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Evidence and Conspiracy Theories
27 Plays4 years ago
An episode "from the can" (due to a recording snafu rendering this week's planned episode utterly unusable), wherein Josh and M talk evidence and conspiracy theories.
Recommended
Transcript
Exploring Divergent Realities
00:00:01
Speaker
Bill, it happened again. What happened again? You know, reality broke, we've ended up in a featureless void. You come from a reality in which Andy Beshago never became president. What do you mean he never became president? What do you mean, what do you mean he never became president?
00:00:16
Speaker
Andy Beshar goes the current lifetime president of the world. He won the 2016 election in the landslide. He recently made peace with the indigenous lifeforms on Mars. He is kind of the best person ever. I mean, we have time machines now. And those jetpacks from the 80s, although they are pretty dangerous. It's the world I live in too. Normally when this shit happens we turn out to be star-crossed lovers or something from different versions of reality.
00:00:43
Speaker
You mean like the world don't move to the beat of just one drum? What might be right for you? May not be right for some!
Confusion and Reality Checks
00:00:49
Speaker
Okay, well yeah, it's definitely you. It does present a special problem. How so? Well, the last time this happened to me, or you, or both of us, but not at the same time... Sorry, it's my nose bleeding. No more than usual. Please, do continue. Well, the last time this happened, we, and by we, I mean me and the other you, or you and the other... Are you sure my nose isn't just hemorrhaging brain matter?
00:01:11
Speaker
It's a bit gunky, but it's a season for gunk. Have you tried antihistamines? Yeah, you know, the last time we got thrown into this void we had to record a classic themed episode in order to get us back to our respective realities, except this time we're both from the same reality, so... So how do we get back? Precisely.
00:01:30
Speaker
Hmm. So last time this happened to me, we started off with the old theme. Same. So maybe that's it. Maybe we just need to play that theme and the rest will just sort itself out. It's worth a shot. Theme? Theme! Well, that's not alarming at all.
00:01:56
Speaker
The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Dr. M.R. Extenteth, and featuring Josh Addison as the interlocutor.
00:02:08
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy.
Welcome to the Conspiracy Guide Podcast
00:02:11
Speaker
I am Josh Edison, and sitting next to me, they just took a DNA test. Turns out they're 100% that bitch. It's Dr. M.R.X.Denteth. Oh, classic beginning. Classic lyricisms. Yeah, well, you warned me last time, so I had one ready. So, what have we talked about in these little episodes from the can? We've talked about what's a conspiracy. We've talked about what isn't a conspiracy. What else have we talked about?
00:02:36
Speaker
So what conspiracy,
Critiquing Conspiracy Theorists' Evidence Use
00:02:38
Speaker
conspiracy theory. What the hell was the second one? No, the first one was definition of a conspiracy. The second one is definition of a conspiracy theory. So now that we've sorted that out.
00:02:51
Speaker
We've got the other important thing we need to talk about is evidence. We do. Evidence comes up a lot. And often evidence is taken to be the rationale as to why we shouldn't believe conspiracy theories in the first place because a general tendency you find in the academic literature on conspiracy theory and also in the skeptical literature on conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists use evidence badly. They use evidence in a haphazard fashion.
00:03:20
Speaker
they use evidence that most normal people wouldn't consider to be good evidence in the first place. And so because of the evidential practices of conspiracy theorists, we should basically not believe conspiracy theories. Now, my argument, which is expressed in the article, evidence and, no, sorry, conspiracy theories according to the evidence, the initial version was called evidence and conspiracy theories, but
00:03:47
Speaker
went for a snappier title, conspiracy theories according to the evidence, which appears in the journal Synthes, basically argues that we have a double standard when it comes to evidence and conspiracy theories, and that double standard is the kind of evidence that we think conspiracy theorists use
00:04:08
Speaker
is often used against conspiracy theories in an unproblematic way. So basically, we ping conspiracy theorists for using evidence badly,
00:04:21
Speaker
But we don't recognize the bad use of evidence against conspiracy theories. And conversely, we treat evidence when it's put forward for conspiracy theories as being prima facie bad, even if the same kind of evidence is being used to show a conspiracy theory is bad. And we don't go, oh, but that must be bad as well.
