This Does Give One Pause

Unbelievable. Humans seem to have an innate tendency to want to believe in conspiracy theories. Couple that with a hatred of Bush, and viola--Bush knew about 9/11.

Seeing some of the beliefs of my fellow Americans in polls often leaves me very pessimistic.

From massive contact with a very wide range of the public over the years, I can assure you that baseless conspiracy theories have never been lacking in weight in any part of the electorate.

McKay's classic 19th century work (Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds) is still in print.

There's a fairly recent episode of South Park which suggested that roughly 1/4 of the general public are idiots. Perhaps its only slightly more refined to think that the 25% of the folks who are idiots varies with the issue. IOW, they're not the same idots on every issue, but on each issue, roughly 1/4 of the people has an idiotic view based on misinformation, lack of information, fear, passion, demagoguery, or what have you.

The SP episode fact concerned 9/11 conspiracy theories, BTW. But I'm entertaining the possibility that the 25% rule can be adapted to most issues at least for modeling purposes. Of course, we may find that the range actually varies quite a bit.

The main reason I am so very skeptical of conspiracy theories is because long experience has taught me that very few folks can actually keep a secret. So the more vast the conspiracy, the more exponentially unlikely I regard it. Suppose the probability of keeping something a secret starts at 1, and drops to 0.25 if you tell one other person. If you tell 2 other people, it drops to 0.25 squared. if you tell 3 people, it drops to 0.25 to the 3rd power, and so on.

My opinion of folks that believe in conspiracies is that they tend to be far too willing to attribute to malice that which can quite easily be accounted for by ignorance and stupidity. The fundamental attribution error (in psychology) says that it's basic human nature to attribute your own mistakes to circumstances but to attribute the mistakes of others to intent. For example, when I said that clumsy thing, I didn't mean to insult you, and I felt bad about it. But when you said that thing about it, it was a veiled intentional slight.

You know that line from the joking self-help book "Maybe He's just Not THAT into You?" That adapts and genera;izes. Other people just aren't paying as close attention to you as you are yourself. They are far too busy paying attention to THEMSELVES. They don't notice your haircut or your new shoes or that you shaved your beard, or that you've lost weight until it's like 20% of your body weight, etc, etc. So get over yourself.

In the end, it boils down to parsimony, for me. While its possible that a conspiracy could have existed, it's simply so much more likely that 9/11 happened due to our ignorance, ineptitude, laziness, and so on. After all, these are flaws we see every day, and are usually quite sufficient to explain bad things. Sadly to me, I feel like I am usually regarded as more of a cynic than a skeptic, but on this matter I think my view is optimistic. I think that malice and treachery are uncommon in the sense that most folks spend very little time hating and plotting and so on.

And, jeez, when it comes to President Bush, I think "exhibit A." I'll go with ineptitude over malice, in a heartbeat.

Folks seem to need for the world to make near-complete sense. They need to know WHY bad things happen, and assigning blame and intent is a big part of that. But thinking this way can make us into idiots, IMO.