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Sherminator 2: Judgement Day
500 Plays9 months ago
In the sequel to last week's episode, we look at Part II of Michael Shermer's book "Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational". This part is all about determining which conspiracies are real - judging them, if you will. So the title works - it's not just a gratuitous pop culture reference! Not that there's anything wrong with a gratuitous pop culture reference.
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Transcript
Critique of Michael Shermer's Book
00:00:00
Speaker
Previously on the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. So this book by Michael Shermer, it's just evolutionary psychology. It's just a series of just so stories about why people might believe conspiracy theories. And now on the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. You know, for someone who says it's sometimes reasonable to believe conspiracy theories, Shermer really comes off as a generalist for most of section two.
Podcast Introduction and Host Background
00:00:31
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Im Dintas.
00:00:45
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Edison, and in Zhuhai, China, they can't be bargained with. They can't be reasoned with. They don't feel pity or remorse or fear, and they absolutely will not stop ever until you're dead. It's Dr. M.R.X.Tentith. Never true a thing has been said about me. Why aren't you writing my academic bio? I don't know. Never asked. It's conceivable there could be a copyright issue.
00:01:13
Speaker
with that particular one, but I make no promises. Now, now we've got another big long episode, which is fine because we're doing them too weekly. So that sort of makes up for the schedule, I guess. But last time we were so eager to get into our giant big long episodes that we forgot the thing that we said we need to keep remembering to do, which then we don't, which is to ask you, Em, what have you been up to in your academic life?
00:01:37
Speaker
Well,
Dr. Tentith's Academic Updates
00:01:38
Speaker
Josh, apart from teaching, which is part of my job here at Beshidar in Juhai, I've been revising papers. So I'm almost ready to submit my revised version of the I Know It When You See It paper, which, as I think I discussed last time, is in a weird position now in that I don't actually have to revise it.
00:01:59
Speaker
But I'm going to revise it because the comments that Brian and Steve made was so good, I do feel that I need to address them. But also, I don't technically have to address them. And so I can't quite tell whether it's a half hearted revision or a proper revision that I'm making. Otherwise, I'm also working on
00:02:19
Speaker
two other papers, one with Julia, one with Curtis, I've been doing some work on those, and about to start work on two book chapters. In fact, I had a meeting with Marty earlier today to talk about a book chapter for a book coming out later this year. And our chapter is going to be on why conspiracy theory theory
00:02:42
Speaker
needs to be considered to be an interdisciplinary area of study and may be ragging ever so slightly on the psychologists who don't really seem to engage in interdisciplinary work on conspiracy theory theory. So
Episode Preview
00:02:57
Speaker
that's what I've been up to. There's nothing particularly big or new there. I am just, as I believe people say in Spain, trucking along. Good.
00:03:08
Speaker
Well, I was going to say there's nothing big or new about what we're going to talk about. It's not new. It's a couple of years old, but it is big. So we should probably play a chime and dive directly into it.
Analysis of Shermer's Methods
00:03:18
Speaker
Indeed. Let's play that chime right about now. Welcome to Conspiracy Theory.
00:03:34
Speaker
So, we are once again talking about conspiracy, why the rational believe the irrational, the 2002 book by Michael Shermer. You've said 2002 again, like you said last time. I did. It's 2022. Well, there's too many twos. I can't be can't be holding with that many twos in a date. I mean, it's very good that you are not going to live for another
00:04:00
Speaker
because you will find the year 2222 very hard to cope with. Probably. That's a problem for future Josh. Immortal future Josh. So you are going to be around in 198 years. It's true. You'll be running away from the grey goo that's powered by the AI ghost of Elon Musk. You won't be concerned about the date.
00:04:25
Speaker
No. So, in part one, what the hell did we look at in part one anyway? I'm not gonna lie, I've erased this from my memories. Part one was this discussion of constructive conspiracies over this. I guess that'll do. But part two? Part two. Part two is the interesting one. Part two is called how to determine which conspiracy theories are real. A lofty promise there.
00:04:49
Speaker
Yeah, it is a lofty promise, as I think I'm going to surmise at the end of the discussion of chapter 6. I don't really think he's doing much to determine which conspiracy theories are real, as opposed to simply telling you which conspiracy theories he thinks are false.
00:05:11
Speaker
If you surmise
Discussion of Shermer's Kits
00:05:12
Speaker
that, I may be forced to concur, but we're not at that stage yet. So, another six chapters, and of them the first, so chapter six of the book as a whole, is probably the most interesting one. So I think we can probably spend a bit of time on chapter six and then race through the other ones fairly quickly, especially when they start going over the details of conspiracy theories that we're going for.
00:05:36
Speaker
Also, the last chapter is quite interesting as well. So I think the chapters that bookend part two are interesting and not interesting as in they're good. Interesting in that they do some fairly weird moves and also kind of display
00:05:53
Speaker
some of the problems with Shermer's approach and the chapters in between are the case studies that he wants to use to go look now I've told you about how a conspiracy detection kit works now we're going to go through and look at some examples of conspiracy theories that I think are fatuous and then he's going to end with all but there are some conspiracy theories you should believe but the story he tells to get there is twisting it's winding and often doesn't make much sense
00:06:23
Speaker
No. Nevertheless, I think chapter six gets off to a good start. How about you take us away with chapter six? Well, yeah, the right. The first paragraph is a doozy. And I should point out for reasons which will never become clear, Josh and I both read chapter six. So we both have notes on chapter six. And we both we both were kind of taken by this first paragraph. Josh, why don't you read this first paragraph? OK.
00:06:51
Speaker
Well, actually, sorry, I forgot to say the title of chapter six is The Conspiracy Detection Kit. How to tell if a conspiracy theory is true or false. But it starts. In 1997, I appeared on the later G. Gordon Liddy's radio talk show while on my media tour for my first book, Why People Believe Weird Things.
00:07:10
Speaker
Lydia asked me if I thought conspiracy theories are weird beliefs and if we should be sceptical of them. It was a set-up question that he himself answered after I hesitated in responding to the man who was behind the Watergate conspiracy. What's conspiracy theories are false? Can you just read that last sentence again? It was a set-up question that he himself answered after I hesitated in responding to the man who was behind the Watergate conspiracy.
00:07:39
Speaker
Bit of a, yeah, yeah. But no, so most conspiracy theories are false. He told me for two reasons. One, competency, and two, leakage. Most conspiracists, Liddy, continued a bumbling, fumbling link of poops who can't keep their mouths shut. Three people can keep a secret, he added, echoing Benjamin Franklin, if two of them are dead. Now, it's definitely true that Liddy was a bumbling, fumbling link of poop, if you've read anything about the stuff he got up to. And also a bit of a psychopath.
00:08:09
Speaker
Oh, strange, odd, odd, very, very bizarre man. Now, one, why would you go on a talk show hosted by a person behind Watergate? I believe, apparently, G Gordon Liddy was a bit of a precursor to your Alex Joneses and your, I guess, Jones. Apparently, at the time, he was kind of a big deal.
00:08:35
Speaker
So going on his talk show, it's not like he was just some obscure nutcase that he decided to go on. Why would you go on a radio show hosted by
Critique of Shermer's Scientific Approach
00:08:45
Speaker
someone who was behind the Watergate break-in? That kind of person should be persona non grata. If G Gordon Liddy's number fleshes up on your phone, you do not answer unless you're Richard Nixon. And you still don't answer it because it's a bad idea to answer the phone when G Gordon Liddy calls.
00:09:04
Speaker
Again, if you've heard anything about Liddy, his was a life of failing upwards the entire way. So even after Watergate and Nixon's presidency, he remained a public figure. He was a notable guy.
00:09:20
Speaker
I know and that's one of the reasons why the American project has failed because there are no consequences to engaging in Watergate. You get to be a talk show host that people like Michael Shermer feel adequately fine of appearing on their show in the same way he feels fine about going on Rogan's show. He probably in a few years time feel fine about going on Tucker Carlson's show as hosted by Alex Jones. It's probably going to happen.
00:09:50
Speaker
And two, and this is the thing which really gets me, why trust Liddy when it comes to characterizing conspirators? Because A, Liddy is kind of interested in
00:10:03
Speaker
poo-pooing or downplaying how serious Watergate actually was. And too, he was a failed conspirator, but as you know, he wasn't a failed conspirator, he was a conspirator who was successful for a short amount of time, but unfortunately his conspiracy was eventually outed.
00:10:23
Speaker
But Liddy's experience as a conspirator isn't something which is generalizable, even if you do want to invoke the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, who wrote a book about farting. He wrote a lot of things. Like to have ear baths, didn't he? Was he the one who just walked around naked?
00:10:43
Speaker
to just ear himself out instead of washing. I mean, I haven't heard that story, but also it doesn't sound inconceivable. I think Ben Franklin was a very weird man. Anyway, moving on from his Liddy anecdote.
00:11:01
Speaker
So he starts off this chapter by talking about how conceivable conspiracies actually are. And he's very much concerned, as he was in the first section of the book, about false positives versus false negatives. So he wants to talk about signal detection stuff, the way that you can detect whether a conspiracy is going on.
00:11:24
Speaker
And he has a kind of four quadrant thing of false positives versus false negatives, where essentially he's just reinventing game theory calculus for working out whether you should be suspicious or not suspicious about conspiracy theories or conspiracies.
00:11:39
Speaker
in a particular policy. But he goes on to note that because we know some conspiracies are real, we need some mechanism or set of mechanisms to be able to distinguish the true conspiracies from the false. And so he notes, what metric algorithm or rule of thumb could we apply to determine?
00:12:06
Speaker
Whether such a theory is most likely true, probably false or undecidable. And I want to focus on the undecidable bit here, because Schirmer basically either goes a conspiracy theory as true or it's false.
00:12:21
Speaker
He never really seems to exist in the realm of the skeptic by going, well, the evidence doesn't really point one way or the other, which is going to come up with his examples in latter chapters. He either sides with the official theory, or he poo-poos the conspiracy theory. At no point does he really end up going, well, the evidence is unclear,
00:12:45
Speaker
I should step back and have an undecided notion here. He really does want a binary to tell whether a conspiracy theory is true or false and leave the undecidable bit to one side. But as we both noted in our notes, he's basically looking for some kind of mark of the incredible to distinguish between good conspiracy theories and bad conspiracy theories.
00:13:11
Speaker
which indicates he should probably read some Brian Keighley. Yes, indeed. A little bit after that, he says, keep in mind that because conspiracy theories are so varied, there is no single set of criteria that can accurately assess the verisimilitude of every such theory. So he is
00:13:29
Speaker
Like, right off the bat, he at least isn't making the claim here is this foolproof method of deciding whether or not a conspiracy theory is 100% true or 100% nonsense. He's definitely operating in a gray area. But I think that that's sort of given that the title of the thing is how to tell if a conspiracy theory is true or false, straight away, there's I think the phrase it depends is going to come up quite a lot as we go through.