00:04:40
Speaker
So it's just double standards all the way up and down the ziggurat. Although the double standard, it does come from the other direction as well, from what you might call the conspiracists or whatever, the people who are offering up unwarranted conspiracy theorists.
Official Narratives vs. Conspiracy Theories
00:04:57
Speaker
you get the idea that we see it a lot, sort of the crops up with the 9-11 ones, where you have people will pick at one tiny little bit of, you know, will scrutinize a theory in my new detail, pick out one tiny little bit of evidence, whether it's traces of iron found in the wreckage of the Twin Towers or something and say, yeah, look, this validates their entire official theory. Therefore, we can use our, not candidate,
00:05:28
Speaker
opposing conspiracy theory and yet never scrutinize their own theories to the level of detail that they do the official works. It goes both ways. In the kind of rivalry you get between one kind of explanation and another, you will get a lot of double standards or people going, I'm using this thing, it's absolutely fine, but if you use the same thing against me, that's bad.
00:05:51
Speaker
But normally, it's taken that conspiracy theories are prima facie false, and one of the rationales behind that is the use of evidence. My argument is actually the use of evidence is fine. There's nothing wrong with it. Well, certainly, I mean, coming from the particularist viewpoint that we talked about in what must have been the last one of these episodes, if you're going to say that whether or not a conspiracy theory is warranted is to be evaluated for each particular one based on the merits of its evidence, and you'd better have a good theory about the evidence.
00:06:20
Speaker
Indeed. And that's what we're going to talk about in this episode. I remember we did an episode about evidence a long, long time ago, and we sort of went through the sort of species of evidence, things like sort of testimonial evidence and... Hominid evidence. All that sort of stuff. Eclithium evidence, and of course the rare cephalopod evidence. Circumstantial evidence.
00:06:43
Speaker
pointing out that the idea that literally a smoking gun, which is often taken to be proof positive of something, is, in fact, itself circumstantial evidence. If you see someone holding a smoking gun, that doesn't prove that they just shot someone. It doesn't matter. But
Selective Evidence and Its Consequences
00:06:59
Speaker
no, I think this time we want to talk more about how evidence is used rather than... Indeed. ...place of finding different kinds of evidence. So how is it used well slash badly? So normally what we're dealing with when it comes to evidence
00:07:11
Speaker
is actually looking at what we might call selective evidence. So every time you put forward an explanation for any kind of phenomena,
00:07:20
Speaker
do do do, because that's also classic analysis, you have to basically select which bits of evidence you're going to present. So normally, there's a lot more evidence per se, then evidence which is actually salient towards the kind of explanation trying to present. So nice example of this is JFK was wearing socks the day he died.
00:07:43
Speaker
It's probably completely irrelevant as to what colour his socks are. So, all socks were. Was he cremated? He was buried. So JFK is probably still wearing socks now. Quite possibly. That's an interesting thought. What colour and JFK's socks?
00:08:04
Speaker
Is it relevant? That's the question. So JFK was wearing socks the day he died. It probably doesn't matter what colour those socks are. They have no role whatsoever in the specific explanation for Kennedy's assassination. However, if you were to elucidate
00:08:20
Speaker
all of the evidence at the time of his death that's going to include whether his zip was done up or undone on his pants, the colour of his socks, the way he had tied his shoelaces and the like. But we take it that that evidence is not salient towards the explanation. So we remove it from our accounting of the explanation. There's a common joke you get in philosophy courses talking about explanations, which is that
00:08:48
Speaker
Technically, if you want a fulsome explanation of what's going on here, let's go all the way back to a few seconds after the Big Bang. And technically, that would be the most fulsome explanation of anything start from the very beginning. But no one really wants to wander through 16 billion years of history to explain why it is that when I release between my thumb and forefinger a pen, it's going to fall towards the ground.
00:09:12
Speaker
So normally we have to select evidence and of course you can engage in evidence selection in a good way and you can engage in evidence selection in a bad way. Now the reason why we select evidence is that we want to show that some particular explanation of an event is warranted.
00:09:33
Speaker
The worry about evidence selection is that you can make an explanation look warranted if you remove certain salient part to the evidential pool in your accounting or make prominent irrelevant part to the evidential pool and say they are actually directly salient to the explanation you're trying to present.
