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The Sherminator
559 Plays10 months ago
Josh and M review part 1 (of 3) of Michael Shermer's 2022 book, "Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational."
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Locations
00:00:00
Speaker
Today's episode is brought to you by Cancer. Because reading causes cancer. It's the number one reason why I don't read and it's why you shouldn't read either. Although, tellingly, passive reading can also cause cancer, which is why the fact Josh associates with me means he's going to get cancer anyway, because I'm a reader.
00:00:18
Speaker
There you are, a big old reading reader who reads readers, just being in the same podcast as you as carcinogenic AF. And because of that fact, I've forced Josh to read a book. Well, part of a book. Half of a third of a book. It's more like you've encouraged me to take up the reading equivalent of vaping. How was it? I don't know. It's a pretty boring book. Well, the half of the third I read wasn't exactly gripping.
00:00:39
Speaker
No, hopefully the next bit will be better. I do get sighted at some point, and that's the high I'm looking for. And for me, it'll be the contact high. Is this what we've come to? Reading books that cite me? Yes. I mean, what else have you got to live for? Well, if you put it that way, well, roll the theme. The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Denton.
00:01:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Edison, and in Zhuhai, China, part man, part machine, all cop, it's Dr. M.RxD, and if I may have got you mixed up with someone else just then, it's possible. I think you may have got me mixed up with Peter Weller. Yes, and worse things could happen to a person, I think, than getting mixed up with Peter Weller.
00:01:34
Speaker
Peter Well has got a degree in art history. He lectures at an Italian university. He occasionally indulges in the actoring. He was in the best episode of Fringe. He was. And actually that is a damn good episode of Fringe. It's a damn good episode of Fringe. He was also in Psych.
00:01:51
Speaker
a show which I enjoyed watching even though I think it is objectively bad. He plays a serial killer who has adopted another serial killer and Twist, the adopted serial killer, kills the serial killer.
TV Show Plot Discussion
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Speaker
It's very, very confusing.
00:02:10
Speaker
Well, what's not confusing is what we're going to be talking about today. I don't know if that's true or not. Yeah, I don't know whether that's true.
Review of 'Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational'
00:02:18
Speaker
We're doing a book review, but we're doing a book review in three parts because this book is in three parts. So we're reviewing the first part, then the second part, then the third part. And I have to say the first part
00:02:29
Speaker
isn't exactly gripping or even interesting apart from all the bloody evolutionary psychology. But we'll get onto that in a minute. Josh, what is the book that we are reviewing? The book we're reviewing is Conspiracy, Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. 2002 by Michael Schirner. 2022.
00:02:52
Speaker
2022. That's what I see it in my mind. That's true. You did say that in your mind, but your mouth. The fact that you're lying here said something different to you is not my fault. So Michael Schirmer. Is Michael Schirmer a name we've heard before on this podcast? I don't believe we have. I know I may have mentioned Michael Schirmer in passing
00:03:13
Speaker
when I've griped about his treatment of me when I wrote an article for The Skeptic. But by and large, Shermer has not been part of our discussion of conspiracy
Michael Shermer's Background and Controversies
00:03:23
Speaker
theories, even though he's heavily invested in writing about conspiracy theories. Right, so in that case, who is Michael Shermer, and why do we care what he thinks?
00:03:35
Speaker
So Michael Shermer is an American historian of science, a writer, a so-called professional skeptic. I'm not entirely sure how you get accredited as a skeptic. I think most skeptics are enthusiastic amateurs and an ex-professional cyclist. He's also the founder of the Skeptic Society. So one of the reasons why we're looking at this book is that Shermer is a prominent Skepta, Skepta, Skepta, a Shermer
00:04:05
Speaker
Shermer is a prominent skeptic in the United States. I don't actually know how well he is known outside of the continental United States. He's fairly famous in America. I don't know he's actually that famous in Australasia. He might be relatively famous in the UK. No idea about his status in the non-English-speaking West. But he is a founder of the Skeptic Society and
00:04:34
Speaker
a prominent self-identifying member of the intellectual dark web, which is not a Sony film. No, I hear about the intellectual dark
Shermer's Views on Conspiracy Theories
00:04:44
Speaker
web and know almost nothing about it. All that I do know makes it sound like anyone who identifies as being part of the intellectual dark web.
00:04:53
Speaker
is suspect to say the least. Stephen Pinker is a member of the intellectual dark web and we'll be talking about him later on in today's episode. Sherma is a former climate change skeptic. He's now changed his tune because he claims the evidence is now in that climate change is real.
00:05:13
Speaker
Most people point out that actually Shermer should have changed his mind a lot earlier than he did. So for a skeptic, he does seem to be somewhat resistant to evidence when it conflicts with his libertarian ideology. He almost endorsed Donald Trump in the last election.
00:05:33
Speaker
He's argued that Substack should continue to be a Nazi bar, and he's a really, really big fan of evolutionary psychology. He's also a hereditary. So he does believe that there are significant differences between the races, including IQ differences.
00:05:54
Speaker
And we can't really talk about Shermer without admitting that there are stories that he has been involved in sexual assault and by being involved in has been the perpetrator of sexual assault at skeptic conferences in the United States. Shermer denies this.
00:06:14
Speaker
PZ Myers actually wrote about this on his blog. Shermer threatened to sue PZ Myers unless he took the blog post down. Shermer never sued PZ Myers for Myers representing reports by several women that Shermer had sexually assaulted him. Notably when James Randi, now deceased, was asked about this, he said, yes, I know
00:06:40
Speaker
that Sherman's been a naughty boy at the past but it's never it's never resulted in violence if it had resulted in violence then I would have kicked him out of the movement but I've been told he's never been violent when engaging in this kind of behavior boys will be boys seem to be James Randi's excuse
00:07:01
Speaker
That is a slight worry, yes. It is, yes. So, with that in mind, with these disclaimers out of the way, shall we look at what he says about conspiracy theories in his
Conspiracy Theories and Humor
00:07:11
Speaker
book? I'm thinking, we've come across this in the past, I think. I think we need a version of the conspiracy theory masterpiece, Theatre Chime, that just cuts out the word master, so we can just say it's a conspiracy theory piece. Indeed, play that chime.
00:07:25
Speaker
H, I'm editing that episode. Me, play that chime in the future. Edit that chime in. Insert chime here. Chime! Welcome to Conspiracy Theory.
00:07:44
Speaker
Very good, I assume that chime went off without a hitch. So once again, two thousand and twenty-twos.
Book Structure and Shermer's Thesis
00:07:51
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Conspiracy, why the rational believe the irrational. So as I think you mentioned at the start, or possibly in the intro, it's a book that has three parts. Today we're looking at part one. Part one has a prologue and five chapters.
00:08:04
Speaker
and we've split them between the two of us, so we'll be alternating one to the other. And looking at what I've written down, I think I've written too many notes, and I'm going to have to chuck some of this out so we don't get rid of the two letters. Or I've not written enough, yeah. Now we're actually going to start before, yeah. No, no, no, carry on, we'll get to this when it's my part. Yeah, so we're going to start before part one, because there is
00:08:31
Speaker
in way of a prologue, a pre-prolog, which is called... I can't say apologetics now with an A. I want to say epilogia.
00:08:48
Speaker
Apologia? Apologia? Apologia, probably. There's an Apologia, and it's kind of a mission statement for the book as a whole, so I thought I would read that out. So these are Sherma's words.
00:09:18
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To this end, I make a distinction between paranoid conspiracy theories involving ultra-secret and uber-powerful entities, for which there is little to no evidence, which are largely driven by paranoia and realistic conspiracy theories pertaining to normal political institutions and corporate entities that are conspiring to manipulate the system to gain an unfair, immoral and sometimes illegal advantage over others.
00:09:46
Speaker
Because both history and current event are brimming with real conspiracies, I contend that conspiracism is a rational response to a dangerous world. Thus in the common computer analogue, it is a feature of, not a bug in, human cognition. The apparently rational reasons in my definition of the conspiracy effect are doing a lot of work. We will explore those reasons in depth in
Shermer's Belief Shifts and Frameworks
00:10:12
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this book. Right.
00:10:13
Speaker
Is that just a disclaimer? I don't quite see the point of that. Is he just priming us so that when people say, hey, you talk about conspiracy theories as being silly and that these ones are real, he can say, oh, no, I'm only talking about a certain kind. So I think the other thing is that because he's a member of the intellectual dark web,
00:10:36
Speaker
and a self-professed member of the Intellectual Dark Web. Most members of the Intellectual Dark Web don't like the title, Intellectual Dark Web. Shermer for some reason is proud of being a member of the Intellectual Dark Web. Because he's a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, he has conspiracy theories about things like wokeism and the destruction of the educational curriculum in the United States.
