You Are Not So Smart is great for stuff like this.
Sometimes I badly want to tell one of these idiots “You are stupid. You should know you are stupid because people have been telling you that all your life.”
A search for Brandolini’s Law turned up just one instance on the Dope. It needs to be mentioned more often.
And the subsequent 30-40 years during which they remained hidden? It also wasn’t the media that kept these secrets, it was tens of thousands of individuals who never went to the media with what they knew. If one is to take conspiracy theorists viewpoints at face value, and 9/11 was an inside job by the government, then it was on the same level as a war, and everyone involved would be as motivated to keep secrets secret as they would during wartime. 9/11 obviously happened, and there is a mountain of evidence that it was caused by hijacked airliners, not by controlled detonations, a missile strike on the Pentagon or any other such nonsense. That is where the strong argument against conspiracies lies. These were public events directly witnessed by thousands of people, and on television by millions.
The notion that thousands of people can’t keep a very big secret is not only a very weak argument against conspiracies but is also demonstrably untrue.
The thing that gets me is that these people don’t seem to actually have a single solitary 100% open-ended Curiosity subroutine anywhere in what passes for their minds. Instead of exploring the world and learning more about it with a fresh and open mind, based on hard facts and rigorous reasoning, without any preconceptions, and seeing what can then be more or less conclusively discovered, they seem to have long ago made up their minds. No true surprises or discoveries thus await them. I simply can’t imagine living such a static life like that.
And again, what would motivate them to make this public, even after the war? In the case of the training fiasco, the men were already dead, and their families had been told they died as heroes on D-Day. Who would have been motivated to tell them otherwise?
In the case of code-breaking, that stuff was still relevant. We went from breaking Nazi codes to breaking Soviet codes without much of a pause, and so keeping their techniques secret still mattered.
But then, you try to compare it to this:
We were not at war prior to 9/11. No one wanted us to be at war prior to 9/11. An “inside job” would have required the government to find some several thousand people, all willing to kill thousands of fellow Americans, and many of other nationalities, to get the US into a war that no one wanted. That is entirely unlike the people who fought WWII keeping secrets, because literally everyone knew why the US was in that war, even if they didn’t like it.
And we have examples where real secrets were really revealed by real people, because they decided, on a personal level, that the secrets they were privy to should not have been kept secret. Keeping secrets is hard, and made far harder when it’s an awful secret that calls into question the very legitimacy of the government trying to keep the secret.
Just watched that documentary ‘Behind the Curve’. I think a lot of it has to do with grifting. Taking money from people that don’t want to think for themselves. And of course belonging to a cult. It sounds familiar, but lets not go there.
But I know what you are saying @solost . Some that are lost, and have no direction feel the need to belong to a tribe, for they cannot think for themselves. This is the case with many CT.
There was one person in the documentary that was a science teacher and flat earther. If my kid was in his school, I would make it my duty to get the teacher fired. Make no mistake, I think it’s good to question things. That’s good. That’s part of science and any reasonable thinking.
On the other hand, using the scientific method, they’re just a bunch of maroons.
I apparently wasn’t clear because I was trying to say what you’re saying. I don’t feel conspiracy theorists are completely stupid. But I think they want to feel smarter than other people. And there’s two ways of doing that.
One is to learn more than other people and actually be smarter. But that takes a lot of work. And no matter how much you learn, you’re always going to be encountering people who know more.
The other way is to embrace some alternative form of knowledge. When you do this, you’re no longer measuring yourself by the same standard. You can feel smarter than other people because no matter how much they know, you can tell yourself that their knowledge doesn’t count. All the stuff they know is wrong so the small amount of stuff you know is better. You understand physics better than they do because you know the world is flat and they don’t. You understand medicine better than they do because you know vaccines cause autism and they don’t. You understand history better than they do because you know the Illuminati runs everything and they don’t.
OK, I understand what you’re saying more clearly, and yes, I don’t think we’re all that off. We’re both saying that people embrace conspiracy theories because they want to feel smarter or more clever than others.
