Conspiracy theories and their cognitive basis

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

Understanding our minds: Fear as an example of cognitive biases at play

In my last post, I made mention of how some people's lives are ruled by fear. I briefly talked about how their (and everyone elses') choices are made without rationally weighing up the reality of the situation. Obviously, I am not advocating that humans should aspire to being purely rational beings, as in doing so, we would likely lose some of what makes us human. However, what I am saying is that we need to be aware of how often we distort the truth, especially when confronted with fearful situations.

In stressful or fearful situations, we are more likely to throw reason out the window and react with our gut feelings. Put another way, we are more likely to fall back on in-built biases (a.k.a. heuristics) in our psyche as they are so innate to who we are. Examples of this might be taking the advice of a person in a perceived position of power over the advice of someone else, or using the crowd's actions as an indication for what we should be doing (see herd instinct).

When a crisis hits, whether real or imagined (see moral panics), we are more likely to fall back on these "rules of thumb". These rules, or heuristics, are some of the first we learn, and to some extent, have probably been ingrained in us through evolutionary processes, as they serve to protect us in a dangerous world where we have limited information. For example, in a situation in the past, if I saw a crowd of people (say, my tribe), running in the opposite direction to myself, I could take this as a pretty clear indication that I did not want to find out what they were runninng away from. You wouldn't even need to think twice to make the decision to turn around and run away with them. Situations of this nature, repeated over millenia, likely helped remove those brave souls who steadfastly continued on their path towards danger rather than joining the group and running away (today we give these folks Darwin Awards). Perhaps this gives us an indication as to how our sheep-like tendencies formed?

Similarly, we have been taught since birth to accept the advice or do what we are told when instruction comes from a "higher authority". Most of us wouldn't be here today if we hadn't listened to our parents and teachers when they told us not to eat that bright purple rat poison (okay, an extreme example), or look both ways before crossing the road. At the most simple and earliest stages of our lives, we rely upon our parents absolutely, and this teaches us to listen to authority. I am not pointing this out in an anarchist sense (i.e. we need to rebel) or in a conspiracy theory-sense (i.e. we are all being mind controlled). That's just the way it is, and it is a basic rule of thumb that we carry with us throughout our lives, and is generally employed at a sub-conscious level.

Anyway, the point of this is that people are more likely to throw reason out the window when confronted with fearful or stressful situations, and there is a very real explanation for this from evolutionary psychology and cognitive perspectives (see cognitive psychology and computational theory of mind).

Daniel Gardner has written a book about this subject (I haven't read it though), called The Science of Fear (there's no Wiki on the book unfortunately). Here's the marketing blurb on the book:

"From terror attacks to the war on terror, real estate bubbles to the price of oil, sexual predators to poisoned food from China, our list of fears is ever-growing. And yet, we are the safest and healthiest humans in history. Irrational fear seems to be taking over, often with tragic results. For example, in the months after 9/11, when people decided to drive instead of fly -- believing they were avoiding risk -- road deaths rose by more than 1,500.In this fascinating, lucid, and thoroughly entertaining examination of how humans process risk, journalist Dan Gardner had the exclusive cooperation of Paul Slovic, the world renowned risk-science pioneer, as he reveals how our hunter gatherer brains struggle to make sense of a world utterly unlike the one that made them. Filled with illuminating real world examples, interviews with experts, and fast-paced, lean storytelling, The Science of Fear shows why it is truer than ever that the worst thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Here's an extract from one of the Amazon reviews, which captures much of what I am saying or touched on in the previous post:

"Gardner is eager to have us understand how these Systems work. He contends that we are carrying a reaction system founded on our ancestors' time on the African savannah. Our brains haven't adapted to the fast-paced, high technology world around us. We are reacting almost entirely with The Gut, and we are making serious mistakes as a result. Are we truly under threat from the things we claim to fear? He cites numerous cases, from the fear of "man-made" chemicals through the spectre of cancer to the possibility of our children being assaulted by strangers. Each of the topics is introduced with our given views - usually captured by polls, then carefully assessed by examining the real odds. In every case, the important things to consider almost certainly haven't been. The breast cancer campaigns have uniformly overlooked the role of age in determining the likelihood of its occurrence. 

