The rise of conspiracy theorists and entitlement culture

Shipwreck

Emp_Fab said:

and Bigsbys look good.

outrageous comparison  

SteveRobinson

The biggest conspiracy? Father Christmas. 

No wonder the kids don't trust grown-ups

menamestom

fob said:

Emp_Fab said:

Far too many people think that their uneducated opinions are of equal value to the accumulated knowledge of accredited experts.  When the hell did that deluded arrogance start ?

How can we stop this insanity ?  How can we stop people thinking that their opinions are just as valid as an expert's ?

What makes someone an expert? I was lucky enough, once, to be present when a number of highly accredited physics professors were having a meeting and the big bang was referenced as an exampe of something they all believed in. There was a cough and then a lot of eye rolling. One of the professors didn't hold to that theory and a surprisingly heated exchange started up. The dissenter quickly made his argument and challenged anyone to explain why it was wrong or any less likely than the BBT. No reply. It's just easy to accept the mainstream view - which could well be true - and not bother drilling down. As an aside, I really wanted to chat with this guy to see if he would explain his position to me in layman's terms. I didn't get to meet one-on-one at the time but, seeing how covid goes, I might be able to meet him later this year.

A long way of saying that a lot of facts, even scientific ones, aren't as rock solid as we'd like to believe.

The point is most of the conspiracies can be disproven with very basic science.  The beginnings of the universe and the big bang are very complex theoretical science.  Whilst the big bang may be taken as fact it's really just the best model available that most physicists use.  If you disagree with it you can't simply do some drilling down, you would need an exceptional mind years of study and research.

But any gaps in theories and knowledge in things like that can't be used for anti scientific types to prove the world is flat or Covid is fake.  But that's what people do.  It used to be called the God of gaps, but now it's often the conspiracy of gaps.

The attitude seems to be 'What I'm saying could be true because science can't even agree on <insert complex scientific theories on the fringe of human knowledge>'

digitalscream

crunchman said:

It may be possible for some of these things to have arisen by chance, but for that many things to have arisen by pure chance just would not happen.  The Fred Hoyle quote above puts it better than I can.

If you think it "just would not happen", then you don't understand quantum physics.

Even if you believe the creator hypothesis as fact, ie that a creator set in place the initial conditions for this universe to come into existence exactly as it has, then...consider your own personal existence. Now consider all of the amazing coincidences which were required to happen to put you right here, right now.

So...in your hypothesis, you existing was an inevitable consequence of the creation of the universe. A consequence of that is that everything, every action and every reaction, was predestined right from the beginning.

That precludes consciousness, which is one of the things you say needs to be explained. You can't be conscious, because that requires free will, of which there is none because everything is predestined.

Heartfeltdawn

crunchman said:

I'm not going to go through all the issues here, as there isn't space to do them justice.  As a good starting point, read Lee Strobel's book The Case for a Creator with an open mind.  Also, think about the totality of it.  If you think you can come up with some kind of plausible explanation for one of these incredible coincidences, however unlikely, what about all the other issues?  It may be possible for some of these things to have arisen by chance, but for that many things to have arisen by pure chance just would not happen.  The Fred Hoyle quote above puts it better than I can.

People instinctively know this.  In the Bible, Romans chapter 1 says: what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Elsewhere, the Bible says that God has put eternity into their hearts.  Deep down people know that there is more to life than the secular humanist world view they are presented with.  People also have spiritual experiences.  On this issue, they don't trust what they are presented with.  That then creates a wider distrust of the scientific community on other issues.

I don't want to get into a huge debate over this, as it won't help anyone very much, but I think it is a major contributory factor to why there is so much distrust of what is presented as fact.

There aren't a whole series of plausible explanations for any of the things you mentioned such as consciousness. But within the realm of our understanding, we can come to more likely/plausible explanations than going into Bible quotations. 

"Deep down people know that there is more to life than the secular humanist world view they are presented with."

In our country, how many kids get presented with a secular humanist viewpoint before the religious God viewpoint? Dunno about other people but I remember a lot more God in my infant school than secular ideology. 

And your post isn't worthy of LOLs at all because it's a good debate starter. 