00:13:56
Speaker
Yeah, and there's going to be some problems with the story he tells, in part because he's really, really reliant on the thesis of falsificationism, as we'll talk about later on. And also, he's really, really reliant on a lot of other people's ways of sorting out between good and bad conspiracy theories, which
00:14:18
Speaker
aren't necessarily reconcilable. So this chapter features a lot of lists, a lot of lists. The first list is Mick West's 10-point scale of the spectrum of plausibility. So Mick West, who is these days very noticeable for debunking pictures of UFOs on YouTube and on Twitter,
00:14:47
Speaker
has a spectrum of plausibility where you go from plausible mainstream conspiracy theories, a value of one, to extreme and implausible conspiracy theories as a value of ten. And so this list goes like this. At number one, we've got actually
00:15:06
Speaker
does people even remember the Dave Letterman list thing these days? I can't do a Dave Letterman impression. Anyway, so it just it just wouldn't work. I don't know. I don't even know. I don't even know why you brought that up, Josh. Why did you bring David Letterman up? I can only apologize.
00:15:25
Speaker
And you should. So number one, you've got Big Farmer, which he takes, by he, it's both Mick West and Michael Shermer here, takes to be plausible that there is a conspiracy by Big Farmer to at least
00:15:41
Speaker
hide some of the null evidence of drugs not working, et cetera, et cetera, to the global warming hoax. So focusing on the notion that there are people out there promoting the idea that global warming is a hoax. So that's the conspiracy theory in question there. The assassination of JFK, that's going to be interesting because we're coming back to JFK in a few chapters time. 9-11 Inside Job is at number four.
00:16:11
Speaker
Chemtrails at number five, false flag shootings at number six, the moon landing at number seven, a UFO cover-up at number eight, the flat earth at number nine, and David Eich's favorite reptile overlords at number 10. Yeah, I'm not 100% sure I get the ranking here. Mainstream to extreme.
00:16:38
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, I'm actually quite curious with 911 being so high up on the plausibility scale here or JFK actually being so high up the plausibility scale here. I mean, it's one of those things as soon as you have a list of one to 10, the crop that's kind of towards the top, which are the ones which are taken to be more plausible.
00:17:04
Speaker
have within them a number of conspiracy theories that many other people would be ranking at say seven, eight or nine. Yeah, the thing that confused me more is he, I'm sure that goes through each of them and gives a, has a few paragraphs talking about them. And for most of them, he's sort of saying, he's basically saying, how, how likely are these sorts of things, which, you know, the less likely they are, the less plausible, but especially for those, the numbers two and three, the global warming hoax,
00:17:33
Speaker
That one just confused me, because he starts off, he's like, yes, global warming is real. So if the conspiracy theory is that people are saying that global warming is a hoax, surely that's convenient. No, no, no. He's trying to make the argument that people claim global warming
00:17:51
Speaker
is
Historical Conspiracies and Public Trust
00:17:52
Speaker
a hoax is the conspiracy theory here. So he's not saying global warming isn't real. He's saying the people who are promoting the idea that global warming is a hoax are the people putting forward a conspiracy theory. And it's plausible to believe that they are conspirators who are falsely putting forward a conspiracy theory.
00:18:15
Speaker
I also had issues with the way he describes this. And also he ended up being a little bit snide when it comes to number two. So he writes, for many decades, some environmental groups appear to have conspired to exaggerate the dire effects of human action with regard to overpopulation, the rainforest,
00:18:36
Speaker
peak oil, precious minerals, and many other doomsday predictions that have not materialized, including a bet that environmentalist Paul Barak lost to economist Julian Simon over the future of Earth's resources. Given these thus failed predictions, it is understandable
00:18:54
Speaker
why more conspiratorily minded people might think that global warming is a conspiracy, especially after the issue became politicized when Vice President Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth bundled the science with liberal politics. Now this I think is actually quite sneaky on Sherma's part, because Sherma was a climate change denier
00:19:18
Speaker
very late into the game. So whilst a lot of other skeptics realized the science was in and the climate was in fact changing due to anthropogenic activity, Schirmer as a libertarian said, oh poo poo, and said it's nonsense for a very long time and only reluctantly within the last two decades basically went actually, it looks like I was wrong, the science is in, but has always tried to maintain
00:19:47
Speaker
The reason why he continued to stick to his guns that humans can't change the environment was due to those pesky environmentalists and those politicians who politicized the science. And this is going to be interesting.
00:20:04
Speaker
because he's going to argue later on that one of the great things about science is it's not politicised. So he wants to say, look, when science gets politicised, it explains why people stop thinking scientifically. But he's also going to make the claim that idealised science has no politics in it whatsoever. He's trying to play both sides off one another to excuse
00:20:27
Speaker
his libertarian resistance towards believing the climate is changing due to anthropogenic human activity, as opposed to the other anthropogenic activity, which is non-human. Now, one thing there, though, in that quote you just gave, he said, it is understandable why more conspiratorial minded people might think. And that was in that one. And then in the next one, the JFK assassination, that is also, he's really talking about you can understand why a person would believe this.
00:20:57
Speaker
which seems to be a different thing from saying whether or not it's actually plausible. And yet for the rest of them, from four through to 10, he is just saying, this is implausible because it doesn't make sense for the following reasons and things like that. It would seem like he sort of changes his talk around a little bit to fit the rankings more than
00:21:16
Speaker
um the ring yeah i don't know it seems it's a bit hard to know whether that's because he's not being consistent in his terminology or he is just literally slipping and sliding from one term to another but this is a kind of recurrent issue i find in his writing throughout the book there's also another point and this one i'm i don't know what to think about when he talks about UFO conspiracy theories the idea that
00:21:46
Speaker
the government is hiding the existence of extraterrestrial technology or alien visitation on Earth. And we'll be talking about that in the bonus episode this week, because there's been a report out about what the American government may or may not be hiding about UFO contacts. Sherma writes,
00:22:06
Speaker
claiming that the reason that UFO conspiracy theories are implausible is actually the opposite is true. The discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would be the greatest find in history. So any government lucky enough to have made that discovery would shout it from the rooftops and any scientists or science agencies would do so as well as it would enhance their status and funding. Now,
00:22:32
Speaker
I don't know about you, but understanding how Western governments work, they like to keep secrets at the best of times. I can imagine if they made contact with an alien species, they wouldn't necessarily decide to shout it from the rooftops. I can understand that they might want to kind of keep that behind closed doors, especially if it gave them an advantage on the international stage.
00:22:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's a bit of a bold claim. I could imagine it going both ways. It might depend a little bit, I guess, on who made this discovery and how it came about and whether, you know, I don't know, I could imagine a few scenarios, definitely not just the one that he puts forward.
00:23:16
Speaker
Yeah, but he's trying to make the claim that, look, the UFO conspiracy theories are all bunk for the sheer fact that if you made content, you would be you would immediately reveal it to the nation, which indicates he's never watched Stargate SG-1, which has entire plot arcs devoted to why the American government keeps the Stargate network secret from the human
Shermer's Historical Inaccuracies
00:23:40
Speaker
population.
00:23:41
Speaker
But he's also quite, he also purposed the X-Files, so he's obviously not a great fan of conspiratorily minded media. No, no. But anyway, he goes on, he says straight off the top that this kind of a ranking is always going to be a bit subjective. But he's looking for, in his words, a line of demarcation or where to draw the line between possibly true and probably false for any one conspiracy theory.
00:24:10
Speaker
And having said that, spoilers a little bit, from what I read, he doesn't really seem to find one.
00:24:18
Speaker
Or at least he's upsetting on everyone's going to have a different line, which doesn't really tell us anything, given that the whole thing is meant to be how to tell if a conspiracy theory is true or false. He points out that West points out that the line can shift even within parts of a single theory. I think 9-11 was one of the ones that he gave as an example.
00:24:43
Speaker
parts of a theory or versions of a theory that are more or less plausible. So when you're analyzing a conspiracy theory, you might even find yourself saying, oh, well, this bit of it may be plausible, but maybe this bit of it isn't. So it gets very, very muddy. But he does say that West says that, West nevertheless thinks that everyone has a line
00:25:09
Speaker
And I think he seems to be sort of getting there. So for the more conspiratorial minded, their line is going to be a lot further one way and the skeptics going to have their line is going to be a lot further the other way of what they believe or disbelieve. And I don't really see what the point of having a line is if you're trying to come up with a general sort of a theory.
00:25:32
Speaker
Because he wants to relate all of this to the demarcation problem introduced by Karl Popper, who of course had a demarcation between science and pseudoscience, or sometimes pseudoscience and non-science.
00:25:48
Speaker
with the notion of falsifiability. Good theories should be falsifiable. You should be able to construct the theory in such a way that you can do experiments or make observations that would show a theory to be false. And if it survives those tests, then we can think of it as being scientific. If it fails those tests, it's non-science and possibly pseudoscience.
00:26:11
Speaker
And people
Chapter 9 Introduction: Real Conspiracies
00:26:12
Speaker
like Sherma, who is a historian of science, really, really love falsifiability because they haven't read any philosophy of science post the 1960s, which is basically pointed out that
00:26:26
Speaker
Popper's notion of falsifiability is a wonderful idea. It just doesn't work as a demarcating factor between science and non-science because most scientific theories aren't falsifiable in the way that Popper talked about them being falsifiable. But we'll come back to that after we've looked at the second of Sherma's lists, the baloney detection kit, which is not a detection kit,
00:26:55
Speaker
for detecting a very particular type of Italian sausage. It is for discovering bad conspiracist theses. Has no idea how disappointed I was. Well, I mean, we'll read a book about sausages at a letter point. Don't worry.
00:27:13
Speaker
So his Bologna Detection Kit is actually based upon stuff he's done earlier in his Why People Believe Weird Things book. And when he did the Bologna Detection Kit, then it was related to pseudoscience. Now he's going to do it with respect to, and I put an air quotes, conspiracism. And this is another 10 point list. And it's a series of questions. The first question is, how reliable is the source of the claim?
00:27:42
Speaker
And he then goes to look.
00:27:45
Speaker
sometimes people make mistakes but the problem is conspiracy theorists often make mistakes and often their mistakes are intentional and the great thing about science is that scientists mistakes they tend to be random and that just indicates he's read no sociology of science because the idea that science is agenda-based or has political content and thus
00:28:14
Speaker
generates the kind of results that scientists are looking for, means that actually the mistakes that scientists do make sometimes aren't random at all. They are in fact due to biases or preconceived notions.
