you're reading the paper charitably, the second half of that discussion is concerning mature and thus unwarranted conspiracy theories.
00:15:18
Speaker
And thus he's not espousing the kind of public trust approach that Lee is attributing to him. And yet it's also understandable as to why you might make that interpretation if you don't kind of track
00:15:32
Speaker
Brian losing the continuity of his terminology throughout that paper. And as I think I've also stressed several times in the series, I too have been guilty of claiming that Brian subscribes to a public trust approach. I talk about that in the philosophy of conspiracy theories. And I now recognize that it's not the charitable interpretation of Brian's work we should be taking from that seminal paper of conspiracy theories.
00:16:01
Speaker
Also, it's one of the points where Lee and I diverge. Lee still takes it that Brian is an exemplar of the PTA. I don't think Brian's a member of any parent-teacher association that I know of in the United States.
00:16:16
Speaker
No, no, do they even have them over there? Probably not. Yeah, I found it a little bit strange that at least for a lot of this section of the paper, he's referring right back to Brian's work from 1999, which from a paper in 2018, we're almost going back 20 years, it did seem a little bit odd.
00:16:36
Speaker
that he wasn't talking about things through a bit more recent. But anyway, we'll get through that. So the section starts with the sentence, conspiracy is dangerous to democracy, which will come up again and again throughout this paper. He refers to David Cody's talk on similar things. And so he says, mainstream accounts of recent history reveal that high-level conspiracies happen with disquieting frequency. Watergate and the Pentagon's deceitful conduct of the Vietnam War are obvious well-researched examples.
00:17:03
Speaker
and that similar conspiracies may even be the basis of more recent policy. The launching of the West's recent wars in the Middle East is a plausible example. A compelling case can be made that the Bush administration and the Pentagon knowingly provided the public with many misleading and false claims about the terrorist threats involved in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, he does point out that even at the time, even when the case was being made for the war in 2002, 2003, there were experts at the time criticizing this and saying, no, we don't think this is true.
00:17:32
Speaker
But the media at the time wasn't pushing this, to the extent that they even reported it at all, were reporting this as sort of the official view. And that's where I wonder whether Lee has blinders with respect to being from the US, because
00:17:52
Speaker
I remember the media response we got from, say, the UK and in Australasia, and the media was talking about the trumped up way that the US and the UK were presenting this kind of case for war in Iraq.
00:18:08
Speaker
which everyone was going, but the UN weapons inspectors don't seem to think that's true. And here's all this other information. We've got we've got suspicions about things. And so one of my worries about the toxic truth approach is that you could go a little bit too overboard.
00:18:25
Speaker
and take it to be kind of a general brush to say, this is why these things occur. I think what's really curious about the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is that there were people in the media and other non-governmental institutions who were pointing out the case for war was flawed. And it turned out governments, well, we can just ignore the criticism.
00:18:54
Speaker
I mean, they're revealing the toxic truth of exactly what we're up to, and we're not going to do anything about it. And I think the proof of that is that George W. Bush and Tony Blair are not declared war criminals spending time in prison. They are acceptable members of society in the present day. They got away with it. People know what they got away with. There's no hiding what they did.
00:19:24
Speaker
It's just that it turns out you can tell a big lie and then just work through it. Yeah, I mean, Lee's defense in the first section, his examples were specifically in the context of the US government. So maybe he's still thinking about that here. And he does have his little thing about the whole point that toxicity only applies within a certain timeframe and
00:19:52
Speaker
there can be issues of what's done is done afterwards. But people were criticising the invasion of Iraq in the media as the invasion was going on and the build up to the invasion. So as long as if time passed and then it got revealed
00:20:10
Speaker
and Bush and Blair went, oops, you caught me, but no, what are you going to do? Though being challenged on this throughout the entire process. I mean, maybe the US is a special case here. But in the rest in the rest of the Western world, there were criticisms and they were prompt criticisms in the media as the invasion was going ahead. Yes, yeah, I think we might get into that a bit more as it goes on. But for the moment,
00:20:36
Speaker
As an example, basically, to set the scene and show exactly what he's going to be talking about, he gives a quick summary of a variety of 9-11 conspiracy theories. Your me-hops and your Lee-hops. Your bee-bops, your lily-hops. All of that. Having set those out, he then says a standard reply to such conspiracy theories being put forward is that,
00:21:03
Speaker
Mainstream media would have launched riveting withering coverage of the nightmare in its many dimensions. Law enforcement would have conducted investigations leading to public arrests, trials, and convictions. President Bush would have been perp-walked to a waiting police van, but none of this happened, or likely ever will, so these accusations are almost certainly false, and that is his example of the public trust approach in action.
00:21:28
Speaker
Which, as you said, is sort of an absence of evidence, is evidence of absence kind of an inference. And so, you know, surely if these conspiracy theories were true, people, you know, and massive crimes had been committed, essentially, we have people whose job it is to investigate those crimes and prosecute them. So surely that would have happened and it hasn't happened. So I guess the conspiracy theories must not be true. And yet this is the kind of view that he's going to be arguing against.