00:09:54
Speaker
Now, if we are recording this particular episode just after recording the episode about the Charles Manson CIA conspiracy theories, I have no idea how long it's been since we last actually did that one by the time this one goes out. But if you recall, we talked about the fact that
00:10:14
Speaker
journalist Ted O'Neill had written a book about the Charles Manson family and all of them. And we said at the time that he tells a good story, but he does it on some fairly select bits of evidence, the fact that Charles Manson seemed to get away with
00:10:31
Speaker
with sort of numerous parole violations and the fact that his manipulation with heavy usage of LSD of his cult followers seemed quite similar to what the CIA was doing with MKUltra at the time. And he sort of takes these bits of evidence and sticks them together and manages to come up with quite a convincing narrative to suggest that possibly there were figures in the government who were looking out for Manson in some way or other. But I remember at the time, we sort of said, you know, it's a good story, but is it based on selective evidence?
Debating Evidence Legitimacy
00:11:01
Speaker
Yeah, and the thing is, we use evidence selection naturally all the time. But we have to. Yeah, you have to. When you're trying to explain something, you are selecting evidence to try and get your point across. And we do that with respect to the type of person we're talking to. If you're trying to explain something to a child, you will select certain types of evidence to be more prominent than you would do explaining the same event to a nuclear physicist.
00:11:31
Speaker
even if your child is a nuclear physicist because they're really, really precocious. So we are always selecting evidence when we're engaging in any kind of explanatory practice. The worry is whether we're doing it with a good principle or a bad principle. And that's the worry that many skeptics of conspiracy theory have.
00:11:53
Speaker
is that conspiracy theorists are engaging in illegitimate selection of evidence. So they'll go, you know, these 9-11 truthers, you know, they keep on selecting bits of evidence which seems like, you know, low probability yield of their explanation being true, but they choose these really small anomalies and then they emphasise them in their accounts.
00:12:18
Speaker
whilst completely ignoring all the evidence that works against that particular interpretation. So they've selectively curated the pool of evidence to make their claim was an inside job look likely, even if you look at the wider claims in the evidential pool, which shows that actually the outside job is the most likely explanation of the event.
00:12:41
Speaker
And indeed referring back to another episode that at time of recording we recorded not too long ago there was the discussion around the autopsy of Jeffrey Epstein where another former medical examiner or something like that had looked at the autopsy results and suggested that they were more likely
00:12:58
Speaker
Contra the ruling of the autopsy which is this death was a result of suicide He said it looks more like a homicide pointing to a couple of details like a fracture of the hyoid bone and and burst capillaries around the eyes or something and the reply to that from the medical examiner who actually performed the autopsy was You can't just take out single bits of information. You have to look at the of the full picture when it comes to an autopsy
00:13:22
Speaker
And so that basically seems to what we're talking about there. This guy was concentrating, was selecting specific bits of evidence to say this fits with this particular thesis and the reply was, well no, you've just selected a couple of ones that suit your theory, but you can't do that when you're talking about an autopsy, you have to take all the evidence of the whole affair.
00:13:39
Speaker
which kept us very nicely into a particular form of evidence selection, which Brian Keighley, friend of the show and just friend in general, talks about with respect to errant data. Now there are two forms of errant data. There is data which is errant such that it's unaccounted for by the explanation. And then there's data which is contradictory to some explanation. So
00:14:09
Speaker
Some of your evidence is always going to be errant to a particular explanation, or at least we normally take it to be errant. So, for example, going back to JFK and his socks, presumably the colour of the socks is either unaccounted for by the explanation in question, because no one cares what sock colours he had,
00:14:31
Speaker
Or it's going to end up being contradictory. The official story says that Kennedy was wearing red socks. But we know from the autopsy report that Kennedy was actually wearing blue socks. That does is unaccounted for. Why is that?
00:14:48
Speaker
And if data is merely unaccounted for, so it just doesn't feature in the explanation, then you need to have some kind of principles to why it hasn't been mentioned, but normally the principle is, it's just not salient. No one cares what the colour of JFK's socks were. If the data is contradictory, i.e. one explanation mentions it and the other one denies its existence,
00:15:14
Speaker
then you need to come up with some explanation as to why the contradiction exists. And the prominent story of this in the conspiracy theory literature is the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to find those pesky weapons of mass destruction, which I believe they still haven't found, although by the time of recording, maybe, between now and when this episode goes out,
00:15:38
Speaker
Maybe they've finally found those WMDs that justified the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. I mean, it's been 16 years and they still haven't found them. I don't have high hopes, but you never know. Now, that was a story filled with contradictory data because you had the official theory coming out from the US and the UK that the Saddam Hussein regime was definitely producing weapons of mass destruction.