00:28:31
Speaker
So he's working with a very idealized theory of science here, and I think this is a problem going forward for Sherma's entire approach for detecting the difference between good and bad conspiracy theories.
00:28:46
Speaker
So moving on to number two, does the claimant often make similar claims? So I assume the idea he's getting at is just old tin foil hat guy thinks everything's a conspiracy, but he does say conspiracists have a habit of going well beyond the facts, which I don't know. I mean, one of the things we see, one of the things that were criticized for by
00:29:10
Speaker
I can't remember, was it, Brian? It was the fact that conspiracists often obsess over the facts and will try to account for every single one of them, which sometimes can be a problem in itself. And for someone who is going to try to argue,
00:29:25
Speaker
that belief in some conspiracy theories is justified or rational. In this chapter, he makes a lot of generalist claims about conspiracy theorists going beyond the facts, making unverified claim, being notorious for cherry picking exa-humbles, or conspiracy theories always fake,
00:29:49
Speaker
failing on a particular issue. So he's building in to his analysis here that conspiracy theories are normally bad. And I think that's interesting.
00:30:03
Speaker
So, I don't know, that covers the next few bits in the list, I think. Yeah, so number three, have the claims been verified by another source? Number four, how does the claim fit with what we already know about how the world works? Number five, has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim or has only confirming evidence being sought? And that's what he says, conspiracists are notorious for cherry picking examples.
00:30:32
Speaker
And if he's concerned about conspiracists being notorious for cherry picking examples, he should look at the conspiracy theory theory literature and look at the way that academics are also notorious for cherry picking the examples of bad conspiracy theories to then make the claim that conspiracy theorizing generally
00:30:53
Speaker
is an irrational process. I mean these things cut both ways. He goes on number six is does the preponderance of evidence converge on the claimant's conclusion or on a different one?
00:31:06
Speaker
So in his particular case, he claims that conspiracy theorists ignore all the evidence that leads to the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy, which I mean, that's one example. I mean, really, that criteria number six kind of seems to be the whole thing in a nutshell. He's really sort of saying, does the evidence support it? And that's going to be all he looks at in the future.
00:31:35
Speaker
Yeah, and so he's claiming here that, look, conspiracy theorists come to a conclusion first, and then they look for evidence to support that conclusion. And his claim is that's not how good science works. Good science starts with the evidence and looks for conclusions that are derived from that evidence. And that just ignores most of the sociology and philosophy of science. It actually goes, look, often scientists start with a conclusion. They also go looking for evidence for that conclusion.
00:32:04
Speaker
That's why we have the peer review process in order to then go, well, look, we need to check and balance on this searching for evidence thing, because you might end up being kind of blindsided by the fact that you think you've got evidence supports one and only one conclusion. And another research will go, well, actually,
00:32:24
Speaker
there are other conclusions we can draw from the same evidence. So it's not necessarily the case that you've entailed in this particular circumstance. So he's picking out conspiracy theories as having a very special feature here, which kind of ignores the evidence from the sciences that go, look, even good science sometimes starts with a conclusion first and then looks for evidence to support it.
00:32:50
Speaker
7. Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and tools of research, or have these been abandoned in favour of others that lead to the desired conclusion? 8. Has the claimant provided a different explanation for the observed phenomena, or is it strictly a process of denying the existing one?
00:33:07
Speaker
And this is the common claim that conspiracy theorists never offer proof positive for their views. They're only interested in refusing official theories. And that is true of some conspiracy theories, but is not true of all conspiracy theories.
00:33:28
Speaker
Number nine, if the claimant has profited new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old one does? He will say conspiracy theories always fail on this front, but then again, as we mentioned earlier, some of the issue that they take with the official theory is that it doesn't account for every single little thing, and their theory they reckon does.
00:33:52
Speaker
That goes back to my old favorite of the nanothermite stuff that interview I remember hearing many years ago of the guy saying, the person saying he thought he'd found evidence of nanothermite at crown zero and the reporter saying, okay, but we've taken like a truckload to do it. How could they have gotten it all in there? And the guy saying, oh, that's not my job. That's your job to work out. I've just dropped my truth bomb and there I go. So in that case,
00:34:18
Speaker
It's challenging one thing without offering an explanation for all of the rest of it. Once again, number nine is something that's true of some conspiracy theories, but not necessarily all of them. And finally, number 10, do the claimants' personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusions or vice versa, which is kind of again what he's been hinting at the whole way through.
00:34:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's reiterating earlier points that look, ideally, when you're doing good science, your personal beliefs and your biases should not be involved in generating and testing scientific hypotheses, but in conspiracy theorizing and the generation of conspiracy theories. This is a common feature. And one, that's not always true. Two, it's not also true of science. But three, and this is the important point,
00:35:13
Speaker
I think comparing the generation of scientific theories with the generation of conspiracy theories
00:35:21
Speaker
is not the right contrast class in that most theorizing fails when you compare it to scientific theorizing because there's a scientific methodology, there's a process of weighing evidence and adjusting things, and there's a kind of metaphysical assumption that the physical world operates in a rules-based or law-based way that can be analyzed through the scientific method.
00:35:51
Speaker
Conspiracy theories are much more like theories in, say, history. Historical theories often fail in comparison to scientific theories because historical theories are not scientific theories. We don't do historical research in a scientific manner, but we also don't think that that means that historical theories are bad theories, coir theories. We simply go that, look,
00:36:18
Speaker
the kind of criteria that we judge a historical theory by is very different from the kind of criteria we judge a conspiracy theory by. So using the standard of the sciences to critique conspiracy theories is a neat trick because it makes conspiracy theories look automatically bad, but using the standard of the sciences for comparing
00:36:42
Speaker
any non-scientific theory is going to make non-scientific theories look bad. No one has an issue with the generation of historical theories. History is a rich tapestry of very good theorizing. We just don't compare it to the sciences.
00:37:02
Speaker
Schirmer is comparing conspiracy theories to the sciences that gets him his conclusion that conspiracy theorizing looks pretty bad, but it's the wrong contrast. But that's not going to stop him at least, because after he goes through a test, we get into more ideas of science. The idea of this null hypothesis and that the burden of proof is on the claimant, not to the skeptic, which is a convenient position for a skeptic to hold. He talks about
00:37:32
Speaker
talks about the residue problem which is that no hypothesis or theory can be of a reason for 100% of the phenomena under investigation. Which does go a little bit against what he was claiming in the list which is number nine if the claimant has proffered a new explanation does it account for as many phenomena as the old one does? So he's quite willing to admit that you might get a new theory
00:37:57
Speaker
that is a better scientific theory, but doesn't explain as much as the old discarded theory. So there's a tension here between the way he wants to poo-poo conspiracy theorizing, but also admit that actually
00:38:14
Speaker
in scientific theory generation, new theories might be better in some sense and actually worse in some other sense. So having brought this up, he says, OK, well, so no hypothesis or theory is going to explain everything. So then why not believe that an alternate theory
00:38:30
Speaker
that appeals to the unexplained, quote unquote, residue. And this is where he brings in the thing, what would you call this motto, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which he decides to turn into an acronym and starts talking about accree for the rest of the chapter, which I don't agree with personally. Sounds like you were writing the words accree. You wait till we get to cowop.
00:38:58
Speaker
Okay, I look forward to it. So this is a claim that we've talked about plenty in the past, as he says that the assessment of a claim as being ordinary versus extraordinary is necessarily subjective, but it can be quantified along the lines of what the Bologna detection kit described above proposes.
00:39:17
Speaker
He gives some examples of this, and I don't know. I thought his examples were a little bit rubbish. Whenever he goes through stuff like this, he'll sort of show an ordinary case versus an extraordinary case, and so obviously because we know the ordinary case is true, then that just shows the ordinary case is true. I don't know. His reasoning here seemed to be a little bit lacking.
00:39:40
Speaker
But he continues, the accree principle also means that belief is not a discrete state of belief or disbelief, like an on-off switch. It's why I could dim a dial, a continuum on which you can place confidence in a belief according to the evidence. More evidence leads to more confidence and less evidence, less confidence. Applying the accree principle to conspiracy theories goes a long way toward determining where to draw the line of demarcation between true and false. Again, he's one that's continuum. The next minute there's a definite line there.
00:40:08
Speaker
not 100% consistent. Then he brings up Bayesian priors, which I'm afraid those less wrong Sam Bankman freed dickheads have destroyed the notion of Bayesian priors for me. I can no longer hear the word without breaking into some sort of a sweat or rash.
00:40:25
Speaker
I mean, I'm not again Bayesian analysis, but you have to also be aware that within both the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of probabilistic explanations,
00:40:41
Speaker
Bayesianism is not necessarily something that everybody agrees is the bee's knees. There are substantial criticisms of Bayesianism as a way for inferring best explanations. So yeah, sure, it's a nice mathematical model.
00:40:58
Speaker
for showing how new evidence allows us to update and revise hypotheses. But it's not a universally agreed upon mechanism that people go, it's absolutely right. There's substantial criticism in the literature about the use of Bayesianism and the appropriateness of applying Bayesianism to all sorts of different theoretical complexes. Now, you'll never guess what comes next. Can you guess? It's another list. It's a ten point list.
00:41:27
Speaker
Yeah, this is the 10-point conspiracy detection kit. The more theory has these properties, the 10 properties we're about to mention, the less likely it is to be a real conspiracy. By which it means a conspiracy that's actually true, not a genuine conspiracy that people think, yeah. So we have patternicity, looking for patterns or connections that there aren't evidence for. So when the evidence fits equally well with other patterns or with randomness,
00:41:57
Speaker
The conspiracy theory is likely to be false. And this is where I think he should actually be bringing in his undecided option. If you have a situation where the evidence is compatible with multiple hypotheses, and you have no reason to favor one hypothesis over the other,
00:42:20
Speaker
then you should be undecided or skeptical at that point. But he's going, look, if the conspiracy theory is equally probable with a non-conspiratorial explanation, then you should believe the non-conspiratorial explanation instead. And that just seems to be bad skepticism on his part.
00:42:40
Speaker
Number two is agenticity, assuming the existence of all or super powerful agents behind the conspiracy. Number three, complexity. So the more complex an explanation is, the less likely it is to be true.
00:42:56
Speaker
And that's going to be difficult for a lot of social science explanations, particularly explanations of human activity, because those things tend to be very complicated and it's actually very hard to demarcate between less or more complex explanations of human activity, given that they are relying on things like intentional states and the like.
00:43:22
Speaker
So complexity is not a very good explanation outside of the sciences. People, the more people involved, the less likely it is. And we both note, it's kind of interesting he doesn't mention the work of David Robert Grimes here. Yeah, he was the guy who came up with the famous paper that, well, the paper that's been got around enough that I remember it being cited on the Daily, not the Daily Show, John Oliver's show last week tonight.