00:11:00
Speaker
So he needs to be able to say, look, there are some spurious conspiracy theories out there, many of which actually talk about people like myself. But there are also some real conspiracy theories out there, the ones that I think are a drastic threat to the polis. So he's trying to thread a needle here between saying that conspiracy theories are bad and people should not believe them, and also justifying, I think,
00:11:28
Speaker
the kind of conspiracy theories that he believes. And this is interesting for the sheer fact that before Shermer became a member of the intellectual dark web, Shermer was very, very against conspiracy theories. You can find earlier writings of his where he's basically saying, look, conspiracy theories are always bad. They are irrational beliefs. Now, I think he's realizing all but some of the conspiracy theories that I believe
00:11:56
Speaker
aren't bad or dangerous beliefs at all, thus I need to write a book to be able to explain to people why the conspiracy theories I believe are actually rational, and why the conspiracy theories you believe about me are very irrational.
00:12:11
Speaker
Right. Now, we didn't say at the start, does he have an academic qualification? Like, this book seems to be mostly based on psychology. Is he a psychologist himself? I believe he's got a degree in history. Okay. Well, in that case, so that's the
00:12:29
Speaker
Apologia slash Apologia out of the way. So we get into part one, why people believe conspiracy theories. Part one begins with a prologue, which is one of yours. So let us have it.
00:12:43
Speaker
Yes, so in the prologue, Shermer gives us an overview of his thesis and it is a mission statement right at the beginning. We need a model to explain who believes in conspiracy theories and why, what evolutionary, psychological, social, cultural, political and economic conditions fuel them, ways to classify and systematize conspiracy theories in order to tease apart their different causes.
00:13:07
Speaker
and means to determine which conspiracy theories might be true in as much as some do turn out to be so. To that end, you might say that we're all conspiracy theorists now.
00:13:20
Speaker
I'm
Taxonomy of Conspiracism
00:13:21
Speaker
going to point out right now I do find some of his terminology in this book annoying and that's not just because I'm a skeptic about evolutionary psychological explanations for psychological characteristics of human beings in the current day but also because he talks a lot about conspiracists and conspiracism and I'm on record of not liking that particular term so
00:13:48
Speaker
There are going to be points where I just rankle by the terminology he uses, and that might just be on me. That may not be a problem with his argument. It may just be my linguistic concerns about the way that we talk about conspiracy theories.
00:14:03
Speaker
What is interesting from our perspective is that he has a rather broad view of what conspiracy theorists believe. And because I'm on this kick at the moment about looking at the way that people use examples to motivate their analysis of these things called conspiracy theories,
00:14:22
Speaker
It's interesting that he starts off with a conspiracy theory that most people all agree is an unwarranted and suspicious conspiracy theory, which is of course the QAnon conspiracy theory. Interestingly enough, towards the end of part one, he actually starts making a list of conspiracy theories that people ought to believe. So he starts with the spurious and bad conspiracy theory at the beginning,
00:14:51
Speaker
and is over these chapters going to slowly move towards conspiracy theories he thinks we should have and should be taking seriously. His treatment of QAnon I think is a little bit one-sided.
00:15:07
Speaker
one-sided. A common feature we're going to find in Schirmer's book is that even though he has a theory of signaling on the idea that sometimes when people talk about conspiracy theories, they're simply kind of signaling their political or ideological commitments and don't necessarily believe the theory in question. The way he talks about QAnon
00:15:32
Speaker
indicates that everyone treated QAnon seriously from the very beginning, and he kind of alights the fact there's a literature now about the gamified notion of the way that the QAnon and the general non-threads actually started out on things like 4chan and 8chan. The idea that people were role-playing
00:15:56
Speaker
and that eventually people started taking the role playing seriously and the other game players basically disappeared from the game and QAnon went from an elaborate ruse to something which was believed by at least some people as a conspiracy theory.
00:16:12
Speaker
even though it's not entirely clear that people who are engaging in talking about QAnon or spreading QAnon theories sincerely believe they were listening to a government insider. Yeah, there'll be a bit of QAnon later in my chapters as well, but we're not up to me yet. What else does he say in his prologue?
00:16:33
Speaker
Well, he introduces the idea of the conspiracy effect, and the conspiracy effect is the problem of why allegedly smart people believe blatantly wrong things for apparently rational reasons. Now, he kind of covers the conspiracy effect as being a novel idea he's had. Why is it that smart people
00:16:57
Speaker
believe the wrong things for apparently rational reasons. But of course, epistemologists have been talking about this for a very long time. The idea that you can have a justified belief, which is nonetheless false belief, but you can have the right reasons for believing falsely.
Rational Reasons for False Beliefs
00:17:15
Speaker
And the entire epistemological literature often is about finding these weird cases
00:17:21
Speaker
where people have false beliefs but have their false beliefs for what appear to be rational reasons or good justification. The other thing to note is that when you define the conspiracy effect, why smart people believe blatantly wrong things for apparently rational reasons,
00:17:41
Speaker
we should point out that blatantly and apparently are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. So he's not saying, why do smart people appear to believe wrong things? No, they're believing blatantly and thus obviously wrong things. And he's not saying that they necessarily have a rational reason for coming to false belief. He's saying, look, these things appear to be apparently rational.
00:18:06
Speaker
So The Conspiracy Effect is a rather interesting pejorative take, at least at the beginning of the book, saying why do smart people believe false things for what they might take to be good reasons but are obviously bad reasons.
00:18:22
Speaker
And even just good and bad, there's a lot of wiggle room there. So is he done making his disclaimers and his pre-andals? Well, he kind of finishes the prologue with
00:18:41
Speaker
a taxonomy, and this taxonomy is going to be very important for the subsequent chapters. So he writes,
00:18:57
Speaker
Recall the three overarching factors at work to explain why people believe conspiracy theories, which I briefly outlined in the Apologia, or Apologia, or however we're deciding to pronounce this word, proxy conspiracism, where specific conspiracy theories are often proxies for something else, either another type of truth, perhaps a mythic truth, a historical truth, or a lived experience truth,
00:19:24
Speaker
tribal conspiracism, where conspiracy theories harbor elements of other beliefs, dogmas and adjacent or preceding conspiracy theories long believed and held as core elements of political, religious, social, political or ideological tribal identity, and constructive conspiracism, where it is often better to assume that the conspiracy theory is real when it is not, rather than to assume it is not real when it is.
00:19:52
Speaker
Now he's going to spend a chapter on proxy conspiracism and a chapter on tribal conspiracism. I would contend that his real interest here is in constructive conspiracism, a story about why it is often better to assume a conspiracy theory is real when it is not, rather than assume it is not real when it is.
00:20:16
Speaker
because he's very much invested in evolutionary psychology. And so he writes on constructive conspiracism. Constructive conspiracism derives from a game-theoretic model for why making a type 1 error in assuming something is real when it is not a false positive is better than making a type 2 error in assuming something is not real when it is a false negative.
00:20:43
Speaker
In our evolutionary past, it was better to assume that a rustle in the grass was a dangerous predator when it turned out to be the wind, a type 1 false positive error, than it is to assume the rustle was just the wind when actually it was a ravening beast, a type 2 false negative error.
00:21:02
Speaker
The latter could result in you being the predator's next meal. We don't always assume the worst, but if enough information points in the direction of conspiracy or trusted sources of information assert that a conspiracy is afoot, we're more likely to believe it just in case. Better to be safe than sorry. So this is very much an account that is
00:21:26
Speaker
derived from theories in evolutionary psychology, which means if you are skeptical of evolutionary psychology as a mechanism for explaining the current human condition, this theory isn't going to do much work to persuade you. No, but this leads us into general. Apologia, by the way, looked it up. Apologia.
00:21:47
Speaker
Apologium. I'll try to remember that, but I just can't guarantee I ever will.
Definitions and Classifications of Conspiracy Theories
00:21:54
Speaker
So anyway, chapter one. Chapter one is titled, Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories subtitle the difference in thinking and the difference it makes.
00:22:03
Speaker
And he starts by talking a bit about about Alex Jones, a bit of an introductory spiel, and then starts talking about how to describe and classify conspiracy theories using the framing of trying to understand what sort of a conspiracy QAnon is.
00:22:20
Speaker
And he says, in order to understand, explain and, where appropriate, counter false conspiracy theories, we need to know what we're talking about. Social scientists call this process an operational definition, namely stating clearly what it is you're studying by defining it precisely and explaining how you would measure it operationally. Let's begin by distinguishing between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory.