00:16:05
Speaker
And then you had the UN weapons inspectors who were going, there's definitely no evidence the project is active at this time. It was active back in the previous Gulf War and for a few years afterwards, but they've stopped. We've got no evidence to believe they're engaging in this activity at all. Two rival explanatory hypotheses, both of which contradict the other.
00:16:32
Speaker
And thus what you really want is for there to be some explanation as to why that contradiction exists.
00:16:42
Speaker
And that explanation to a large extent is going to go, well, one of these theories is probably filled with disinformation. Just before we go on to disinformation, because it's a good one, some of that, especially the errant unaccounted for data, I think one reason possibly that sometimes the lay thinking about conspiracy theories might
Fiction's Influence on Data Perception
00:17:04
Speaker
go against
00:17:04
Speaker
some of the academic or certainly some of your academic thinking is that fiction conditions people to think otherwise. Talking about stuff makes me think of the likes of Sherlock Holmes, where Sherlock Holmes, especially in the more recent, the Stephen Moffat ones, has
00:17:20
Speaker
Yeah, his superpower is that he sees all the data out in front of him, and he's able to pick out these things that everyone else thinks are completely irrelevant bits of data, but he can see that this little one thingy here is the salient thing, and by noticing that one special thing, he's able to show that, you know, the police's theory at the time is complete nonsense, and that his theory is the only one that makes sense, which is how it often works in fiction.
00:17:46
Speaker
And I think how people sometimes think it works in real life, but it seems to be not so much the case in reality. No, no, I mean, yes, we do seem to think, I mean, yeah, crime fiction in particular often revolves around finding the one contradiction in someone's story and then going, ah, so that does prove you were at the cafe at 11 o'clock last night and thus you must have committed the murder. And basically all of Colombo is basically Colombo
00:18:15
Speaker
badgering the person he knows committed the crime to say the one thing which is a contradiction to the previous story, which then allows Columbo to basically unravel the messy knot that this person's created to try and cover up the fact that they killed Mrs. Hitchens with a candlestick in the jacuzzi. I don't think that ever happened on Columbo. And yeah, you want a principle that explains this. Now, as you point out,
00:18:41
Speaker
There's a worry here that conspiracy theories might be more prone to using errant data because that's the way they get presented. But you have to also be aware that official theories like the invasion of Iraq define those weapons of mass destruction
00:18:59
Speaker
also can feature errant data of this particular type. So it's not a feature which is unique to conspiracy theories in the pejorative sense, because we both agree that the official theory about the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is itself a conspiracy theory.
00:19:17
Speaker
But people take it that errant data is a feature of the pejoratively class conspiracy theories. Actually, errant data is to be found in all kinds of explanations. And there's no reason to think conspiracy theories suffer from this, especially. But now you mentioned disinformation before, and that's quite a quite a special case when it comes to evidence, isn't it? Given that it's not, well, stuff that's presented as evidence, but which by its nature is not really
00:19:46
Speaker
Yeah, disinformation was last century's fake news, because fake news is a big thing
Disinformation and Trust in Expertise
00:19:51
Speaker
everyone talks about. Now disinformation was a big thing people talked about in the 20th century, in part because we got the name in the 20th century from the Russians. This information was a term that was generated by the USSR as a response to the Moscow show trials in the 1930s.
00:20:09
Speaker
So it's actually quite interesting that the name is relatively recent, even though the actual phenomenon is actually quite old. And disinformation is the activity of presenting fabricated or manipulated information to make some explanation look warranted according to the evidence when it might not be. So basically, you put in information,
00:20:34
Speaker
which may be evidence, actually maybe things that occurred or it may be fabricated or manipulated information to try and make your particular claim look like it's the kind of thing that people ought to believe.
00:20:47
Speaker
I think there's also the worry these days that there's a bigger project to the likes of disinformation and claims of fake news, which is to simply undermine the notion of truth whatsoever, to make it so that people completely give up trying to work out what's true evidence and what's disinformation. And therefore, at that stage, you can kind of say whatever you want and people just believe along tribal lines or what have you.