00:43:50
Speaker
He basically came up with a mathematical formula for working out how long you can expect a conspiracy to remain secret given the number of people involved. And as you and other people have pointed out, it makes a bunch of assumptions about conspiracies and how they work that aren't necessarily universal.
00:44:08
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it ignores, for example, the fact that the structure of the conspiracy is very important. There might be a lot of people involved in running the conspiracy, but only a few people who actually know the conspiracy is going on in the same respect that you can be a factory worker on the floor of the Ford plant, making the individual widget that goes into a Model T without having any idea about the rest of the vehicle that your
00:44:36
Speaker
building. We accept this to be the case in business but apparently when it comes to conspiracies everybody must know what's going on and therefore the conspiracy can't work.
00:44:52
Speaker
If you want to sound cool and with it for the kids these days, you could talk about a year-old TV show named Andor, the Star Wars one. Have you seen it? It's surprisingly good. It has a section set in prison where the prisoners are forced to spend all day building these things. And at the very end of the series, you see a little post-credits scene where it's revealed that those things are actually components that are going towards the construction of the Death Star.
00:45:20
Speaker
So here you have people who have no idea that they're involved in this, this, the conspiracy of the Empire to create their planetary just planets and destroying a super weapon. So there you go. The same. Well, I can say Josh is evacuated in our moment of triumph. Always.
00:45:36
Speaker
if you're referring to bowels. Anyway, which brings us on to number five, grandiosity, the bigger the conspiracy, the less likely it is. And he states, if a conspiracy theory encompasses some grandiose ambition for control over a nation, economy or political system, and especially if it aims for world domination, it is almost certainly false.
00:46:00
Speaker
Now, it's sneaky that he puts in the conjunction there, and especially if it aims for world domination. Because if his claim was if a conspiracy theory encompasses some grandiose ambition for control over a nation, economy, or political system, it is almost certainly false. That's going to be surprising to a large number of dictators over time.
00:46:22
Speaker
and also is kind of going to go against the list of conspiracies he makes towards the end of Section 2, pointing out how often America as a nation has engaged in conspiracies for control over a nation, economy, or political system.
00:46:44
Speaker
yeah so putting in the it aims for world domination is very sneaky there it is yes so six is scale which is the same so i think grandiosity is sort of the the scale of their ambitions scale is simply the the scale full stop how large is this conspiracy in terms once again there are examples of big conspiracies out there
00:47:09
Speaker
Seven is significance. A conspiracy is less likely if it assigns significance to insignificant things, which seems like another way of saying point one, looking for patterns where there aren't any.
00:47:21
Speaker
And he states, if a conspiracy theory assigns pretentious and sinister meanings and interpretations to what most likely are innocuous or insignificant events, it probably is false. And the most likely claim here is doing an awful lot of work, because most likely is a relative claim, which means, once again, he's assuming that one explanation is more likely than the other,
00:47:49
Speaker
before you start looking at the particular of the theory. So once again he's implicitly building into his account that when you've got an official theory you've got good reason to believe it over a conspiracy theory.
00:48:06
Speaker
Yeah, point eight is accuracy, which doesn't really seem to talk about accuracy. It's more about whether or not it's mixing, whether you've got known facts or mixed in with speculation and what have you. Number nine is simply paranoia. I guess the more the more paranoid a theory is, the less likely he thinks it is. And number 10 is good old fashioned falsifiability, which we have already discussed.
00:48:30
Speaker
We have. The thing that struck me about that one is a lot of it, it's all things which could conceivably cause a conspiracy to fail, but that's not the same as saying the conspiracy couldn't exist. It might not ultimately be successful, but that's not the same as saying
00:48:49
Speaker
It couldn't exist in the first place. I'm not sure. I guess if you're talking over a long historical period, then you could say, yes, it's unlikely that this thing could have been around and have remained secret up until today. But that's often not what you're saying when you're looking at conspiracy theories. Yeah. As a final point of this, he points out that we human beings are bad at understanding probabilities.
00:49:12
Speaker
which means that conspiracists will see patterns and random charts, the thing you talked about previously in this list. You'd think it would also make us bad at applying the various rules that he's just talked about, because there's a lot of probability there. I don't know.
00:49:24
Speaker
Yeah, because you're looking for patterns in a theory, and if you've got a pre-existing notion that conspiracy theories are bad, then you're probably going to see those patterns even when they don't exist in theories that have been labeled as conspiracy theories, because he's completely ignoring the labeling aspect
00:49:47
Speaker
of calling something a conspiracy theory, whether or not it's prima facie, plausible or implausible. Now, to give him credit though, he does bring up a point that you're rather fond of, doesn't he?
00:50:00
Speaker
Yes, so he states, to these factors we should add one more, the type of country or society in which the conspiracies are alleged to unfold. Open, transparent, and free liberal democracies make it more difficult to pull off a conspiracy because of the apparatus in place to prevent illegal or immoral cabiles from forming to cheat the system. Think of all the checks and balances designed by the founders of the United States. It was various forms of political conspiracies they were concerned about.
00:50:29
Speaker
In contrast, closed autocratic societies protect and even enable conspiratorial shenanigans. And in some cases, the government itself is the most dangerous conspiracy citizens face. Shades of libertarianism right there. Researchers have found that conspiracy theories about the government are especially rampant in autocratic societies
00:50:50
Speaker
albeit unexpressed, out of fear of reprisals. Now, sociologists and philosophers have been making this claim for a while. If we want to talk about belief in conspiracy theories, we also need to talk about the context of the society or culture those conspiracy theories are expressed on. So it's good that he points out that your attitude towards conspiracy theorizing
00:51:20
Speaker
is going to be different from one culture to another. And I thought that was a good thing for him to end the chapter on, apart from the fact that he then actually ends the chapter with, this is why the conspiracism principle I introduce in chapter 2 bears repeating, never attribute to malice what can be explained by randomness or incompetence.
00:51:44
Speaker
So sure, you live in a society you think is conspiratorial, but really, you should never attribute that to malice. You should basically go, will it probably just randomness or incompetence instead? So he gives with one hand, and then he pulls away with the other.
00:52:00
Speaker
Yeah, I found this whole chapter a little bit back and forth. I mean, it starts, how can you tell if a conspiracy theory is true or false? And then immediately start saying, well, it's all a little bit subjective and it's great gray areas and hard to tell. And there's no one set of criteria that will tell you. Then it provides a few sets of criteria. And yeah, but at the end of it all, like having read this chapter,
00:52:26
Speaker
I don't think I could tell you how to tell if a conspiracy theory is true or false. There's just a lot of rules of thumb, which to be fair I think is the best you can get, but he started talking a lot in a lot more definite terms. And as we're going to see in subsequent chapters, he doesn't ever really go back to his lists to say this is how
00:52:47
Speaker
This particular conspiracy theory I'm discussing fails on points 1, 4, 5, and 6. Instead, what we're going to see in the next few chapters is that he's going to claim to refute some conspiracy theory, but instead what he's going to do is reiterate the official theory and say, look, you should believe this theory.
00:53:11
Speaker
But we'll talk about that when we look at chapter seven. So, Josh, chapter seven. Truth is and birth is the 9 11 and Obama conspiracy theories. Take it away. Yes. Now, given that we've been going for almost an hour and we've only covered one of the six chapters we're going to talk about, we might want to pick up the pace, but that's going to be easy because the next couple are just looking at conspiracy theories that we all know and love.
00:53:38
Speaker
So there's a lot of a lot of sort of history and evidence and stuff that we're all familiar with and I can skip over it fairly quickly. But it begins by saying in this chapter we'll review the two most prominent political conspiracy theories of the 21st century until QAnon and the rigged election conspiracy theories displaced them. The 9-11 truthers and the Obama birthers.
00:53:57
Speaker
Now, I want to point out, Josh, the Obama Bertha's sounds like it should be a jazz band from the 1930s. We are the Obama Bertha's. Well, consider the claims in some detail to see not only why they're wrong, but also how conspiracists think in the teeth of contradictory evidence. So the teeth of contradictory.
00:54:16
Speaker
Teeth? Teeth, yeah, the teeth of a gale and the teeth of something. It's an expression I have heard before. I'll give him that. But so he starts looking at 9-11 truth conspiracy theories, noting the shift from calling things theories to being a search for truth. He goes over and replies to all sorts of bits of evidence that are appealed to by truthers. And in particular, he lists nine arguments for the controlled demolition theory and their rebuttals by protec demolition services.
00:54:44
Speaker
which is apparently a company that documents the work of building demolition contractors. And it's a company that Sherman has worked with for Skeptic magazine. I assume it's a magazine. It's the US publication, not the UK publication of the same name.
00:55:00
Speaker
Right. And so, I mean, it's interesting enough, but really it's just here a bunch of claims they make and here's why they say, no, it's not true. So the collapse of the towers looked like a controlled demolition. Basically, no, it didn't. You can figure that one out on YouTube. The towers collapsed into their own footprint. No, they didn't. Again, you can see video of it. That one's easy enough. The old explosive charges shooting out of the windows, they say, no, that's just air and debris being ejected.
00:55:30
Speaker
as due to the pressure from above. Witnesses heard explosions. Well, apparently seismic evidence shows no sign of large explosions, although there could have been smaller ones due to things exploding within the buildings due to fire. Thermite or something melted steel at ground zero. They say, no, no demolition workers reported encountering melted steel. Ground zero debris was shipped away quickly to avoid scrutiny. Again, they say, no, it wasn't some of it was shipped away, but not immediately.
00:55:57
Speaker
and there was nothing suspicious about that. The old WT-7 was pulled with explosives. Basically, no, it wasn't. Steel-framed buildings do not collapse due to fire. Sometimes they do. Anyone who denies that explosives were used is ignoring the evidence. No, we aren't. It's an interesting survey of some of the more common talking points, but it really just is, these people claim this and the evidence says otherwise.
00:56:21
Speaker
And there's not much engagement with the theory behind the contrary claims. So, I mean, when people claim the clips of the towels look like a controlled demolition, demolition experts say, no, it doesn't. But then you get people like Richard Gage go, well, actually, no, here's a mathematical model to show why it looks like a controlled demolition if we take into account it was designed to look like freefall.
00:56:51
Speaker
So there are sophisticated versions of these theories which are not being talked about. He's simply going, well look, people claim this stupid thing here. Obviously the experts disagree, ipso facto they are wrong. He doesn't look at the sophisticated theories, he only looks at the simple or naive theories instead. And I'm not trying to defend 9-11 trutherism here.
00:57:13
Speaker
but at the same time, you should probably deal with the best arguments for 9-11 being an inside job rather than the worst ones.
