Fact Bombs

In My Humble Opinion
1

If your experience is at all like mine, you might have noticed a recent uptick in conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and all-around woo. Without speculating about the causes (which might just be confirmation bias on my part), I think it’s desirable to assemble a sort of ‘toolkit’ to react against the most egregious examples.

By that, I mostly mean a collection of what I call ‘fact bombs’: a small collection of well-supported assertions that, together, serves to debunk some common form of woo. So, you might have a ‘why homeopathy is bunk’-fact bomb, a ‘why the Earth isn’t flat’-fact bomb, a ‘no, we really went to the moon’-fact bomb, and so on.

This has two purposes: one, for all of those who are ‘on the fence’ (if there actually are any), you supply a short, self-contained argument warding off the woo; two, ideally, they help averting those long, pointless discussions with the latest tinfoil hat bearer where you keep kidding yourself that maybe the next attempt to explain things might make a difference.

To do so, fact bombs should ideally be easily comprehensible, sufficient to demonstrate the claim being made, and convincing to everyone adopting a rational stance. This is, in all probability, impossible to achieve in practice; but we can try and get as close as is feasible. To this end, I’d like to invite discussion, while discouraging quibbling, if at all possible.

So, I’m gonna start things off with my evolution fact bomb:

[ol]
[li]Microbial adaptation: it is readily observable in the lab that, e.g., bacteria adapt to adverse stimuli, like antibiotics, by mutation and reproduction.[/li][li]Ring species: along, for instance, coast lines, there exist populations such that each population can interbreed with its neighbors, yet the beginning and end of this chain cannot, and thus, have to be considered separate species.[/li][li]Endogenous retroviruses: the genome contains traces of DNA from viruses that have infected the germ line, which is thus inherited from parent to child. There are numerous identical such loci between different species, such as humans and chimpanzees—the likelihood of this being an accident is astronomically low. Hence, there must be a common origin.[/li][/ol]

What are your fact bombs? Do you have one for 9/11, the moon landings, chemtrails?

2

It’s hopeless. People who believe that 9/11 is an inside job will not be convinced otherwise. In fact, I am not sure what kind of evidence would do. For flat-earthers, it is utterly impossible since they have already discarded all the obvious arguments. Moon landings faked? Sure you can explain why stars are not in the photos, but so what? If you believe they were faked, there is no way to disprove it.

My main explanation in each case is that the number of people who would have to have been involved is large and it is inconceivable that not one of them would have blown it. (Flat earth is a different kind of question.)

It is hopeless and pointless. Incidentally, it is not clear to me why the existence of ring species is strong evidence for evolution. If every species is a special creation of god, then why couldn’t he create a ring species? You cannot refute the assertion that the universe was created five minutes ago, replete with all our memories, fossils, etc. In fact, the universe of five minutes ago, being in a state of higher entropy than that of the big bang is even a likelier beginning of everything.

3

It was stipulated that the refutations should be convincing to anyone “adopting a **rational **stance”. Based on everything we’ve observed and learned from testing, the universe couldn’t possibly been created five minutes ago or five billion years ago, for that matter. Your assertion could only be entertained if we irrationally ignored the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

4

Yes, but they’re not the targets here. Ideally, a fact bomb contains sufficient evidence to convince anybody behaving rationally in a minimal sense (i. e. presuming they’ve never heard of the topic, they should come out convinced, or something like that). This serves the two ends I’ve mentioned above—one, any ‘hapless bystanders’ have enough material to convince themselves, provided they’re not already committed to something irrational, and two, you’ve done all you could, so all further argument is likely pointless. So I don’t want to convince the nuts, but at least try to keep their quackery from spreading with minimal effort.

I think that’s a very reasonable point to make regarding the moon landings. In fact, I recall a paper trying to quantify the odds of conspiracies lasting to this day, but I didn’t think the statistical analysis was really convincing.

It’s evidence for the divergence of species—one popular claim of the evolution-deniers is that while microadaptation (such as bacterial resistance) occurs, no new species are generated in this way, although what mechanism stops a bacterium from changing too much is usually left for future work. Ring species show that gradual change leads to a loss of the capacity of interbreeding, which is often considered a criterion for speciation.

5

Pareidolia: is the tendency of the human brain to assign meaning to random stimuli. That’s why, when dim light from a widow catches your eye in just such a way, your brain, desperate to make sense of it, tells you you’re seeing a human form. Ergo, it’s a ghost. Or when the burn patterns on your piece of toast hit your eye in just such a way, your brain, desperate to make sense of it, tells you you’re seeing a human form. Ergo, it’s Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary.