00:21:52
Speaker
Here he starts talking about Brian's stuff. He was where it started to stick out to me. Why is he talking about...
00:22:01
Speaker
the paper from 1999 in 2018. But nevertheless, he goes through the things that Brian said in his earlier papers and says, we should recognize that Keeley is not making the implausible, sorry, I need to emphasize that we should recognize that Keeley is not making the implausible claim that if an ambitious political or economic conspiracy is real, then the media, government officials or other sources will inevitably successfully report it. And so we shouldn't fear since it was not reported it will occur.
00:22:28
Speaker
He recognises that sometimes dramatic conspiratorial secrets will be successfully kept from sufficient numbers of people or the right kind of people for a period sufficient for the success of these conspiracies and even indefinitely for good reasons, national security for instance, and on occasion for bad reasons.
00:22:46
Speaker
In Lee's defense, you have to realize that after Of Conspiracy Theories, the next publication that Brian produces is kind of a response to Lee in The Conspiracy Theory, the philosophical debate book edited by David Cody. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition from 2003. And then Brian's next work is God as the ultimate conspiracy theorist.
00:23:15
Speaker
And that's in the Epistem special issue in 2007. And I don't think Ryan's exploring the same kind of concepts in God as the ultimate conspiracy theorist as he is when he's talking, actually, sorry, God is the ultimate conspiracy theory, not ultimate conspiracy theorists. Although God would be the ultimate conspiracy theorists. Three in one, easy to plot with, to find out about.
00:23:44
Speaker
he does move in mysterious ways. So mysterious. So it is fair for Lee to go, look, the main text I'm drawing upon for characterizing Brand's view is this 1999 paper. So having gone, so I mean, he's doing a lot of sort of summarizing
00:24:08
Speaker
Brian's views and reacting to them, he says, in this case, the issue becomes, how likely is it that a complicated crime, one beyond the reach of ordinary minds, could be covered up indefinitely or for a sufficient amount of time from a sufficient amount or kind of people? Is anything approaching the conclusion almost certainly not justified?
00:24:30
Speaker
And he starts, so while this section is on the public trust approach and the next section is on toxic truths, his point is that the toxic truths kind of put paid to the public trust approach. So he starts talking about them fairly early on here. He says, here we meet the real force of the problem of toxic truths. The problem of toxic truths can threaten to invert our apparently warranted expectations of public institutions of information, our public trust,
00:24:56
Speaker
Critically examining public trust helps us see how these expectations might predictably even reliably flip. This inversion thesis is the ultimate thesis of this paper.
Institutional Reliability and Scientific Comparisons
00:25:05
Speaker
So he says, when he's talking about information hierarchies, he sort of talks about how originally that your hierarchy would be in earlier times. You'd get your information from the people around you who you spoke to.
00:25:18
Speaker
Over time, now we have the idea that information kind of comes from the top down, from your official sources, gets disseminated through media and what have you. And so he says, in this sort of case, information hierarchies can be inverted so that they, as he puts it, have a very limited number of persons in the role of control.
00:25:36
Speaker
So it's the probable relevance judgments and potential intentional neglect by such leadership that are critical for estimating the prospect of undirected coverup. And this is something that's going to be coming back to the idea that stuff gets covered up, not because the evil forces at the top are dictating that anyone in a position to report on it mustn't report on it. He's going to go on to say that it can just sort of happen.
00:26:03
Speaker
due to the sorts of toxic truths and institutions he's going to be talking about. But he talks more about Brian's arguments, in particular how Brian compares
00:26:12
Speaker
the sciences to the likes of government and the press is saying that they're all institutions that have processes and safeguards to prevent bad information from coming out. You know, he talks about how sciences, we have all these processes of checking and reviewing and what have you that are supposed to ensure that the information coming out of these institutions is reliable. And he says, and there are similar ones elsewhere, but Lee says,
00:26:36
Speaker
But is there really sufficient parallel between the reliable regulation of information in the sciences and the political and economic realm to justify such a sweeping, hopeful conclusion? While initially appealing, the analogy becomes unconvincing. There are both problematic disanalogies as well as stunning failings even within scientific peer review, which at least given Keeley's analogy, predict at least as stunning failures within public institutions of information.
00:27:03
Speaker
And so there are a couple of things there. So one thing, as Brian himself pointed out, that unlike scientific investigation, the subjects of a conspiracy are often, or always, I guess if it's an actual conspiracy, actively trying to hide from investigation. Not always. I mean, you can conspire and then go, oops, as long as nobody looks into it, we're going to be sweet. As Charles Picton has argued,
00:27:28
Speaker
Claims about disinformation production or cover-ups are always auxiliary hypotheses for certain conspiracy theories. Sometimes you hide what you're doing and you then don't continue to try hiding what you've done. Sometimes you just do it and walk away. Yeah, but in most cases, especially if it's if an active investigation into the conspiracy is going. Certainly, I mean, it doesn't apply in science.
