Has an ardent conspiracy theorist ever been dissuaded?

Factual Questions
1

It’s very common here on the SDMB to see people ask how to disabuse some acquaintance of theirs about some conspiracy theory they are propagating. Usually it’s about controlled demolition of the World Trade Center, faked moon landings, control of the world by some secret society or ethnic group, income tax evasion schemes, free energy suppression, or harmful vaccination. Some people who respond helpfully try to provide evidence and logical arguments demonstrating why the conspiracy theory is false, but others simply write, “Don’t bother! People like that just won’t listen to reason.”

So I’m here to ask if any ardent conspiracy theorist has ever been dissuaded from believing a false conspiracy theory. And by “ardent conspiracy theorist”, I don’t mean someone who merely believes a particular conspiracy theory, but who actively and repeatedly propagates it in speech or writing. If anyone has been dissuaded, how was it done? With evidence and logic, or by some other method? Have there been any high-profile cases of a famous conspiracy theorist retracting the entirety of his or her theory (as opposed to a particular argument they had been using)?

2

I don’t think I’d qualify as an ‘ardent conspiracy theorist’ but for decades I believed that, while Oswald may have been a shooter (and missed or hit Connelly or something), Kennedy was actually hit by two other shooters: one shooting from a street level window behind Kennedy (the throat shot) and one shooting roughly from the direction of the grassy knoll (the head shot).

My belief in this scenario regarding the neck shot was based on a couple of photos I’d seen decades ago where I mistakenly placed the entry wound on Kennedy’s upper back and the exit wound in his throat on a level plane parallel to the ground. And I believed the head shot came from in front and to Kennedy’s right due the fact that his head and body were driven so violently up, back, and to the left, with Kennedy’s left shoulder cresting the boot of his limousine’s convertible top.

I was at long last persuaded otherwise by Shodan, BJMoose and bonzer in this thread, as explicated by me at a later date in this post.

3

At one time I was a believer in the biggest conspiracy theory in the world today, but the evidence and logic shared by this board (among others) helped me come to the realization that it just wasn’t true.

4

Out of curiosity, what theory is that?

5

My dad is very susceptible to believing all kinds of conspiracy nonsense. Just recently he sent me an 8 page article about the big “AIDS HOAX”.

I always tell him to consider the source and do independent research (as far as Google goes) and try to find trustworthy corroborating evidence.

This process seems to work most of the time but he’s really entrenched into this AIDS hoax thing. Mainly because there’s not a lot of online articles debunking the specific one he has.

The ironic thing is that he recently got an HIV test.

6

I’m guessing he’s referring to religion.

7

You could possibly have gotten whooshed by somebody named Smart Alec, could you?

The OP excludes people like Starving Artist. And that ends the game. There may be a few cases of major proponents recanting their beliefs out there somewhere, but I’ll bet ahead of time that the total this thread will ever come up with can be counted on the fingers of one hand with room to spare.

What happens in the real world is that people who believe in conspiracies quietly go on to the next big fad item. They don’t mention the one that they got so hot about ten years ago. If you dig into the records of the people who make money off this nonsense, you find that many of them have done books on a whole series of nutcase topics to hit the sweet spot of whatever is current selling. Do they really believe what they write in that case? No way to tell. However, I’ll bet even more money than above that people who loudly advocate for one major conspiracy theory also are more likely to believe in others than the public as a whole.

8

Some people just seem to be particularly susceptible to this sort of thing.

There’s a similar type of person who is susceptible to ‘get rich quick’ schemes. Or, for the more sophisticated type, ‘get rich a bit quicker than usual’ schemes.

I have a friend who is always finding these. It sometimes takes quite a while to find the flaw and point it out to him. The more credible schemes always make a point of explicitly emphasising that you really need to work hard to get them profitable (whilst the examples tend to show you don’t :rolleyes:).

Of course, anyone with any sense will shortcut the detective work on the basis that if the scheme worked the person selling it would actually make a lot more money paying someone minimum wage to do it for them rather than selling a book or franchise.

9

Bingo

10

To whoosh someone requires something more than an elliptical reference to a concept nobody else seems to be expressing.

I’ve heard religion called a lot of things, from a delusion to organized crime to a simple scam, but calling it a conspiracy theory is a new one on me. What conspiracy do most* religious people seem to be pushing?

*(‘Most’, here, means ‘If you limit this to Jack Chick and the kind of loons who believe in backmasking I’ll be a little disappointed.’)

11

Wow. Guess I was giving you way too much credit.

12

Yeah, how is religion a conspiracy theory? Who is supposedly conspiring to do what? “Conspiracy theory” doesn’t apply to any belief that people cling to regardless of the evidence.