It is not.

6

I have a family relative who is a conspiracy theorist. Her approach is basically this: It doesn’t matter how many holes there are in her theories, as long as there is one hole in yours, then yours is debunked but hers is left standing.

So dropping fact bombs doesn’t work.

7

Some people cannot dissuaded from what they ‘know’ by evidence.

I have a friend, a good guy in all other respects, that was absolutely convinced that Obama and his jack-booted thugs were gonna break down his door and take his guns.

8

This.

Every good theory must be falsifiable. And that’s the problem with conspiracy theorists; none of their theories are falsifiable. In other words, no amount of evidence, logic, and reason will convince them their theory is bunk.

They will even admit it:

Me: “So the moon landing was faked?”

Them: “Of course!”

Me: “Is there any evidence I can show you that will prove your theory is incorrect?”

Them: “Um, no. Not really.”

So I don’t waste my time arguing with them. The only exception is when their CT puts lives at danger.

9

As I explained in the OP and my second post in this thread, I don’t intend to convince the nuts:

10

Can you start by disproving this theory? My contention is that it is not a recent uptick, just confirmation bias on your behalf. Grassy knoll ring a bell?

11

It certainly will be if we allow ourselves to become exhausted just arguing for the usefulness of the enterprise rather than forging on with it. Perhaps the naysayers might start their own thread while we develop responses to the OP’s excellent idea?

12

The Fact Bombs are no match for The Stupid Bunkers.

13

I acknowledged the possibility in the OP. However, cursory googling suggests that at least belief in ghosts is on the rise, and I know of two book-length philosophical studies about conspiracy theories coming out in the recent past. But if you’ve got facts supporting a different conclusion, I’ll happily reconsider!

14

A great deal of the talking points of the Moon hoaxers depends on anomalies that they claim to notice in NASA pictures.

Last time there were proponents of that conspiracy on this place they decided not to touch Fact Bombs like these:

Not only they were wrong about the photographic evidence, but by simply looking at the resolution a digital picture should have to be, to be closer to the resolution of film, gives their game away. The images that the hoaxers needed to show or talk about needed to be 20 Megabytes or 40 Megabytes in size or even more. That is because to approach the resolution of 35mm film picture a good digital copy is about 16 to 24 Megapixels. (millions of pixels or dots)

Why was that important? Because the hoaxers usually enhanced low resolution images from NASA educational sites to show their anomalies, many times using digital images less than a few kilobytes in size. Now, many do debunk hoaxers by pointing at the silliness of the ¨problems¨ they see with shadows for example. But when Hoaxers demanded that we see anomalies on blowed up, low resolution, digital images, that was really sad. That was because one can then inform the hoaxers that they needed to at least check the negatives to do serious research, of corse then they had to admit that they never had checked neither the negatives nor high resolution digital ones.

They also had to report that they do not need to do that reseatch, because of… reasons.

Yeah, no hope to convince the hoaxer, but the point is to let others why the hoaxer is not only wrong but how.

I was going to type a fact bomb about how other properties of images and video technology of the day would not had allowed NASA to fake the landings. But these short videos do the job:

Moon Landings Faked? Filmmaker Says Not!


Popular Mechanics - Why Faking the Moon Landing Was Impossible

15

My son-in-law is only marginally nutzoid. They’re living with us right now because their second pregnancy is costing them a fortune without her previous work based insurance. They’re getting crushed, but when I try to talk to the boy about his crappy insurance policy, he won’t hear it. So the other night he let it slip. The health care industry is rigged. Really. He said, have you ever seen a sick president? I believe they have a magic shot that keeps those people healthy. :frowning: I had hope for the fucker. On the other hand when I pointed out that if they told us every time the President sneezed it would be complicated. A news report that POTUS was in bed with a 100 degree temperature would cost the stock market a 100 points. He said, basically, Oh yeah, huh. He’s a business professional. So I got a small one.

16

For most of the conspiracy theories cited, though, there’s nothing BUT nuts. These aren’t positions which can survive even the smallest amount of rational inspection.

17

For the Moon thing, I like to point out that the people who had the most to gain by exposing a conspiracy, and who probably had spies in place to uncover it, consider the Moon landings to have been real: Interview with Sergei Khrushchev .

18

Part of the gay agenda is to cause more abortions because abortion makes people gay . I know someone who believes this one.