[HN Gopher] An automated pipeline for the discovery of conspirac...
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An automated pipeline for the discovery of conspiracy theories
Author : iNic
Score : 103 points
Date : 2021-01-04 13:12 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (journals.plos.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (journals.plos.org)
| Anka33 wrote:
| CNN?
| aritmo wrote:
| Do these conspiracy theories appear organically or is there a
| special nudge to make them stick?
|
| Who nudges the conspiracy theories to stick?
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, they probably show up organically, but clearly
| sometimes people who should know better stoke the flames and
| spread them.
| throwaway80332 wrote:
| Most likely it is the team around loser ex-president Donald
| Trump and nazis like Breitbart, and they are bought and
| controlled by Vladimir Putin and other right-wing extremists,
| who hacked the election in 2016 even though Hillary Clinton won
| the popular vote by a landslide. Do you remember when Donald
| Trump called nazis "very fine people" and threatened to have
| journalists assasinated? There is nothing these people won't
| attemp to destroy our democracy, including putting immigrant
| children in concentration camps, and spreading dangerous
| falsehoods and conspiracy theories is just another day at the
| office for them.
|
| And these days it is even worse. I fear for the republic if
| Trump attempts a coup because they ridiculously claim "the
| election was hacked"!
|
| In short, those paranoid idiots spreading conspiracies are sick
| and evil and I hope we will have the technology in the near
| future to keep them under very close surveillance 24x7.
| overallduka wrote:
| You literally are using a left wing conspiracy theory to
| corroborate your arguments against CT. You just want shut
| down opinions that disagrees with you, you are not interested
| in truth at all, if the IA disagree with you probably you
| would call the IA "racist" or "nazi".
| vharuck wrote:
| Sarcasm doesn't work very well on the internet. Even when
| it's obvious, it rarely improves the discussion.
| rightbyte wrote:
| It is hard to tell whether this is sarcasm or not.
| jberryman wrote:
| The "Reply All" podcast episode #166 ("Country of Liars"), has
| a pretty good analysis of the history of the Q-anon conspiracy
| theory. fwiw
| Item_Boring wrote:
| I can't answer your question but maybe you'll find this paper
| interesting [0]. TLDR: social bots are highly responsible for
| spreading misinformation - and for such also conspiracy
| theories. By tagging people with a lot of followers and
| tweeting the information multiple times they attempt to make it
| go viral. Keep in mind that this paper concerns the 2016
| elections.
|
| [0] http://cs.furman.edu/~tallen/csc271/source/viralBot.pdf
| crispyambulance wrote:
| It's a wild combination, everything from bored Estonian teens
| getting money from clickbait to state-sponsored disinformation
| campaigns with specific intentions.
|
| The best writing about this IMHO is from Renee Diresta. She has
| papers, articles, talks, testified before congress, and founded
| the Internet Observatory project.
|
| Diresta co-wrote a very comprehensive report on the activities
| of the Russian "Internet Research Agency":
| http://www.reneediresta.com/ira-report-4e8d0ff684.pdf It
| explains in gory detail how this "stuff" works when there are
| state actors involved.
| [deleted]
| throwaway91774 wrote:
| I saw a lot of crap appear organically, but my guess is that by
| volume most is exagerated, clickbait, racebaitting stuff done
| as a dayjob, with wildly varying levels of sincerity. The few
| talented peddlers that create organic looking content make a
| huge difference, and some almost believe their own bullshit.
|
| For reference: IMO, Alex Jones knew from day one that pizzagate
| was just bullshit made up on the internet, and kept distance
| accordingly. But there was so much intersection with his
| audience that he treaded carefully and did an obscure video on
| the side where he said he was just playing it cool to avoid
| persecution. Of course, if anything real came out of that, he
| would have claimed he was in on it from the start.
| RobertoG wrote:
| I have observed that speed of change in supporting facts is very
| important in Internet conspiracy theories (CT) vs. the old
| conspiracy theories.
|
| It goes like this: you find a surprising fact that, if true, will
| support the CT. You go to investigate it, which, of course, take
| some time. You realize that the fact has a normal explanation
| but, when you go back to conversation of the CT, that's not a
| relevant fact in the conversation anymore. There is a new fact,
| or more, supporting the CT. Start the process again. It's
| impossible to catch with the fact that it's, at the moment,
| supporting the CT.
|
| I think, this is different from the old way conspiracy theories,
| where people just believed highly improbable things.
|
| It also makes it more appealing to more people, because, if you
| take it all globally and don't look carefully, it really looks
| like there is a lot of evidence.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Modern CTs are also sometimes the result of disinformation
| campaigns where (contrary to your example) there is not an
| attempt to provide multiple facts that would support "the" CT
| but rather continuously providing multiple plausible
| _different_ (and incompatible) CTs to drown out the true
| situation - especially since most parts of the true explanation
| (which the disinformation campaign wants to muddle) would also
| overlap with one or more of the debunkable and debunked CTs,
| thus eventually getting to the desired end position of "ah,
| noone can really know what's true".