The calculations leave little doubt that we are far too often looking at threats with little consideration of their true nature. Why are we reacting so readily with The Gut instead of with The Head? In no small part, Gardner argues, media, politicians and industry play a significant part. Media, anxious to sell its products, emphasizes the violent, the extreme and the bizarre. The result, of course, is that's what captures our attention. The bombardment of such stories, often unthinkingly repeated by politicians, is a reinforcement of The Gut's reaction to this kind of information. Never seeing a rational analysis of such news, we lose any sense of proportion about what is truly important. We rarely find the opportunity to consider an issue rationally before the next one is upon us."

I would imagine that Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine would be along similar lines, whether she realises it or not - hopefully she does :)

Cognitive biases, religious certainty and interpretations of life

A friend sent through a list of 12 questions that had been sent to him by a "religious girl" in his office. I think the questions are designed to lead a non-believer on a logical progression that ends with the reader having to accept the religious person's argument. I saw these questions and I couldn't help but respond, if only because I have never fully articulated my own views before. So here they are, but first the original questions (pasted verbatim):

1. "Do you recognizes evil? And how would you give it characteristics or identify it?"
2. "Do you recognizes good? And how would you give it characteristics or identify it? "
3. "What is the thing most feared in the world?"
4. "Is fear a good or a bad thing?"
5. "What is holding all your phisical sells, everthing in your boday together? And how?"
6. "What is solid truth to you?"
7. "Is truth and facts the same thing? Explain why answer. And how is facts identified, based on what is it called an fact?"
8. "Why do you think is reseach of life itself so significant or important?"
9. "Why should good questions be asked in life?"
10. "What makes a begining and an end in everything (like books, movies, earth, songs, life) so significant to all humans?"
11. "Where does universal laws come from? And would you consider it needed and why?"
12. "If you could help someone today in pain, and only you have the cure to help them and give them life. Would you help them?"

-----------------------

"First off, these questions have been asked by humanity for ages so this email won't give answers, nor will it convince someone who believes differently, so I am not going to get into a pointless debate. However, it is kinda fun to answer them with your own views and hopefully it will help show someone that there are many different points of views out there...

Hyperlinks are underlined and in blue. If the person who has asked these questions is truly sincere about wanting to know the answers, then they should read these links. Considering how complicated the questions are that have been asked, one can't expect to answer them in a few lines. Even this email, along with these links, only begins to scratch the surface of what is being asked.

Also, I hope we get to hear the answers to these questions from the perspective of a religious person. It wouldn't be fair to have a one-way conversation :) [I'll post their replies if I get them]

1. "Do you recognizes evil? And how would you give it characteristics or identify it"

No, I don't recognise evil. There is no good or bad. Trying to simplify life into black and white, good or bad, right or wrong is misleading. By doing so, you over-simplify reality and set yourself up for misunderstandings with others. The concept of evil also implies some kind of intelligence behind it, as if there is a person pulling the strings, making others do evil things. This really isn't the case - there is no "evil intent" behind life. There are just evil interpretations of life, which often say more about the person making the interpretation than life itself.

Life is a grey area full of probabilities and tendencies, but very little is certain. Concepts like right and wrong are intellectually immature. They may have worked for our ancestors in the jungles or on the plains of Africa when just beginning to rise above the level of the other monkeys around them, but by clinging to such out-moded concepts we are making humanity worse off. It is these dogmatic, stubborn beliefs in an absolute right or wrong that cause most of the conflict in the world today. For example, both radical Islam and Christianity believe they are privy to absolute truth, and obviously, both can't be correct. However, both believe it is correct because they base their belief on subjective evidence i.e. their beliefs are not based on phenomenon that can be repeated or that can be used to predict futures events. 

As an example, I can create fire, so I know that it exists (as much as we can know anything anyway). If my friends tell me about fire, I also know it exists but mainly because I can recreate it for myself. Similarly, I know that if I raise the temperature of water, it will begin to boil. In this way, I can consistently predict the outcome of the same action every time i.e. heating pure water to a high enough temperature will always cause it to boil, and there is no subjective interpretation or justification required.

