Below is a response I typed up to an email about conspiracy theories:
I have a problem with most so called "conspiracy theories" and their relatives, mostly because they all assign intentional causality to events i.e. they assume that events have been orchestrated and planned by some form of illuminati or lizard people. While I don't always dispute that events happen the way they do and that they are caused by people, I think that it is more likely that these events are emergent phenomena that occur due to the complex interactions of the people working within a specific system.
It's easy to say that Rupert Murdoch (owner of a huge chunk of international news and other media through his News Corp) has evil plans for the domination of world culture, but what is more likely the case is that he, like everyone else, believes that his way of thinking is best and so runs his business and makes investments based on his own personal ethos. Unfortunately, the knock on effect of this is that any decision he makes affects millions due to his position of power and influence. Some like to think that he sits behind the scene pulling the strings, but all he is doing is acting like many others do to create the world they would want to live in, with the difference being the scale of the stage he is acting upon.
Conspiracy theorists operate with the "hindsight is 20-20" rule. They essentially pick and choose pieces that make a great story. They are subject to confirmation bias, as are we all. Their brains essentially filter out non-relevant pieces of info and only take note of those things that support their central hypotheses e.g. "man didn't land on the moon". We all do this, but most of us don't focus on the perceived global domination by an elite few.
Depending on how you look at most situations, you can either imply some kind of intentional causation or you can view people as fallible and human (and thus subject to human desires and a human level of understanding), which is probably a more realistic view since no matter who you are, or who we are talking about in history, every person is subject to the same limitations that make us human. It doesn't matter whether you are Ghandi, Mother Theresa (another story all together), Bill Clinton or Emperor Constantine.
Anyway, that's a very, very rough and convoluted reason for why I tend to discount things like the templar myths and the like. Granted, I haven't read as much on the topic as I maybe should before dismissing it outright but I stuggle to pass up an opportunity to rant... :)
P.S. While it's true that you can't believe everything you read on Wiki, as you say, it is generally annotated with footnotes and its self-regulating nature actually generally leads to a more robust source of knowledge than any single person could create. If you look at the comparisons between Wiki and other encyclopaedias like Brittanica, etc. they actually have similar levels of factual errors, while Wiki has a greater depth of information that you could only gain by having someone that is truly passionate and knowledgeable on a subject write about it.
Are you familiar with the wisdom of the crowd? I think this phenomenon comes into effect in Wiki - another emergent property of the system if you will.
P.P.S. Check out a larger list of some of the cognitive biases that we employ in our minds every second of every day. These biases act as the lenses through which we view the world and every single one of us is subject to them (generally without our realising it). Essentially, our brains have limited processing power (we can process a lot, but there is a limit), and we are subjected to more stimuli in any one second than our brain can process, hence we have these mental shortcuts to help us get through the day by making the job of processing everything simpler. Some call them biases, others call them heuristics, but these are essentially rules of thumb that we employ subconsciously in order to process more information and stimuli more quickly.
They helped our ancestors survive by cutting out a lot of the hard work. For example, we have a predisposition (or bias) towards listening to a person in a position of authority. This is useful when you are on the plains of Africa and you spot those poisonous berries that your mother told you not to eat. Rather than test that hypothesis yourself, its a lot easier (and safer) to assume what your parents say is correct.
Another example: we are predisposed towards going with the crowd (known as the bandwagon effect). We assume that if many people say something is true, then it must be. This saves us the hard work of having to find out for ourself.
The point is that conspiracy theories generally come about as a result of our complex brains acting in a way they have evolved to act, but in this case, the outcome is a deviation from the truth rather than a closer representation of the actual truth.
Anyway, I am really rambling now :P
P.S. the image for this post comes from this Worth1000 entry
No comments:
Post a Comment