I think CTs have gotten more complex in the internet era due to a “one up” effect where everyone is trying to push the envelope and poes trolling CT discussions being taken seriously. Or maybe that’s what they want me to think.
TBH, I’m pretty sure die-hard CT’ers think that William of Ockham is part of their pet conspiracy. One of them.
CT nutjobs do not invent complex conspiracy theories in response to every single event. Rather, they maintain one giant theory like a big ball of string. They monitor the news… anything that can’t tie in, they ignore. Anything that can be tied in, will be. They never unroll the ball to see if the surface matches the core, they’re just obsessed with making it bigger and bigger.
Because the simple explanation can be easily debunked with a minimum of contradictory evidence.
Also realize that for some CT is a form of entertainment and simple stories aren’t entertaining.
Conspiracy theories are not needlessly complex. They must be complex to cover all their flaws.
It’s what a teacher of mine called an “ad hoc theory.” That’s one where each flaw in the theory is patched over by a explanation pulled from the air. He was discussing the idea that the sun revolved around the Earth. The ancients came up with the idea of epicycles to explain why the motion of the planets was not what it should have been if they revolved around the Earth, and they kept adding epicyles atop epicycles to make everything fit. And the theory did explain things; you can prove anything you want with an ad hoc theory.
Conspiracy theories are always ad hoc.
Epicycles was the best working theory they had at the time. They were just following their data and the logical assumption that since the sun appeared to be moving around the Earth, and the Earth appeared to be still, that was legitimate data too. Wrong, but it is what it appeared to be.
A lot of dumb people have the need to believe they are the smartest person in the room. Therefore, throwing the lid off a complex conspiracy with layers and layers of cover up with such convoluted logic that no one can really debunk it is their way of looking smart.
And combining that with the obsession with the notion that “since the circle/sphere is the most perfect form, things which are perfect such as the sky/heavens must be circular”. It’s difficult to understand for us, but back in Copernicus’ and Kepler’s time, the proposal of elliptical orbits was as radical as that of heliocentrical calculations.
I’d say take a look at it from an information theory perspective. Imagine we have a particular event we’re trying to explain, and before any evidence becomes available, we have two possible explanations, A and B. With no evidence, a reasonable person might choose either explanation so we could assume then that the probabilities for both are equal. As more and more evidence becomes available, if it doesn’t favor either particular explanation, we have a reasonable dispute. So, maybe one piece of evidence supports A but doesn’t support B and another vice versa. Chances are in these situations, most of this evidence probably won’t be too strong, more circumstantial, so something like 55-45 or 60-40. Explaining why a particular piece of evidence like that may have gone to the lesser but still not unlikely side doesn’t take a particularly complex explanation. For example, someone has a slight preference for chocolate over vanilla (say 60-40), it’s not all the convoluted that he might choose vanilla, especially if he’s had chocolate often recently.
But now imagine that the evidence starts to pile up, and a lot of it heavily favors one explanation over another, something like 90-10 or 95-5. Now you need a much more elaborate explanation to explain why it’s in that unlikely scenario, and not just for one piece of evidence, but likely several. So, imagine the same sort of situation, except someone vastly prefers chocolate over something like Rocky Road. Okay, with vanilla, a little variance makes sense, but here, it’s harder to buy that that person just wanted some variety.
But it gets worse, because entropy isn’t a linear function of probability. Obviously, Occam’s Razor here, basically always choosing the best case evidence, isn’t always right, but even a little variation off of that, usually in the less convince evidence, doesn’t affect it all that much. But in order to have something that flies against a lot of it, you quickly introduce a lot of chaos into the system. And particularly in the case of conspiracy theories, you have a lot of competing problems that you may or may not know about.
So, let’s take the example in the OP and run with the false flag to support gun control. There’s the immediate problem that you have two strongly contradicting pieces of evidence. I believe this conspiracy and I’m pro-gun, then I have to make the fact that people I know are against guns are using them to make their point; even if I think they’re evil, it completely contradicts that point. If I’m anti-gun, I have to make the fact that people I agree with would be capable of doing that. In both cases, I can reconcile this my just thinking that they’d pretend to do it.
Or look at the case of 9/11 Truthers. There’s a ton of evidence that just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. And there’s plenty of obvious contradictions, notably that to pull it off would require a level of competence on the part of the conspirators that even most conspiracy theorists reasonably reject.
I think another part of the problem is that two people will look at certain pieces of evidence and horribly misunderstand how significant it might be and, thus, misinterpret it to support their wild assumptions. A good example i can thing of is, again, 9/11, where conspiracy theorists will mention the clouds of smoke on lower levels and assume it’s explosives. Confirmation bias makes that seem like it heavily favors their explanation and disregard others, but they disregard the general explanation that all the pressure being built up by the collapse above has to go somewhere.
