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Paper On Conspiratorial Thinking Invokes Conspiratorial Thinking
Layzej writes "Last summer a paper investigating the link between conspiratorial thinking and the rejection of climate science provoked a response on blogs skeptical of the scientific consensus that appeared to illustrate the very cognitive processes at the center of the research. This generated data for a new paper titled 'Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation (PDF).' The researchers reviewed the reactions for evidence of conspiratorial thinking, including the presumption of nefarious intent, perception of persecution, the tendency to detect meaning in random events, and the ability to interpret contrary evidence as evidence that the conspiracy is even greater in scope that was originally believed. Some of the hypotheses promoted to dismiss the findings of the original paper ultimately grew in scope to include actors beyond the authors, such as university executives, a media organization, and the Australian government. It is not clear whether the response to this paper will itself provide data for further research, or how far down this recursion could progress. I fear the answer may be 'all the way.'"
all the way down.
The turtles are behind it all in the end.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I herd you like conspiration theories
Real life is overrated.
"from the elvis-lives-on-the-moon-with-hitler dept." - from the strapline of the title...
I was convinced beyond all doubt that Elvis was living with Diana in a guest house in Blackpool, but then again, I am a Brit, so I would think that...
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
In 3... 2... 1...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
It took them less than a month to put a paper out. I'm in the wrong field. I could have graduated in half a year.
You wouldn't take people's freely written statements as being evidence of what they think?
Evidence does not have to be perfect to make an objective study. The brain may be an inaccessable black box as far as psychology is concerned, but if there are identifiable patterns in its output, you can still work from that.
Are we to presume, then, from the analytical model in TFA that the LIBOR affair, Watergate, and the 1919 Black Sox scandal are all just paranoid hysteria?
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
People believe in conspiracies because they don't have anyone in authority they can trust. It doesn't help when authority lies to them about virtually everything.
"Cheese Makes you Fat!"
"Shows what you know! I'm in the CHEESEMAKING PARTY! Cheese will just give me a healthy glow!"
"I'm sorry Mr Ridebacher, you have lung cancer"
"No, that's unacceptable. You're interfering with my rights! Tell you what, why don't we compromise and say that I have a bad cold?"
Isn't it obvious? The researchers paid dozens of bloggers to come up with these conspiracy theories. The blogs were used as evidence to support the hypotheses in the follow-up paper, which will earn the researchers enough cash to pay more bloggers. And so on.
It's kinda like the way McAfee and Symantec have secret programmers who strategically release new viruses when business is slow.
MEMBER OF THE ROYAL FAMILY, KING RICHARD III, FOUND MURDERED IN PARKING LOT, POLICE DECLINE TO INVESTIGATE!! CONSPIRACY??!! - Leave out one key piece of information and it takes on a life of it's own, but there is nothing untrue about the above. Conspiracies seem to live on the interpretation that those who believe them have a better understanding of the issue at hand than those in charge, or that they have all the relevant information, when they don't.
The paper was put forward in a slanted way. The report apparently concluded that: "those who subscribed to one or more conspiracy theories or who strongly supported a free market economy were more likely to reject the findings from climate science as well as other sciences."
What it the report SHOULD have concluded is: "those who subscribed to one or more conspiracy theories or who strongly supported a free market economy were more likely to reject the findings from science" which is exactly as valid, is a far more neutral observation, and does not single out a specific group.
By including the "climate science" as a specific category the researchers make themselves suspect and people may (perhaps not entirely without cause) assume that this report was not unbiased and perhaps targeting "climate sceptists" rather than being an honest report on the behaviour of conspiracists in general. And of course this fuels a discussion. The authors could have known this and probably did. Therefore the article's title should be renamed to: "Those who play at bowls, must look out for rubs".
Flamebait "study" provokes flames. News at eleven. I'm waiting for the next study showing the correlation climate alarmism and being a poo-poo head.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
The very mention of thumb awareness makes you immediately more aware of your thumbs. That is unless you don't have any in which case you are increasingly aware of that fact.
How does it not? It references posts people made on blogs whilst sat at home scratching their balls. Where is the pressure being put on them to write something not true to themselves in that situation?
Not true, they explicitly state that they are not investigating the validity or not of any of the criticisms of the first paper. They are measuring psychological indicators of conspiracy thinking. Even the most out there obsessed conspirac theorist could be right, and this paper doesn't deny that.
