Quick Sketch: Conspiracy Tolerance

 I am still resolute in not following news stories because it is mostly an experience of addictive self aggravation. Just a well spring of dazzling editorial incompetence that succeeds, virtually ever time in activating me. That said, Taylor Swift is so overexposed that I passively managed to hear about the Kansas City mass shooting at the Superbowl parade but my apologies because I'm not going to go to news sources for more details.

I subsequent to my decision not to follow this or any other news story, I can't know if more than one person died, I know suspects were arrested, and I don't know the suspects motives.

Just, I was aware that there was a "they are coming for your football" conspiracy theory propagated because Taylor Swift doesn't like Donald Trump, she dates a guy on the Kansas City Chiefs, therefore if the Chiefs won the Super Bowl it was rigged. Then coincidently, the first ever mass shooting to take place at a Super Bowl victory parade happens at the Victory Parade for a team that was at the center of a conspiracy theory.

Tennis has this statistical category called "unforced errors" which measures how often a tennis player needlessly screws up on service or a return shot. Like so obviously double faulting because you are trying to serve an ace would be an unforced error, but also if you tried to chip the ball lightly just over the net because your opponent is on the baseline but the ball hits the top of the net without sufficient momentum to carry over and you cost yourself the point.

Conspiratorial thinking, I don't think is really costly in absolute terms, compared to the social costs of bad welfare design or bad tax policy. There are plenty of boring problems built into the ordinary operation of society that do much more damage and are harder to solve.

But conspiracy theories have gone from mostly harmless indulgence like the moon landing one, the net total of damages being that time Buzz Aldrin punched a conspiracy theorist in the face, to a problem that is probably creeping up on drink driving as a category of dangerously impaired judgement.

Conspiracy theorist death tolls are almost certainly going to be at their highest estimation regarding the recent global pandemic. It is going to be much more tolerable than drink driving though, because there's a degree of self selection to conspiracy theories surrounding a pandemic. The people who won't take the vaccine are at an increased risk of dying to those who do. An "own goal" conspiracy.

So, I think the social acceptability of being a conspiracy theory has become a massive problem. Not just a massive problem, but a massive symptom of broader social dysfunction facilitated by the internet and its sub-innovations like the attention economy and social media.

It makes me think about school. 

I think the problem and the solution starts in how we schooled people from the industrial revolution onwards. Schools functioned in some capacity as an information quality control filter. This meant that you could send a kid to school and rest assured that they would not learn how to not calculate the correct change for a 1 pound note from school. The curriculum in theory, was supposed to be vetted. 

The same things with books in Library's, all the information you could get from books in the library was designated as fiction or non-fiction, categorized by subject, the authors were known, the publishers were known, they had tables of contents, glossaries, bibliographies and end notes.

Our schooling was designed so a student with no critical thinking capacity could attend and passively absorb curated knowledge. 

It admittedly would be hard to set up an educational experience where students were protected from the fallacious argument from authority "because teacher said so". The basic structure of a class is that a teacher tells you what they are going to test you on, then they test you on it and you either pass or fail.

It was historically, a good enough system because teacher's rarely wrote the textbooks with the exercises from which they based their class plans, and the curriculum was set by a central body that probably had the dual goals of believing a society that contains a large number of educated people is intrinsically good and that a society that produces skilled workers can gain economic advantage.

For much of the 20th century, students in Australia learned useful social goods like how to read and write, that are pretty easy to just teach to passive students with no critical thinking skills because if they can't count their money they will go broke and if they were taught nonsense literacy they wouldn't be able to make sense of any signage or restaurant menus and their orders wouldn't make sense at a restaurant.

Furthermore, the hard sciences that deal with the physical world tend to be non-controversial. There are very few contentious issues surrounding whether things fall toward the earth or not or whether you put enough water molecules together wetness emerges as a property. Sure there's arguments in biology regarding monkeys and souls and shit but it's hard to sustain that traction when one side of the controversy just doesn't describe reality very well.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out the traditional function of school to teach controversial beliefs as though they were knowledge to passive uncritical students who needed to absorb those beliefs to pass tests. Beliefs about history and the Queen and special books written in part or wholly by the creator of the universe and who started a boarder dispute.

