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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mick West
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June 20 - December 14, 2019
A popular example of evidence used by promoters of the Chemtrail theory is photos of suspicious looking metal barrels on planes with tubing coming out of them. These are actually just photos of the interiors of test aircraft. The barrels contain water, used as ballast to simulate the weight of the passengers for flight testing. But if you don’t know this then these photos could easily look like evidence of some kind of spraying campaign.
Contrail Science,
If you think you can only help someone by beating them in every argument and making them look stupid, then I respectfully disagree.
First they say I’d never find any. Then they say if I did, all that means is someone was lying. Then they say that you’d have to be really stupid to stop being a Truther in the first place and since stupid people don’t become Truthers that would be impossible. This attitude was surprisingly common among the group. For a true believer, no true believer would ever change their beliefs; it was literally impossible. If you pointed out people who had changed their minds and spoken publicly about it, they denounce them as shills or “gatekeepers,” or say they never really believed in the first place.
That they are asking questions and not blindly accepting everything they are told is indeed something special. Try to convey this to them, but combine it with the need to also get things correct.
There’s also the possibility that a need for uniqueness can be satisfied by becoming an advocate for science and reason.
The thing that keeps me engaged is checking back and looking at comments. Seeing the kind of intellectual dishonesty that’s going on. I just want to try to show people that their thinking is flawed. Part of it is I’m a guy and guys tend to be warriors, and they want to show people that they’re right. It’s funny that there’s so few women that do this kind of thing. It’s always men kind of at war with each other.
the conspiracy mind, abhorring the inexplicable, rushes to fill the void with an explanation: a false flag, designed to take away our guns.
Review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects on radar and overeager [sonar operators] may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken.
Perhaps one small reason for the ease with which some people get sucked down the Flat Earth rabbit hole is the decline of popular astronomy because of light pollution.
Effective debunking isn’t about scoring points.
I have occasionally encountered people on the internet who are potentially mentally ill, and a few times in person. My general strategy when dealing with someone who I suspect is mentally ill is to briefly treat them as if they are not. Assume the best, and see what happens. But as soon it seems likely that they are in fact mentally ill then I will not continue to engage them about conspiracy theories. I am not a doctor, and I am not a psychiatrist. I’m a debunker, a fact-checker, and a communicator. I do not know how to cure illness, mental or physical. My attempts could quite possibly make
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The common concession in debates that “the truth is somewhere in the middle” is a fallacy. The world is not half flat, jet planes are not half spraying poison, the World Trade Center was not half demolished with explosives. But politics differs from these traditional conspiracy theories in that it’s an appeal to the center and not an appeal to an extreme.
1) Undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance. 2) Foment or exasperate divisive political fissures. 3) Erode trust between citizens and elected officials and their institutions. 4) Popularize Russian policy agendas within foreign populations. 5) Breed general distrust or confusion over information sources by blurring the lines between fact and fiction.
The high-level Russian strategy here is to diminish the strength of the US and NATO by making the US look bad in the eyes of its allies, and by creating dissent and distrust of authority within the US itself. One way of doing this is to spread conspiracy theories.
Zeynep Tufekci in her TED talk on the dystopian future of social media algorithms says: We are not programming anymore. We are growing [artificial] intelligence that we don’t truly understand.14
Google employs twenty-five thousand developers, who make significant changes to the code forty-five thousand times a day.15 Programmers don’t often write entire things from scratch any more—they write pure algorithms from time to time, but most of what programming is now is either working on small parts of a large program or gluing together existing libraries of code that other people wrote.
I wanted to write something about one of [Donald Trump]’s rallies, so I watched it a few times on YouTube. YouTube started recommending to me, and autoplaying to me, white supremacist videos, in increasing order of extremism. If I watched one, it served up one even more extreme.
Facebook attempted to use neutral third parties. For certain audiences this was doomed from the start. Fact checkers like Snopes, FactCheck, and PolitiFact are already considered suspect. Facebook teaming up with Snopes is unfortunately going to be a laughable concept for someone who thinks both organizations have been “debunked” as Illuminati tools.
One such company is AdVerif.ai, which is developing what it calls “FakeRank,” a way of automatically detecting what the Trust Project does manually—quantifying and measuring the reliability of an outlet or an individual story.27
5. Cook, John; & Lewandowsky, Stephan. The Debunking Handbook. Skepticalscience.com, 22 Jan. 2012, https://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/Debunking_Handbook.pdf. Accessed 1 Feb. 2018.
WIRED. “Google Is 2 Billion Lines of Code—And It’s All in One Place.” WIRED, 16 Sept. 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/09/google-2-billion-lines-codeand-one-place/. Accessed 4 Apr. 2018.