RaymondLin

There are 2 kinds of books.

Facts or Fiction.

I would place all religious books in the Fiction section in the library.

SteveRobinson said:

The biggest conspiracy? Father Christmas. 

No wonder the kids don't trust grown-ups

I distinctly recall when I was told about Father Christmas I thought the idea was STUPID.  I  grew up in HK and they teach kids quite advance maths at school, and I was also the kid who watches day time educational TV (like maths), so when I was told about Father Christmas, from the other things that i found out, like distance, the circumference of the earth, how quick he needs to travel to get from Greenland to Hong Kong, and all the other kids using algebra.

I immediately dismissed the idea as stupid and impossible, not even spending a single second or so to drop presents off in the home and magically teleport away.  Not in a day anyway.

Then we also lived in a flat, there is no chimney.

I have never believed it.

sinbaadi

Correlation does not equal causation.  This is a fundamental principle. 

Conspiracy theories are like the new religions.  People believe on faith, and with certainty that what can't be disproved categorically must therefore be right, and not the thing that evil organisations suggest is right, fuelling confirmation bias and all the other stuff that drives Christianity and every other religion.

chillidoggy

crunchman said:

This post will probably get me a record number of LOLs but I'll throw it out anyway.

When the scientific community presents something as fact, which people instinctively know is wrong, then it causes people to question the other stuff they present.

The specific issue is the exclusion of God and the idea we all got here by chance through evolution.

There are a whole bunch of things about our universe that are incredibly finely tuned.  The idea that those values arose by chance is very difficult.

For instance, it has been estimated that the cosmological constant is tuned to 1 in 10 to power of 53

Oxford physicist Roger Penrose said that one parameter, the “original phase-space volume”, required fine tuning to an accuracy of one part in ten billion multiplied by itself 123 times.  It's impossible to write that number out in full – it would require more zeroes than the elementary particles in the universe.

Fred Hoyle (not a Christian) said the following:

“A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

There are a bunch of other interesting Fred Hoyle quotes:

https://www.azquotes.com/author/6972-Fred_Hoyle

That's just a handful of examples.

You then have other major questions, like how everything came from nothing.  What is the cause behind that?

How did life start?  That's a major one.

How did complex organs and systems evolve? 

How do you explain consciousness?

I'm not going to go through all the issues here, as there isn't space to do them justice.  As a good starting point, read Lee Strobel's book The Case for a Creator with an open mind.  Also, think about the totality of it.  If you think you can come up with some kind of plausible explanation for one of these incredible coincidences, however unlikely, what about all the other issues?  It may be possible for some of these things to have arisen by chance, but for that many things to have arisen by pure chance just would not happen.  The Fred Hoyle quote above puts it better than I can.

People instinctively know this.  In the Bible, Romans chapter 1 says: what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Elsewhere, the Bible says that God has put eternity into their hearts.  Deep down people know that there is more to life than the secular humanist world view they are presented with.  People also have spiritual experiences.  On this issue, they don't trust what they are presented with.  That then creates a wider distrust of the scientific community on other issues.

I don't want to get into a huge debate over this, as it won't help anyone very much, but I think it is a major contributory factor to why there is so much distrust of what is presented as fact.

Don't take this the wrong way, but that's precisely the sort of old bollocks I was referring to in my post.

fob

menamestom said:

The point is most of the conspiracies can be disproven with very basic science.  The beginnings of the universe and the big bang are very complex theoretical science.  Whilst the big bang may be taken as fact it's really just the best model available that most physicists use.  If you disagree with it you can't simply do some drilling down, you would need an exceptional mind years of study and research.

But any gaps in theories and knowledge in things like that can't be used for anti scientific types to prove the world is flat or Covid is fake.  But that's what people do.  It used to be called the God of gaps, but now it's often the conspiracy of gaps.

The attitude seems to be 'What I'm saying could be true because science can't even agree on <insert complex scientific theories on the fringe of human knowledge>'

The BBT wasn't presented as a conspiracy, just something that the man in the street would probably accept as fact. You don't drill down into the deeper science or truth of it but rather into the knowledge that there are alternative theories, valid but not popular.

