atheists and "conspiracy" theories

[Angrboda]

I'm jumping into a deep thread, so I hope I'm not repeating for not having read things, but here goes.

There is a sense in which conspiracy theories, of a sort, have to be taken seriously. I'm hesitant to apply the label "conspiracy" to them, but the U.S. and other countries have well documented histories of false flag operations, covert operations designed to undermine legitimate foreign governments (or prop up bad ones), and working to conceal the true nature of events from its people. (I just finished Jon Krakauer's book on Pat Tillman, whose death by friendly-fire was quite evidently concealed from the public through a campaign of misinformation, destruction of evidence, lies, and silencing of witnesses.) So one obviously can't just categorically conclude that all conspiracy theories are bollocks, because some of them do turn out to be real.

However, in general, 9 out of 10 such conspiracies turn out to be the imagining of crackpots. And we as a species reward people who come to useful conclusions and results, and punish those that don't (with job promotions, marriage proposals, friendships). Even without examining the evidence for a particular conspiracy, it's relatively probable that anyone who repeatedly comes up with the conclusion "conspiracy" is not someone we want sitting at the bottom of a tower in North Dakota with their finger on the trigger of a nuclear warhead. Maybe they can be a shift manager at McDonald's or something.

And examination of specific conspiracy theory claims usually bears this out with several kinds of flawed thinking being prominent in the arguments.

A short list:

1) Non sequiturs; reasoning that a conclusion follows from a set of premises when it in fact does not do so. (e.g. Arguing that Bush and America's involvement with the bin Laden family implied a similar relationship with Osama bin Laden.)
2) Argument from ignorance; the belief that if no better explanation is available, the one that one has must be correct. (This is a common theme even outside conspiracy theories, that if person B doesn't know why X, then person A must be on to something. Many times we don't know, we may never know. And this is exacerbated when people like 9/11 Truthers present details that people aren't familiar with and then imply that it means something when this person whom you've accosted with unfamiliar information can't explain it.)
3) Propaganda; appealing to emotion to generate a conclusion rather than facts, evidence and logic. (Despite having ample bad guys to draw from, 9/11 truthers inevitably look to people they don't like. To the best of my knowledge, the pope has yet to be implicated in 9/11.)
4) Fraud and lies (or simple mistakes); presenting facts which are either known to be untrue, or which one has omitted to check. (Much of the 9/11 conspiracy theories rest on heaping mountains of untruth; the propagandistic claim that fighter jets scram in 10 or 15 minutes, ignoring the confusion among the controllers and others involved at the time, ignoring that they simply don't, and ignoring that the 17 minutes between tower 1 and tower 2 strike would leave 2 minutes of flight time even if they had scrammed in 15.)

Anyway, I've written more than I intended, but even once one gets past the base rate at which conspiracies occur, relative to the rate at which your typical conspiracy theory nut asserts they occur, most such people are a cornucopia of bad thinking and bad logic; it would be unwise to trust their account even if a real conspiracy was suspected.

(I recently was asked to listen to an 11 minute youtube video by someone I've known for years on irc. Upon finding the material filled end-to-end with Truther bullshit, I confronted him. I had hoped it was merely a joke, albeit a not too funny one. Upon realizing it wasn't, and confronting him with the problem, he quickly found reason that further discussion with me was undesirable. That may be #5 - conspiracy theorists often form closed communities which don't tolerate questioning of the conspiracy arguments -- this is well known, for example, with regard to the "Loose Change" community.)

I don't know what I intended to say other than that, yes, you need to examine the evidence, but most often what you will find are cranks, liars, and idiots; there simply aren't enough real conspiracies, with enough real evidence, to support such a thriving community. And if there were, it would quickly be taken away from the lunatic fringe by some hungry journalist. (Or 10.)