Conspiracies
I’m as hungry for a revelation as anyone. It feels so good when my paradigm shifts and gives way to a new reality. It feels good to connect all the dots and find someone to blame as if I solved a major problem. It feels good for others to follow me into the new world of the enlightened. But what if it turns out I’m terribly wrong and I’ve misled many others, and actions based on these conclusions have led to real harm? How will that feel?
Are the experts and the government doing an adequate job of explaining our situation? Clearly not, and they could do better. One reason is that no one has all the answers yet. Experts in this specific field are making guesses based on a complexity of factors, any of which shifts and their predictions must change. That is annoying for those of us who crave certainty.
There are lousy scientists, politicians, and journalists who might deceive us with lies or spin data to frame it in a misleading way. But maybe we don’t understand what’s involved in these communities.
Scientists’ reputations hang on their accuracy and their honesty. Getting caught lying could permanently destroy one’s career. They do rigorous testing of their hypotheses, arguing against their own theories to test their merit, and then publish them so that any scientist in the world can read and challenge their findings. Rather than connecting the dots, they are scrutinizing every side of a puzzle piece before placing it in the massive puzzle. The scientific community, therefore, is a terrible place to lie. When the entire scientific community is caught in an old paradigm or cultural lens that prevents them from seeing the new picture, that is when academia can be very wrong for a period of time. But eventually someone bursts that bubble, other scientists get on it, and the error is corrected.
Journalists typically have to have at least two sources to corroborate a story and their editor will scrutinize it before deciding if it is strong enough to risk the news network’s reputation, built largely on trust in accuracy. (I’m not talking about cable news punditry or tabloids.) If a news network blatantly lies, it can destroy them publicly, and other news networks would be more than happy to lead the lynching of the disgraced competition. That doesn’t mean they get everything right or that journalists don’t have bias — they do. But it means that the news is unlikely to be able to conduct a coordinated cover-up.
Politicians somehow get away with lies and spinning the truth. But they too have checks and balances, enemies within the system that would love to see them go down in flames. The culture of politics may favor large corporate interests and those who fund their campaigns, but that’s a culture of back-scratching, not necessarily conspiracy that they need to cover up.
The government and rich people are the classic villains in our mythology, so naturally they are first to be distrusted and labeled as conspirators. Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci make fore good targets, and for some it’s Donald Trump. It is comforting to label the bad guys in the story, but more often it is the culture of corruption or insufficient oversight that is to blame, and that means more work for us. It means we have to do more research, examine the edges of the puzzle pieces, and study the whole puzzle. It means we have to change our habits and push to shift our entire culture, and that daunting task definitely doesn’t feel as good as connecting the dots.
Researcher David Robert Grimes studied actual conspiracies and determined that when you increase the number of people who must be in on the cover-up, it dramatically shortens the time before it is leaked publicly. This means we can determine probabilities that a conspiracy is true or false based on it fitting within the average time-limits relative to the number of people supposedly involved. This means many conspiracy theories proposed today are highly improbable. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any, just that the ones that involve thousands or millions of people are very unlikely to be real.
What we do have to watch out for are cultural blind-spots that prevent good people from looking into the unseen problems. Cognitive biases, motivated reasoning, rushing to conclusions, and old-fashioned sloppy negligence are the greatest threats to our world today, all of which have been displayed in the handling of the Coronavirus. There are simply no grounds for a wholesale distrust of the scientific community or journalists. We depend on each other to understand reality, sharing knowledge across an extended mind of our peers. If we don’t trust the community of specialists in their field of study to give us their closest approximation of what’s real, and without expertise we go down our own rabbit-hole of conspiratorial dot-connecting, then we have given up our greatest human mechanism for vetting truth and replaced it with our cognitive-bias laden little minds. That is not wisdom.