00:22:41
Speaker
So he lays out his definition. A conspiracy is two or more people or a group plotting or acting in secret to gain an advantage or harm others immorally or illegally. Conspiracy theory is a structure. Interesting definition of conspiracy. It has some has a bit of baggage in it. Yeah, it does. Yeah.
00:23:00
Speaker
It's gain and advantage, I suppose. I can see gain and advantage, but it's the awe harms others immorally or illegally. Now an awful lot rests here as to whether you think awe is inclusive or exclusive.
00:23:17
Speaker
Because if it's inclusive, then he's saying, look, you're gaining an advantage and you're seeking to harm others immorally or illegally. If it's exclusive, then it goes, look, sometimes conspiracies can be for the good and sometimes they can be for the bad. And I think if you look at what he writes later on,
00:23:38
Speaker
I think he means it to be an exclusive or, but most linguists and philosophers of language will say or is almost always used inclusively, at least in English. Yes, there's a bit of ambiguity.
00:23:52
Speaker
So that's a conspiracy. A conspiracy theory is a structured belief about a conspiracy, whether or not it's real. And a conspiracy theorist or conspiracist is someone who holds a conspiracy theory about a possible conspiracy, whether or not it is real. So it seems like he's using conspiracy theory and conspiracist as equivalent terms.
00:24:12
Speaker
Yeah, so the only quibble I have at this stage is the definition of conspiracy. Now he does go on to point out that even a Wikipedia-level understanding of history reveals that conspiracies are common at every level at all human communities and societies throughout history, enough to make constructive conspiracism, I better to assume that a conspiracy theory is real when it's not, rather than to assume it is not real when it is, an adaptive feature in human cognition.
00:24:40
Speaker
There's a bit of evolutionary psychology there. So then at this point he spends a bunch of this chapter coming up with suggested classifications. You could classify conspiracy theories by subject type. He talks about Walker's classification by enemy type in that you can classify conspiracy theory according to who you think is
00:25:03
Speaker
out to get you. There are Bakun's classifications, which you've looked at before. Brian Dunning apparently has 50 classifications. Far too many. That does sound like too many. Apparently, they have two requirements. One, they must be specific enough to be falsifiable. And two, they must be known by the conspiracy theorist before being revealed by the media or law enforcement.
00:25:26
Speaker
I'll just point out, this whole thing is specific enough to be falsifiable, once again shows that skeptics just haven't kept up to date with the philosophy of science, given that falsificationism was a really nice idea when Popper put it forward in the middle of the last century. But within 10 years, people are going, it just doesn't work. It just doesn't work at all. Most science is unfalsifiable.
00:25:49
Speaker
And rationally so. Yeah. Schurmus suggests another distinction of his own, which you mentioned earlier in the prologue, the distinction between paranoid conspiracy theories involving ultra secret entities for which there is little to no evidence and allowed to be driven by paranoia, and realistic conspiracy theories involving normal political institutions and corporate entities conspiring to manipulate the system to gain an unfair immoral and sometimes illegal advantage over others. So does seem to be baking the whole immoral legal thing in there.
00:26:19
Speaker
So obviously at this point he did, old Hofstadter and his paranoid style gets a mention here.
Statistics and Governmental Conspiracies
00:26:24
Speaker
Although he's not going to understand Hofstadter as we'll see in a later chapter. He gives some examples of what he considers to be realistic conspiracy theories, including Watergate, the VW emissions scandal and Wells Fargo bank scandal, which I don't think we talked about, but that was that was the one where Wells Fargo was basically opening accounts for
00:26:45
Speaker
for people without telling them and benefiting financially. He also talks about- I'm sorry Josh, are you saying a bank might have engaged in immoral activity? Just brace yourself, yes. A bank in our economy?
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah, no, I'll just let you let you ruminate on that and I'll carry on. There's talk of power as a central element of conspiracy theories and the two, two Joes, Jusinski and Pierrot get a mention. And they mentioned the work of the Joes where they looked at letters to the New York Times going back over 100 years, dispels the myth that conspiracism is a recent phenomenon, they found all sorts of things going on.
00:27:30
Speaker
This is also going to be a problem for him because he has this entire section on the history of the term conspiracy theory which he dates back to that CIA dispatch from the 1960s and he constantly contradicts himself by pointing out that actually people have been talking about conspiracy theories since well before that point. He hasn't spotted
00:27:52
Speaker
that he wants to make a claim about the origin of the term conspiracy theory and also claim people have been talking about conspiracy theories for ages. He moves on to look at the question of how many people believe conspiracy theories, which is more than none, including, quote, disturbingly high numbers of believers in certain cases. And again, we look at the work of Joe and Joe for evidence around there.
00:28:20
Speaker
I'm not sure if we've talked about the North Dakota crash thing before. That was a study where people, the North Dakota crash is a fictitious event. It didn't happen, but there have been a study where people sort of say, here are a bunch of conspiracy theories, do you believe in these? And included one that they had just made up on the spot to see whether or not people would believe in it.
00:28:46
Speaker
attach some significance there and at this point there's a lot of survey results quoted in this section of the chapter. There's a little bit where he says conspiratorial thinking is apparently correlated with gun ownership and political extremism. Doesn't really
00:29:06
Speaker
build on that much. He does have a lot through this. He will make a suggestive claim and then not say anything to substantiate it. But so he says, in the coda to this book, I'll review the findings of my skeptic research center study on conspiracy theories and why people believe them, which reinforce the revelations that there are often good reasons to be conspiratorial about those in power. And we will be looking at that in the third episode. We will. But in closing for this chapter, he says, findings such as these are the various
00:29:36
Speaker
studies involving conspiracy theories that he's gone through remind us of the multifarious nature of conspiracy theories and their verisimilitude. Totalitarian governments suppress the rights of their citizens in the interest of maintaining power concocting conspiracy theories about threats to the nation that such authoritarian measures are implemented to combat.
Christchurch Attacks and Libertarian Critique
00:29:54
Speaker
Citizens in turn must determine which conspiracy theories to believe, those related to real threats that governments are normally instituted to counter, such as foreign invaders or internal insurrectionists, or those made up by the government itself to conceal its own illegal or immoral actions. It can get confusing. All the more reason why we need a robust science of conspiracies and conspiracy theories.
00:30:14
Speaker
And Daphne is up by listing various governmental conspiracies, past and present, referring, of course, to Catherine Olmsted, who we've mentioned before, and her work. And interviewed for the podcast back in the day, so long ago. So that's where he gets in chapter one, mostly definition and a bit of sort of, I don't know, literature review, I guess you'd call it, but hasn't really started advancing any arguments yet. Does he do so in chapter two?
00:30:44
Speaker
Kind of. So chapter 2, a brief history of conspiracy theories and conspiracies towards a science of conspiracism, starts off with the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks back in our home nation of Aotearoa, New Zealand. I will point out he names the terrorists in this chapter, which
00:31:04
Speaker
There's just generally a view in Aotearoa, New Zealand, that we just don't name the terrorist. His name should be lost to history. Although I do see the media do occasionally back home now go against that consensus we had back in 2019 and 2020. And I don't think it's ever been a consensus elsewhere. So I guess he can be forgiven for that.
00:31:29
Speaker
Yeah, although because he's a libertarian I kind of feel he just deliberately used the name because you can't tell me what to do. Only I can tell you what to do.
00:31:40
Speaker
And he talks about the mosque attacks because he wants to talk about the way that the terrorist manifesto had links with eco-fascism. So going back to fascism from the middle of the last century and the way that eco-fascism itself was kind of a offshoot of the kind of fascism we saw in Europe. So we get a reference to the Nazis.
00:32:05
Speaker
And then he wants to talk about how the Nazis were inspired by the protocols of the elder of Zion in order to then connect the terrorist views with what he calls proxy and tribal conspiracism.
00:32:20
Speaker
And he does his definitions again, and he does this a lot. He kind of reiterates definitions and core conceptual points at the beginning of chapters, which I'm in two minds of, in that on one level,
00:32:36
Speaker
If you're writing a book in the modern era, many publishers like you to license the chapters separately. So those chapters can be used as readings in courses, and publishers can make money from just selling individual chapters rather than books. So often what you want when you license a book in that way is to make sure that each chapter is sufficiently self-contained, that it can be used as a course reading.
00:33:04
Speaker
but also it does mean if you're reading the book in one thou go you end up going you said this just five pages ago and you said this just five pages ago. Why are you repeating yourself Michael? Why are you repeating yourself?