00:27:57
Speaker
unless you're like a biologist investigating like chameleons or something who can hide from you? I don't know. Come chameleons. I mean, think about 9-11, something which we agree is a conspiracy theory given the operating definition we work with. Al-Qaeda didn't try, if we take the official theory to be a conspiracy theory, Al-Qaeda didn't try to hide what they did.
00:28:24
Speaker
they owned up to it quite quickly yes but they tried to hide it they did hide it while they were doing it though yeah but once the event was completed there was no need to engage in a cover-up and of course the assassination of Julius Caesar is another great example of course you had to keep
00:28:40
Speaker
assassinating Julius Caesar from Julius Caesar. If you don't keep assassinating Julius Caesar from Julius Caesar, he's going to object to the assassination of himself. But once you assassinate Julius Caesar, you want to be celebrated as the heroes who have restored the glorious Roman Republic. So you want to kind of start shouting about it as quickly as possible. We're the ones who just did that thing. Well, as Lee puts it,
00:29:08
Speaker
Unlike carefully described and perfectly general scientific experiments that can be reenacted anywhere, the expertise and apparatus are available, the public cannot replicate much of media or law enforcement investigations or ascertain with any certainty how these were actually conducted or not, nor can they have direct access to much of the evidence collected or ignored.
00:29:26
Speaker
They cannot observe or replicate the actions, motives, reasoning, and direct communications of key players in these information hierarchies, be it mass media or law enforcement, that play a controlling role in investigations or the neglect of such. Now, I saw in the copy of the paper you gave me, you still marked up with some of your comments. I see you noted at that point that law enforcement at least does have some fairly strict regulations on
00:29:51
Speaker
the handling and procurement and storage and what have you of evidence. Now, of course, law enforcement can disregard those things. And as we've seen, both back home and in the US, sometimes law enforcement goes out of its way to break those rules. But
00:30:09
Speaker
technically speaking, in the same way that you can't trust scientists to actually follow scientific protocols all the time. There are huge issues in the sciences with people doing experiments and then going, Oh, yeah, I, I followed the protocol. Sure, that that guidebook with all the safety stuff in it, I definitely followed every step there. I definitely didn't do anything I wasn't meant to do. I didn't leak anything from the lab. But
00:30:36
Speaker
Yeah, it turns out law enforcement in particular usually has fairly prescribed abilities and also has fairly rigorous reporting requirements at the same time. And that's going to be true for some media organizations as well, that they have to
00:30:54
Speaker
keep a paper trail of some kind, even if they're taken to court, they might go, well, privilege says I'm not going to reveal who my source is. There is going to be some kind of paper trail, so an editor can go, so we're going to print this story where you're claiming that the President of the United States is a werewolf hunter.
00:31:16
Speaker
I'm going to need to see some documents. Oh, oh, I see. You've actually got the presidential diaries here. Fantastic. We've both seen that documentary. I have seen that documentary, yes. Now, Lee, I'm just going to leave that there. We are talking about a specific film. If you know it, you know it. Yeah. So Lee, having sort of said that or having claimed that science
00:31:43
Speaker
and the law and the media aren't necessarily the same, although we might argue with that. He then turns to the other end and says that also even science, its institutions are not immune from conspiracy. He says, Keighley's appeal to the purity of science begs the question against many conspiracy theories that impugn its invocation.
00:32:00
Speaker
Wherever humans are involved, conspiracy is sometimes a significant possibility. Science can fail for these same reasons, a legacy involving diverse motives, internal and external to science, examples going all the way back to Lysenko and the paleontological charade of Piltdown. But have we talked about Piltdown, man?
00:32:17
Speaker
We have not. And Piltdown Man is interesting because Pertahard de Chidane was on the dig where Piltdown Man was discovered. And so there was, for a period of time, a Jesuit conspiracy theory saying it was a Jesuit who planted Piltdown Man, even though we now know it was quite clearly Mr. Piltdown himself. But at any rate, so it sort of summarises that...
00:32:41
Speaker
I kind of want to push back on Lysenko, because Lysenkoism wasn't science. Lysenkoism was presented as science by the Soviets, but the scientists who were operating in the Soviet Union at the time thought that Lysenkoism was bunk.
00:32:59
Speaker
pushed back against it, it just turned out Lysenko had the air of Stalin, and those scientists didn't, so those scientists either lost their jobs or died. Lysenkoism was not a scientific endeavor written with conspiracy, it was political ideology being presented as science.
00:33:20
Speaker
Yeah, I guess you could say it was relying on the institution of science to try and... Well, except that all the institutions of science at the time in the Soviet Union were against Lysenkoism until such time those people got replaced by their political masters.
00:33:38
Speaker
But I assume the political masters, when asked about this, would insist, oh no, no, this is all totally scientific and you can trust it because it's science, not because I'm a politician who's saying so, even though it's
Social Implications of Toxic Truths
00:33:48
Speaker
interesting. It's getting us into a kind of dodgy ground of, I mean, it wasn't, it was presented as science, it was labelled as science, it wasn't science, and it wasn't being endorsed by
00:34:00
Speaker
My best, I wasn't being endorsed by scientific institutions. It's true, there were a few Western scientific institutions who were Marxist-aligned. They were going, oh yes, of course, Lysinquism is real science. But it turns out the consensus of scientists working in both the West and the East at that time were going, is this Lysinquism? We don't think it works.