Wow someone writes a paper on conspiracy theory and targets it slap bang at climate sceptics and then complains when they cry fowl! It's like calling someone paranoid when people really are out to get them!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
It's not a question of what they set out to measure. It was the methodology they used to measure it that was flawed.
The sixties would be a late time to come with that prediction/accusation. Keep America Beautiful, arguably the first corporate environmental front group, was founded in order to preempt and oppose laws restricting disposable products - in 1953.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Yes the politics comes in when people with different outlooks or values, try to decide what to agree to do.
Say your dog keeps relieving itself in my garden. Should I spend the money to improve the fence, or should you keep the dog under control?
Now take that simple example and multiple the complexity up to, if the climate shifts, and rain belts move, glaciers feeding rivers retreat, some forested areas increase, some storms reduce, some farmland becomes too cold, some warms up for better crops, etc. etc. how do you decide who is responsible and who should pay to act?
Some people say, it doesn't matter if China is emitting more CO2 than anyone else, it is the moral responsibility of the West to set the good example. Or even Germany, people say Germany should do the right thing, even if it'll make a negligible impact. And that is also weighed up against all the other problems, like disease in Africa, and so on. There's a value judgement that doing something about the climate is more important. Or not. Depends on you.
of course you're right, environmentalists aren't really interested in keeping the land, water, sea and air free of poisonous substances, its all just a big power play. (nice trolling)
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
If you make a habit of reading polls on a a variety of political and social issues, you'll learn a lot about Americans and specifically you might come to the conclusion that about 25-35% of Americans are basically so disconnected from scientific and social reality they're functionally insane and their opinion should ALWAYS and AUTOMATICALLY be classified as "non-truth related".
For instance, and famously, about 46% of Americans don't believe in evolution
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/americans-believe-in-creationism_n_1571127.html
But also 10% think that prosecutors who send innocent people to jail should not be prosecuted:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-texas-exoneree-testifies-20130204,0,3950542.story?page=2
25% think Obama is not an American citizen:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20056061-503544.html
30%^ think God decides the outcome of sporting events: http://rt.com/usa/news/super-bowl-result-god-337/
And on and on and on. Watching polls what you'll discover is about 10% of Americans are just outright fascists who wouldn't hesitate to do whatever any right wing authority told them to do, and think it should have been started yesterday. This is also the finding of Bob Altemeyer in his seminal work on authoritarianism :
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/.
right.
About 25-30% believe that events on Earth are assiduously overseen by an all knowing God who "sees them when they're sleeping / and knows if they're awake / and knows if they've been bad of good..." and what happens in everything from their personal life to world events is really of no consequence except to the extent that it is a reflection of an eternal, ongoing battle between good and evil being fought on an unseen cosmic plane. This is something they have this is common with every Muslim extremist who ever strapped a suicide bomb onto himself.
Americans have a deficit of rationality, a deep and persistent belief that something other than outcome based, welfare of humans is the proper measure of human morality, are scientifically illiterate and constitutionally incapable of perceiving in their thinking just the kinds of bugs that the referenced article details.
There's not enough time to reform the American character before we have to take radical and decisive action on global warming. The fact is, democracy stops where science begins. This isn't going to lead to anything good.
The least divisive, least disrupting course of action is for the government to internally and secretly set up an Executive Action team within one the intelligence agencies whose purpose is to discredit, attack and dismantle and neutralize the leaders of the denier terrorist movement. We all know who they are. These *thought leaders* need to be attacked the same way we'd attack any group of terrorists building a bomb named which would have the same long term destructive power as global warming. Denialism is a bomb with the capacity to permanently destroy civilization and the people assembling that bomb are not working in secret. They need to be neutralized and their sources of funding and societal legitimacy attacked through and and all means necessary. They have forfeited their civil rights and constitutional protections. We simply need to deal with them like the world destroying terrorists they are.
You can come to this conclusion now when there's still time to do something about global warming or you can come to this conclusion later, when there's no possibility of doing anything about it and the starvation, the concomitant societal breakdown and mass, uncontrolled immigration, the tidal wave of anti-Western (Big Oil / Big Coal ) terrorism and collapsing centralized governments take not just the denier's civil liberties and Con
It seems all sides are conspirators, and conspiracy crackpots, depending on how you interpret them. So it goes nowhere fast.