Evil is a subjective thing and depends on your position. What you consider evil, another society may think of as just and moral. You can argue your case, but they can argue their's as well. For the record, I think many of the things advocated by the bible are evil e.g. not being able to be around a woman while she is having her period, stoning people to death, killing entire races for having different beliefs to the Christians/Jews, etc. These could all be considered evil.

My rule of thumb: if it does not hurt you or another and if the act is consensual, then it can't be evil.

Examples of this: 

1. Recreational drug-taking. Drugs like marijuana, LSD and ecstasy have very little impact on the body and are not addictive. When used in moderation (like coffee, alcohol or cigarettes), they are enjoyable and can be beneficial to the user e.g. by relaxing them, making them more social, by making them more creative, etc. 

2. Homosexuality. No one should have any right to dictate what two people do in the privacy of their own home. If people didn't stick their noses in other people's business and tell them how to run their lives, they wouldn't even know that some people are homosexual. It is a private matter that is of no concern to others. It is only because they have been attacked by religious groups that homosexuals feel the need to group together, protest and to proudly show that they are gay - that they are not ashamed of who they are and that they will not be beaten into submission, whether physically or morally. We would all do the same.

2. "Do you recognizes good? And how would you give it characteristics or identify it?"

To me, goodness requires two things:

1. Empathy. Being able to empathise with someone else i.e being able to walk in their shoes and understand their situation 

2. Caring about another's well-being without being obliged to do so

Obviously it's not as simple as this though. Being able to empathise with another might mean being able to understand where they are coming from i.e. their background, up-bringing, social environment, and this may mean accepting their acts even if you find them immoral. Such acceptance requires strong character, insight and wisdom. However, we can explain morality in evolutionary terms, so again, the black and white distinction of good vs. evil is a gross over-simplification.

Steven Pinker has a great article on morality over at The New York Times (requires free registration). If that link doesn't work, try this one - link.
 
3. "What is the thing most feared in the world?"

Ignorance. People's actions are generally misguided because they don't understand the underlying mechanisms affecting and influencing their actions and decisions. If we better understood how we make decisions and how we are influenced by the crowd, we could make more informed decisions that benefit all those around us.

A few good areas to start with are:

• Cognitive biases 
• Computational theory of mind 
• Group think, group behaviour, herd behaviour, crowd psychology, mob rule, etc. 
• Game theory 
• Reconstructive memory 
• Emotion

4. "Is fear a good or a bad thing?"

Fear can be a healthy driver of competition and innovation. It can be the thing that prevents us from stagnating and keeps us moving forward. It is a good thing as long as you do not let it rule your life. In order to prevent this from happening, you need to put it into perspective. You need to understand the cognitive biases at play in your own mind (see above). Doing so will allow you to look at things from a more balanced perspective. By better understanding the real-wolrd probabilities of supposedly fearful events you can put them into perspective. Understanding how our own minds fool us also helps. If we give into fear, moral panics result, where things are blown out of proportion and even more fear is created. 
 
I would say that religious people live in a constant state of fear (fear for themselves and their own moral short-comings, fear for their family and friends and fear for the world), which blinds them. It gives them tunnel vision and only serves to further reinforce their fears, turning them into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

5. What is holding all your phisical sells, everthing in your boday together? And how?
 
First of all, for the record, saying somthing like "God holds us together" isn't an argument. That excuse can be used for any area where we don't know the answers and it has been used throughout history. So far, we have worked the following out though: our bodies are held together by forces of attraction between atomic particles. We are currently physically restricted in how deep we can look into the atomic particles (i.e. we don't have the tools), but this month, physicists in Europe are starting up a machine called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that they will use to look into this very question in more detail that we have ever been able to do so before. This is truly fascinating stuff as they are on the forefront of modern science. It's like watching a sci-fi movie. The following article does a wonderful job of summarising what we know about particle physics (i.e. the stuff that the universe is made of) at the moment and what the importance of the LHC is. I highly recommend you read it, if just because it illustrates the amazing beauty and elegance of the universe we seek to understand: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11837478
 