13

Yeah I just realised I can’t dissuade an acquaintance. Every piece of evidence he provides that I debunk, he claims later other things. I told him he is intellectually dishonest and he found this hilarious but you can’t keep changing premises. As I told him, the onus is on him to prove to me that something other than what I read in a reputable history book actually happened. I don’t think I’ll even bother from now on with it. It’s pointless. I did actually say to him from the outset, “I probably won’t change your mind and you won’t change mine.”

14

Education is the key. As soon as people understand “Why” they start seeing the flaws in the arguments.

It’s like trying to tell someone about the theory of relativity. You start with two concepts. “Nothing moves faster than the speed of light,” and “The speed of light is a constant.”

Now really if you step back these concepts seem to make no sense and to fly in the face of reason. But if you spend a few hours with a decent physics book it suddenly makes sense.

People believe in 9-11 hoaxes because let’s face it, it was too damn easy. People think “It just couldn’t possibly be that easy and cheap to bring down two buildings.” But it was.

If I had said on Sept 10, 2001, “hey everybody on this board, tomorrow not one, not two, not three but FOUR planes are going to be hijacked tomorrow,” everyone on this board would’ve said, “C’mon Mark you’re nuts.” “Maybe one plane, could be hijacked but not two and certainly not three or four planes could be hijacked.”

People just can’t grasp that it was just that easy to do hijack those planes and use them as guided missiles. So of course it has to be a conspiracy. We have checks and security in places. It’s too conincidental that ALL of these checks failed. But they did. The thing was it wasn’t coincidental the checks failed. The terrorists studied the system and FOUND the holes and exploitd it. Those holes were there a long time. The checks didn’t fail, they were never there to begin with. It just too a clever group of people to study them and exploit the weak links in the chain

HIV misinformation comes from the fact we don’t do standardized medical testing on HIV. We don’t use double blind studies. We don’t inject people with HIV to test them. We only use people that are accidently exposed or already HIV+

Of course this negates the quality of the tests and leaves people open for doubt. Furthermore AIDS isn’t a disease. It’s a series of diseases all dependent on having HIV in your system. You know TB is TB unless you have HIV in your system, then TB = AIDS. So the definition of AIDS is somewhat circular

It’s a hard concept for people to grasp. They say “My cousin Fred has HIV but is fine.” My Aunt Wilma has TB." But my friend “Pepples has TB & HIV so why does she have AIDS, while the other two don’t.”

There’s logic behind it but you have to take time to study it and figure out “WHY” it is there. It’s easier to say “This is too complicated so it’s made up.”

15

Cite?

16

There was a story on This American Life about the Underground bombing in London. One of the women who survived and was interviewed on TV soon found herself in the midst of a group of people who thought that the whole incident was a government conspiracy.

Nothing she said could change this group’s belief. They simply decided she was a government informant who was part of the plot. They pointed out alleged inconsistencies here and there in the incident and her story.

She finally just gave up. When one of these conspiracy people hold a certain belief, they will ignore evidence that contradicts that belief and embrace evidence, no matter how scant or strained that reenforces that belief.

17

Markxxx writes:

> It’s like trying to tell someone about the theory of relativity. You start with two
> concepts. “Nothing moves faster than the speed of light,” and “The speed of
> light is a constant.”
>
> Now really if you step back these concepts seem to make no sense and to fly in
> the face of reason.

I remember first reading about the theory of relativity when I was in elementary school. Not for one second did I ever think that they made no sense or flew in the face of reason. I didn’t understand all the consequences of them, of course. It was a long time before I understood how all the ideas of relativity worked together. What about those concepts made no sense or flew in the face of reason to you when you first heard them.

18

Well, in my personal life I have tried very hard to point out the reasoning errors in conspiracy theories…to pretty much no avail.

However, with the example of the moon landings I’ve had a friend do a very slow U-turn, from certain vocal belief in a conspiracy, to silent belief, to doubting the conspiracy, to being confident that man has been on the moon. It took about 6 months of debunking as well as pointing out the lazy and/or dishonest research methods of the conspiracy sites.
So maybe pride keeps people from making overnight “conversions”, but changes of opinion are possible over time.

Good question btw

19

…oh, and as well as pride I think another factor is the fallacy of “sunk costs”.

That the more time / money / whatever you’ve spent on something, the more difficult it becomes to accept it was simply a waste of time.

20

I see it happen all the time to 13 year olds.

Them: I don’t wanna study math! I’m going to play pro basketball!
Me: You know Kevin Garnett, Kobe, and Vince Carter all went back to school to finish their college degrees?
Them: Oh…then I’m going to be a rapper!
Me: You know that music is based on math?
Them: You suck!