The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

by Steven Novella

Once you begin to see the entire system, involving many people and institutions with different motives, the notion that there is a “they” that can control the whole thing for their own nefarious purposes becomes obviously absurd. No one has the power to hide something as big as a cure for cancer.

Once the conspiracy narrative is adopted, it becomes a lens through which reality is viewed. Pattern recognition and hyperactive agency detection combine to form a tendency to see disparate events as connected, with an unseen agent behind them. Confirmation bias then kicks in. Every event, no matter how random or innocent, can become evidence for the conspiracy. Anomaly hunting feeds into this as well. Everything even slightly unusual or unfamiliar becomes an anomaly that proves the conspiracy. Every coincidence is part of the pattern.

Conspiracy theorists also commit the fundamental attribution error, ascribing deliberate actions to others and ignoring the quirky external details of everyday life.

The ad hominem attack is also a common fallacy employed by the conspiracy theorists. If you question their elaborate conspiracy theory, then you’re gullible and lack the vision to see events for what they are. If you point out the factual and logical problems with their case, then you’re clearly part of the conspiracy. You are a shill, or part of an “astroturf” campaign, or even perhaps one of the Illuminati.

Conspiracy theories are also often arguments from ignorance.

Too Big Not to Fail

Grand conspiracy theories tend to grow larger and more complex until they collapse under their own weight. In the PLOS One paper, Grimes set out to do a probability failure analysis of grand conspiracies. What’s the probability that they will fail from within, meaning that someone who is in on the conspiracy either deliberately or accidentally exposes the conspiracy sufficiently that it fails? He didn’t consider extrinsic failure—being exposed by outside investigation. Grimes used real historical conspiracies as his guide, namely the National Security Agency spying scandal (exposed by Edward Snowden), the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and the FBI forensics scandal. In order to make a mathematical model of grand conspiracy failure, he had to plug in several factors. These include: How many people would need to be involved in the conspiracy; how does that number change over time; and how reliable is each individual on average? From the historical examples, he came up with a range of reliability and then used the most reliable end of the spectrum for his calculations to come up with the most conservative estimate of failure probability. How the number of conspirators changed over time is an interesting variable. For some conspiracy theories, like the alien recovered from a crashed saucer at Roswell, the people involved at the time would die off over the years, reducing the number of people who can expose the conspiracy and decreasing the probability that this would happen. H...

In short, grand conspiracies can only exist in a fantasy world. Author Dean Koontz summarized it this way: The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut.

Who Believes in Cons...

Across the board, liberals and conservatives were more likely to accept a conspiracy if it was in line with their ideology.

There’s also no political difference when it comes to basic conspiracy ideology, such as the tendency to think there are powerful secret forces at work in the world.

There seems to be a 4–5 percent floor for any conspiracy, no matter how bizarre. Those are the hard-core conspiracy theorists.

The Psychology of Conspiracy

Swami and Coles write: To the extent that conspiracy theories fill a need for certainty, it is thought they may gain more widespread acceptance in instances when establishment or mainstream explanations contain erroneous information, discrepancies, or ambiguities (Miller, 2002). A conspiracy theory, in this sense, helps explain those ambiguities and “provides a convenient alternative to living with uncertainty” (Zarefsky, 1984, p.72). Or as Young and colleagues (1990, p.104) have put it, “[T]he human desire for explanations of all natural phenomena—a drive that spurs inquiry on many levels—aids the conspiracist in the quest for public acceptance.”

Conspiracy thinking is rooted in a desire for control and understanding, triggered by a lack of said control or ambiguous and unsatisfying information.

The Sandy Hook Conspiracy

Once you’re through the looking glass of conspiracy theories, the normal rules of evidence and logic don’t apply. All you know is that nothing is what it seems. The only real protection is to understand conspiracy thinking as a phenomenon, to recognize its elements and control against them. This probably has to happen preventively, however. Once you really accept a conspiracy narrative, it’s too late.

26.

Skeptics’ Guide Entry: Witch Hunts

Section: Science and Pse...

See also: Conspiracy...

A witch hunt is a dedicated and unjust investigation or prosecution of a person or group in which the extreme and threatening nature of the alleged crimes is used to justify sus...

Highly conservative estimates of how many people were killed as witches between 1300 and 1700 in Europe range from fifty to sixty thousand. This is almost certainly an underestimate, however, with some estimates reaching the hundreds of thousands. The time frame is also a bit conservative, with witch hunting beginning before 1300 and ending after 1700.