00:34:24
Speaker
Stalin likes it though. And what Stalin likes, Stalin gets. It's all such a time Stalin decided we didn't like lysincoism and then it all went south. But yes, no, so Lee sort of summarises this is that, summarises Brian's view is essentially saying that we would expect to see conspiracy theories to be uncovered over time. And then when they aren't, it gets harder and harder to continue believing in them. I think that was sort of Brian's idea of the unwarranted mature conspiracy theories over time.
00:34:54
Speaker
level of skepticism required to continue believing in it sort of makes them less and less tenable. Whereas Lee replies, well, though we wouldn't expect to see conspiracy theories to be uncovered over time if they're competent conspiracy theories, if unlike the case of, say, your 9-11s and your Julius Caesar's where they want
00:35:12
Speaker
want to be known afterwards. If it's something that people want to be kept secret indefinitely and they're good enough at it, then the fact that they haven't been revealed doesn't mean that they don't exist. Think I got that right? Yep. Yep, that's within the ballpark.
00:35:28
Speaker
There are too many negatives in that sentence, so I like it. He goes on to say that, of course, the thing is that this is referring back to the business and with this definition of relatively proximate time frames. Over time, people basically care less and less. The case goes cold, essentially. He talks about, as we've talked about in the past,
00:35:47
Speaker
sort of the Kennedy assassination I think is long enough ago that if someone came out and conclusively proved that it was the mafia or the CIA or something like that and Ellsworld was a patsy it's not going to upend the world at this stage people would go huh that's how about that but I don't think it would
00:36:06
Speaker
It's not going to overthrow the US government or anything at this point. Although, but again, examples from outside the US. So there's still a lot of public interest in what happened to Olof Palm in Sweden, to the point where people are going, you know, many of the people who are probably responsible have died.
00:36:28
Speaker
But if it turns out any of them are still alive and we can prove it was a conspiracy of right wing police officers, we are going to prosecute those guys until such time they're dead. So it does, I think, depend on a whole bunch of cultural factors.
00:36:43
Speaker
Possibly. I mean, he's going to be talking about the idea of toxicity as this idea that stuff that if it were, if the truth came out, it would cause sort of genuine harm to society as a whole. I don't know that even in the Swedish case, there's definite interest. People still care about it. But I think if it turned out that the police back in the 80s were behind it, would that overturn the institution of the police in Sweden today? But at any rate, his claim, Lee's claim,
00:37:13
Speaker
is essentially that Brian's argument's a question begging. He's sort of saying we should trust in these institutions because they are trustworthy. So he says, in the end, the PTA tries to ground the trustworthiness of public institutions, be they government or corporate media, in the uncontrollability of the vast bureaucracy of employees in possession of a significant conspiratorial secret, which will rebound upon any leadership that tries to keep it exploding into public view.
00:37:42
Speaker
which is always sort of going back to the idea that the more people are involved, the harder it is to keep a secret, and the whole idea of how conspiracy theories come out, which is not an unproblematic model of how things work. Well, so I take it that what Brian is saying is actually something slightly different, which is if a conspiracy theory persists in public discourse,
00:38:07
Speaker
with no positive evidence for its warrant accruing, then you are justified in treating it as unwarranted, which say you it's plausible to believe it's not the case, but it doesn't rule out the possibility that the conspiracy theory in question is true. You're simply going to look from a pragmatic point of view
00:38:28
Speaker
If you've got no good evidence to believe a conspiracy theory after a lengthy amount of time, then you've got no good evidence to believe that conspiracy theory. He's not saying it's that it shows that the conspiracy didn't occur. He's simply saying it just shows that you've got no reason to believe the conspiracy has occurred. Well, yes, that's why things get a little bit murky. We were talking about warrant versus truth and what have you. But in terms of this idea,
00:38:56
Speaker
Lee says, how could so many keep a terrible truth for any time? A good question, and perhaps the root source of public trust's psychological appeal. We need to believe in the honesty of other human beings. Maybe this is the world as we understand it today, but it is also a poor caricature of life within our information hierarchy. The competent conspiracy theorists can argue that one, the overwhelming majority of employees in these bureaucracies are excluded from critical information, and two, the high placed remainder effectively controlled via means of
00:39:25
Speaker
both advantageous and punitive, carrots and sticks, as it were. So he finishes off this whole section by saying, in conclusion, contra-arguments for public trust, an examination of the evidence specific to particular conspiracy explanations instead of an examination of our televisions, appears a more reliable and convincing method of epistemic evaluation. Next, we will consider how much more. That leads into section three, the problem of toxic truths, significant grounds for public distrust.
00:39:54
Speaker
And again, he starts with the sentence, conspiracy is dangerous to democracy and sort of lays out this idea of public trust and how it can be undermined, I suppose, saying that both public trust and its related uncontrollability ignore a vast number of real world institutional motives to cover up and how these can exploit the public's many mutually reinforcing epistemic vulnerabilities, even in a democracy that recognises itself as primarily valuable for being a democracy.