Any time two people get together to bone a third person it is a conspiracy. The only overarching conspiracy of which I am aware is the conspiracy to deprecate the word conspiracy, and you're assisting with it.
An environmentalist told me, it doesn't matter if CO2 isn't a problem, because by forcing people to reduce emissions, you force them to reduce production and consumption â"â"and then with a thoughtful pause she added, "It is about reducing greed." And I see that kind of view a lot, just like the free enterprise competitive types like Burt Rutan says the data doesn't add up and it is verging on fraud.
It is about reducing greed. Where do the emissions come from? Making stuff. How much of that stuff do we need? HTH, HAND.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Say your dog keeps relieving itself in my garden. Should I spend the money to improve the fence, or should you keep the dog under control?
False dichotomy: You're assuming it's the neighbor's dog, and not the neighbor.
One thing that many who believe that climate change is a "scam" or a "conspiracy" have in common is a political outlook that says that lefties, socialists, hippies, greenies etc. are just plain WRONG about everything, that their entire world view is basically incorrect.
So it really is hard for them to accept that the lefties and the greenies might be RIGHT about something - which seems to lead to ever more bizarre denials.
The corollary of this is that people with this kind of viewpoint tend to believe that climate change is a stalking horse of the left, to de-industrialise the economy, to promote their "business-hating" ideals, etc.
In Soviet Russia, all our base are belong to YOU!
Every time somebody tells me that, I have to give myself a time out in the bunker until I calm down.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Conspiratorial Thinking is clear example of the Dunning Kruger effect at work.
They overestimate their own intelligence or skill, and ignore contrary feedback. They disavow the intelligence or skill of others. These people are simply too stupid to invalidate their own hypothesis and recognise the validity of the alternative.
Real environmentalists are interested in the keeping things clean. Politicians, corporations and those so vocal in the news, blogs etc are not the same thing as real environmentalists. The sooner you learn the difference between those that use a cause for personal gain and the cause itself the better off you will be.
That is indeed the way it should be. The problem is that the free marketeers won't honestly discuss this choice. Instead they deny the science.
Politics comes into picture when deciding what to do.
Unfortunately, many politicians and other organisations that have a vested interest in certain choices on what to do, have found that when hard science is involved, the easiest option to affect which choices are made is to attack the actual number producing science and scientists in the eyes of the public (i.e. a typical Straw Man strategy) using the techniques of propaganda.
This works because the vast majority of people simply don't have the mental discipline necessary to build an sytematical image of the world, which would filter out this kind of noise - they work through heuristics (i.e. gut feeling), shared memes and are prone to have a belief reinforced by hearing others repeat the same belief (i.e. groupthink). In fact, this same process is often displayed here in /.
It's not exactly a difficult thing to ascertain in a market economy. You simply include the environmental cost of manufacture and a lifetime of usage into the monetary price of the product. Then people choose which things they still need based on a true cost.
I'm utterly confused by the premise here.
Conspiracies are very often extremely real and extremely provable. HSBC was just found guilty at the highest levels of management of laundering money for Mexican drug cartels. LIBOR manipulation involved dozens of banks and hundreds of people and was the largest financial market manipulation in history. During the mortgage crisis we had robosigning and MERS which intentionally broke the chain of ownership (and the law) in the interest of securitization. We also had dozens of investment banks bundling worthless mortgages and assigning positive valuations to them. Bernie Madoff and his partners conspired to rip off countless pension funds and communities. Etc. Etc. Etc. These are all conspiracies involving billions of dollars and hundreds if not thousands of people. That's just the last 4 years. And those are the provable conspiracies.
And then there are the conspiracies we know to be true, but cannot prove: Julian Assange for example, who announced he had an upcoming Wikileak regarding the banking system, and the next thing you know he's wanted on rape charges for consensual sex but supposedly with an aconsensual lack of a condom. A crime supposedly so serious that apparently world governments are willing to abandon 500 years of international law and invade sovereign embassies. Is disbelieving the premise "Conspiratorial thinking" or just "not being an idiot"?
Or let's take an easier one: Jon Corzine and his firm looted private accounts and absconded with over $1 billion dollars. The money was transferred somewhere. But no one knows where. It's a magical mystery of the disappearing $1 Billion. If you believe that are you resisting "conspiratorial thinking", or are you the biggest idiot on Earth? Let's see -- JP Morgan underwrote MF Global's trades. Everyone knows where the money went. But no one can talk about it. Because if you claim that the money went anywhere but to "money heaven", you're engaging in "conspiratorial thinking".