Saying that God is doing it, is the same answer that people have given throughout the centuries. Other examples of where people have falsely invoked God: "the world is flat and God is holding it up"; "heaven is shining through the pin-pricks in the night sky and that is what we call stars"; "the universe revolves around the earth because we are chosen by God"; "God strikes those down that he does not favour (i.e. disease - turns out that its actually germs and viruses)"; etc. etc. etc. Whenever we don't know the answer, we invoke God. However, it usually turns out that we can explain it ourselves with a little bit of effort and those that do are initially branded as heretics and crazy people, and we persecute and/or kill them. So, whenever there is a gap in our knowledge, we use God as an excuse not to ask questions. See God of the gaps.

6. "What is solid truth to you?"
 
I don't believe in solid truth. Only subjective truth. Recognising this and recognising others' truths goes a long way to creating better understanding. I don't know if we will ever understand objective truth. At least, we humans can't in our current form as we are only able to perceive in 3 dimensions - a very, very basic restriction on all our interpretations. However, I will use a certain set of rules in order to minimise the guess-work, and those are the basic rules of argument and rationality, which rely on solid, falsifiable evidence, because to rely on a single person's interpretation, knowing the short-comings of the human mind (again, see cognitive biases), is asking to be mislead.

7. "Is truth and facts the same thing? Explain why answer. And how is facts identified, based on what is it called an fact?"
 
They aren't the same thing. Facts can be used to intepret truth, but the actual interpretation is subjective. Defining a fact is a bit more difficult. I would loosely define a fact (and in the process, open myself to many challenges) as something whose interpretation is unambiguous i.e. it cannot be interpreted in multiple ways. This is a very difficult criterion to live up to since most things can have multiple interpretations. Example of a fact: my birth date is the 28th December based on the current Western calendar - my birth certificate says so. Example of a pseudo-fact: Moses parted the Red Sea - there are many people who believe this, but there is no contemporary or archaeological evidence to support it.
 
Its a murky area. I would say that it is very difficult to nail down a true fact, but, by increasing the number of pieces of evidence in support of the "fact", we can dramatically increase the probability of it being true.
 
Also, remember Carl Sagan's statement: "Extra-ordinary claims require extra-ordinary evidence", which translates as, the bolder, more outrageous your claim, the more evidence you need to support it.

8. "Why do you think is reseach of life itself so significant or important?"
 
I want to live a good, comfortable and happy life and this requires that all those around me are happy too for I am only happy if others are happy, otherwise life would be pretty lonely. I research and ask questions in order to improve my understanding of this goal, and if this goal is not achievable, well then at the very least, I will come to terms with this through my understanding. For, to not ask questions is to live based on what others dictate. Not asking questions makes you a machine, a robot, a sheep. You are simply riding the waves of reality without understanding what you are doing and you cannot truly have free will if you do not have an understanding of the implications behind your actions. Instead, you simply react to what life and other people throw your way.

9. "Why should good questions be asked in life?"
 
See above. Just to add that there are no bad questions and all options should be (at least momentarily) entertained.
 
10. "What makes a begining and an end in everything (like books, movies, earth, songs, life) so significant to all humans?"
 
Like I said, we can only think/conceptualise in three dimensions (up/down, left/right and back/forward). All our mental images and concepts are constrained by this. There is a fourth dimension that we experience and that is time. We are trapped in the dimension of time which only moves in one direction so we perceive things to have a beginning and an end. However, we know that there are more dimensions than this. I am not talking weird mumbo-jumbo here. This is pretty well-supported theory.
 
An inherent "design" (I use this word loosely) limitation of us humans is the need for causality and I think this is related to our inability to think outside the dimension of time. We think linearly (in a straight line) i.e. we assume that everything has a beginning and an end, and that everything must have a cause. If you were to read more on the subject you would realise that one of the greatest philosophical problems we humans face is the problem of causality. The problem of causality states that we cannot say for sure that A caused B. Often it is just as likely that B caused A. For example:
 
"I eat a lot, therefore, I am fat" - our first instinct in this case is to assume that I am fat because of my over-eating habits, but just as likely a scenario is "I am fat, therefore, I eat a lot". Its a slightly clumsy example, but, maybe I have a hormonal imbalance that prevents my brain from knowing when it has had enough to eat or maybe my metabolism is twice as slow as a normal person's. In this case, eating a lot isn't the cause of me being fat at all. My body is naturally more prone to storing fat, which depresses me and makes me eat more. The point is that modern media implies causality in every headline, news report, TV show, etc. when most situations can easily be flipped around (although we never do this). Western society in particular thinks linearly while Eastern philosophies are far more open to the circularity of life (just think of the ying-yang symbol).
 
