Posted: Dec 14, 2012 12:04 am
by tolman
InsaneRobot wrote:A lot of the problems with conspiracies make more sense if you think of the theorists working backwards to get to their point.

Oh, I can understand the ass-backwards reasoning involved, and why it results in stupid arguments.
Such as the classic one where someone assumes a conclusion, looks for things consistent with the conclusion but then never turns round and asks whether those things are consistent with anything else, whether because they don't think of doing so, or because they assume some exclusivity of cause/effect links.

Hence a building collapses in a similar way to buildings which are demolished, therefore that proves demolition.
Either they don't try to ask whether the evidence is consistent with other explanations, or they take an exclusive (and plainly stupid) view that evidence consistent with explanation X is evidence against all other explanations by default, or take the view that even if evidence is consistent with multiple explanations, if it is consistent with their explanation that is still somehow evidence in their favour even if it is evidence which points nowhere.

Somewhat like 'religious evidence' in favour of deities in general or a specific one in particular.

InsaneRobot wrote:Even if all the things about the conspiracy theory or whatever are totally true, the fact remains that a conspiracy on that level would collapse unless the government is secretly more competent than would be expected. I've never heard a conspiracy theorist explain how the government managed to get past all the scientists who would speak up or news organizations who would cover all the obvious facts when the very same government never been shown to even have control over their own group in much less crucial matters. Wouldn't we expect just one of the many people who were in on it to be a spy, or have a sense of human decency?

Yet the Great Conspiracy can not only manage the difficult task of enforcing such secrecy, but can also be supremely confident in advance that it can press-gang people at will and not have any of them talk - it's not a case of it just managing to pull off the secrecy, but of being so fantastic at it that it can confidently predict success.

And yet such a conspiracy is also supposed to come up with (and approve) some of the most ridiculously convoluted, bodged-together, expensive, risky and overcomplicated plans imaginable, typically with little or no obvious benefit over far simpler ones.
Plans which the most unhinged Bond villain would be expected to piss their pants laughing at.

And they're supposedly doing it to 'get power' or 'get money' while also apparently already being some of the most powerful people on Earth, who have entire governments under their control, and who have had decades, if not centuries, in which to line their pockets with money filched from one or other treasury.

If I had the power to fake 9/11 and cover it up afterwards, why would I need to fight a bogus war?
To [somehow] get more power?
Power to do what which I couldn't do already?

As for moon landing conspiracies, who was it who said that it'd be fun to go to a conspiracy meeting, find someone who says we couldn't have gone to the moon because we didn't have the technology, and someone else who says Area 51 is full of advanced alien space tech, and let them fight it out?