00:33:22
Speaker
The other thing to note, and I'm going to say this a lot, his libertarian definitions can get in the sea, because I think the reason why he talks about a definition of conspiracy as being gaining an advantage or harm others immorally or illegally
00:33:37
Speaker
is because he's a libertarian. And we've kind of talked about this when talking about Joe Ucinski's definition of conspiracy theory, which builds in libertarian work. I love Joe. Joe and I are writing a book chapter this year. But those libertarian definitions, definitions held by such a small and coarse member of society,
00:34:01
Speaker
They can get in the sea. Libertarians. I don't want them in my society. They can go seasteading. Or they can live under the sea with Andrew Ryan. That's what I say. Yes, I thought you were going to get some sort of a seasteading thing in there anyway. Carry on. So this is where he gets into the history of the term conspiracy theory and he gets it wrong. So...
00:34:24
Speaker
He wants to say that conspiracy theory was coined in 1967 with the famous CIA dispatch about how the CIA want to deal with people who believe in JFK conspiracy theories. Where the conspiracy theory here is that JFK was killed by elements of the state or at least not by Lee Harvey Oswald and that's been covered up by the authorities.
00:34:50
Speaker
The first thing I want to note is, does he have no access to the Oxford English Dictionary? Because the Oxford English Dictionary tells you the first cited instance of the term conspiracy theory is from 1908 and it's in an academic journal and the reference is such that it looks like readers of that journal would know what a conspiracy theory was
00:35:14
Speaker
which indicates there are probably earlier instances the OED has never found and indeed we now know what some of those instances are. Now one of the reasons why he wants to talk about conspiracy theory originating in 1967 is that he wants to be able to cite
00:35:33
Speaker
Lance de Harvensmith and Katerina Tolman, who kind of talk about the origin of the term conspiracy theory in American political discourse as being something which intelligence agencies and the like have been involved with. And so Lance de Harvensmith used to make the claim that the term conspiracy theory was coined in 1967.
00:35:57
Speaker
He doesn't make that claim now for two reasons. One, he's dead. And two, it was pointed out to him that actually there were earlier instances. So he went from it was coined in 1967 to it was popularized in 1967. But Sherma's reliance on Tauman is problematic because she talks about the stigmatization of the term conspiracy theory in the 1950s. Her book is about
00:36:26
Speaker
1950s conspiracy theory and conspiracy theory rhetoric. So he's saying, look, it was coined in 1967. Here are two authors who talk about it. Talman is talking about the 1950s. It's almost as if.
00:36:40
Speaker
Shermer is looking for citations and not actually reading the citations. He also references the work of Mick West, who famously is a debunker and has been involved in a whole bunch of really interesting stuff aside from debunking UFO videos. And Mick West is the person who discovered an 1870 instance of the label conspiracy theory.
Emotional Engagement with Conspiracy Theories
00:37:10
Speaker
So Sherman's also admitting within the same section that there's a reference which is almost a hundred years older than the start point of his term conspiracy theory here. So this is where you end up going, there's something skewer about his research here where he wants to make a claim and then he makes citations that show that he's wrong to make that claim in the first instance.
00:37:38
Speaker
Yeah, we'll see. And I think the next chapter that I'm going to talk about, yes, he'll cite papers and either not get them right or not seem to be aware that there's significant criticism of those papers already.
00:37:53
Speaker
Yeah, now he does do quite a bit of lit review in this chapter as well. So most of this chapter is a scattered look at lit from psychology and political science. And most of it is stuff that we as host of this podcast,
00:38:10
Speaker
And you as listeners to this podcast will be aware that we've talked about and cited and had arguments as to whether it's good or bad evidence for precursors or preconditions for conspiracy belief. So the effect is causing conspiracy beliefs such as anxiety, general and cultural alienation, feeling of rejections, loss of control, and interestingly enough, entertainment.
00:38:36
Speaker
has the section in the middle of the chapter, and I have to admit that in the course of reading thousands of books, essays and documents purporting to reveal a true conspiracy, especially when watching films, both documentary and, allegedly, dramas like Oliver Stone's JFK, I find myself emotionally absorbed
00:38:57
Speaker
unlike any other field I have engaged in over a long career spanning a wide diversity of fringe and extraordinary claims. It is entertaining to take these accounts seriously, even if sceptically. And I just think it's a little bit sad to go that look the only thing that brings him any amount of emotional absorption is reading about conspiracy theories. That seems that he's unlike any other field
00:39:26
Speaker
Maybe he means absorbed in a different way. Maybe, maybe, but he does make what we might take to be some hyperbolic claims during the course of this first section of the book.
00:39:40
Speaker
Now he also talked about this thing called the conspiracism principle. So towards the end of the chapter he writes, revealingly, Hart and Grether also found a negative correlation between science-mindedness and conspiratorial thinking. That is, the more one identifies with a scientific worldview, the less likely one is to believe in conspiracies.
00:40:02
Speaker
I suspect that this is because the scientific mind is alert to the role of ineptitude and randomness in the unfolding of events, thereby expanding on Hanlon's razor, never tribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. When this is applied to conspiracy theories, it might be called the conspiracism principle, never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence or chart.
00:40:31
Speaker
The reason why I bring this up is that the Conspiratism Principle, which he's just coined, actually has a pre-existing name in the academic literature, which is coincidence theory or the cock-up theory of history.
00:40:47
Speaker
So he didn't really need to re-coin an existing term that is already discussed in the literature, unless of course he wants to be able to try to make claims that he's saying something novel that people haven't said in the past. He does this a lot.
00:41:05
Speaker
He goes, defining illusionary pattern perception, what I call patternicity, as if he was the one who coined it as opposed to that being a common name for illusionary pattern perception, seems to be a kind of recurrent theme, inventing terms or claiming to coin terms where we either have existing terms or those terms pre-exist Schirmer himself.
00:41:30
Speaker
And that is a decent segue into chapter three where he talks about two of his previously defined terms, proxy conspiracism and tribal conspiracism. So the title, the full title of chapter three is proxy and tribal conspiracism, how conspiratorial beliefs are reinforced as truth.
00:41:47
Speaker
So he begins by saying the mystery I'm trying to solve in this book is why people believe conspiracy theories, not just those with some degree of plausibility, corrupt politicians or corporations conspiring to gain an immoral or illegal advantage over others are obvious examples, again with the repetition, but those with little to no evidentiary support, such as grand schemes for global domination through political or economic plots or control of the world's population through vaccinations or 5G internet towers.
00:42:12
Speaker
I'm especially interested in why smart people believe blatantly wrong things for apparently rational reasons, in other words, the conspiracy effect. In this chapter, I'll make the case that such obviously false beliefs are true in the minds of believers, not necessarily in the specifics of a theory, but in the more general truths for which it stands, proxy truths and tribal truths.
Belief-Dependent Realism and Cognitive Dissonance
00:42:32
Speaker
And so that's what he starts off by talking about, this claim that people will believe certain things are true in the absence of evidence or even in the presence of contradictory evidence. Because those beliefs are proxies for a deeper truth. You believe in all the stuff Trump says, even if there's no evidence for it, because ultimately what you're really saying is, I believe there's this corrupt deep state government. And this is a theory of signaling.
00:42:59
Speaker
The way he talks about it reminds me of the way people would say that the protocols of the Ellis of Zion may be false, but they're spiritually true. The Kerry-Boulton argument. I mean, we know they're false, but we also know at heart they describe a spiritual truth.
00:43:19
Speaker
So he talks about this idea of belief-dependent realism. He believes that beliefs come first followed later by explanations for those beliefs. And he says because of this, we therefore tend to look for confirming evidence and ignore or rationalise away contradictory evidence. But he says we can use, quote, science and rationality.
00:43:41
Speaker
to test our mental models of the world against reality and hopefully try to overcome this tendency to only believe what we want to believe. He goes on to say that there is a rational mindset and a mythical one in which mindset we're acting at any time affects how we treat beliefs. If you're acting in a rational mindset he says you'll treat beliefs
00:44:02
Speaker
in a more sort of analytical manner and look for evidence of whether they're true or false. And if you're acting in the mythical mindset, you'll be more willing to countenance things in a way of saying, ah, yes, that might as well be true. He talks about the idea of having a winking belief in something and things like theories in certain cultures or believing in a flat earth, which
00:44:25
Speaker
where people sort of say they believe in them, but it's with a bit of a wink. It's, oh yes, yes, yes, I believe in fairies, those good old fairy folk. But again, the idea is that when they say things like that, oh yes, yes, yes, the world has flashed, didn't you know?
00:44:44
Speaker
these things that they're saying they believe in are actually proxies for something else. You might just believe, generally, that the world is a mysterious place and we can't know it all. Or you might believe that governments can't be trusted, just in general. That's what you're really saying when you say the government's hiding the fact that the world is flat, or that theories and theory folk are all around us.