We are surrounded by corruption, plotting, scheming and insane rapes of the public coffers every day of every year.
These schemes are nothing other than "conspiracies".
But somehow this study begins with the entirely "fringe" premise that conspiracies aren't real. That in itself appears to be a conspiracy.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
If I assume there's more to a story than what appears in the mainstream media, I must be experiencing "conspiratorial thinking." Or I could be assuming that most journalists are morons who are paid to write *something* whether they know anything about it or not.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
So, in the course of reading the article on ElReg, I noticed that the folks denying climate change are being referred to as "Skeptical".
I get it - being "skeptical" of something means that you are not taking it at face value - that you dispute it.
However, there's also the self-identified "Skeptical Movement" nowadays which consists of a lot of great folks who are trying to introduce science-based thought and skepticism / critical thinking.
I'm talking about folks like Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame), Phil Plait (of "Bad Astronomy"), Brian Duning's Skeptoid, The Skeptic's guide to the Universe, Skepchick.org, the James Randi Educational Foundation, QackCast, and many many more...
Real science-based medicine and thinking... and to see "Skeptical" with a capitol S, I think of these folks and having the word used to refer to conspiracy nuts and climate deniers... well, it just feels like the same kind of co-opting that happened to the "hacker" monicker.
I guess I just wanted to get the word out that while the climate deniers and conspiracy nuts may be "skeptical" of climate change and such, they're not representative of "the Skeptical Movement" which is all about critical thinking and science-based approach to life, the universe, and everything.
The Digital Sorceress
The rub is how that "true cost" gets assessed and who asseses it, because something like global warming is *extremely* hard to put a price on. That is not a free market interaction because the costs for environmental issues, especially the theoretical costs such as with global warming, are anything but easy to guess at. The government would have to do the assessing. As we know with the global warming issue, asking the government to do this job is *extremely* political. Some politicians would not put a single penny of extra cost on something because of global warming concerns, they think it's a load of crap. Others would hike the price up by an order of magnitude because they hang on Al Gore's every word.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
No, that's a slippery slope leading to an imaginary dilemma, in service of your balance fallacy.
That's actually a rather strange scenario for you to create, since solar power is bringing energy to areas of Kenya traditional power doesn't or won't go.
Is it a reference to this? Are they having problems with their equipment? If so, it is rather obnoxious of you to call their hospital a "shack".
Or, is the scenario made-up, but still plausible? So where in Kenya are diesel generators illegal?
Basically, what I'm asking is, is there some reason for us to not believe you are completely full of shit?
We get it, you don't like people politically different from you and you think they're acting in bad faith.
Maybe you could try to objectively measure it and write up a paper on it?
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The problem here is that the conspiratorial thinking that was invoked was was on the part of Lewandowsky. Rather than taking the critiques of his abandoned first paper as legitimate, he immediately decided that anyone disagreeing with him must be part of a conspiracy against him.
My prediction - when this second paper is also taken apart as a fraud, he'll write a third one saying everyone who disagreed with his second one is part of a conspiracy of conspiritorial thinking :)
You're making the point that true free markets are poor at dealing with the environment. That's true. They are also poor at dealing with all sorts of other concerns, which is why markets are regulated in all sorts of ways. And taxed at varying rates. All decided on by politicians. This is just one more way.
I'm quite open to non-market ways of dealing with the AGW problem. If you have any suggestions.
Doing nothing, just because the idealised, imaginary, true free market has no way to deal with the issue, is certainly not the answer.
But thanks for adding to the evidence that people who deny the existence of climate change are both paranoid and stupid.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Well, you shouldn't always. Some people do act in bad faith.
I remember way, way back, actually right here on Slashdot, I learned about organized bad faith public discourse for the first time.
The occasion was that an organization called "The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution" had published a book on Linux, which was widely reported as being a commissioned hit piece. In the ensuing discussion, someone linked to the blog of Tim Lambert, an Australian computer science professor, which was very enlightening.
Finally, Bruce Perens got the occasion to ask Kenneth Brown outright: What would it take to get you to stop attacking Linux and start defending it instead? "We can talk about that" was apparently his reply.
