Quote:
Originally Posted by Willd
This is a good example of something I've been thinking for a while. Essentially I think a lot of this stuff stems from a fundamental human trait of being unable to handle randomness. It's a strongly beneficial evolutionary trait to be able to find patterns in data but it also leads to humans consistently finding patterns in truly random data.
In terms of how this relates to conspiracy stuff, my view is that people like Luckbox see something like these hand pictures and correctly think that these specific pieces of data are unlikely to be random chance. What then happens is that instead a series of individually plausible, if improbable, connections are made that in combination form a "logical", or "more likely", explanation for the data.
However in reality while each individual part of the "logical" explanation is significantly more likely than the original dataset, it only requires one step in the chain to be incorrect and the whole explanation comes apart. As a result, the actual chance of the explanation being correct ends up being orders of magnitude less likely than the initially dismissed random chance, despite every step seeming to be far more likely.
Obviously putting actual numbers to any of this is essentially impossible but it's my view as to how some otherwise very intelligent and logical people end up going down the conspiracy rabbit hole. It certainly doesn't describe all conspiracy theorists, in fact it's probably quite a small minority, but it's my view of Luckbox-esque INTP theorists.
So the term for seeing patterns in randomness is
aphophenia, but it's really difficult to see how this is something that could apply to conspiracy ideas--perhaps some but I don't know what those are. Mostly, it comes down to inductive reasoning vs deductive or Bayesian reasoning.
The Portland story is a perfect example of this because it is sort of a 'one-off' example that doesn't tie-in to too many other ideas. But to recap: a story broke that a Portland area antifa guy was involved in a crazy incident involving gunshots where he was run over and killed. But due to the nature of the reporting I was able to see immediately that the story was bogus. And to this day and despite the fact that the police supposedly have the murder weapon vehicle in their possession, there have been no arrests. And the kicker is that Portland area media including supposedly independents like Andy Ngo never even asked Portland PD who the car is registered to and they pretend like it doesn't exist.
The whole story stinks galore and there isn't any randomness about it. The conspiracy idea there flows directly from straight-forward logical thinking. The various naysayers have said things like "well they are definitely investigating" or come up with alternate conspiracy explanations of how the Portland PD is fascist and covering up for the killers. But that doesn't explain how they got the Portland media to obfuscate about the story from day 1 by claiming it was a hit and run when the car was left at the scene.
The issue with those who deny that there is a conspiracy there is that they deny the possibility that such a thing could ever occur, so they are forced to seek other explanations. It is this way with all such 'conspiracy events' where preconceived notions about how the normalcy of the world get put ahead of facts and logic.
It isn't my claim that there isn't a certain amount of 'dot-connecting' that is necessary to draw a picture amongst the complete data-set of these sorts of events. There is. But you can't call the data random nor can one say 'well sometimes there are massive conspiracies between government and media but not all the time'. Ultimately though what happens is that the debunkers and naysayers ignore both the data-points altogether and the bigger picture that stems from them.