00:45:04
Speaker
He is a claim from Pinker that Trump and his crowd are deliberately trying to move politics into the mythical realm rather than being in the rational realm where
00:45:20
Speaker
What went through the mythical realm, everything's just a story. And truth is a lot more optional. I mean, there's certainly, I don't know if you put it that way, there's certainly, was it Steve Bannon was the one who talked about just just flooding it with bullshit. And yeah, so much cracked that the truth becomes unknowable. So I don't know.
00:45:41
Speaker
Oh, you know, John Key historically, when people say, look, water conservation scientists are saying water quality in Aotearoa, New Zealand is getting worse. Oh, you know, scientists are like lawyers. You can always find someone who supports your view.
00:45:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's not really how we kind of think that science tends to work. So yes, there is definitely an argument to say that there are some politicians who, if they're not trying to move truth into a mythic realm, certainly want to use the rhetoric of, well, truth isn't really that important. It's all just opinions, man. It's all just opinions.
00:46:18
Speaker
Now, he then goes on to talk about the UFO slash apocalypse prophet Marion Keach, real name Dorothy Martin, and how her followers, the Seekers, reacted when her... Not the band. Not the band, no. No. The UFO cult. So there's a famous book called When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, Henry Rieken and Stanley Schachter. And this is the book that they
00:46:45
Speaker
infiltrated perhaps isn't the right word. They weren't particularly secretive about it, but they went along and to the meetings of this woman who apparently communed with these aliens and received messages from them and had predicted very specifically the day when the world was going to end and they're all going to be taken away by UFOs. And this is one of those cases you'll have heard about where the followers, you know, sell all their possessions and things like that and, and, and go along and, and wait for the day. And then surprise, surprise, the world doesn't actually end and they're not taken up by
00:47:12
Speaker
UFOs and then the books about how people react to that and some of them lose faith immediately and go away and then other people that other times they'll sort of rationalize why it didn't actually happen even though we thought it was going to or say okay yes it's in and now it's going to happen later and all things like that.
00:47:29
Speaker
And it's in this book, I believe, that Leon Festinger is credited with inventing the term cognitive dissonance, which he brings up in this book to explain the followers' behaviour. And Sherman's a big fan, goes on to talk about cognitive dissonance quite a bit.
00:47:48
Speaker
The way he talks about it often is the thing that we've talked about before, how people want big events to have big explanations. He says that he compares something like the Holocaust, a horribly evil event, which was nevertheless caused by a horribly evil regime, compare that to, say, the assassination of JFK or the death of Princess Di, a hugely significant event,
00:48:12
Speaker
or hugely significant people at least, killed by some dude with a gun or a random car accident. He says cases like that cause cognitive dissonance within us because something doesn't seem to make sense in that case.
Monological Systems and Motivations
00:48:26
Speaker
And so we try to create cognitive harmony within ourselves by coming up with a cause that fits the effect. Doesn't mention Holocaust deniers, of course. There are people
00:48:41
Speaker
for whom the idea that the Holocaust occurred does not fit with their worldview and come up with all sorts of strategies for explaining that away. But that doesn't come up here. He then moves on to the eye now. Now, this was when I started, this was when I
00:49:01
Speaker
at least metaphorically rocked back in my chair and went, ah, I've heard this before. When he starts talking about the idea that believing in one conspiracy theory makes you more likely to believe in others, and he cites the paper by Michael Wood and Karen Douglas, that we've looked at before. In particular, back in episode 377, we looked at Curtis Hagen's paper on Monological Belief Systems.
00:49:24
Speaker
And he brought up this this paper and roundly criticized it because that was the paper that that's used. People use that paper as evidence that conspiracy theorists will basically believe any old crap. They'll even believe things that contradict each other. They'll believe that Princess Di was never killed. And they'll also believe that she was secretly bumped off by the Illuminati. Those two things can't be true. What's going on?
00:49:49
Speaker
And as we pointed out at the time, that's not actually what the survey said. It was people asked whether they would be willing to believe certain things. And so they would say that these things were plausible, which isn't the same as saying that they believe both of them at the same time. They were just things that they would be willing to believe were true. And crucially, as Jan Willem-Vampoyen and his colleagues pointed out in a paper that was discussed last year,
00:50:17
Speaker
It turns out that Wood and Douglas kind of made a mistake when they were calculating their outputs, because it's not the case that conspiracy theorists are believing contradictory conspiracy theories. It turns out that if you don't believe, if you believe the official theory of the event, it turns out
00:50:42
Speaker
you don't believe all of the contradictory conspiracy theories. So there is a correlation here. There's a belief in contradictory conspiracy theories, but what they're actually showing us is a lack of belief in all the contradictory conspiracy theories once you believe the official theory.
00:51:02
Speaker
Now, Schmer, though, takes the paper at face value, and he says that even when people believe multiple contradictory conspiracy theories, which he and the evidence shows that they didn't actually do, they're just once again using these beliefs as proxy beliefs for a deeper distrust of authorities. So when they say, I believe this thing and I also believe this thing, which contradicts the first thing, what they're really saying is, I don't trust what the government tells me or something like that.
00:51:29
Speaker
Yeah, and I should point out, I mean, Sherma's book predates the von Prien paper, which actually analyzed the Wood and Douglas piece. So here's no reason to think that Wood and Douglas have been basically debunked by other psychologists.
00:51:46
Speaker
But there is literature on Monological Belief Systems, which has poured scorn on the notion of the MBS, including papers by Douglas. So Douglas and Sutton have argued that actually the evidence for the Monological Belief System actually isn't as strong as people originally thought. So it does once again seem like Sherma has found a paper that supports his view
00:52:12
Speaker
And that's where his literature review ends. Once you find supportive evidence, he doesn't need to then go to see whether anyone's criticized it. He does mention the Sutton and Douglas follow-up, but as I recall, even Curtis said, yeah, it does question
00:52:32
Speaker
the results of the paper but didn't question it nearly enough for Curtis's liking as I recall. So after this following Alexandra Sichoka, I may be pronouncing that completely incorrectly, Shuma goes on to talk about three kinds of motives for conspiratorial beliefs.
Teleological Thinking and Comfort in Conspiracy Theories
00:52:51
Speaker
He talks about having, you can have epistemic motives for believing in a conspiracy, so these are motives that basically you don't believe in something because it makes the world make more sense.
00:53:01
Speaker
So you don't want to believe that the economy is basically just chaos. You'd rather believe it's secretly controlled by the Illuminati or the Rothschilds or whoever. He talks about the idea of existential motives. So these are believing in conspiracies, conspiracy theories that let you feel safe or somehow in control of your own environment. He lost me a little bit here because example of this is believing that
00:53:27
Speaker
Politics isn't a messy and complicated process. It's secretly controlled by corporate interests, which sounds exactly the same as the kind of example he gave previously. But in principle, I get the idea of just believing in things that
00:53:41
Speaker
that mean that you're in some way in control or in some way safer. And then he also brings up the idea of social motives for conspiratorial belief. So these are basically motives that let you fit in with the social, you believe stuff because it lets you fit in with a particular social group. And he notes that these ones, unfortunately more than the others, tend to involve demonizing other groups. He goes on to introduce the concept related to this of teleological thinking.
00:54:10
Speaker
If you've done your metaphysics stage one philosophy papers, you'll remember teleological being all about sort of final causes and what have you. So, teleological thinking in the sense is basically giving a final cause to observe phenomena. It's the idea that everything happens for a reason.
00:54:31
Speaker
giving a single simple cause to the chaos that we see in the world. This concept apparently came about in the paper looking at creationism and conspiracism and of course if once again if you ever did a stage one philosophy paper in metaphysics you'd know that there were the teleological arguments for the existence of God have been around for a very very long time.
00:54:52
Speaker
So it's probably no surprise that it came up in that context. Now, of course, everything does happen for a reason, or at least as far as we're aware, everything has a cause, but Schurmer distinguishes between what he calls transcendentalists and empiricists when it comes to the sorts of causes people look for. Empiricists are just, you know, physical forces causing things to happen, whereas transcendentalists is more of the idea of, I don't know, fate or higher powers or what have you.
00:55:22
Speaker
As he puts it, empiricists tend to think that randomness and coincidence interact with the causal net of our world, as well as that belief should depend on evidence for each individual claim. Transcendentalists discount the role of chance and weave all strands of conspiracies together into one tapestry of meaning. I am definitely an empiricist, but the problem for conspiracy thinking is that transcendentalism is intuitive and empiricism is not. Not quite sure what he means by that, but I guess so.
00:55:50
Speaker
No, I mean, he's making a strict binary between two positions, and I don't think there are pure empiricists and pure transcendentalists under this view.