In 1487 the book that would become the guide to hunting witches was published in Germany, the Malleus Maleficarum (Latin for “The Hammer of Witches,” Der Hexenhammer in German). The book was written by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, members of the Dominican order and inquisitors for the Catholic Church, and was intended to codify knowledge of witches and how to identify them.

A “witch hunt” as typified by the Malleus and the literal European witch hunts has six parts:

Accusation equals guilt.

Suspension of the normal rules of evidence.

Allowing spectral evidence.

Methods of investigation as bad as the punishment for conviction.

Encouraging accusations.

Accusations used as a weapon.

This seemingly absurd logic has been translated into modern discourse. In 1996 philosopher Douglas Walton wrote a paper in which he described ten features typical of a witch-hunt-style argument. He wrote:

(1) pressure of social forces, (2) stigmatization, (3) climate of fear, (4) resemblance to a fair trial, (5) use of simulated evidence, (6) simulated expert testimony, (7) nonfalsifiability characteristic of evidence, (8) reversal of polarity, (9) non-openness, and (10) use of the loaded question technique.

Most of those characteristics are self-explanatory or consistent with the Malleus Maleficarum. “Reversal of polarity” refers to the reversal of the burden of proof. In witch trials the accused has the burden of proving themselves innocent, rather than the accuser or prosecutor proving guilt. “Non-openness” refers to being open to the truth of the case. The judge in particular should enter a trial with an open mind, willing to be convinced by the evidence. In a witch trial, they may enter convinced of the guilt of the accused.

Modern Witch Hunts

Of course, it would be a mistake to think that such things don’t happen today. We’re perhaps just a bit more sophisticated at hiding them.

McCarthy used fear of communist infiltration into the US government and high society to organize congressional hearings that were little more than modern-day witch hunts. Accusations of being a communist, or even just a communist sympathizer, were used to defame and destroy many. They were then promised that the devastation to their lives would be minimized if they would just turn in their friends and colleagues. In this climate, accusation was as good as guilt.

In the 1980s came the satanic panic. This started as an accusation of ritual abuse in the McMartin preschool in Southern California. Despite the long investigation and trial that followed, no convictions were made. Dan and Fran Keller were not so lucky. They were convicted in 1991 of sexual assault based on the testimony of children who attended their daycare center. The accusation started when a three-year-old claimed that Dan Keller “pooped and peed on my head” and suggested sexual assault with a pen. Of course, all suspicions of child abuse need to be investigated, but just because the idea of such crimes is horrific doesn’t mean we can suspend the rules of evidence. In this and other cases, children were interviewed using dubious leading techniques. When their testimony started to get more and more bizarre—including animal sacrifice, murder, and satanic rituals—that should have called the testimony and the methods into question. Instead the prosecutors assumed that the daycare was the center of ongoing satanic rituals. The utter lack of physical evidence (it’s hard to sacrifice animals and murder people without leaving anything behind) should have also given them pause. Instead the Kellers were convicted and sentenced to forty-eight years in prison. They were released in 2013 after twenty-one years when a judge ruled that their conviction resulted from faulty testimony by an expert witness.

It gets worse. Many people have been sent to prison based on testimony given through facilitated communication (FC). This is the equivalent of spectral evidence, as FC is not a legitimate method, but it still has its true believers who think they can communicate with severely mentally disabled individuals by holding their hand and moving it over a letter board or equivalent. Studies have shown that the facilitator and not the client is doing the communicating. And yet FC testimony has been allowed in court.

It takes vigilance to consistently apply fair rules of evidence and logic to any accusation, no matter how upsetting.

Better kill them just to be sure.

27.

Skeptics’ Guide Entry: Placebo Effects

Section: Science and Pse...

See also: Nocebo...

Placebo effects refer to an apparent response to a treatment or intervention that is due to something other than a biologic...

What Are Placebo Effects?

The operational definition of a placebo effect is any positive health effect measured after an intervention that is something other than a physiological response to a biologically active treatment. (Negative effects from an inert treatment are called “nocebo” effects.)

Subjective outcomes like pain, fatigue, and an overall sense of well-being are subject to a host of psychological factors.

It has been clearly demonstrated that subjects who are being studied in a clinical trial objectively do get better. This is precisely because they are in a clinical trial—they’re paying closer attention to their overall health, likely taking better care of themselves due to the constant reminders concerning their health and habits provided by the study visits and the attention they are getting, being examined on a regular basis by a physician, and their overall compliance with treatment is higher than usual. Basically, subjects in a trial take better care of themselves and get more medical attention than people not in trials.