I'd also guess that most conspiracy theories aren't strictly scientific in nature: JFK, Paul is dead, Elvis isn't etc, and so basic science wouldn't help. Also, what would constitute basic? I remember a few years ago there being a thread about flat Earth. It was an obvious wind-up but it got pretty testy and those that were fighting the good fight didn't necessarily have the weapons to do it. I don't see worshipping mortarboards as any more worthy than worshipping the papal tiara.

I'm not defending every conspiracy and its attendant believers as true seers but there is a lot of very strange stuff that goes on that would be laughed out of the room by most. I became very interested in the MK Ultra programme that was carried out by the US government - it's truly staggering what people got up to and now is out in the open (or as much as it probably ever will be). Some poor sap who claimed to be the victim of mind control programmes would look like a prime idiot if they said it even now - especially if they were saying it in defence of a murder they'd committed.

Roland

Congratulations Emp on starting a worthwhile thread. Just last night I was reading a theory on this subject. It identified two steps to the current situation, both arising from the Internet.

First, it used to be common to recognise that you didn’t understand lots of things. Unless you happened to know the right expert, or could find and read the right books in the country library, then it was difficult to find information. With google it’s easy to believe that you can find answers almost instantly, without recognising that you might not have the education to understand the implications of what you’ve found, or that it’s just plain wrong.

Secondly, we are used to television and radio reducing things to bite size, particularly if those sound bites grab attention. Social media makes this worse because it allows us to focus only on themes which reflect and support our views. 

An example I like is about the ascent of Everest in 1953. Sir Edmund Hillary was asked whether he or Tenzing Norgay was the first to step onto the summit. He spent several minutes explaining that neither could have reached the summit without the other, nor without the logistical support of Hunt’s expedition, and they reached it together. He would not say who of them might have been in front at the time. Yet everybody knows the sound bite answer.

munckee

I distinctly recall when I was told about Father Christmas I thought the idea was STUPID.  I  grew up in HK and they teach kids quite advance maths at school, and I was also the kid who watches day time educational TV (like maths), so when I was told about Father Christmas, from the other things that i found out, like distance, the circumference of the earth, how quick he needs to travel to get from Greenland to Hong Kong, and all the other kids using algebra.

I immediately dismissed the idea as stupid and impossible, not even spending a single second or so to drop presents off in the home and magically teleport away.  Not in a day anyway.

Then we also lived in a flat, there is no chimney.

I have never believed it.

When I was a child without doubt there was a father christmas, an easter bunny and a tooth fairy.

Imagine my excitement as a grown up when it turned out all 3 of them were me!

tekbow

Sassafras

We all know experts and academics work for shadow government.

viz

webrthomson said:

Really stupid and uneducated people don’t actually realise how dumb they are:

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect 

George Bush did - he once said he was in the top 95% at school. 

DefaultM

Social media is just a load of people sharing random links to articles and photos, and then arguing underneath them.
I took down all my social media and only 2 of my friends even noticed haha.

SPECTRUM001

tekbow said:

Excellent stuff - I forgot just how funny he is.

stratology

menamestom said:

The point is most of the conspiracies can be disproven with very basic science.  

I wouldn't even go that far.

Most conspiracists can't answer the most basic follow up questions. Like 'Bill Gates wants to use vaccinations to implant microchips into people':   What would be the actual purpose of that? What type/model of microchip? What's the power source for the microchip - second implant from a second vaccination? etc.


While it's true that ignorance is quite common among conspiracy theorists - I haven't met a single '5G' conspiracist who understands the most basic principles of electromagnetic radiation - I recently found that quite a few intelligent, reasonable people I know started buying into conspiracy BS, and going down various rabbit holes. Quite concerning...

Emp_Fab

Stratavarious said:

46% of the UK adult population have the numeracy skills of a primary age kid.

What's even worse is the parents of the other 67% suffered in the same way.

Emp_Fab

Roland said:

Congratulations Emp on starting a worthwhile thread. 

That sounds remarkably like a back-handed compliment !

Rich210

Its the digital iron curtain that's done it