So yes, some people do argue in bad faith. If you keep assuming these people argue in good faith, they win, so sometimes it's necessary to call out. But obviously it shouldn't be done lightly either.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Put a proposal on the table that reduces net human carbon emissions to zero. Then we can talk about its costs and benefits and possibly decide to take action.
So until they can come up with a solution that completely solves the problem, we don't have to think about working toward solving the problem?
Are you, by any chance, a mathematician?
And the next rub is that some of the cost can only be determined much later, because only much later we actually see that it really creates costs. When the first roads were built, no one thought about the costs of cutting biotops. When the first iron forges were built, no one thought about the costs of cutting down forests for charcoal. When the first fields were leveled and irrigated, no one thought about the costs of changing ground water levels. When the first towns were build, no one thought about the costs of covering arable land.
Sometimes we already know that there will be costs, but we have no good estimates for them.
So it all boils down to negotiations, and negotiations are inherently political.
While you're ad hominem stereotyping is no doubt amusing to you and your fellow neo Nazis
Talk about recursive!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
may I gently rib my co-employee and say "well duh Stephan, so the paranoid get paranoid being told that they are paranoid and blame the people that tell them they are paranoid? like we never saw that one coming"
Ah, the old "it's the will of the people so it must be right" meme.
Well, the first failure is that Democracy is not about the will of the people, it's about the informed will of the people. Control the information that people get (and their education) and you can shape their will.
The second things is that most countries don't actually have true Democracy: they have electoral circles and other little schemes that mean that 30% of the votes can be made to produce an absolute majority of representatives (with the right shape of electoral circles). True Democracy requires proportional vote.
Lastly but not least, your "will of the people" argument is in no way applicable to my denounciation of the methods which are used to try and subvert said will of the people. I did not made the argument that the will of the people is not valid, I made the argument that it is often subverted through misinformation. Straw man much!?
I would love you see you substantiate the first clause of your first sentence.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
It saddens me as I used to vote for the Green party but it just seems to fracture into left vs right wing ideologies.
Some things can only be expressed by left vs right wing ideology.
If you think (say)that it is legitimate for the US to pursue its economic interests through war, you are taking a right wing position whether you like it or not.
I think you just dis-proved the point you were trying to make using that example, because it's actually a bi-partisan statist position, not a right wing one. John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and François Hollande being clear left-wing examples of thinking it is legitimate for the US (and France) to pursue economic interests through war.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Most of the environmentalists I've known were just interesting in their own smug sense of self-righteousness.
I have relatives like that. The grief I get from them because I drive older vehicles that are kept in proper running order while they drive new vehicles replaced every couple of year but are of the environmentally friendly type. They also frown upon hunting while at the same time preaching about the necessity to only eat meat that is organic, free range, fair trade, locally produced, etc. The disconnect they have is rather shocking at times.
Time to offend someone
If only it were the case that people were simply arguing over the correct course of action. Your nation actually has elected representatives who think that all of the scientists behind climate research are part of some secret scheme to make millions of dollars and the data was entirely made up. I mean they have stated these things as though they were facts in the political decision-making process of your country.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The problem is that by calling out the first paper as BS science you're automatically labelled a conspiracy theorist. The second paper went on to do just that.
Well, no.
If yoiu claim that the first paper is total crap using conspirationist reasoning then you get called a conspiracy theorist.
If you have a valid complaint, what is it?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I think you just dis-proved the point you were trying to make using that example, because it's actually a bi-partisan statist position, not a right wing one.
Of course it doesn't disprove the point. It's simply that both Republican and Democrat are right wing. For example, the policies of the Democrat party are to the right of the policies of the UK Conservative party.
Pursuing economic interests through war is most certainly a right wing idea. Pursuing social justice through war would be a left wing one.
Well, if you'd read the paper, you'd see that they define a specific set of behaviors as relating to "conspiratorial thinking" before setting out to do the study. They don't just sit down and say "yeah, that looks conspiratorial".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Yes, this has always been the strategy of the climate-change-stonewallers:
1. It's not happening.
2. Conclusive evidence is not yet available.
3. The total effect could be small or even beneficial.
3. It's too late and too expensive to do anything about it.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
That would explain why nuclear power is rejected out of hand by Warmists because it would enable us to continue "making stuff" without the emissions.
There's more than emissions. In any case, nuclear power and industry on earth have been developmentally retarded since we developed space technology. Instead of using it to get industry off Earth and clean it up, we used it to build ICBMs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"