The fact that our schools operate as belief injectors for largely passive young minds mean that there is almost always some political contest happening over what beliefs get injected into passive young minds.

I contend that our extant education system does a number of disservices to society that are admittedly difficult trade offs for the amount of good primary and secondary education does.

The first is that school structures most people's lives for them for a very long time. The basic 13 years of grade school it has been pointed out is longer than many people serve in prison for killing someone. My own experience of education was that it took a farcical amount of time before I was given as a student any real electives. This was true even of my tertiary education. 

Structuring my life deprives me of the necessity to think about what I want to learn and why. To what end my learning is in service of. 

The second and more relevant one is that curation of the beliefs that are taught. Meaning even in a well functioning educational program where the powers that set the curriculum know to teach astronomy and not astrology, we are fed a diet of information that we don't have to think about that is going to make many people prone to absorbing beliefs assuming they are absorbing knowledge.

I would not bet on a friend being able to distinguish an argument from an assertion. Having recently watched Anatomy of a Fall, that is structured around a court case, I have to concede that the presence of lawyers in a court to point out to a jury that someone just presented speculation not proof is a necessary and value added occupation in our society, because I wouldn't trust a jury to notice for themselves.

That case can be fairly summerized as prosecution and defence continually claiming they knew what happened, and the adversaries having to then point out to judge and jury that nobody actually knows what happened.

Now, in times past, we could rely on the market to keep education somewhat honest. If you got a bunch of 12 year old's in your matchstick factory that couldn't count, they got fired because the market eventually figured out that Old Scrooge's Quality Fire Sticks couldn't be relied on to have 40 matches in a box. 

With the proliferation of bullshit jobs that don't need to exist, fake jobs that facilitate large portions of the public having an income with which they can consume and borrow against - the market can no longer be expected to weed out schools that teach their students garbage.

It can literally apparently take Liz Truss becoming the Prime Minister of a G7 economy to discover that the economic theory she believed to constitute knowledge of how an economy works, was garbage. Absolute burning dumpster fire of shit garbage.

Renteirs have proliferated into the 21st century, I defy anyone to work a job in a modern economy and not witness people who have and keep jobs they shouldn't have and shouldn't keep and possibly never needed to exist.

One of my old employers went through an amusing house cleaning project where upper management finally after 26 years discovered they had a useless middle manager and canned her, which caused them to finally discover after 28 years that she had been brought in by her manager who was also completely fucking useless and canned him. That is a mere two people, whose salaries generated no value for the operation of a business for a combined half century that could have sustained approximately 30 people on welfare for half a century. Instead, two people absorbed a half century of 30 welfare cheques between them.

In such an economy, one can easily survive without having to adapt critical thinking skills. The education system, combined with an inefficient market is ripe for the festering of conspiracy theorists.

If property investors, cannot literally explain to me why I should purchase their valuable services as a landlord. And I mean, I haven't come across a single property investor that doesn't literally call me an idiot for renting, which is purchasing the very service they provide. Right, they think of me with contempt for considering being their customer. Then of course people are going to overestimate their ability to believe true things and disbelieve false things.

However big people imagine imposter syndrome to be as a social problem, it mathematically has to be a smaller problem, because so many people are imposters impersonating someone who is worth what they are paid. 

Even 10% of a workforce being fundamentally useless, is an alarming number of useless people pulling a decent wage and being loaned 40 times that decency to make an investment they fundamentally don't understand. I'm labouring the point, I know, but this phenomena is proved in every recession when companies lay off a bunch of staff and continue to operate. Some of it is directly related to decreased demand meaning decreasing supply meaning less workers on less lines to assemble products that no longer sell. But some of it is sending desk workers with boxes containing family pictures and potted plants walking under security escort, because with decreased revenues the company finally is forced to admit that it wasn't necessary to employ a second marketing assistant.

That has likely been going on for quite some time, but it's a problem now because where people used to live in uncurated offline communities, people can now self-select into pretty much any online community they want.

There might be 180,000 flat earthers in the world. There were almost certainly less flat earthers when that potential population was distributed amongs 5~6 billion people, and Grant had to hang out in a pub where he was likely to have a 5th grade science teacher explain to him how if he goes to the beach he can just see ships sails or exhaust stacks appear on the horizon before he sees their hulls. Or demonstrate how a sphere casts a shadow on the moon in the way a disk can't so he can observe the Earth's shadow on the moon himself for the rest of his life.