00:40:23
Speaker
especially in one. And so we get to this idea of what is a toxic truth. And this has been bugging me for a while. I was sure there was a pop culture reference that this reminded me of. And I finally worked out it was the old episode from old episode of the season two Simpsons, the one where Marge and Homer tell a story of how they first met. And Marge went to the prom with Artie Ziff, voiced by John Lovitz.
00:40:52
Speaker
And there's, if you haven't seen the episode, because you're not a Generation X-er in your 40s or older. The point is, at the end of the episode, Marge goes to the prom with the guy, the egotistical Arty, and then afterwards he tries to put the moves on her and she slaps him.
00:41:13
Speaker
and just gets him to drive her home. And as he drops her off, he says to her, by the way, it'd be good if you could not tell anybody about my busy hands, not for me, but because I'm so well regarded around here, it would damage the town to hear it. Although the way John Lovett will damage the town to hear it. He's got some great intonation. And then when I think about it, John Lovett is the proto Matt Berry. He is a little bit, yes.
00:41:41
Speaker
But in this particular example, to be honest, I like Matt Berry, but I don't quite get why people gush over his weird pronunciations and what we do in the shadows so much. Like a lot of the time, he said a word in a funny way. I don't get why that's...
00:42:00
Speaker
comedy genius. Anyway, not important right now. That's an example of someone who's essentially making the case that this is a toxic truth and therefore should be kept for the good of everyone. Although, of course, in that particular case, he's just an arrogant dick and what he's saying shouldn't be believed. But that's the impulse, I think, that Lee is exploring here.
00:42:26
Speaker
So this section is in two parts. 3.1 is called Beyond Begging the Question, The Problems of Toxicity. And I have to say, every time he talks about toxicity, this and toxicity that, I immediately assume that he's talking about the system of a down song and just really has a problem with that. And I'm like, dude, what's that? That's a good one. See, I'm thinking more Britney Spears.
00:42:50
Speaker
Well, that was toxic. That sounds actually called toxicity. So the point is any time you're talking, I'm not actually listening to you. I'm just thinking humming to myself about somewhere between sacred science and sleep.
00:43:04
Speaker
Disorder, disorder, disorder. I refuse to countenance this. Fair enough. So he's talking about, as he's brought up earlier, the idea of active cover-up versus cover-up by neglect, which he sometimes refers to as the why-look response to toxicity. Not so much, we found out about this thing, let's cover it up, but why even look into this thing? Because we don't want to know if it's true or not.
00:43:30
Speaker
and in particular it's this cover-up by neglect, this this why-look response that Lee is more concerned with. So he says, toxicity presents us with the likelihood, the warranted belief, that the information hierarchy will intentionally ignore democratically critical significant possibilities and so realities. They're just too toxic. So he starts, as an example, he looks at the idea of corporate mass media, what people disparagingly call the MSCM in the States. He says,
00:43:56
Speaker
Would a mass media investigation aimed at convincing the population that the highest elements of national government are involved in the mass murder of thousands of civilians to be the story of the century or corporate suicide? Probably both. He's talking about the context of events such as your 9-11s, if it were to be shown that the government
00:44:18
Speaker
were actually behind some sort of horrific attack that had killed thousands of people. Although, to be honest, reading him talking about this stuff mostly reminded me of Jimmy Savile in England, because there was a case of, like even at the time, people had sort of said, well, surely if these rumors about the horrible things he got up to were true, it would be the scoop of the century for any paper that chose to expose him. And in fact, in that case, it was then taken as evidence that
00:44:45
Speaker
that so obviously these rumours there's no substance to them. And of course it turns out there were people who wanted to write articles on Seville's predilections whilst he was alive and editors went no.
00:44:59
Speaker
No, we're not going to print that. And there's a big debate that goes on in the British media about this, because it did occur, people were saying, we tried to write a story on Savile, he was alive, editors wouldn't let us. The editors in question have gone, well,
00:45:17
Speaker
There just wasn't enough evidence. It was conjecture and hearsay, and due to Britain's libel laws being so bad, conjectures and hearsay do not stand up in a court of law if several wants to sue. So they were hesitant.
00:45:35
Speaker
not because they were going, this is too toxic to release the argument they present, but because the law of the land meant they wouldn't be able to survive any legal repercussion for printing those particular stories. And so these stories can get really quite complicated, given other ancillary information we have access to.
Public Reaction to Conspiracy Theories
00:46:00
Speaker
But at any rate, Lee's not talking about that specifically. He's talking about to your 9-11-like
00:46:05
Speaker
examples. And so he asks, could revealing that the country is essentially run by domestic terrorists cause riots, revolutions, mass unrest, or even war, could there be a genuine cost in human life to revealing these truths? And he thinks, well, maybe there could be.
00:46:29
Speaker
And so in these cases, why risk sparking off something like that? As he puts it, why look? Now, this kind of argument always sounds a little bit like, well, there's a possibility this plays a role in people's decision making. Therefore, this plays a role in people's decision making. So the suggestion that this could occur is sometimes made out to be, and this is occurring.