So, in short, you end up trying to reconcile some sorts of massive contradictions, this introduces chaos and gets you a wild explanation, and then confirmation bias and ignorance take over from there easily handling any other evidence.
Honestly, yes. Other than nobody seems to actually seen the second shooter. We have a somewhat blobby crappy picture that may or may not be a second shooter on the grassy knoll. <shrug> I find it personally plausible that there was a second shooter, but I really don’t give a rat’s ass who shot Kennedy as it wasn’t me, didn’t directly affect me or my family, and I have no dog in this fight.
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Honestly, no way. The evidence against any “second shooter” is overwhelming, so you have to get into the kind of compounded nonsense the OP is asking about in the first place to justify who/how/where, not to mention “if.”
There is no “magic bullet.” There is a bullet that traveled a straight line between JFK’s neck, Connally’s chest and ended up loosely embedded in his wrist. Many experienced pathologists and battlefield medics have reported similar passages, even to finding bullets basically just sticking out of the last point of impact. The supposed zig-zag is the invention of misinformation, emphasized and amplified by CT’ers. (Position the two men correctly in the car and have them turned very slightly instead of sitting straight, fore-and-aft, and there’s no zig-zag.) And the “undamaged” bullet actually shows considerable signs of impact in photos other than the famous one taken from its “good side”… and it was a jacketed military round, which is supposed to pass through flesh without mushrooming.
The explanation is both simple and correct. Honest.
Part of the reason that conspiracy theories are so complex is that most people don’t realize how difficult it is to create a plan. They assume that all of the steps that they are told went into making their pet conspiracy theory occur could have happened in the manner that they did without exposing its planning and planner to anyone who researched the event carefully. That’s not the case.
[ol]
[li]A vast conspiracy uses a anti-social loner to murder a US leader. Somehow this conspiracy involves dozens of unnecessary people in an operation which would be hard enough to complete if it was streamlined down to just two people.[/li][li]Terrorists both plant dozens of explosive charges throughout a busy set of office towers AND hijack planes to fly into them. This is despite the fact that the explosives alone would have caused far greater damage if they had been used.[/li][li]Alien technology is being concealed by the government rather than being used solidify its preeminence in world affairs. Alien lifeforms are hidden away from the public despite such maneuver being nearly impossible in a society where such information would be worth millions if revealed.[/li][li]Billions are spent to send a small spaceraft to a nearby natural satellite, but instead of this occurring, the entire program is faked multiple times. This somehow occurs with a mortal enemy watching your country’s space program closely and even amateur astronomers who would have no reason to support the coverup watching as well.[/li][/ol]
The above conspiracies as proposed would be so complex that they would take years if not decades to plan and schedule and that level planning would very nearly negate any possible chance of secrecy.
If/when people learn about planning, they look at most of the conspiracies realize that they aren’t even remotely and adjust their thinking (if they are rational that is) to the most parsimonious explanation available.
One other point worth making is that the rule of parsimony in explanation (Occam’s razor…call it what ever you want) suggests that the simplest explanation that satisfies the observed facts is the best path to take. The reason it isn’t a perfect process is that we often work without the complete facts (i.e. epicycles vs elliptical orbits) or, in the case of CT nutjobs, facts are simply invented which then forces the explanation to grow ever more complex.
How does my simple “Saudi-Arabian terrorists” 911 theory explain the thermite used to bring down the towers. It doesn’t, but then it doesn’t have to seeing as the thermite is not, in fact, a fact.
How does do you simply explain the magic bullet without a second shooter?..well you might not have to if there is not actually a magic bullet in the first place.
If the conspiracy theory isn’t complex, how can you make your wall of crazy with all the pictures thumb-tacked to the wall and different-colored string connecting them? I mean, really…
Minor nit: The bullet went through Connolly’s wrist and ended up loosely embedded in his leg.
Except Ruby showed up after the original scheduled transfer time. As it happened, Oswald was also late. You could claim Ruby and conspirators in the Dallas PD worked together to both be late so the hit would look coincidental. However, one of the factors that made Oswald late was that he demanded a change of clothes at the last minute. So, either (a) Oswald was part of the conspiracy to set himself up for Ruby, or (b) we’re back to Ruby got lucky with his timing.
I have a theory on all off this, but it’s needlessly complex…
Yeah? That’s what they tell you, isn’t it?
I knew I’d missed a step in there somewhere.
It’s November 24th, 1963, and the US has gone slightly insane. How hard is it to just consider Ruby the one crazed American who acted for, and was luckier than, nearly 100 million of us? It’s not much clearer than Oswald’s motivations and specific actions, but a clear path, free of conspiracy and shadowy associations, can be drawn from Ruby’s hearing of the assassination, obsessively following the news, and showing up at the Dallas station where he was slightly known by the cops. He thought he was doing the right thing, in a sense almost as twisted as LHO’s.