We probably used to keep conspiracy theorist numbers down without anyone having to think about it because they couldn't form in-group silo echo chambers online, connecting each only guy in the village who thinks the earth is flat with each other guy in the village who thinks the earth is flat.

Except of course, we had churches everywhere.

This Kansas City shooting is another data point for me that fails to contradict Tim Snyder's argument that I have often quoted because it seems most relevant to the times:

We know, because this is something that people have theorized about since the Enlightenment, that in order for there to be a democracy there has to be something between you and me and our fellow citizens, something between you and me and our leaders, which is: a factual world. We have to have this thing called the public sphere where you and I and our fellow citizens and our leaders agree that there are certain realities out there, and that from those realities we draw our own conclusions, our own evaluative conclusions about what would be better or worse, but we agree that the world is out there. And that it's important for you and I, as citizens, to formulate projects, but it's also important in moments of difficulty for you and I, as citizens, to resist our leaders. Because if we're going to resist our leaders we have to say, "On the basis of this set of facts, this is the state of affairs; it's intolerable; therefore we resist." If there are no facts we can't resist, it becomes impossible.

Snyder's been a guest a number of times on Sam Harris' podcast, and Sam Harris was in that new atheist wave of names that began to target the problem posed by moderate religious types protecting extremist religious types.

The impotence of the argument "well those people take this book too seriously." 

The big social norm that needs must be introduced to combat the unnecessary costs of conspiracy theories, is that we can't extend to ourselves or others the right to believe what we want. To have beliefs unconstrained by reality. 

This is the problem faced by largely secular, progressive Isreali's living in Tel Aviv wanting a stop to illegal West Bank Settlers. They face a clear line in the sand where they could cross it and say "these people need to be stopped because Judaism is hooey, the messiah isn't coming, God doesn't make real estate promises etc." but compared to rejecting the premise that magic exists, on the other side of the line one is obliged to make the limp dick argument "Yes, I believe God does exist, and that the God I believe exists did send the prophet Moses to give us His laws and lead His chosen people to the Holy Land, and that he didn't incarnate as his own son to offer us a new covenant through the blood libel of his own divine sacrifice (Christianity isn't true) nor did He send Gabriel to visit an illeterate peasant in a cave and inspire him to speak the direct words of God (Islam isn't true) nor did he send angels to direct a former known conman to find gold plates and a seer stone to translate them in a hat (Mormonism isn't true) and only the original book is special and I know what that original book of the prophets of the God I pray to says in a lucid way is promised to His chosen people in terms of this land but those people who take those things it says seriously are just taking it too seriously."

Right wing conspiracy theorists, yes they have the guns and are really dangerous, but they cannot be resisted by left wing conspiracy theorists. 

More accurately, left wing conspiratorial thinking. Just to pick one example with a large target on it's back - how many female action movies have to bomb before the left entertains the notion that boys and girls are born and made, not simply made. 

Or the gender-equality paradox that currently sports two scholarly explanatory hypothesis: one being that gender stereotypes are somehow more pronounced in countries with greater gender equality (so Norway for example is more ridden with gender stereotypes than India and China) and the other being that as opportunities increase sex differences become more pronounced (so Indian and Chinese women are forced by circumstance to study STEM courses to secure reliable income and pay, whereas Norwegian women are relatively free to make a living from interior design consulting and not have to worry about how they would pay for future healthcare costs.)

One of those hypotheses strikes me as nonsense, in terms of it makes no sense, and one of those hypotheses strikes me as common sense plausible. How long does it need to take to invalidate one of these hypotheses? How hard is it to design the experiment to generate primary or predict secondary data (eg. looking at the choices of lottery winners in less-gender-equal nations).

The trouble being, that certain positions associated with the left, can only be held by taking sound epistemology off the table. If it's okay for Ibram X Kendi to infer that all racial inequity has to be attributed to systemic racism, then it has to also be okay for a team whose player is dating a celebrity who dislikes Trump winning the Super Bowl means the superbowl was rigged because jews. 

Neither of these methodologies are okay, and society is far too tolerant of people luxuriating in beliefs that simultaneously comfort them and inspire them to act by directing life changing violence toward strangers.