The distinction I’m making is that I don’t think it’s necessarily taking an intellectual shortcut in feeling smarter by embracing the CT. There are intellectual ranges on both sides of the equation. For example, to use my flat earther example, there are people who are told the earth is round in grade school and believe it, without really getting further into the science of it. If they’re asked why they believe the Earth is round, they may say, “that’s what they taught me in school”, or “that’s what Carl Sagan / Neil DeGrasse Tyson says”. On the other end of the spectrum there are people who become astronomers or astrophysicists.
Then there are flat earthers of wide intellectual ranges, from “I just have a gut feeling / look at the horizon-- tell me you see a curve” to flat earthers who have increasingly complicated theories of why they are right. Similar to Tychonic or Copernican theories of planetal orbits in the past, where increasingly complicated orbits within orbits were proposed to explain the empirically observed motions of planets and the Sun, while still believing the earth was the center of the universe. They weren’t taking an intellectual shortcut; just the opposite-- they were jumping through intellectual hoops to cling to their cherished belief system that in their eyes made them better than the Sun-center blasphemers.
So I think CT belief is not so much intellectual shortcut, as it is feeling part of an exclusive club or tribe, because they have ‘inside info’ that others don’t have. The majority of deluded morons believe ‘X’, but I and my exclusive club know that ‘Y’ is the real truth. The depth of the attempt to understand either X or Y doesn’t matter, it’s the choice itself.
The problem with the events you cited is that 1) they were not nefarious plots kept hidden by thousands despite strong reasons to reveal them (including ethical imperatives), and 2) they were not finally exposed by people exploring conspiracy theories on the Internet.
I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the exceptionally rare cases in which curious amateurs did unravel a genuine conspiracy involving actors high in government was the Dreyfus Affair in France (see Bernard Lazare and others).
As have I. I know a few members of MENSA who outright reject germ theory in favor of the enviroment causing diseases, the first moon landing hoaxer I met was a programmer and a pretty smart guy (he was an odd duck), and 9/11 truthers/birthers/anti-vaxxers/stop-the-stealers don’t seem to have a deficiency of intelligence when it comes to doing their jobs or otherwise functioning in the real world. So it’s not really about being dumb or smart. So what is it?
There’s more than one reason people fall down the rabbit hole. People who ought to know better may have problems in their life that they’d rather not face and a CT takes their mind off them. Others might have an obsessive personality but start to follow a CT instead of taking up an expensive hobby like ‘normal’ people do. Obviously some people need to makes themselves feel important or special because they’re onto the big secret. And then there are those who are simply gullible and stupid.
“Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for it are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth, whereby the conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than something that can be proven or disproven. Studies have linked belief in conspiracy theories to distrust of authority and political cynicism. Some researchers suggest that conspiracist ideation—belief in conspiracy theories—may be psychologically harmful or pathological, and that it is correlated with lower analytical thinking, low intelligence, psychological projection, paranoia, and Machiavellianism. Psychologists usually attribute belief in conspiracy theories to a number of psychopathological conditions such as paranoia, schizotypy, narcissism, and insecure attachment, or to a form of cognitive bias called “illusory pattern perception””
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[Wikipedia]
I simply couldn’t put it any better than that 
If I follow your link to Slapton Sands, it states, " [o]fficial histories contain little information about the tragedy. Some commentators have called it a cover-up, but the initial critical secrecy about Tiger may have merely resulted in longer-term quietude. In his book The Forgotten Dead: Why 946 American Servicemen Died Off The Coast Of Devon In 1944 – And The Man Who Discovered Their True Story , published in 1988, Ken Small declares that the event “was never covered up; it was ‘conveniently forgotten’”.
As far as Japanese codes, it was widely known that we had broken their codes after the war. David Kahn’s The Codebreakers (1966) has a long discussion of Purple and JN-25. The Chicago Tribune even claimed we won Midway because we were reading the Japanese codes–in 1942! Kahn even hints at the breaking of German Enigma machines.
The Soviets were using German Enigma machines, so the secrecy was maintained during the cold war, but it fell apart in the '70s.