00:56:02
Speaker
In pericis, people who think, look, chance plays a bigger role in the world than we think. And transcendentalists go, well, look, actually, there's more of a unified field theory going on here. I mean, his claim that everything has a cause also has a big scientific problem.
00:56:22
Speaker
in that we're not actually entirely sure that the Big Bang was caused by anything. It just appears to be an event that happened. It might be the uncaused cause. So we're not entirely sure that everything does have a cause. Yes. So basically what he's getting at is the idea that it's more comforting to think that a conspiracy is behind everything rather than the world being chaotic and random. This is one of the key emotions. Is it actually more comforting?
00:56:50
Speaker
So he claims that some people will find it more comforting and that's why they hew to these conspiracy theories. Anne goes on to talk more of various cognitive biases and in chapter five I think he'll go through a whole bunch of them.
00:57:06
Speaker
of cognitive biases to explain why people stick to beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence. Got old confirmation bias, which has gone over a bunch. He talks about hindsight bias, basically reconstructing the past to fit with things, how we know things turned out.
00:57:22
Speaker
and so examples of that. He talks about the let it happen, made the lee hop, knee hop theories around both 9-11 and also the attacks on Pearl Harbor where later it turned out that there were intercepted Japanese communications to do with Pearl Harbor that were discounted because we were intercepting a hell of a lot of Japanese communications as far as I'm aware. There was that
00:57:47
Speaker
Bin Laden determined to strike a U.S. memo, which came out after 9-11, which with the benefit of hindsight, you can say, oh, look, so they definitely knew all along, and so they must have known unless it happened. Anyway, he also mentions the idea that people conspiracy come up with conspiracy theories due to a lack of power or control. He quote, quote, no less than Alan Moore.
00:58:09
Speaker
talking about I think this was when he was writing Watch Me No Possibly V for Vindeta or maybe it was even from Hell when he was looking at the works of conspiracy theorists at least and he came to the conclusion that conspiracy theorists are often comforted by the idea that someone's in control even if it's someone there. Yeah this is another issue I have with this book. In them
00:58:31
Speaker
For a book which is meant to be a sceptical and scientific look at conspiracy theories, he's really, really keen on using pithy quotes by authors of fiction, as if that somehow tells us something really interesting about the world. And don't get me wrong,
00:58:47
Speaker
I love the work of Alan Moore, but I'm not entirely sure that we should just take Alan Moore's word about what he thinks about conspiracy theories as some kind of pithy evidence for a particular claim. He does this with other novelists as well, you know, according to Russian novelists blah blah blah blah blah blah. That's not evidence of a salient kind.
00:59:14
Speaker
Yeah, well, yeah, I don't know that it's presented as evidence as much as an illustration of a point that he's making, but yes. But it's an illustration of a point by someone with no relevant expertise. It'd be much better citing an academic who makes a similar claim, because at least then you can point to they've got an argument for this, as opposed to this is what Alan Moore thinks. But Alan Moore thinks a lot of strange things, including believing in magic. He does.
00:59:43
Speaker
So the last part of this chapter looks at personal psychology. And so there are various issues in personal psychology. I'm a person. I've got a psychology. I've been one from time to time. He basically looks over a bunch of different issues in personal psychology and conspiracy theories. There's the question of cause and effect. Do certain personality traits lead to conspiracy theorizing or do conspiracy theories cause certain personality traits, for example,
01:00:10
Speaker
Do distrust, naturally distrustful people believe in conspiracy theories, or does believing in conspiracy theories make you less trusting? And he says basically we don't know, although he suspects it's the former, not the latter. In sense of this, there's this not being sure about this sort of thing, this qualification applies to many of the studies discussed in this chapter. Research is exploring these additional cognitive, attitudinal, social, political and other factors in conspiracy cognition often contradict one another.
01:00:37
Speaker
it isn't always clear which factors are the strongest and to which extent they interact. And so similarly, he talks about the role of scepticism and the fact it's complicated, the role of scepticism plays in how sceptical any particular individual is.
Skepticism and Constructive Conspiracism
01:00:52
Speaker
You can be sceptical of the official story or you can be sceptical of the alternative conspiracy theory if we place those to an opposition to greater or lesser amounts and says, you know,
01:01:05
Speaker
You can be too skeptical of conspiracy theories and site studies, which I think we've mentioned before, of people ending up not believing in things like MKUltra, which we know actually did happen.
01:01:16
Speaker
He looks at studies that show that exposure to conspiracy theories can colour people's attitudes, supposedly just showing someone JFK can show a measurable change in their attitude in certain areas afterwards. That's a question as to how long that effect lasts. Yeah. Yeah. And one more bias, the my side bias, which is a cognitive bias, he says where we tend to think that our side is more reasonable and educated and assume that the other side
01:01:45
Speaker
is unreasonable or ignorant. So there's a whole lot of issues here. It sort of starts talking about his proxy and I don't know that he actually specifically mentions tribal conspiracism. I might have just skipped over it and not mentioned it in my notes. He talks about the social side of things, which I guess is what he's getting at there.
01:02:04
Speaker
Yeah, well, as I say, I think because constructive conspiracism actually plays the main role in his theory. He wants to talk about proxy and tribal conspiracism to admit that sometimes conspiracy beliefs are a kind of signaling function.
01:02:22
Speaker
But it doesn't seem to play much of a role in the rest of this section. He really does want to be kind of committed to the idea that when people say, I believe the conspiracy theory, they in some sense are sincerely committed to the truth of the conspiracy theory.
01:02:39
Speaker
He needs to be able to say, well, look, in some cases, obviously that's not the case. But for most of the rest of the analysis, it's going to be, if X says I believe Y, it's not going to be the signaling Y to show affiliation Z. It's going to be because they really do believe Y. Well, let's just get a seguezini into the next chapter on constructive conspiracism. So what does he have to say? Well, in chapter four, constructive conspiracism, paranoia,
01:03:09
Speaker
pessimism and the evolutionary origins of conspiracy cognition, just put ergh in there because of the evolutionary psychology stuff, he starts talking about constructive conspiracism. And he talks about this with respect to two people, Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker.
01:03:30
Speaker
Now Steven Pinker is an interesting character, he's a member of the intellectual dark web, and many people now think that he's probably gone, well he probably went off the rails about 10 years ago, but he's really against things like wokeism and the like. Jared Diamond's a slightly more fascinating character in that Gund, Germs and Steel, when it came out, was taken to be this
01:03:56
Speaker
really interesting anthropological look at how civilizational complexes work. And then he read, he read? I mean he read subsequent books and then read even, I want to say the word right, I keep saying the word read. He then wrote subsequent books
01:04:15
Speaker
And each one of those books has been more heavily criticized than the past, which has led to a kind of retrospective analysis of guns, germs and steel, where people were
01:04:27
Speaker
He kind of overgeneralized in the first instance, but we found his thesis so fascinating, we kind of ignored the evidential issues. But the more he writes on these issues, the more we realize that there's a lot more speculation and a lot less evidence in his theories than we originally thought. But before we get onto that, we need to talk about Sherma's views on election rigging.
01:04:55
Speaker
Because he has, I think, a slightly weird view on what happened with claims about election rigging for Trump's first, and hopefully only, electoral victory. This might be a phrase we need to rethink in a year's time, but hopefully...
01:05:15
Speaker
his first and only electoral victory back in 2016. He writes, after Trump won, Democrats decided that the election was rigged after all, but the result of the Mueller investigation into the matter of Russian collusion
01:05:29
Speaker
did not pan out as they expected. Now let's leave to one side the worries people have about the Mueller investigation and actually the rationale that Mueller made for not laying charges which wasn't really based upon the evidence but more based upon
01:05:48
Speaker
political ideals and the idea that the best move would be to impeach Trump as a Senate trial rather than bring about criminal charges. So it was basically a decision, no, the Senate should impeach Trump, a Republican controlled Senate, rather than the Department of Justice doing anything to actually prosecute this thing itself.
01:06:12
Speaker
He seems to be arguing along the lines of if X is investigated by a certain kind of body, and they claim there isn't enough evidence to show X occurred, then we can make the claim that X did not occur. And that's
01:06:29
Speaker
not a particularly sound claim to make, because you might have evidential thresholds and go, look, we know X did it, but we don't have enough evidence to prosecute them in court. Or you might go, we know X did it, but due to the way our legal system works,
01:06:46
Speaker
there isn't a kind of punishment of the kind that people expect. It turns out that actually the punishment for this is not what people normally expect. So Schumer seems to go, look, because there was an investigation into the alleged election rigging, the fact we got a particular verdict shows that actually Democrats were wrong to think it was rigged in the first instance.