00:57:22
Speaker
Yeah, see then he looks at building seven in more detail, looks at the attack on the Pentagon. And again, here's the evidence. Here are the claims. Here's why the evidence says they're not true. Now he brings up, he eventually brings up the whole argument that if so many people were involved or rather lots of people must have been involved. And with this number, how come none of them ever blabbed? And to be fair, like a lot of the time I just hear this made as a claim.
00:57:48
Speaker
you can't keep things a secret if lots of people are involved. He at least does appeal to the precedent of all of the tell-all books that popped up after Trump's first turn in the White House. He sort of says, you know, here's a case where there's a bunch of conspiratorial stuff going on behind closed doors, allegedly, and lots and lots of people jumped at the chance to be the ones revealing all this.
00:58:12
Speaker
So again, it's sort of full of argument, but it's more than European. Actually, the one thing which comes out from the tell-all books from the Trump White House is it turns out Trump is a terrible human being when it comes to personal relationships.
00:58:30
Speaker
So Trump expects complete obeyance and obedience, but doesn't ever reciprocate, which is why he demanded so much from Giuliani. And now that Giuliani is bankrupt, Trump is offering him no cycle whatsoever, because Giuliani was there to serve Trump. Trump wasn't there to reciprocate.
00:58:53
Speaker
it might be the case that if 9-11 was an inside job that the people responsible are actually just really good at looking after their fellow conspirators and thus there is no need to tell all because the system is designed in such a way that you know no one feels the need to talk or as Charles Picton has pointed out might even be a situation where maybe there are mechanisms in place to ensure that people don't talk
00:59:23
Speaker
So he mentions at this point that he and Brian Dalton have made a video about this argument called You Can't Handle the Truther. Apparently it's on YouTube. I haven't actually looked it up, but it might be interesting to go into for some bonus content later on.
00:59:41
Speaker
He says that dozens more 9-11 conspiracy claims go on and on in what skeptics call anomaly hunting, chasing around for anything unusual while ignoring more obvious explanations, all grounded in the argument of personal incredulity. If I can't think of an explanation for anomaly X beside being a conspiracy, then that proves there's a conspiracy. No, it doesn't. It just means you can't think of an explanation.
01:00:04
Speaker
which I guess is a fair enough point. But again, he's generalizing perhaps about what conspiracy theorists say. He talks about a bunch more things around 9-11 that we have gone over plenty of times before in many episodes. Again, he gets back into his psychology. So he brings up the conjunction fallacy, which is basically A is more likely than A and B.
01:00:28
Speaker
People often act like the conjunction is more plausible. He talks about the psychological experiment that I found quite weird. The nature of the experiment was that they tell you these details about a woman, in particular things like she's interested in social issues and things like that. And then they say, ask her, what are the chances that she's a bank teller and a feminist? I think it was.
01:00:54
Speaker
Well, yes, it's a bank teller and a feminist or just a bank teller. And people would often say it's more likely that she's both of those things. And the idea is, well, mathematically, it's much less likely if the V1 person you pick, they're going to be have two things rather than just a single thing. But the way it is, like it seemed as though the facts they give about her
01:01:19
Speaker
was leading you to think that she is more likely to then have these particular properties. It really did seem to be mixing pure logical mathematical probabilities and inferences with the sorts of presuppositions and inferences that people make while they're using language like human beings.
01:01:40
Speaker
Yeah, so the Kahneman and Tversky experiment does have that particular criticism. But actually, you can do this experiment in class, and I've done it in my critical thinking courses, where you tell a completely irrelevant story about a person's background. And then you give people a list of four options. So Bruce is a carpet layer. Bruce is a rugby coach. Bruce is both a carpet layer and a rugby coach.
01:02:08
Speaker
and Bruce plays the oboe, and people almost always, and I say predominantly about 80% of the class, will choose the conjunction over the individual conjuncts themselves. So you don't have to tell the story to kind of lead people into being a bank teller and a feminist. It just turns out people like options that give them more information.
01:02:35
Speaker
And so they seem to always go for the conjunction. And when you explain to them that actually probabilistically, it's much more likely that Bruce is either a carpet player or a rugby coach, but not both at the same time. They'll go, oh, you're right. But the initial impetus is to go for the conjunction because it gives you more information. Yes, I don't know. It sounds like you're violating Grace's conversational maxims, if you ask me, but that's a linguistic thing.
01:03:05
Speaker
Look, I'm not even looking at Grice's copies of Maxim. I didn't even realize he had any copies of Maxim. Oh, he loved the stuff. But the point of all this is that he wants to say that planes hitting the building is more probable than planes hitting the building and there being bombs in the building. So he wants to sort of say that logically, the controlled demolition theory
01:03:28
Speaker
we should reject it purely on grounds of propositional logic. He presents it as evidence for the official theory. I guess it's evidence that goes towards the plausibility, I guess, of the official theory, which is that he gives a whole bunch of incidences of attacks and threats by terrorist organizations, including prior ones by Al-Qaeda and Assad and Laden.
01:03:56
Speaker
doesn't seem to say a lot, but it is just sort of, you know, the official theory isn't coming completely out of nowhere. There is sort of precedent for it.
01:04:05
Speaker
There's another interesting part here. So he talks about how we should accept the official theory of 9-11 because Al-Qaeda took responsibility for the 9-11 attacks. And he doesn't tell you the timeline for when Al-Qaeda took responsibility because the attacks occur, as we know, September 11th, 2001. Al-Qaeda officially takes responsibility for the attacks in 2004.
01:04:33
Speaker
There is some reason to think they were responsible evidentially in around about 2002 due to, I believe, leaked emails from Al-Qaeda leadership. But initially, after 9-11 occurs, Al-Qaeda denies responsibility. They certainly praise the attacks, but they don't take responsibility. It's only in 2004 that their rhetoric changes go, yes, we definitely
01:04:59
Speaker
did it. And there's quite a lot of this kind of ignoring the details of the story in order to make the conspiracy theories look bad that goes on in Sherma's work. So I'm quite curious to see how does he cover the birth of stuff. Well that bit's a bit shorter, but there's a lot less to say. It really is just a case of
01:05:22
Speaker
People thought the birth certificate was fake, so they produced this bit of evidence. That wasn't good enough, so they produced more evidence. That wasn't good enough, so they produced more evidence. And eventually it becomes obvious that no matter how much evidence they produced, they're not going to actually change some people's minds.
01:05:38
Speaker
He says that as with the 9-11 Truth is, he again goes to the idea that in order to actually keep the truth of Obama's parentage secret, a bunch of people in a bunch of relatively high positions
01:05:53
Speaker
would have to all be in on it, and the chances of nobody blabbing makes this conspiracy less likely. Same case we've seen before. So having gone through this, he then says, okay, so why do Berth is continue to believe in this theory, despite this history of people constantly producing the evidence that they demand, and then they'll just reject it and ask for more evidence. So he says,
01:06:16
Speaker
One explanation is to be found in normal political tribalism, in which each side goes in search of and finds support for their own political party or representative, while pulling out any conceivable argument against the other, as evidenced by the fact that birthers tend to be republicans, while truthers tend to be democrats, with a smattering of conspiracy-minded libertarians among both conspiracy theory camps. Do truthers mostly tend to be democrats? I mean, it was
01:06:40
Speaker
It is the Bush government you're accusing of doing bad things, but... It seems to vacillate with time. I mean, there is polling on this. It is definitely the case that birthers do tend to be Republicans. It's less obvious about the doctrinal split around truthers.
01:07:02
Speaker
I mean, it is the case that it does seem to be a slightly more, and I'm saying this in the American context, left-leaning conspiracy theory because it is largely an anti-war conspiracy theory, but it's also a theory which has, for some supporters, quite a lot of racism associated with it.
01:07:25
Speaker
Well, yes, exactly after he says, you know, why do people believe in this stuff? He offers the explanations of political tribalism, good old fashioned confirmation bias, which he's talked about a bunch before. And then finally, at the end of it, just plain old racism is another factor.
01:07:41
Speaker
So that's that chapter. And as we said before, he certainly doesn't apply any of his criteria. He doesn't put the theory of chapter six into practice in these things like you might expect he does. He simply says, here are some conspiracy theories and here's why they're wrong. And that's it. So maybe do things improve in chapter eight?
01:08:02
Speaker
Well, chapter eight, is JFK blown away? The mother of all conspiracy theories. Now, Josh, you don't like the Billy Joel reference here. I'm not certain I approve of the Billy Joel reference. No, no, but we'll let it stand for now.
01:08:17
Speaker
We will. So this is a fairly standard account of who killed Kennedy. So Shermer is going to support the claim that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and there was no governmental conspiracy behind the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
01:08:35
Speaker
He's really, really keen on the Warren Commission Report because he talks about it as being this comprehensive document. The one thing he doesn't talk about is how incomprehensible the supposedly comprehensive Warren Commission Report is because it is true. The Warren Commission Report is comprehensive in the sense that
01:08:58
Speaker
in its 12 volumes, it covers all of the evidence and things that the Warren Commission looked at. But it's also incomprehensible because there is no index, the Warren Commission report, and there is no system for the way the Warren Commission report sorts or presents the evidence. Because the Warren Commission didn't think that anyone was going to read this document, they were obliged to produce the report,
01:09:25
Speaker
They were obliged to produce physical copies of the report, but they didn't think anyone was going to read it, and thus they did nothing to aid readers whatsoever. And I make you quite curious to know whether Schirmer has read the Warren Commission report, or has simply seen its 12 volumes in length, and go, well, that must be a pretty comprehensive reporting.
01:09:48
Speaker
because one of the conspiracy theories about JFK is that the Warren Commission report was produced in this incomprehensible 12 volume set in such a way to make it really hard to look at the sum total of evidence and see whether the Warren Commission had got it right or whether by producing the report in this way they were actually hiding the truth in plain sight.
01:10:18
Speaker
Schumer does talk about how popular the conspiracy theories about the death of JFK have continued to be in America to this day. But he also says most of the theories contradict each other and none have identified a second shooter.
01:10:36
Speaker
much less a conspiring organisation. So the lone assassin theory keeps rising to the top as the inference for the best explanation. Now this none word, that's a bit weird, but a lot of the conspiring organisations have been put forward here.
01:10:54
Speaker
and a lot of individuals have been said to be the people who aided and abetted JFK. I mean he even talks about Jim Garrison later on in this chapter and Garrison was quite explicit as to who he thought was involved with Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination of President Kennedy.
01:11:14
Speaker
I'm assuming that when he says none have identified, what he actually means is none have successfully identified a second shooter. So none of these theories have been proven to be true.