My personal thoughts: there is no beginning, middle or end. There is only an infinite regress and I don't know why that is yet, but if I did then that would imply causality :P
 
David Hume is one of the greatest philosophers of Western thinking. He first articulated the Problem of Causality in the 1700s. Another philosophical issue that he came up with was the Problem of Induction, which says that we can only base what we know on what we know. We cannot imagine those things that we do not know about, because, obviously, we do not know about them (you probably need to read those last two lines again). 
 
This means that we will always be surprised and that we will always base our beliefs on the limited world around us. I prefer to live in the world of the unknowable. I know that I don't know much and I am happy with this. I don't try to create an explanation for everything. Instead, I add it to the list of things to figure out as I go along. I don't create an excuse like "God did it". I am just very grateful that others out there are also trying to answer questions about areas that they don't know everything about, because I sure don't have time to look into it myself. Those guys are called scientists and they push humanity forward.

Here's a few great quotes relating to living with the unknown and the search for knowledge:

• "Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned" ~ Unknown
• "[S]cience is the best defense against believing what we want to" ~ Ian Stewart
• "Fanatics are cock-sure and the wise are full of doubt" - Bertrand Russell
• "But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me" ~ Richard Feynman
• "I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them" ~ Galileo Galilei

Here are a few examples of multi-dimensionality:

• A hypercube. A hypercube is a conceptual shape. In the same way that a square is a 2D representation of a line, and a cube is a 3D representation of a 2D square, a hypercube is a 4D representation of a 3D cube. I can't tell you what it actually looks like because, again, we are limited to perceiving it in 3 dimensions. But, I can tell you that it exists, at least conceptually. While our senses may fail us in this regard, our mind still provides us with a powerful tool in conceptualising these things

• Visualising the 4th dimension. The website, Slashdot (one of my favourite), has a link to videos showing you how to visualise the 4th dimension. Here's their intro to the link: 
"Think it's impossible to see four-dimensional objects? These videos will show you otherwise. Some mathematicians work with four-dimensional objects all the time, and they've developed some clever tricks to get a feeling for what they're like. The techniques begin by imagining how two-dimensional creatures, like those in Edwin Abbot's 'Flatland,' could get a feeling for three-dimensional objects. When those techniques are transferred up a dimension, the results are gorgeous."

• String theory. String theory is a mathematical theory of the physical world. It is not considered the only theory, but many consider it the best theory that we have at the moment for describing reality. It assumes that there are actually 11 dimensions of perception

11. "Where does universal laws come from? And would you consider it needed and why?"
 
Again with the inferring causality. I don't know where the universal laws "came from". I don't know how they were set up, but why say that God made them? Why not just say that they were created by the Big Bang, which they were. Some just add the extra, needless step and say that God did it all.

12. "If you could help someone today in pain, and only you have the cure to help them and give them life. Would you help them?"
 
Undoubtedly, but I would first delve deep into myself and ask whether they wanted the cure and whether the cure was really right for their situation. I would also look into my definition of "pain" and ask myself whether I am projecting my beliefs and peceptions onto this person. And, I would never presume to impose my "cure" onto someone else against their wishes.
 
I assume you are referring to Christianity as the cure here and by life you mean "everlasting life". This brings to mind another quote: "Without God, life is everything." 

And a few more quotes for good measure:

• "The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also" ~ Mark Twain
• "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours" ~ Stephen Roberts
• "Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one" ~ Richard Dawkins
• "Mythology is often thought of as other people's religions, and religion can be defined as mis-interpreted mythology" ~ Joseph Campbell