00:21:11
Speaker
There was a sociological theory there, which is basically going...
00:21:18
Speaker
Well, one way you might want to get the public to only trust what you say would be to make expertise basically disappear as a trusted class of information. What better way than claiming that experts are in fact producing fake news or disinformation and thus they can't be trusted, which then means that people who buy that particular line are going to be more likely to believe what you say as their trusted source.
00:21:46
Speaker
I think this is not a new issue in any way, shape or form. As long as the recorded history has existed, people have been talking about how everyone lives in a post-truth age now. Because people have been aware that expertise is the kind of thing that can be quite easily perverted by people in positions of
00:22:03
Speaker
power. But it also doesn't help that in the USSR you had a series of government agencies that went out of their way to make fake news, to make people think things are better than they were. And it doesn't help that as of the time of recording with Donald Trump being the President of the United States,
00:22:23
Speaker
You also have someone who delights in making up conspiracy theories or claiming that his opponents are engaging in the production of fake news for the sheer fact that people say things that Trump just doesn't want to hear.
00:22:38
Speaker
But anyway, disinformation as it relates to conspiracy theories then. So one of the worries about disinformation is that disinformation is often a claim in many conspiracy theories, that if there is a conspiracy going on,
00:22:55
Speaker
people will be producing disinformation to make it look as if there isn't a conspiracy going on. So the best way to make a conspiracy theory look unwarranted would be to fabricate information which either tars the conspiracy theorists as being irrational or to present an alternative view that goes the conspiracy theorists are simply mistaken about the likelihood a conspiracy is occurring there.
00:23:21
Speaker
And as people point out, if you make a claim about disinformation in a conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theorists is basically rendering their conspiracy theories being unfalsifiable by going, well, you may have heard that X isn't happening, but that's disinformation being put out by the state, which proved X is happening.
00:23:46
Speaker
Now of course, if there really is a conspiracy going on, you can actually expect that people in positions of power will be producing disinformation to try and cover up the fact there is a conspiracy going on.
00:24:01
Speaker
In the 2003 case, the US and the UK were going, well, yes, you may have heard from UN weapons inspectors that there are no centrifuges making X or Y in Iraq. But we have anonymous sources in the CIA with agents on the ground who say they're definitely seeing those chemical weapons producing factories. So you can believe us. And that was a lie.
00:24:30
Speaker
they were putting forward fabricated information to support basically a political decision to invade Iraq at that particular point in time. And people who were putting forward conspiracy theories about the US and the UK's stated rationale were saying they're going to make these claims, but they're actually false, which goes to show they are conspiring to cover up the real reason for the invasion.
00:24:54
Speaker
It reminds me of the whole, the thing you see in some conspiracy theories where the lack of evidence is taken as evidence, where we can't find any evidence for this, well that just proves they're covering it up, sort of going in the other direction. Yes, now it is true that disinformation is problematic, but if there really is evidence of a conspiracy out there,
00:25:18
Speaker
then predicting disinformation is not actually an irrational claim. And this is the point that Brian makes when in of conspiracy theories. Claims about the falsifiability of hypotheses. And I'm going to make a claim here I don't agree with, but generally are taken to be good rationales for thinking that a scientific hypothesis is bad.
00:25:40
Speaker
The reason why they say they disagree with it is that falsificationism was a really nice criteria for distinguishing good science from bad science in the 60s. It's been 60 years now since Popper wrote about falsificationism. There's been a lot of criticism of falsificationism as a thesis for demarcating good science from bad science.
00:26:00
Speaker
The general consensus is falsificationism doesn't work as a way of demarcating between good science and bad science at all, but it is also true it's a fairly useful metric for going whether a theory is supported by evidence or not. But it's also the case that when we start talking about conspiracy theories, we're talking about complex social phenomena made up of people who have intentional states and the ability to lie about what their
00:26:30
Speaker
doing, unlike say scientific theories about the position of an electron inside an atom. Electrons don't lie about their position. Human beings lie about what they're doing all the time. So there's a reason to think that actually disinformation is the kind of thing which is predictable in social phenomena, because people will actually lie about what they're up to, to save face.
