Haha yeah, QAnon is so silly, we all know there's no such thing as a pedophile in a position of power. I mean, there was Epstein, but then he killed himself, now it's pretty much over.
QAnons think Trump is King Theoden needing time be rescued they don’t have a leg to stand in this
God this conspiracy-theorist habit of mind is endlessly fascinating to me. It’s such a distinct, common-but-alien way of thinking, and it’s so widespread and uniform that it clearly says something about the way a lot of people’s minds work rather than just being a rhetorical mode. Like, this style of argument – “anyone who finds this pedophile-sex-ring theory implausible must consider the very concept of a pedophile-sex-ring implausible, and since it’s not, that proves how plausible the theory is” – is the exact same thing Flat Earthers say, except there it’s “everyone who disbelieves must imagine that the government would never lie to them about something important.”
I talked about the phenomenon a bit back here, but rereading it I feel like I didn’t quite capture it to my own satisfaction. There’s clearly something really fundamental going on in terms of how conspiracy theorists reason about probability, but I don’t wholly have a handle on it – this style of rebuttal suggests that it’s at least partly about distilling things down to general classes of event, and treating the question as being about whether it’s plausible that the class of event exists at all, with the process by which specific examples emerge left unexamined. I need to think more about how to model it mathematically.
(Anyhow, for anyone who might be confused about this sort of thing: the single most distinguishing feature of fake conspiracy theories as opposed to real ones is hidden-in-plain-sight symbols and code used to allow the conspirators to communicate through common public channels. This is vanishingly rare in actual conspiracies, because they basically always have better ways to get the same benefits, but it’s the signature feature of false ones, because it’s a kind of thumbprint left by the mindset of a pareidola-hunting paranoiac.)
This is an interesting observation, and I’ve had a not-yet-written reply to this in my drafts folder for weeks – it’s time to finally return to it. I think the different understandings of probability that you’re groping at boil down to Bayes’ Theorem.
For some reason I find it unreasonably difficult to focus my mind on consciously formulating and applying Bayes’ Theorem to actual things, despite my calling myself both an aspiring rationalist and a professional mathematician and despite myself having a good nose (I think) for when something Bayesian is going on. I actually have an almost-bare draft of Wordpress interpreting certain disagreements in Bayesian terms that has been idling for well over a year now. Maybe actually breaking down the issue you describe in these terms will help push me to actually writing the long post one of these weeks.
Here is how I’ll take a stab at modeling it. Let A be the event that the world is flat. Let B be the event that the government is lying to us about something important. A flat earther might say that since the probability of B (denoted P(B)) is reasonably high, the probability of A (denoted P(A)) is also high, and they way they make this deduction somehow vaguely rests on the fact that P(B|A) (the probability of B given A) is very high – in fact, P(B|A) = 1. But this is in fact irrelevant, because Bayes’ Theorem implies P(A) = P(B)*P(A|B); thus, the link between P(B) and P(A) is P(A|B): the probability the earth is flat given some major government lie. And a priori we don’t know anything about P(A|B)! In fact, the common-sense way to approach finding P(A|B) is to try to determine P(A), which we were trying to do in the first place, so our reasoning has taken us in a circle back to where we started.
In other words, there’s some fuzzy thinking going on that conflates P(A|B) (flat earth given some major government lie) with P(B|A) (some major government lie given a flat earth).
I’m tired and so I’m not sure if what I wrote is clearly explained or gets at the root of the problem, but I think I must be touching on part of it.