00:46:57
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. He says a similar thing about law enforcement. He says that essentially he's saying that institutions have an incentive to maintain the status quo. He says, there's little doubt and overwhelming priority of the US federal government and its bureaucracy is the continuity of this government.
00:47:16
Speaker
such as the nature of established national governments everywhere. Is there anything the federal government would not stoop to in order to stay in power? We cannot say, but it should not surprise us if the answer is no. Nothing goes on. Gives another example. This was a bit of a funny one. Funny as in unusual, not funny. This example is going to be hilarious when you hear the first line, imagine your much loved sister is killed in a car wreck.
00:47:44
Speaker
A funeral surrounded by your supportive and loving family mourning the senseless tragedy. I'm trying to read this in the most lighthearted way possible. I don't think you should. A seemingly sincere but distant relative approaches you. She says she has compelling evidence your loving father murdered your sister and your favourite uncle amount are in on it.
00:48:04
Speaker
It's true, Dad was once involved in shady dealings, but such a disgusting allegation, if openly entertained at a time where this could tear your family apart, undermining all it has accomplished together. No, it was just a car wreck. Call security! Yeah, no, that did not help. If anything, that made it worse. That example I thought kind of depends on the family, really. Immediately, my pop culture brain goes to the sixth sense.
00:48:33
Speaker
where little Haley Joel Osment reveals to a mother during the funeral or the wake for her daughter that the, no, to the father that the mother had been monchowsen by proxying the daughter and that's why she died and he sort of confronts the mother. Although of course there was video evidence of that. I don't know. I think that that one to say that's how that scenario would play out I think is
00:48:55
Speaker
I mean, I'm just thinking of an example of two sisters that I knew. And their father had had an affair. And a affair which kind of broke the family up and caused a lot of damage to the family unit. And one sister absolutely loathed her father for it. And the other sister just wouldn't ever contemplate it. That was in the past, everything is fine now. And believe you had to love your parents no matter what.
00:49:24
Speaker
And so it really does depend on the family member. Some people would go, oh, yep, yep, I can imagine that. And other people would go, nah, I'm just not going to recognize that at all. Yes. Now, we're getting on on time and there's actually a lot of the section left to go. So I don't know that we have time to go through the whole lot. There's a diagram. At one point, there's a diagram.
00:49:47
Speaker
in talking about how toxicity, toxic truths were, which, to be honest, I couldn't make head nor tail of. There's lines, diagrams and philosophy, articles, ridiculous. But an article I'm writing at the moment has two tables and a histogram in it. And frankly, I just don't know who I am anymore. I don't know who I am. I'm putting histograms in articles now.
00:50:13
Speaker
I think maybe you need to seek help for that. Some kind of immunotherapist, I'm assuming. Something like that. Hypnotic regression, I don't know. So I mean, I guess the overall feeling I got is he very much seems to be going for a worst case scenario sort of thing. This is the absolute worst way this could all play out, which I guess kind of is the point because as he said before and as he kind of says now,
00:50:40
Speaker
He's not saying as such that the world is definitely like this, that institutions always do this and this will always happen, but a lot of it is we can't know that the world isn't like this, at least in this instance. We can't know that institutions definitely aren't behaving this way. Yeah, this always feels like he's trying to have it both ways. I'm not saying
00:51:03
Speaker
the world is like this. But also, I'm saying we should think the world probably is not like this. I'm not saying it's not Lupus.
00:51:15
Speaker
But I'm also not saying it's not not lupus. But it's never lupus, so that's okay. The only other thing... Was it I have not watched every episode of House, unfortunately, so I couldn't say. One thing that did stick out for me from this section, though, is he notes it's weird that Watergate is kind of the conspiracy theory that stuck eventually. Whereas other things like the Gulf of Tonkin or what have you, conspiracy theories that have eventually come out
00:51:45
Speaker
that had much worse consequences than Watergate. As you say, with your bushes and your Tony Bleas, it's kind of just water under the bridge. We wasn't quite sure exactly what it was that made Watergate stick. I guess it's an early example of
00:52:03
Speaker
stuff going viral, something like that, every now and then. Also, presidents resigning, not a particularly common thing. The American military committing war crimes actually disturbingly common.
00:52:15
Speaker
Well, yes, that's another thing entirely. Yeah, we're kind of used to the American military being bad. But we did up until Nixon, although about to say Andrew Johnson, I think, is a contender here for saying you probably shouldn't think this up until then we thought, you know, presidents are typically at least goodish, you know, they're on the side of angels to some extent. And then you get Nixon gets, oh,
00:52:42
Speaker
Oh, yeah, that's a bit awkward. President, eh? No, can't live with him.
00:52:52
Speaker
don't have him in New Zealand, that's all I have to say. Well, we have presidents of small societies like parent-teacher associations. That is actually true. But so let's take section three, but one is read. That's the basic thrust of it, which brings us to section 3.2, silencing individuals, which is essentially just a single long paragraph. I'm assuming this is another one of those. Reviewer B had a comment, so he stuck a section in here to address that.