01:11:30
Speaker
Therefore, as none of them have proven to be true, we have a reason to prefer the official theory at this point. But that's not what he says here. He seems like none have identified a second shooter. And that just indicates he hasn't really read that many JFK conspiracy theories because lots of them mention an entire cohort of people who may or may not have been in the book depository or on the grassy knoll
01:11:58
Speaker
or even sitting in the same car with JFK. I mean, there are Governor Connolly conspiracy theories that say he was the one who fired the actual fatal shot that killed Kennedy. And Lee Harvey Oswald was simply there to cause a distraction so Connolly could kill the president. So it's all rather confusing. And then
01:12:26
Speaker
He talks about the church committee stuff. He says, look, not only is it the case that we've got the Warren Commission report,
01:12:37
Speaker
We've also got the Church Committee, which also looked into political assassinations, and they also said that Oswald was guilty and that no agency within the US government was involved. And he goes, look, it's case closed. And this is a misrepresentation of what the Church Committee said. And we've talked about this on the podcast, but I'm going to repeat this again.
01:13:00
Speaker
To quote the Church Committee, the Committee emphasises that it has not uncovered any evidence sufficient to justify a conclusion that there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, so Shermer's right on that point. But they go on. The Committee has, however, developed evidence which impeaches the process
01:13:17
Speaker
by which the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions about the assassination and by which they provided information to the Warren Commission. This evidence indicates that the investigation of the assassination was deficient and that facts which might have substantially affected the course of the investigation were not provided to the Warren Commission or those individuals within the FBI and the CIA as well as other agencies of government who were charged with investigating the assassination.
01:13:46
Speaker
The committee has found the FBI, the agency with primary responsibility in the matter, was ordered by Director Hoover and pressured by a higher government officials to conclude its investigation quickly. The FBI conducted its investigation in the atmosphere of concern among senior bureau officials that it would be criticized and its reputation tarnished rather than addressing its investigation to all significant circumstances, including all possibilities of conspiracy.
01:14:15
Speaker
The FBI investigation focused narrowly on Lee Harvey Oswald. So the church committee offered a rebuke saying, look, we can't show that your investigation didn't get the right man, but we are also concerned you didn't investigate any other possibilities.
01:14:35
Speaker
Right, which is, yeah, it leaves enough wiggle room, I guess. But it's alright Josh, because Lee Harvey also was in fact tried for the assassination of JFK and found guilty. Despite being dead. Well, because there was a mock trial held on TV
01:14:56
Speaker
where after a 20-hour trial, which is a very short trial for a political assassination, the jury deliberated for six hours in what Time Magazine called the closest to real trial as the accused killer of John F. Kennedy will probably ever get, and they found him guilty. And apparently that's good enough for Sherma. So a TV trial, which I believe involved
01:15:23
Speaker
journalists judging the veracity of the trial as opposed to legal professionals calling into question a 20-hour trial held on TV as a mock trial is apparently good enough for Sherma to show that Lee Harvey Oswald definitely did it. Well, I guess that's okay then.
01:15:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, he goes on, he does other potted defenses of why we should believe the official theory over the conspiracy theory. So it says, for those who think Oswald was a panty set up by the CIA, the KGB, or the mob, one need only recall the above facts about the man and ask yourself, who in their right mind would select someone this unstable and deranged to carry out an assassination of this magnitude? Now one,
01:16:13
Speaker
The theories account for this. You choose an unstable subject to engage in your assassination because they're easier to ply to get to perform that particular act. And two, he's going to talk about things like MKUltra and the like letter on in the section where he admits that actually the security agencies in the US
01:16:37
Speaker
were engaging in attempted mind control to do exactly this kind of thing in the 1960s? Yeah, they never actually had much success. But yes, you can't just simply write things off like that when a lot of the theories, as you say, specifically account for it.
01:16:58
Speaker
Yeah, now he also poo-poos the notion that Jack Ruby was in on the conspiracy because Ruby told investigators exactly why he shot Oswald in order to save Mrs. Kennedy the discomfiture of coming back to trial. He said his decision was a spur of the moment thing after recovering from two days of grief-stricken sadness, saying of Kennedy, whom Ruby loved as his president,
01:17:25
Speaker
that he did not understand how a great man like that could be lost. And Shermer just goes, oh, you know, Jack Ruby must be a, he must be a good sort. He certainly wouldn't lie about his involvement as to why he killed Lee Harvey Oswald. Shermer seems very credulous when it comes to evidence
01:17:48
Speaker
that support his contention that President Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald alone. And I know I'm sounding here like I'm kind of defending the conspiracy theories about the death of Kennedy, saying that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone. And I actually do think the Lee Harvey Oswald lone assassin hypothesis is the best explanation of what happened to President Kennedy. But the kind of evidence that Sherman uses to support
01:18:17
Speaker
his official theory isn't so much rebuking or refusing the conspiracy theories as to just asserting that we should believe what we've been told about how JFK died.
01:18:32
Speaker
Does he have any more points? Or does that really leaves it? I mean, there's some minor stuff. He tries to make the claim that most JFK conspiracy theories depend on there being four shots fired rather than three. And he gives no evidence for this claim. He just asserts that if you believe that JFK was killed by a cohort of assassins, you have to be a four-shot rather than three-shot person. That is not necessarily the case.
01:19:01
Speaker
And he ends the chapter with, the evidence overwhelmingly points to the conclusion that JFK was blown away by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. And the thing is, it doesn't. Because all the evidence he's presented strongly suggests that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one to fire the shots.
01:19:25
Speaker
But it doesn't actually tell us that he wasn't supported by other people in preparation for the event. So he goes to great lengths to show that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin. But that doesn't necessarily mean that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
01:19:45
Speaker
It just means that Shermer, if he's correct, has shown that Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that killed Kennedy. But it says nothing about the conspiracy that got him to that point on that day with that gun. It does, though. Give him a nice segue into chapter 9. Yeah, real conspiracies. What if they are really out to get you?
01:20:09
Speaker
So chapter 9, he changes tack in chapter 9. Now, having gone through a couple of examples of conspiracies that he believes are not true, he now says, well, let's have a look at some conspiracies that are true. He doesn't again, as we'll see, he doesn't
01:20:26
Speaker
apply this to his theory at all. Just as I would have expected him to have said, look, these things, you shouldn't believe these things because they exhibit all these points that I've already mentioned of implausible conspiracy theories or that they fail these tests. And you would expect that he would then start talking about real conspiracies and do the same thing. You can see these ones don't have these things that should cause you to doubt conspiracy theories and that they do pass these tests, but he doesn't really do that either. He starts by saying,
01:20:55
Speaker
There's another reason why people might believe in conspiracy theories, especially political ones like the JFK assassination. And that's because conspiracies really do happen. Sometimes they really are out to get you. But again, this is from the focus of, here's a reason why people might believe in these things, which I guess is the point of the entire book. But the point of this chapter was meant to be, here's how you can tell the difference between the bad ones and the good ones.
01:21:20
Speaker
But so all he really does is he looks at what he calls three broad historical trends. The first is real political assassinations, and he points out that historically, regime change via assassination was not an uncommon occurrence. He cites a study that says that 15% of European monarchs between 600 and 1800 AD were assassinated in coups.
01:21:44
Speaker
Now, Josh, I would put you, that's too low a number. Quite possibly. Yeah. I mean, they are really. I'm saying I think there should be more political assassinations. Oh, there should have been. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I'm saying, look, we were not doing well enough. We could have done so much better.
01:22:04
Speaker
So then he starts talking about actual political assassinations. He talks about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, which we'll get to in a minute. Not the band. Not the band, the Archduke. He talks about the assassinations of the Romanovs. He talks about the assassinations of presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy, and also the unsuccessful assassination attempt on presidents Jackson, Roosevelt, other Roosevelt, Ford and Reagan. He makes the interesting point that there's this new TV series, I think it's called Manhunt.
01:22:34
Speaker
which is all about the hunt for the dude who shot Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth. John Wilkes Booth. All of these three name people. John Wilkes Booth. Yes, the hunt for John Wilkes Booth. There is a conspiracy theory about the death of John Wilkes Booth.
01:22:54
Speaker
because there's a big question as to whether the person who was shot in the barn actually was Booth at all, or whether they allowed him to escape and killed someone else. So there are conspiracy theories that John Wilkes Booth survived his death and then went into hiding. But that's another matter.
01:23:15
Speaker
What Schumer points out and what I've seen people pointing out in the discussion of manhunt is that Lincoln wasn't the only target. There were two or three other people. There was a plot to kill Lincoln plus a few other people. And John Wilkes Booth was the only one who actually went through with it and succeeded. So that was indeed part of an even larger conspiracy.
01:23:37
Speaker
Apparently, and he uses that to try to argue that that means it was an unsuccessful conspiracy. So I mean, it's a partially quite successful conspiracy, because it succeeded. Still killed the president. I mean, sure, they didn't kill two other people. They still killed the president. That to my mind is a successful conspiracy. It could have been more successful.
01:24:01
Speaker
Yes, I was listening to, I was actually Pat and Oswald, who plays a part in the thing Manhunt. I saw an interview with him and he was talking about how the point of Booth was off to the Confederates and there was actually a genuine chance that had everything gone through, they were going to start up the Civil War again.
01:24:17
Speaker
They certainly didn't succeed in their wider goals, but one bit of it was bloody successful. He's talked about real political assassinations. He goes on to talk about US involvement in political assassination, and then goes through the history of the US government in particular.
01:24:34
Speaker
and their various plans or attempts or successes when it comes to assassinating. He talks about all those various wacky plans we've heard about for assassinating Fidel Castro. He talks about Operation Northwoods, which we've looked at before. Interesting, when he talks about Northwoods, he quotes the Department of Defense Warning
01:24:54
Speaker
They explicitly say, now, if we did decide to go through with something like this, it would be bloody hard to keep it secret. So we'd have to be very careful to make sure all this remains a secret, which is interesting. He goes back to the Kennedy assassination by pointing out how eager Johnson was for the Warren Commission to find that Oswald acted alone.
01:25:14
Speaker
He talks about the CIA's involvement in overthrowing, and he has a decent list here. Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, Indonesia's President Sukarno, Chile's President Salvador Allende, and General René Schneider of Chile.
01:25:31
Speaker
Apparently after the Church Commission, President Ford signed an executive order, which was later followed up by one from Reagan, saying,
01:25:46
Speaker
He points out that technically this executive order doesn't apply to enemy combatants, so they would have been acting within the rules had they decided to assassinate Saddam Hussein during the Iraq war. Apparently, there was a thing where Bush Jr.
01:26:02
Speaker
We were allowed to assassinate him. This executive order doesn't prohibit that, and Bush was like, no, we should do this properly. We should get rid of him by winning a war against him rather than just bumping him off. I don't know. Anyway, but the point is that even though there was this executive order saying that, okay, we're not going to assassinate people ourselves, the US has, of course, continued to be involved in raging changes all over the world.