01:07:11
Speaker
when it's really not as obvious from looking at the evidence itself that the decision wasn't, say, politically motivated rather than arrived at epistemically. So there is something weird about the way he talks about the election rigging story here.
01:07:31
Speaker
But he's using this to say that in this chapter, I want to consider the deepest psychological reasons for conspiratorial thinking, starting with the observation that conspiracy theories are slanted toward the negative. There are good evolutionary reasons for such pessimism. So this is the idea that we should suspect the existence of conspiracies because it's dangerous to not suspect them. It's better to have a whole bunch of false positives
01:08:01
Speaker
you
01:08:01
Speaker
and suspect there are conspiracies abounding than to have false negatives and avoid detecting a successful conspiracy. And so he talks about what he calls Jared Diamond's notion of constructive paranoia. So Diamond has the story about when he was staying with a particular indigenous group. He wanted to build his tent beneath a tree. And the members of the tribe said, no, don't do that. It's dangerous.
01:08:31
Speaker
and diamonds going I don't know what you mean by this and then he realizes as he's sleeping at night you can always hear trees falling down in the forest so the reason why members of the tribe are saying don't pitch your tent beneath the tree is that trees fall down
01:08:48
Speaker
And if you live long enough in the forest and you're camping beneath trees, you are going to eventually die by a tree falling on you. And Diamond calls this a kind of constructive paranoia. I don't know why this is a form of paranoia. I mean, it does appear to be a form of saying, look, there's a low chance of a bad event occurring, but given enough time, enough low chances mean it's going to happen to you.
01:09:17
Speaker
That isn't paranoia. Paranoia is an irrational fear. This seems like a very constructive fear to have in this particular case. Yes, yeah, I wouldn't call that paranoia at all. Just prudence more than anything.
01:09:32
Speaker
Yeah, and it seems that when he, so when Schirmer is talking about constructive conspiracism, if he's using the diamond analogy here of constructive paranoia, he's saying, look, constructive conspiracism is a lock-like constructive paranoia, and yet Schirmer is talking about the fact that if you're historically literate,
01:09:55
Speaker
you know conspiracies occur. So it's not, you're not being paranoid by going, well look, if historically conspiracies have occurred, they could be occurring now. Once again, that's not an irrational fear. That is a fear based upon evidence.
01:10:12
Speaker
So he also discusses Pinker on the idea that historically, given that people have conspired, conspiracy theories end up flourishing because we're very much worried about false
Critiques and Historical Conspiracies
01:10:24
Speaker
negatives. So he writes, the problem is that there is often an evolutionary mismatch
01:10:29
Speaker
between trays that were adapted for survival in our Paleolithic environment, but are not necessarily functional in modern settings. Being constructively conspiratorial in an ancient hunter-gatherer milieu may not be especially beneficial today, especially if one acts on one's conspiratorial beliefs, from barging into a Washington DC pizzeria to storming the U.S. Capitol.
01:10:55
Speaker
Now, part of my problem with this evolutionary psychological story that Shermer tells, relying on people like Pinker, is that he starts using evidence of N culture X, N culture Y to say, look, this shows that there's a genealogical story that shows that these things are part of our evolutionary makeup.
01:11:17
Speaker
But of course, a lot of these things are actually probably going to be due to the nurture or society in which we live. And this is the general problem with evolutionary psychology. You pick and match cultures across the world that have
01:11:34
Speaker
what appear to be similar psychological complexes for people within those cultures and say oh the common route here must be our distant evolutionary path when we were on the savannah as opposed to going well I mean it could just be devolved
01:11:50
Speaker
from the cultures in which people live, there's no good argument that gets us the evolutionary psychological account without making huge assumptions about our evolutionary past. Whilst we do have good arguments for the idea that our cultures and society
01:12:08
Speaker
And to a certain extent, program us to have particular views about things. That doesn't require an evolutionary or genealogical story going back hundreds of thousands of years. And he gets into more of these bloody biases. I've got more in my bit. He just keeps coming up with them.
01:12:29
Speaker
Yeah, so it has this thing called negativity bias, that negative events are more salient, potent and dominant in combinations and generally effectatious than positive events. So basically we remember and focus on bad things rather than remember and focus on good things. Now I'm not entirely sure that a negativity bias is a universal human condition.
01:12:56
Speaker
He does make this claim, tellingly, we have more words to describe the qualities of physical pain, deep, intense, dull, sharp, aching, burning, cutting, pinching, piercing, tearing, twitching, shooting, stabbing, thrusting, throbbing, penetrating, lingering, and radiating. Then we have to describe physical pleasure, intense, delicious, exquisite, breathtaking, sumptuous, sweet. It's telling that he has a nice long list of
01:13:21
Speaker
pain adjectives and goes for a short list of pleasure adjectives. You could actually have added quite a few more in there. That might be true of English. I don't know whether that's true linguistically across all cultures though. So, as evidence here seems pretty... And at least some of those pain words would work as pleasure words also.
01:13:49
Speaker
He also makes this claim progress is mostly made incrementally and in small steps, whereas regress can easily come about in one colossal calamity. That is not a universal truth, that is a central
01:14:05
Speaker
tenant for a form of centrism, that the best way to make progress is incrementally and in small steps. But there are lots of people who believe that progress can be made in big steps, and you don't need to make it incrementally at all. He's just asserting that this is the only way progress is made. Well, that is actually part of his libertarian ideology.
01:14:29
Speaker
which kind of fits into a conservative mindset of, you know, just make small changes and then adapt to those and then make another one, as opposed to save people on the extreme left of which I and you are a member go, no, big changes now, big, big structural changes now.
01:14:45
Speaker
I would say I am less extreme than you, but yes. Yes, yes. I mean, I want bigger changes. You just want big changes. I want the biggest changes. Some changes would be nice, yes. Well, yes, that's also true. And so, yeah, he continues talking about his evolutionary story, particularly making use of the work of Van Perun and Van Valk.
01:15:11
Speaker
they are both evolutionary psychologists who are writing on conspiracy theory. He tells this really bizarre story about how entropy in the second law of thermodynamics is the first law of life. Lost me there a little bit. So he basically says because entropy is a thing then our entire
01:15:35
Speaker
theory of life should be based upon the second law of thermodynamics. It just seems bizarrely wooey and has absolutely no role in his argument whatsoever. But anyway, he goes on to start talking more about constructive conspiracism. Colloquially, we might think of constructive conspiracism as a default position when living in a dangerous world.
01:16:01
Speaker
If it turns out there is no danger, no harm is done, and not much energy is expended in being a little paranoid, there's that word again, paranoid. Instead, if it turns out there is a danger, being constructively paranoid pays off. In other words, assume the worst. In this model, constructive conspiracism is a type of pattern, a belief about the world in which our ancestors benefited from focusing more on the negative than the positive.
01:16:30
Speaker
thus it offers an evolutionary explanation for a worldview in which bad is stronger than good. Finding conspiracies where none exists is a low-cost error than not finding conspiracies when they are present, especially if someone or something is conspiring to harm you.
01:16:48
Speaker
And so he goes on to end the chapter with a list of conspiracies, both of which could have been avoided if people had been, in air quotes, constructively conspiracist, or just historical examples of conspiracies which we need to take into account. So for things which could have been avoided,
01:17:07
Speaker
if people had been appropriately conspiracist in mind. You've got the Yom Kippur War, Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor. And as he points out, historically, conspiracies like the assassination of Julius Caesar, the gunpowder plot, the attempted assassination of George Washington, the actual assassination of Abraham Lincoln,
01:17:31
Speaker
the death of Archduke Ferdinand, the Joseph McCarthy trials, Operation Northwoods, Watergate, Iran-Contra, David Koresh, and Timothy McVeigh, and of course, our firm favorite, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 over the weapons of mass destruction. Look, these events happened. This was meant to be the motivation for being constructively conspiracist.
01:17:59
Speaker
Right. It's... Yeah. I don't... Something isn't sitting well with me about this, but I can't quite put my finger on it right at this particular moment. Well, he's trying to square a circle between saying, look, you're justified in being dismissive of conspiracy theories, except you're not.
01:18:19
Speaker
And I think it's because he starts off this section of the book talking about the spurious conspiracy theories, the ones he doesn't think are particularly realistic. And in this chapter, he really pivots towards his evolutionary psychological story about why we should be constructively conspiracist.
01:18:42
Speaker
and is now really focusing on examples of conspiracies which he takes to be realistic. The problem is they are only taken to be realistic as a kind of post-facto thing. I mean Watergate is a really great example here. People prior to Watergate thought it was fantastical.