00:53:17
Speaker
I mean that is my theory when you get a section which seems to stick out like a sore thumb and you go probably put in there to get the paper through peer review. Given that section 3.1 was almost half the paper and section 3.2
00:53:34
Speaker
is short enough that I can read it out in its entirety, so I will. But what of the lone investigator, a rogue agent who populates Hollywood movies, unveiling the conspiracy to the world? This trope is basic to our political mythos, the deep throat informant of Watergate law, the generic, shocking, all revealing press conference and print media slash internet doppelgangers. On the public trust approach, we need mainstream media and law enforcement to transmit truth.
00:53:58
Speaker
In the context of sufficiently toxic truths, if such agents go rogue and conduct personal investigations, they face a media and law enforcement establishment that has already wisely walked away. Their efforts are futile and easily foreseen as so. Word of mouth can accomplish little in our vast civilization, the internet notwithstanding.
00:54:15
Speaker
Where virtually every view of events is passionately championed without official recognition, the truth is lost in a sea of alternatives. Add to this the reality of devastating punitive measures to self and loved ones, and our iconic rogue agent will not only be a failure, but probably rare. This is ancient, the advent of our democracy into the free press has not vanquished it, and our daily media remains in operation every minute of every day. From this perspective, the fact most of us do not directly encounter it is simply a testament to our personal, political, and significant.
00:54:44
Speaker
which I don't know. I mean, yeah, I guess like imagine if David Icke was actually telling the truth when he says he'd been going on about Jimmy Savile at the time and nobody
00:54:59
Speaker
believed him because he's David Icahn. They were the mainstream media and quite happy to poo-poo him. I mean, I guess there's a bit of that, but I don't know. I mean, this is one of those things where in an age of social media,
00:55:15
Speaker
and algorithmically delivered content. It turns out you can be a Mr. Beast or a Pew PewDie or however you meant to pronounce his name or even H-Bomberguy on YouTube and be a solo individual sitting in your office room and actually I mean Mr. Beast and PewDiePie are not solo individuals. H-Bomberguy has a co-writer
00:55:44
Speaker
but by and large small groups of people sitting in their room doing research and then releasing reports that get millions of views or sometimes tens of millions of views on social media.
00:56:00
Speaker
you can actually be the lone investigator in this world. I mean, I think Lee's right to say it's rare, but it actually still occurs that individuals can change the world because we now have an algorithmic system which allows individuals to get amplified in a way that you couldn't do 10 or 20 years ago. And also to the lone investigator and the rogue agent, you've got the whistleblower. I mean, I immediately think Edward Snowden,
00:56:29
Speaker
is as an example of a single individual who managed to get... Although, I once recall having a conversation with Lee and he's going, do you really think that Edward Snowden is a whistle blower or is he a convenient plant to allow America to release some information? So you can also do the whole conspiracy theory there and go, well, these whistle blowers, they're just a kind of release valve for the establishment.
00:56:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's an interesting concept, but yeah, it's a theory. And I mean, you can then apply that to the individual who is, their data is delivered to you algorithmically.
00:57:16
Speaker
If you think the algorithm is designed to be biased in a particular way, then sure, you get an Hbomberguy video on how terrible Tommy Tallarico as an individual actually is.
00:57:31
Speaker
But that's because it's at the consequence of more important stories never being amplified at all. But at that point, we're not talking about toxic truths. At that point, we're actually talking about an actual conspiracy operating within companies to go, there's information out there that you don't need to know. And we're going to deliberately suppress it by promoting other information instead.
00:57:57
Speaker
But yes, at any rate, this section does seem to be a little bit added on, presumably to placate some peer reviewer. That's all he has to say about it, and it leads to section four, the conclusion, social epistemology and catastrophe theory.
Epistemic Challenges and Uncomfortable Truths
00:58:27
Speaker
Unlike millennia-old, reality-detached, abstraction-driven narratives of global skepticism, here only the intersection of familiar history with well-known motives for intentional neglect is at work. If we restrict ourselves to established hierarchies of information, this can be an epistemic catastrophe.
00:58:32
Speaker
So the conclusion reads,
00:58:43
Speaker
Alternatively, in our increasingly distributed networks of information, there are options to our information hierarchies. Commitment to the success of our system of representational democracy can easily, even predictably, be twisted into a betrayal of that very system. So how can we as a self-governing people defend against our epistemic vulnerabilities? In the end, we may be recognizing our hierarchical information societies may inevitably be at critical instances for the vast majority epistemically opaque.
00:59:10
Speaker
Unlike ancient small tribal groups where close mutual surveillance and long familiarity gave us considerable access to social realities, in societies as vast and hierarchical as their own, there may be no adequate mechanism for the majority to reliably ascertain the facts in certain extreme and extremely important events.
00:59:26
Speaker
A visual image, the typical pyramid of information, few at the top knowing much and sometimes struggling to prevent information's natural gravitational flow of descent, is really upside down. Invert the triangle and dangerous information wells at the narrow bottom point and only through intentional efforts will it ever be pumped upwards and spread to the wider public expanses.