01:26:28
Speaker
Interestingly, the Church Committee also uncovered something called Operation Shamrock, which was an operation all about the intelligence agencies of the time, just hoovering up whatever no pun intended, whatever information they could from
01:26:43
Speaker
telecommunications companies and doing things like opening people's mail without a warrant, photographing it and sending it on without notifying the senders or the recipients, which he says this was stuff going on in 1975 and yet is the same in spirit, the same sort of stuff that the whole Edward Snowden WikiLeaks thing showed up happening several decades later.
01:27:05
Speaker
The more things change, Josh, the more they stay the same. That's what leads him into the third of his broad historical trends, which is real conspiracies that eroded public trust in the government. The first thing was that this is something, the way he describes it, apparently this is well known within the States, so possibly it is, but I hadn't heard of it. The case of Schenck versus the United States.
01:27:28
Speaker
which is a case in 1919, a free speech case. From what I gather from what he talked about, this was the case that formalized the idea that there are limits on free speech, regardless of what it says in the Constitution, and the idea that there are things such as shouting fire in a crowded theater.
01:27:49
Speaker
There are sorts of speech that can do harm and those are not necessarily protected by the First Amendment. Now, interestingly enough, the speech that they found did do harm and was therefore not protected by the First Amendment was this person distributing socialist leaflets telling men to resist military conscription on the grounds that being forced to serve your country without whether or not you want to or not constitute slavery.
01:28:15
Speaker
Yeah. And apparently this ruling, this particular ruling has since been used against various whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and of course Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers. And that leads into then talk about the Pentagon Papers, talk about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, moving forward in history, talking about Donald Rumsfeld and what went on in Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War. And then finally, of course, into
01:28:41
Speaker
Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and the various things that WikiLeaks and Snowden revealed about the dodgy stuff that the US government was getting up to. And like I say, this is interesting enough, and I don't think I'd dispute much of it, but all he's done is sit here a bunch of
01:28:58
Speaker
real conspiracies that provide reason why people might want to believe conspiracy theories, which is fair enough, but it doesn't really seem to fit in with the stated game of this part of the book.
01:29:11
Speaker
It certainly doesn't fit in with his baloney detection kit and his his point about how conspiracy theories are almost always false because now he's go well look actually you've got good reason to believe quite a number of them so he has
01:29:30
Speaker
a circle he needs to square, which is he wants to be, seem to be sensible and go, look, we can normally poo poo conspiracy theories. But he also wants to be able to say, well, look, sometimes it's rational to believe them. And he's never really convincing on both parts. It's quite weird. But it does lead him into chapter 10, where once again, now he's going to look in detail at a conspiracy that we know was a real conspiracy.
01:29:59
Speaker
Yes, the deadliest conspiracy in history, the trigger of World War One, and how conspiracies really work. And looking at these chapter titles, he promises a lot in these chapter titles. He really ever delivers. It's almost as if he's getting someone else to write the headlines.
01:30:18
Speaker
So this is about World War One, but Josh, let me give you a quote here. It will surprise most readers of this book as it did me when I first heard about it that war was outlawed in 1928. Were you surprised to find out that war was outlawed in 1928?
01:30:42
Speaker
It's not a fact I knew. It doesn't surprise me that people would have made such a ruling, and also that ruling has had no effect on the history of the world. Well, it kind of had an effect. I mean, he's explaining this. In 1917, with the carnage of the First World War evident to all, Chicago corporate lawyer Salman Levinson reasoned, we should have, not as now, laws of war, but laws against war.
01:31:09
Speaker
just as there are no laws of murder or poisoning, but laws against them. With the support of American philosopher John Dewey, John Dewey of the Dewey Commission, French Foreign Minister Astrid Brand, German Foreign Minister Gustav Dreitemann, and US Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, presumably not of the Kellogg Kelloggs, Levinson's dream of war outlawy, I like that, Levinson's dream of war outlawy,
01:31:37
Speaker
came to fruition with the General Pact for the renunciation of war, also known as the Peace Pact or the Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed in Paris in 1928. War was outlaw. And so basically what happened was that after World War II,
01:31:53
Speaker
this thing called outcasting took place. So rather than punishing rule breakers as we had done historically by invading them or declaring war on them, outcasters, as Sherman notes, refused to do something with the rule breakers. This principle of exclusion doesn't always work. Think of Cuba and Russia today. But sometimes it does. Think of Turkey and Iran today.
01:32:22
Speaker
maybe around today is not the best example.
Decline of Interstate War and Economic Sanctions
01:32:25
Speaker
I don't think at the time he wrote this was the best example either and is almost always better than war. The result these researchers shows that interstate war has declined precipitously and conquests have almost completely disappeared.
01:32:41
Speaker
It probably doesn't help that we're recording this in the year of our Lord 2024, when there's a war going on in Ukraine being waged by Russia. But it certainly is the case that economic sanctions have kind of become the standard mechanism for retaliating against powers you don't like, as opposed to simply invading a country like maybe we used to do on the regular in the
01:33:09
Speaker
up until the early part of the 20th century.
01:33:17
Speaker
We have to now go back in time to World War I because he wants to get to the idea that war was outlawed by talking about how the conspiracy to bring about World War I is one of the worst things to have happened and thus the outlawing of war was kind of a way to try to avoid it. Although I should point out if war was outlawed in 1928,
01:33:40
Speaker
World War II is a bit of a problem here, given that it occurs after 1928. But maybe that Hitler fella, maybe he wasn't the biggest rule of law abiding or rule of law. You're not gonna tell me Hitler violated the peace pact. That doesn't sound like him. I know, I know. Anyway.
Franz Ferdinand Assassination Conspiracy Theories
01:34:07
Speaker
So he tells the story of World War I, it's a fairly standard story here, although
01:34:16
Speaker
He does engage in a bit of victim blaming for Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie. So they made, Sophie and Franz, made this excursion despite warnings they received the day before, indicating that a terrorist attack was possible, even likely. Nevertheless, Sophie told one of her hosts, everywhere we have gone here, we've been treated with so much friendliness. And by every last Serb too, with so much cordiality and unsimulated warmth,
01:35:05
Speaker
failed to engage in Schirmer's recently invented constructive conspiracism and therefore it does seem a little bit like Schirmer is kind of blaming Franz Ferdinand for not thinking like good old Michael Schirmer. Now admittedly there are lots of reasons to criticize Franz Ferdinand heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and it is quite clear that it was a fairly foolish thing to do but at the same time
01:35:05
Speaker
that we are very happy about it.
01:35:35
Speaker
Can't really ding him for not engaging in constructive conspiracism when it wasn't an idea that Franz Ferdinand had access to at the time he decided to go for a drive in Belgrade. No. Does this chapter point out what a cascade of cock-ups the assassination was and how it almost failed completely until they got lucky at the last minute?
01:35:59
Speaker
Kind of. So the weird thing about this chapter is it's never entirely clear which conspiracy
01:36:08
Speaker
Sherma thinks actually set off World War I, because he talks about two conspiracies, or at least he talks about one actual conspiracy and one postulated conspiracy. So he gives the conspiracy to kill Franz Ferdinand, and he does go through the mess of cock-ups that occurred and how the actual assassination was due, so one of the previously unsuccessful assassins
01:36:36
Speaker
drinking coffee at a cafe when Franz Ferdinand happens to drive by. And he goes, oh, I didn't think I was going to get a second chance, but I've got my gun. I might as well go for round two. And how it looked like it had failed completely. And then they managed to pull it off at the very last minute. And it points out this is an actual conspiracy. This is a conspiracy by Serbian nationalists.
01:37:02
Speaker
who want to divulge themselves of the Austro-Hungarians to get a united Serbia back into a position of power, and that's a deliberate conspiracy. And then he talks about how the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans thought that the conspirators were supported by the Serbian government.
01:37:26
Speaker
And so they generated a conspiracy theory that then led to World War I.
01:37:36
Speaker
And Sherman also talked about how this is the deadliest conspiracy in world history. And it's not quite clear whether he's referring to the assassination, which didn't plan to generate World War I, World War I as an accidental byproduct of a political assassination, or whether he's intimating that when the Germans and the Austrians waged war on the back of their conspiracy theory,
01:38:06
Speaker
of the Serbian government being behind the assassination, they were doing that knowingly. So it's not quite clear whether he means it's the conspiracy that caused World War I, the political assassination, or the conspiracy theory believed by the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans that led to World War I.
01:38:27
Speaker
So there's a whole big thing about the investigation by the Serbians into exactly what happened. So an Austrian judge by the name of Leo Pfeiffer was tasked with actually looking at what the assassins did. And Pfeiffer discovers that it wasn't a officially state sanctioned hit by the Serbian government, but the Austro-Hungarians don't believe that. So they make a pact with the Germans
01:38:56
Speaker
who have said they will support Austro-Hungary and whatever they do. And so because the Austro-Hungarians think that Serbia as a nation was behind the assassination, they attack Serbia leading to the outbreak of war. But as I say, it's never quite clear which of these conspiracies Schirmer thinks actually leads to World War I.
01:39:19
Speaker
Are we up to cow-hop yet? I see it's coming. Well, yes. Is there another step before we can start saying cow-hop? No, no, we should get to cow-hop because as Sherman notes, sometimes real conspiracies can be catastrophic, and this one was the result of those six seconds on a street corner in Sarajevo. Sorry, I said Belgrade for some reason. Didn't actually mean to say that at all. Sarajevo.
01:39:46
Speaker
This is how conspiracies really work, as messy events that unfold according to real-time contingencies and often turn on the minutiae of chance and the quirkiness of human error. Now, once again, in an earlier chapter, it says we should not believe complex theories, and yet actually understanding how the assassination of Franz Ferdinand works is a mixture of complicated circumstances
01:40:13
Speaker
and pure coincidence, which is a very complicated theory, and yet is still the product of a conspiracy and intention to conspire to kill Franz Ferdinand. And so he goes on to say in an earlier chapter, we discussed the two conspiracy theories about 9-11, that President George W. Bush made it happen on person, mihop, or that he let it happen on purpose, lehop.
01:40:38
Speaker
Neither one of these applies to what Austro-Hungary did in attacking Serbia after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Kojek. Instead, that nation acted as many countries have done when they want to accomplish something that would otherwise be immoral, illegal or both. It turned to its advantage an event that happened for some other reason.
Political Exploitation and Conspiracy Theories
01:41:01
Speaker
Call it cowhop. Capitalized on what happened on purpose.
01:41:05
Speaker
Which I think is what anyone would say the Bush government definitely did following 9-11. Yeah, and once again, he's invented a term for something that already exists in the nomenclature, which is politics by other means, and in the very next paragraph.