That they were finally revealed 30-44 years after the fact doesn’t negate that they were kept secret for that long by governments despite thousands to tens of thousands of people being directly aware of and continuing to conceal said secrets. If the issue is them not being nefarious enough for people aware of their occurrence to want to come forward for ethical reasons, there are plenty of examples of extremely nefarious things orchestrated by governments and kept hidden by thousands of participants for decades. To whit:
MKUltra - no, not the X-files version, but the actual human experimentation by the CIA that was illegally conducted from 1953-73 and wasn’t revealed to the public until 1977.
Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra )[a] was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken people and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.[1][2] It began in 1953 and was halted in 1973. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects’ mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals without the subjects’ consent, electroshocks,[3] hypnosis,[4][5] sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.
Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male - the notorious and highly unethical 40 year long study conducted by the US government from 1932-72 which wasn’t revealed to the public until 1979.
Unit 731 - The biological warfare unit of Imperial Japan that conducted active biological warfare in China during the Sino-Japanese war, conducted the most grotesque kinds of human experimentation imaginable and performed vivisections on Allied POWs to boot. No members of Unit 731 were ever brought to justice by the United States, and the very existence of the unit was covered up by the US after the war. Why?
While Unit 731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December 1949 Khabarovsk war crimes trials, those captured by the United States were secretly given immunity in exchange for the data gathered during their human experiments.[6] The United States helped cover up the human experimentations and handed stipends to the perpetrators.[1] The Americans co-opted the researchers’ bioweapons information and experience for use in their own biological warfare program, much like what had been done with Nazi German researchers in Operation Paperclip.
Again though, just so it isn’t lost, and nobody mistakenly presumes that I’m citing these as furtherance of ‘proof’ of whackadoodle conspiracies, I’m not. I’m only stating that the idea that conspiracies can’t have happened because it isn’t possible for so many people to keep something so big a secret for so long is both a weak argument, and demonstrably untrue. Tens of thousands of people have kept terrible things secret for decades. That they ultimately saw the light of day doesn’t negate that they took decades in order to see said light. By definition, an unexposed example would be impossible to demonstrate, as it hasn’t been exposed yet.
If one is to take for example the ‘9/11 was an inside job’ conspiracies at face value, its only been two decades since it happened. Attacking it from the angle that it couldn’t possibly be true because too many people would need to keep too terrible of a thing a secret for so long is both a weak and pointless angle to attack it from. There is an overwhelming plethora of positive evidence out there proving that hijacked airliners were used to conduct a terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and that the Twin Towers weren’t wired for controlled demolition and a phantom missile wasn’t used to attack the Pentagon. The same thing goes with for example, the ‘we never landed on the Moon’ conspiracy. There is no need to resort to the weak argument about the efforts that would be required to maintain the conspiracy when there is overwhelming evidence that we did indeed go to the Moon.
I think it’s worth bearing in mind a similarity between conspiracy theories and economics: economists have correctly predicted 26 of the last eight recessions.
That there have been fairly intricate conspiracies that were later uncovered bears little resemblance to the fire hose of totally baseless conspiracy theories that disappear in a news cycle or three.
Not really. The ones you have listed from secret agencies, though horrible, were not in the 24 news and internet age and are not in the same ballpark as an attack on the US that cost thousands of lives, cost billions of dollars and that played in full view of the world in real time.
How many people would it have taken to execute AND keep it quiet were it an inside job?
No moon landing conspiracy thread is complete without this sketch:
Mitchell and Webb
That site is freakin’ hysterical.
Damn, Tuskegee mischaracterized yet again.
The Tuskegee syphilis experiments were not part of a secret conspiracy - those responsible openly published data!
The other two examples, MK Ultra and Unit 731 did not to my knowledge include vast numbers of people “in the know” who covered things up, whereas “faked” moon landing and 9/11 conspiracies would require thousands upon thousands of people maintaining silence.
In none of your cited examples were conspiracies unraveled by eager Internet amateurs.