00:59:45
Speaker
No intention, no effort, none needed beyond a studied silence. In agreement, conspire, and in preparation should there be a few who present what they fail to realise are stillborn questions. And conspiracy theory? A nascent but not yet blooming prison riot that never dies. What would a civilisation that we have compelling reason to believe is relatively conspiracy free, particularly in times of crisis look like? Whatever the answer, it would not look like ours. Curative and creative work lies ahead.
01:00:11
Speaker
Which essentially is the exact conclusion he'd come to in an earlier point, I'm sure, the idea that a world free, the world that we know is free of conspiracy theory would not look like the world we currently live in. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, yeah, I didn't see a lot new in this from from what I recur. Well, I mean, there's been more of a lot of detail. Yeah, there's development of the ideas. But his basic thesis doesn't seem to have changed.
01:00:37
Speaker
No, I mean, once again, I agree with the general thrust of this paper. I think there is something to the toxic truth notion. I should point out, having put in two criteria for what actually counts as giving us a notion of toxic truth, we've got a threshold criteria and a people on the street criteria. That bit is not particularly well developed.
01:01:05
Speaker
So we still have the vague notion of there are truths which are toxic, which might mean that some information does not get released due to societal pressures coming from the top.
01:01:17
Speaker
but we're not really given any criteria to show when toxicity is present in a system. It is more the suggestion that toxicity can be present in systems. And certainly we don't live in an open enough society as it stands to think that we don't live in a society where there are some toxic truths out there. I did, yeah, I wasn't sure about his characterization of the media in that
01:01:44
Speaker
The media does report on things, like I'm sure everybody's heard of 9-11 truth conspiracy theories, and QAnon especially gets a lot of reporting, although I guess a lot of the time it's not reported as, you know, here's what happened, here's what some people believe, and often here's what some crazy people believe. Especially when you look at your
01:02:09
Speaker
I don't know, Jordan Klepper for the Daily Show going out and interviewing the people at the Trump rallies and all that business. But the other thing which is interesting about this paper is that because of Lee talking about toxic truths, and that's not just in this paper, but in previous papers as well, I kind of came up with a complementary thesis, which I call the polite society hypothesis, which is that
01:02:35
Speaker
Sometimes you don't need a top-down approach, which is the toxic truth one, that there's information that people at the top think would be toxic for people at the bottom, i.e. the hoi polloi, to know about. No, sometimes that toxicity actually emerges from the bottom up. And the example I was thinking of was in the 60s and 70s, it was widely known that the police fitted up suspects to get convictions.
01:03:04
Speaker
and everybody just went along with it. There was no covering up of it, it was a well-known factor that the police fitted suspects are, but it was kind of appropriate because those people were criminals and they deserved to be in prison. It was simply considered to be impolite to actually mention how insecure many of those
01:03:26
Speaker
actions were. And you get the same example that goes on in family units. Here, most of the people in the family unit know that X is having an affair and cheating on their partner, but it would be impolite to bring it up. Even though everybody knows about it, everybody acts as if they don't know about it. And so sometimes this kind of weird informational control is not top-down, it's actually bottom-up.
01:03:56
Speaker
Hmm. Well, have you, so you've written on that? Yeah. The plant society hypothesis.
Conclusion and Patron Content
01:04:03
Speaker
I think there's a nascent version of it in the philosophy of conspiracy theories and it's appeared in a few other places as well. Well, there you go. I think the only sensible solution then is for you and Lee to get into a bit of bare knuckle boxing. I think that'll sort this out once and for all. I'm not really a violent person.
01:04:27
Speaker
No, you don't have to be violent. You just have to give a good mark where you do Queensbury rules. It gives you a decorum, a bit of fear and gentlemanly conflict. I don't know.
01:04:42
Speaker
Fine, fine, jelly wrestling it is, whatever, we've got that sorted. So we're at the end of an episode, which means we now need to go and do a bonus episode for our patrons. What are we going to be talking about this week? Well, at the top of the show, we're going to be talking about that special issue of social epistemology, which is slowly cranking articles out as we speak, as online access.
01:05:07
Speaker
And so I'm going to give you the abstracts of the articles and I'm going to get your sincere and honest response because you have no idea what's in the issue. That's actually true. Yes, it is actually true. Although I think you have been putting some of them up on Mastodon, but I haven't followed any of the links. So my ignorance is my defense.
01:05:27
Speaker
Your laziness is your ignorance, which is your defense. Yes, I'm willing to go along with that. So, we're at the end of an episode. I'm still in my head humming the lyrics to Toxas a D by System of a Down, and I hope you are too. So I'm going to leave both of us to hum to ourselves and simply just say out loud, goodbye.
01:05:55
Speaker
I've never listened to a system of a down album. I wouldn't recognize a single song they've played. No, I bet you would. Lesser tune. The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself.
01:06:11
Speaker
Associate Professor M.R.X. Stentors. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are 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, they're coming to get you, Barbara.