00:26:56
Speaker
Okay, so next in the notes we have something about fortuitous versus fortunate data. Does this directly relate to disinformation or is it just one of a species of information of evidence that can be problematic like disinformation? There's all these things where
00:27:11
Speaker
In the book, The Flossy of Conspiracy Theories, I put fortunate versus fortuitous data outside the realm of disinformation. I keep on translating as to whether I think it's a form of disinformation or not. So fortuitous data comes from the work of Buting and Taylor, which is actually where we get the terminology of generalism and particularism from. But their main discussion was on a species of data.
00:27:36
Speaker
which is used by conspiracy theories to show that a conspiracy theory is likely, which they take it to be information which is so lucky that it can't be a coincidence. So their claim is the passport that was found after the destruction of the Twin Towers that showed that one of the terrorists was on board the flight
00:28:00
Speaker
is information which is so lucky that it's kind of fortuitous it survived and thus it was disinformation put into the public record by the US government to try and bolster up support for
00:28:15
Speaker
for the official narrative. The planes were piloted by terrorists when they flew into the Twin Towers. It's so lucky, it's actually kind of suspiciously lucky that it supports a particular hypothesis.
00:28:31
Speaker
And Buting and Taylor basically then run an analysis on fortuitous data going, well, this is the kind of data which we need to be attentive to, although they are actually somewhat suspicious that we should actually be using data of this particular kind to support conspiracy theories generally. Now,
00:28:52
Speaker
My issue with the fortuitous data analysis here is that, yes, it is suspicious the passport survived. So there is something weird about the passport surviving. Of all the things you would find after the plane's crash into WTC1 and WTC2, it's unusual you find this particular one passport. It's so lucky, it is slightly suspicious.
00:29:19
Speaker
But the problem is, lucky things happen all the time. People are just really, really bad at stats, probability, or understanding how physics work. So it is true that it's lucky it survived, but it's hard to distinguish that between it being fortuitous or simply just being fortunate. It's just lucky. If the odds of something happening to a person are a million to one, that's a lot, but there are nearly 7 billion people on the planet. Which means it's actually happening all the time.
00:29:49
Speaker
And so yeah, you can't make a claim about something being fortuitous or fortunate without already having made an assumption about what's going on in that particular case. So the problem with fortuitous data is that it assumes the existence of a conspiracy.
00:30:07
Speaker
to make something count as being fortuitous, whilst actually you might go, well, it's just fortunate. I mean, you don't have to believe in a conspiracy to believe that the passport survived. Sometimes passports do survive plane crashes. Okay, well then moving on then to secret evidence. Now this, I mean, secrecy, as we've said in the previous episodes, is baked into the notion of conspiracy and is a large part, perhaps, of why people tend to be suspicious of claims of...
Secret Evidence and Government Transparency
00:30:36
Speaker
suspicious of secretive activities and make up conspiracy theories around them for one thing. But when it comes to talking about them, you can have, now when we say secret evidence, do we mean people claiming to have evidence but it's secret so they can't tell you? Is that what this is about?
00:30:53
Speaker
Which, yeah, that brings in a notion of just take my word for it, which is a difficult sort of thing to reconcile with wanting hard evidence. Yeah, and the problem is, secrecy is sometimes justified given particular things you want to do. So, and the example I use all the time, if you're negotiating a trade deal with a foreign nation,
00:31:16
Speaker
you want to keep your negotiation secret. Because if you publicly talk about what you're up to, and what you're willing to trade away versus what your hard lines are, then the opposing power you're in a trade deal with
00:31:31
Speaker
If you make that public, you're going to be, oh, so they will give up this thing and they won't give up that thing. We can play hardball in this particular thing and get the deal that we want. So you want to keep your negotiation secret so that basically people are on a level playing field when it comes to trades against particular desiderata or considerations. So there is always going to be a role for secrecy in particular types of activities.
00:32:01
Speaker
But when you get things like the invasion of Iraq in 2003, we're the only evidence being put forward to, well, we've got evidence that Saddam Hussein is producing weapons of mass destruction, but no, you can't see it. Just take our word for it. That's...