01:19:06
Speaker
that the President of the United States of America would authorize a burglary of his opponent's officers. It's a fantastical thing to believe, it's not particularly realistic. It's only after the fact that people went, oh,
01:19:23
Speaker
I mean, I guess presidents can do that particular thing. So the demarcation he has at the beginning of the book between the unrealistic versus the realistic conspiracy theories is a false dichotomy. They're only realistic after the fact.
01:19:39
Speaker
But he seems to be making the claim that we can detect from the face of it between realistic and unrealistic conspiracy theories. So to quote Brian Keeley, friend of the show, there is no mark of the incredible here. There is no prima facie way of just looking at a conspiracy theory and knowing whether it's realistic or unrealistic.
01:20:02
Speaker
Yes, I think that's what was bothering me, the fact that earlier on it was all about why do sensible people believe things that are obvious nonsense, and then here he's talking about it's perfectly sensible to believe in conspiracies, although having given the distinction between the paranoid conspiracy theories and sensible ones, rational ones,
01:20:24
Speaker
He hasn't done a very good job of making it clear which type he's talking about in any given time, which I think is what old Brian got in trouble with a little bit way back when in his earliest paper.
01:20:40
Speaker
But anyway, on to chapter five, last part of this, last chapter of this part. And it's good because this episode has grown somewhat rotund. Fortunately, I can skip through this one fairly quickly because it is chapter five, a case study in conspiracism, the sovereign citizens conspiracy theory.
01:20:58
Speaker
So I can skip over a large part of chapter 5 because it's basically a summary of sovereign citizen beliefs and their history. I actually found it quite interesting. I thought it was a decent potted history of where at least some of them seem to be fairly sort of American focused, but where these beliefs actually came from and how they spread in some places. And this is one of these situations because he's testified in court.
01:21:18
Speaker
on sovereign citizen conspiracy theories. He does seem to have the relevant expertise to talk about the history of these theories and some of the rationales as to why people believe them, which is mostly tax avoidance.
Cognitive Biases and Conclusion Preview
01:21:33
Speaker
Well, yes. He talks about his own personal experience. The first time he heard about sovereign citizen conspiracy theories was when he was in college. Someone gave him a convincing explanation that because the 16th Amendment was supposedly never properly ratified, you don't actually have to pay tax.
01:21:48
Speaker
His reasoning at the time was, well, this can't be true, otherwise no one would pay tax. Although if you believe it's a conspiracy theory and the government's actually trying to hide that truth, then I don't know that that reasoning actually works. But anyway, as you say, he's testified about the sort of stuff in court. In 2013, he appeared in court as an expert witness on the psychology of why people believe this sort of stuff. He was brought in by the defense
01:22:13
Speaker
so that he could basically say, this guy who was doing weird sovereign citizen stuff and had seemingly defrauded the IRD of a large amount of money, he testified that, no, this guy isn't a malicious con man. He actually believes this nonsense as a sort of mitigating factor, I guess, in the guy's defense.
01:22:34
Speaker
Yeah, I mean he even talks about talking with the defender and trying to elicit from him. Did you really believe this stuff or is it just you just don't want to pay tax? And it really does seem that the defender was no, I truly do believe this.
01:22:49
Speaker
He says that he was all set to testify in another case, which in the event got settled, and so he never actually had to testify. But in preparation for his testimony, he put together a primer on belief consisting of 10 components that explain precisely how and why someone can come to believe a conspiracy theory.
01:23:12
Speaker
And so the majority of the rest of this chapter is his list of 10 components, which mostly are a list of cognitive biases, which he sees can support or encourage conspiratorial beliefs. And so the 10 components are, number one, the brain is a belief engine.
01:23:32
Speaker
in particular, sometimes we believe things that are false and sometimes we reject things that are true. Number two, beliefs are reinforced by authorities. This particular one leaned on the Milgram experiment quite a lot, which was the people... Yeah, and by the time he's writing this book,
01:23:49
Speaker
There's quite a lot of literature on how the Milgram experiment results were actually largely faked. Or at least they were written up in a way to suggest a conclusion that was not supported by the actual data.
01:24:03
Speaker
component three beliefs are reinforced by peers four beliefs are reinforced by liking and by the similarity of other beliefs more of these are sort of both the social stuff five beliefs are reinforced by payoff success and happiness so here here this contradicts his idea we only focus on negative things now actually positive things
01:24:25
Speaker
getting things right that reinforce believing these things. Six, beliefs are reinforced by confirmation bias. Seven, beliefs are reinforced. Which is itself reinforced by confirmation bias. Beliefs are reinforced by optimism and over-optimism biases, which one I hadn't heard of before. Optimism bias is apparently the tendency to see yourself as better than average and more likely to succeed than the odds warrant.
01:24:49
Speaker
He says, in this bit he says, conspiracy theories fuel optimism bias and usually tip it over into over-optimism to the point where reality is distorted. For example, who in their right mind would believe paying taxes is purely voluntary over optimistic conspiracists? That's who. Which seemed a little bit... Take that, sovereign citizens.
01:25:07
Speaker
Point eight, beliefs are reinforced by self-justification bias, which means we tend to rationalize our decisions after the fact. Nine, beliefs are reinforced by sunk cost bias. And 10, beliefs are reinforced by an endowment effect, which is apparently a psychological effect, which is the tendency to value what we own more than what we do not possess, which he talks about a study where people sort of are given a thing and say how much
01:25:36
Speaker
Knowing how much do you think this thing that you own is worth and then ask other people how much would you pay for this thing? And the people who have the thing tend to think it's worth more and the people who are looking to buy it tend to think it's worth less.
01:25:49
Speaker
Which, no, maybe that works when assigning monetary value, but then you've got the whole grass is greener on the other side effect. People surely often tend to value what they don't have more than the thing that they do have in other situations, I don't know. Yes, I mean, once again, this, I think, is his market capitalism libertarianist going on. People don't understand the true value of things. The true value of things is what the market decides it to be.
01:26:15
Speaker
I said, yeah, but I don't care. For me, this particular model I had as a child is priceless. It doesn't matter. You're willing to give me five bucks for it. For me, it's actually priceless. So in this context, he says conspiracy theories are further reinforced by endowing believers with secret knowledge, which they believe gives them power they would otherwise not have. With power comes confidence and then overconfidence.
01:26:39
Speaker
And that's basically the end of chapter five. He goes through his ten components of things that can reinforce belief in conspiracy theories and talks about how that's the end of part one and in part two he's going to look at how to determine which conspiracy theories are true and which are not.
01:26:55
Speaker
But that's for another time. And that's what we'll be discussing in two weeks time. Part two of Michael Shermer's book. Hopefully, slightly. It's bound to be much more interesting, so you'll have to start grappling with specific conspiracy theories in part two. You can't just do his potted literature here or coining terms that other people have already coined. You'll need to actually go, but this conspiracy theory, but that conspiracy theory.
01:27:22
Speaker
Yes, so we'll look at that in a little while and hopefully have a slightly shorter... What I was going to say at the beginning was my tendency for note taking is to just go through the thing and just, oh, that looks like an interesting point. I'll write that down. What I probably should do is then go back afterwards and actually
01:27:40
Speaker
prune out things that where I could give them a miss and what have you but not only do I not believe in reading I don't believe in second drafts either. Well you do you. I do. Also now that we're a fortnightly podcast a slightly longer episode is probably not a terrible thing. You're getting getting getting your value anyway.
01:28:00
Speaker
So that is the end of part one of that book and it's the end of this episode. We of course are going to go and record a bonus episode where we'll talk about a bunch of contemporary events. Of bonuses? Yeah death and destruction. A bonus episode full of bonuses. Including our thoughts on what's been happening or not happening in the White Vault. Yeah I don't see we can avoid that.
01:28:27
Speaker
So, if you want to be a patron and therefore eligible to listen to our bonus episodes, go to betraying.com and look for the podcasters going to the conspiracy. Do not go to Podbean and look for the Earth thing, because we're not on Podbean anymore. But Josh, you should be aware that there's a bias here. If you mention that people shouldn't do a thing, they're very likely to end up doing that thing. Well, they'll find out that they can't, and then they'll be sad.
01:28:52
Speaker
Which means that, contradictory, we should say don't go to Patreon and become a Patreon. Because then we go, you can't tell me what to do. I'm going to Patreon right now and I'm becoming a Patreon right now. You can't stop me.
Closing and Next Episode Teaser
01:29:04
Speaker
You may have it there. But anyway, I think we've gone on for certainly long enough this time. So I'm just going to call things to a close in the traditional manner by saying goodbye. And I'm going to say the shortest goodbye possible.
01:29:38
Speaker
The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, Associate Professor M.R. X. Denton.
01:29:46
Speaker
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.
01:30:16
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.