01:41:25
Speaker
He admits that actually we also refer to this as politics by any other means but he has to put his coinogen first to make it look as if he's saying something really novel and new as opposed to simply saying what people have been saying for a long time.
01:41:42
Speaker
Then he engages in a bit of revisionist historianism or alternative historianism. Yeah. So he makes this claim in this chapter, which is to say, look, if the assassins had not been successful or
01:41:58
Speaker
if the Austro-Hungarians hadn't believed the conspiracy theory, that Serbia was behind the assassination of France for a land. He says, look, moreover, no World War I would almost certainly mean no Hitler, no Nazis, no World War II, and no Holocaust. Just imagine.
01:42:18
Speaker
And that, to my mind, is bad skepticism, because he is going well beyond the evidence there. It's true that if World War I hadn't occurred, the history of the 20th century would have been different.
01:42:34
Speaker
But that doesn't mean that fascism would not have arisen in Germany. It doesn't mean that a young artist who failed to get into art school wouldn't have gone on to have a political career. It's a counterfactual and we've got no reason to believe it's true.
01:42:55
Speaker
Yeah, World War I is basically what killed the idea of empires, didn't it? And if that not happened, we might still be an Austro-Hungarian Empire and a Prussian Empire and so on and so forth. So yes, I don't know. It's a weird one. A weird one indeed. Almost as weird as Chapter 11.
01:43:12
Speaker
The final one. We've been at this for one hour and 48 minutes, apparently. So let's wrap it up. Chapter 11 is called Real and Imagined Enemies, Conspiracies in Reality and in Our Imaginations, which, again, as a title, it doesn't really seem to map to what he actually ends up talking about in the
Governments and Conspiracy Theories
01:43:29
Speaker
chapter. What do you do? What do you do? There's a secret to this, which is sometimes when you propose a book to a publisher, you give a list of chapter titles.
01:43:41
Speaker
And then as you write those chapters, you realise that the content of the chapter no longer actually reflects what you've written there. And then you forget to change the chapter titles, because you actually don't think about your chapters having titles, you're just writing content, unless you get a mismatch between the title of the chapter and what's actually in the chapter.
01:44:01
Speaker
So what's in this chapter? It begins, a central theme of this book is that conspiracy theories are often enough are true. So it's not unreasonable for us to be constructively conspiratorial about people and organizations with power, especially when trust in them is low.
01:44:17
Speaker
And at this point, he refers to Catherine Olstead, about whom we have spoken and to whom you have spoken in the past, talking about the history of this sort of stuff in America. He gives a bit of a sort of a rundown of the tumultuous times following the assassination of JFK, citing the Pentagon Papers and similar revelations, including the fact that the FBI was monitoring Martin Luther King, Jr.
01:44:43
Speaker
which then was followed by his assassination, in RFK's assassination. He had the likes of Watergate, the revelations about MK Ultra, about the Iran-Contra affair. And so by the 1990s, conspiracy theories were, I don't know, certainly the notion of conspiracy theories became a lot more mainstream. I mean, that was sort of a thing. And we saw it with The X-Files and then later on in that decade, The Men in Black and the actual movie called Conspiracy Theory.
01:45:12
Speaker
And the movie's called Men in Black. One, two, never saw three, never saw Men in Black. International. Never watched the cartoon. Never watched the cartoon. Oh, maybe I don't know. Anyway, so he says the problem in discerning true from false conspiracy theories of these types is that governments do lie and cover up. And he moves on to a bunch of different areas. He talks about UAP sightings and the military statements of them and
01:45:38
Speaker
There's a whole bunch about the history of UFO sightings and Roswell and Area 51 and that. But basically, the takeaway of the whole section is that almost all UFO stuff can definitely be explained as not aliens, which means leaving only a very small amount that's unknown.
01:45:58
Speaker
He had a bit of fun with that. He then moves on to more serious conspiracies, in particular medical ones. He talks about the United States' history of sterilizations in the name of eugenics, which was one of the things used by the Nazis as to justify their own practices. They're like, hey, everyone else is doing it, which was true at the time.
01:46:16
Speaker
And as he says, sterilizing people without informing them that they're being sterilized, as happened in some cases, that counts as a conspiracy. He, of course, goes on to mention the Tuskegee experiment as being another real historical case of things.
01:46:32
Speaker
And of course, we can't forget about corporate conspiracies. He talks about the tobacco industry's campaign to deny the health effects of cigarettes, which inspired similar campaigns against the dangers of chemical fire retardants, dangers of various food additives and carbon emissions.
01:46:48
Speaker
which leads into the idea of industries lobbying against the existence of climate change in general. So this was rather than, yeah, didn't really seem to talk about the difference between conspiracies and reality and conspiracies as we imagine them. It's just sort of a potted history of conspiracies in the latter half of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century.
01:47:09
Speaker
But then he looks forward to the future of conspiracy theories and what he thinks is a new type of conspiracy theory.
Classic vs. New Conspiracy Theories
01:47:16
Speaker
He says classic conspiracy theories are grounded in arguments and evidence, whereas more recent ones are simply asserted, usually without facts to support them.
01:47:25
Speaker
Which I don't know, is that actually true? Or did these ones, these calling classic theories also start out as assertions, but they've just been around long enough and people have been going at them for long enough that they have built up a body of evidence? I wasn't sure. So he's talking here about the new conspiracism that Muirhead and Rosenbaum talk about. And
01:47:44
Speaker
I mean, Steve Clark has written a piece for the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective that points out that they are basically just making things up when it comes to how people talk about conspiracy theories now versus how people talked about conspiracy theories in the past. It's very nice to make the claim we live in a post-truth civilization where people just make assertions.
01:48:08
Speaker
There were classic theories that were assertions with no particular evidence being put forward. People were simply looking for evidence to support their hypotheses. And there are lots of conspiracy theories out there that don't start as assertions. But here's some evidence of something weird going on. Can we explain this with a normal explanation or a conspiratorial explanation? So the new conspiracism thing
01:48:31
Speaker
people like to talk about it because people like to talk about post-truth stuff but everybody's been talking about post-truth for as long as human history has been going on which is a very long time as a species we have a lot of history
01:48:47
Speaker
So Shermer in particular is talking about your Donald Trumpy sort of election rigging kinds of conspiracy theories, which he says spread by repetition on social and other media. He says that he does say people have been making evidence lacking assertions for a very, very long time, but not to as wide an audience as social media makes available, which is why he's saying things are different now.
01:49:12
Speaker
He goes back again to this idea of tribal stuff, which you talked about earlier in part one of the book as well, and with the idea that people will believe in, or at least to say they believe in, things like QAnon, more to signal which side
01:49:27
Speaker
they're on to which tribe they belong to. He refers to Hugo Mercier arguing that most people don't really believe because most people don't actually do anything about it. He sort of says, you know, if everybody who said they believed in the Comet Ping Pong thing really, truly believed in it,
01:49:47
Speaker
How come only one guy showed up to investigate? If you really honestly believed that child sex trafficking was happening there, how come nobody actually did anything about it? And similarly, how come people who believe in massive government surveillance and control will meet openly at public conspiracy conventions?
01:50:06
Speaker
Now, one reaction to that, and it might be an insincere reaction, but people like Alex Jones and David Dyke believe that talking about these things stops them from going on. So by drawing attention to them and advertising their existence forces the, in quotes, elites to change their behavior. So
01:50:32
Speaker
There is an interesting discussion here to be have about what kind of action you should have when you find you believe a particular conspiracy theory. And I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea that a lot of people entertain conspiracy theories without necessarily
01:50:47
Speaker
being committed to the truth of them. But you can think that something is plausible and A. think there's nothing I can do or B. think well the best thing I can do is make this information public so the authorities will step in and stop it. At the end of all of this, which is
01:51:06
Speaker
fairly sort of general and wide-ranging discussion of conspiracy theories in general, he says, this is what makes the new conspiracism so troubling. Most conspiracy theorists at least try to muster facts and logic to convince you that a cabal is afoot. In my correspondence with conspiracists over the years, they routinely send me readings of documents, articles, books and papers, as well as links to websites, documentary films and demonstrations, all in hopes of convincing me, through reason and empiricism, that they're right to be constructively conspiratorial.
01:51:35
Speaker
The new conspiracists who have emerged since 2016 don't even bother to try. For them, it's truth by assertion. A lot of people are saying. And if there are political or social consequences and demanding evidence, people in positions of power who could break the spiral of silence by speaking out don't do so because of fear. So then he asks, OK, what might we do about this? And he says, two things will help us out this through this knowledge and transparency.
01:52:00
Speaker
He says, I'm confident that through knowledge and transparency, the conspiracies and conspiracy theories of today, like those of the past, will be revealed for what they are, and that our civilization will continue its long path of progress with the arc of the moral universe continuing to bend towards truth, justice, and freedom, even if we never eliminate all forms of bigotry and prejudice.
01:52:21
Speaker
And part three, I'll consider how we can do that, both in talking to individual conspiracy believers and in rebuilding trust in the institutions on which each of us individually and liberal democracies generally so depend for determining what we should believe as the truth.
Conclusion and Future Discussions
01:52:35
Speaker
On reading that, I assume you would add consequences to that. I certainly would. You've mentioned multiple times. You could possibly fold that into transparency under seeing justice be done, but yeah. But it's the end of part two.
01:52:50
Speaker
What do you think of part two? Yeah, and what a part it was. As sequels go, it's kind of unwieldy in the same way that the second Matrix film was unwieldy. But maybe, maybe it'll get rescued by the third Matrix film or part three. We'll just have to see. Because as we know, that worked out very well. Excellently. Right, well, that's it.
01:53:15
Speaker
Just under two hours now, I suspect by the time I finish editing, it'll be 150 or something like that. We'll see. So I hope you stuck with us this far and you've got another one to look forward to in two weeks time when we talk about the third and final part of the book, but that is only two chapters, but also a survey. So we'll just have to see. So that's it for now though, except of course for the bonus episodes that we're going to go and record. What's in the bonus episode?
01:53:43
Speaker
going to talk about computer games, we're going to talk about UFOs and what the military does want you to know about them, and we're also just going to mention that a whistleblower has been found dead, and there's no conspiracy theory about that, but people claim in these situations conspiracy theories quickly follow. So this will be one of those situations we have to see
01:54:06
Speaker
whether people start making conspiracy theories. And as usual, we'll probably have a little bit of a gripe about the White Vault. Maybe we will. But for now, that is all. So I'll just say goodbye. And I will also say goodbye. Goodbye. The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself.
01:54:31
Speaker
Associate Professor, M.R.X. Denton. 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.
01:55:02
Speaker
And remember, nothing is real, everything is permitted but conditions apply.