00:32:19
Speaker
That's kind of suspicious, and that's where you start getting into what you might think to be patterns of bad behaviour. If you're using secret evidence all the time to justify military actions overseas, pogroms against your political opponents and the like, you might go,
00:32:41
Speaker
That pattern of secret evidence seems to suggest that they're just trying to get away with things that they can't really support themselves. And the important thing here is that secret evidence tends to emanate from governments. There are some conspiracy theories that will go, well, you know, we've got an anonymous source here, like Q, who is telling us about what's really happening in the White House.
00:33:09
Speaker
But actually, secret evidence is also used by governments an awful lot to justify their actions with regard to political scandals, military invasions and the like. And so is found to be problematic in all aspects of life, conspiracy theory or otherwise.
00:33:25
Speaker
and yet we seem to be more concerned about secret evidence when it comes to fisking conspiracy theories than we are when it comes to secret evidence being used to bolster official theories which oppose particular conspiracy theories. Yeah as you say there's the element of trust in there and I wonder how much of that is sort of cultural. At the moment there's much more distrust I think of governments than there used to be and we've talked in
00:33:52
Speaker
Actually, it was a bonus Patriot episode, wasn't it, about the situation in Romania and how in Central Europe people had much less trust of the government due to history. So yeah, there's probably...
00:34:07
Speaker
What you can get away with in terms of secret evidence probably differs according to community, which unfortunately is not the sort of thing that people like to hear when they want to hear, you know, this is good, this is bad, this is proof, this is not proof. Well, unfortunately, it's a lot of...
00:34:24
Speaker
Speaking of messy toxic truths, so this is a notion that's put forward by friend of the show and also once again friendly Basham in numerous places now, this is a pattern of behavior of
00:34:40
Speaker
evidence of a conspiracy that no one will touch or disseminate because of the feared negative consequences. So this is in reference to the Britney Spears song, Toxic, I assume. Yes, I believe that was Lee's inspiration was Britney Spears, Toxic. Now that's got Martin Henderson in the music video, who was in the movie, Talk.
00:35:03
Speaker
which I think is good and a lot of other people don't. See, I've tried watching talk and I couldn't get through the first 15 minutes. You just have to go with it. It's ridiculously silly, but if you allow yourself... At one point, Jamie Presley and the female lead have a fight with motorbikes.
00:35:23
Speaker
Not they fight while on motorbikes, they fight while on motorbikes with the motorbikes. They like pop wheelies and zoom at each other and bash each other with the front wheel of their motorbike. That's the thing that happens in this film. And that's from the director of detention, so he probably should give it another go because detention is one of my favourite films. Yes, no, he definitely should.
00:35:44
Speaker
So Lee's prime example of this is the Atomic Energy Commission, who for a very long period of time either denied that radiation was as bad as it appears to be, or covered up.
00:36:02
Speaker
radiation fallout patterns in the US, because there were tragic consequences for reporting that information. So this claims that sometimes there is evidence which is so toxic, that people don't want to talk about it. So they are deliberately covering up information because of the fed social consequence of that information coming out. Now, I think there is something too toxicity as a concept. Ah, so now we're talking about system of a down.
00:36:31
Speaker
See, I was with you with the Britney Spears thing, but I don't actually know System of the Down. You don't know toxicity. That's one of the biggest hits. But I also think it's hard to distinguish between something being toxic and something being politely covered up, which is to say that there are two ways of talking about this.
Toxic Evidence and Societal Cover-ups
00:36:48
Speaker
There's the top down kind of cover up. We're members of an institution.
00:36:53
Speaker
know that if they reveal something, there's going to be public backlash, which is why they keep it secret. But you also get the bottom up form, which is what I call politeness. And the example I use is, it was fairly common knowledge in the 60s and 70s.
00:37:12
Speaker
that the police would arrest people and manufacture evidence to get convictions. And it was a well-accepted process in the system because they were criminals. They probably deserved it. I mean, if they have to manufacture evidence to get these crimes off the streets, well, you know, they probably deserve it. We all politely went along with it.
00:37:38
Speaker
Even though ostensibly we knew that it was police corruption of a kind, but it was the kind of corruption we all agreed with. And then you got a culture change, where people were... Yeah, so sometimes they arrest people who haven't committed crimes.
00:37:53
Speaker
and they put them in prison with their manufactured evidence. And that happened to my uncle, and now suddenly I'm against the system which I've been politely ignoring for quite some time. And so it's hard to distinguish in many cases between whether something is toxic from a top-down perspective or simply something which is politely covered up by the population going, well, we know it goes on, but we're just not going to question it because, you know,
00:38:21
Speaker
be really awkward to bring that up. It's much easier to be polite about these things. We've talked, I can't remember if it was in a real episode, a real episode, a main episode or a bonus episode about the porn industry, which seems a weird mixture of the two in that
00:38:38
Speaker
In America, there's one company which basically has a monopoly in the production of pornographic movies and also the websites which host them. So the fact that porn gets pirated and stuck up on these websites doesn't actually harm the company because they also own the websites that they get pirated onto and they make all the ad revenue.
00:39:00
Speaker
is owned by one of the production companies. But apparently they all are, which gives you a monopoly situation, which is very bad for the workers in the industry, not just the actual actors, but anyone who works in the industry. But it'll never get addressed, because for it to get addressed, a politician is going to basically have to stake their career on standing up and saying, we need to do something about porn, and that politician will be known as the porn politician from now until the end of days.
00:39:24
Speaker
So it's not quite, it's certainly not something being imposed from up top. It's kind of, but it is a big corporation that's benefiting from it. It seems like an interesting item. Everyone knows what the issue is, but no one knows. Although I'm thinking if anyone's going to do it, it should be Ron Paul, because then he gets to come and run porn. Yes, or Ron Jeremy Paul.
00:39:50
Speaker
Actually, if Ron Jeremy ever runs for Congress or Senate, he'd be willing to... He might. ...to whip it out. Yep. Maybe we could get... I think Stormy Daniels might be the closest we have. Maybe get her to give some sort of PSA. That's a name we haven't actually heard for quite some time. No, actually, it's just... The whole Trump scandal thing just has got so much bigger that Stormy Daniels... Yeah, I mean, paying off a porn star is kind of small beans, really. Yeah, as opposed to...
00:40:16
Speaker
high crimes and misdemeanours. But anyway, moral of the story. What is the moral of the story when it comes to evidence and conspiracy theories?
Final Thoughts on Double Standards in Evidence
00:40:24
Speaker
Well, according to the notes, the moral of the story is the kind of evidence routinely said to be problematic when used in support of conspiracy theories, in that being the kind of evidence we routinely
00:40:35
Speaker
used to show conspiracy theories are bad. There is a curious double standard here. And I stand by my words. Good. So yeah, so basically, when you think about it, secret evidence, toxicity, disinformation, fortuitous versus fortunate data, disinformation, and the like, are all used
00:40:54
Speaker
both by conspiracy theories and they get pinged for using them. But they also get used by official theories. I've put scare quotes around that to show that conspiracy theories are bad. And if we're going to say this kind of evidence is prima facie bad no matter what, then we have to admit that actually we use problematic forms of evidence to dismiss conspiracy theories all the time as well.
00:41:24
Speaker
Well, there you go. Indeed, we went. So I guess that then further is fully consistent, I guess, with the project of this podcast and possibly your academic work to rehabilitate slightly the notion of conspiracy theory. The majority of reading on them is not always justified.
00:41:43
Speaker
And those are wise words, and frankly, thank you for saying them. Yes, well. So I think that brings us to the end of this little episode. We can stick it in the can. We can. We need a new sting. We need another sting. We need a from the can. From the can. Episode. From the can. Episode from the can. Can, can, can. Can, can, can. Can, can, can, can.
00:42:04
Speaker
Cancun. Now normally we end with a promise as to what's going to be going on in the bonus episode for patrons but of course this is a in the can episode so we don't know what patrons... The last time we took an episode out of the can the bonus episode that followed it was a recording taken during a car journey that didn't come out perfectly it has to be said but was a nice change of pace.
00:42:30
Speaker
So you're saying we have to do planes, trains, and automobiles quite possibly? We should record the next patron bonus episode on a train. We could do that. There are trains in Auckland. Yeah. That could be very interesting. Could be. Could also be very annoying for the other passengers. For the other people on the train, yeah.
00:42:50
Speaker
Oh well, who knows, who knows. For now, all we know is that it's time to end this episode. Stay tuned patrons for something, and either way, we'll talk to you next week. Buena vista, my good friends. Goodbye. You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Addison and Em Dantas. If you'd like to help support us, please find details of our pledge drive at either Patreon or PodBen.
00:43:15
Speaker
If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.