| throwaway80332 wrote:
| It will be interesting to see what algorithms like the one in
| the linked article will reveal about the people and
| organizations behind those conspiracy theories and
| disinformation campaigns.
|
| We already know that Trump is secretly colluding with
| Vladimir Putin, the Koch brothers and homophobic nazis like
| Milo Yiannopolous, and recieving behind-the-scene support
| from far-right capitalists like Fox News, Breitbart and the
| proud boys. They are practically running the hate-filled
| cesspits like 4chan, and we saw the results last summer when
| they burned down the inner cities to stop the peaceful
| protests against white supremacy and George Floyd.
|
| When I've tried to bring attention to this, right-wing
| extremists have called me a malicious collaboration
| hypothesizer, but I just report them to the mods and that's
| that.
|
| Hopefully under Biden, and with new technology that respects
| people of all backgrounds, all this disinformation can be
| dealt with legislatively once and for all, so that you'll be
| able to trust the news and what you read online, and never
| have to deal with any racist fascist misogyny ever again.
| dagmx wrote:
| You might enjoy reading a Game Designers Analysis of QAnon.
|
| https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...
|
| The author has a pretty compelling explanation for the design
| of mass believed conspiracy theories, which I think is fairly
| close to what you posit in spirit, though not exactly.
| jjk166 wrote:
| I think the opposite is really the case.
|
| Back in the day, fact checking was incredibly difficult. If you
| were a domain expert, you might notice something was off, then
| go to the library to double check the information, and if the
| library happened to have what you needed you could try to
| convince your close friends and family of the truth. The other
| 99.99% of what you heard on the news or read in the paper was
| simply accepted as fact. Conspiracy theories were, at the time,
| either what the news said were conspiracy theories, or ideas so
| fringe that the news didn't even talk about them.
|
| Nowadays, we are a few thumb movements away from fact checking
| literally any piece of human knowledge. There hasn't been a
| sudden proliferation of fake news, it's just more readily
| apparent. As it has become easier to spot the holes in shoddy
| reporting, faith in journalistic institutions has plummeted.
| More people are getting news from alternative sources whose
| quality is variable. For better or for worse, there are simply
| more versions of stories nowadays.
|
| To try to retain viewers, traditional media outlets have tried
| to cultivate an image of themselves as the arbiters of truth
| which they once defacto were, and to do so have been quite
| liberal with labelling their competition as conspiracy
| theories. We haven't seen any uptick in the number of people
| wearing tinfoil hats to keep out the mind control rays or
| claiming any given senator is a lizard person. Instead, we live
| in a world where you're labelled a conspiracy theorist if you
| don't think there is a shadowy cabal of government agents
| spreading misinformation to manipulate us or depending on which
| of the past two presidential elections you think was
| illegitimate.
|
| Even small deviations from the narrative of any particular
| bubble are heretical, but that narrative, and every other one,
| is composed from the incomplete knowledge of fallible people,
| so invariably as time goes on you will start to notice
| inconsistencies in the story. In years gone by, we would have
| simply chalked this up to someone being misinformed, people
| could admit they were wrong and papers could print retractions
| and we'd all forget about it. But now the combination of the
| record being so readily accessible and the increased role of
| our media consumption in our personal identity means we have
| forgone nuance and are strongly pressured to adhere to
| increasingly absurd stories. It's so much easier to label the
| other side as stupid and crazy than to try to demonstrate the
| veracity of our position and face the fact that we are not
| entirely correct either, but if we do not strive for truth
| ourselves, it becomes easy for them to see the faults in our
| logic and further convince themselves that we, in fact, are the
| crazy and stupid ones.
|
| tl;dr there are many more non-mainstream narratives being
| labelled as conspiracy theories at the same time that the
| mainstream narrators who would normally dispel them are losing
| credibility.
| throwaway91774 wrote:
| I watched pizzagate grow from day 0, AMA.
|
| I spent an inordinate amount of time on /pol/ around the 2016
| election and when Wikileaks made the emails available I was among
| those hitting the random button to see what we could find. The
| authors of the paper did a great job in understanding a key
| feature; (vacuous) conspiraciy theories involve a lot of jumping
| to conclusions, and are all over the place (multi-domain). At the
| time there was so much momentum to find dirt on Hillary, that
| every silly comment seen through chan culture lenses became a
| zero-point energy engine, and suddenly we were swimming in
| mspaint.exe infographics pulled out of thin air.
|
| I was never a believer though, but I did enjoy the shitstorm, and
| human trafficking is a real thing. I was disappointed that people
| was so fed up with the matter that Epstein's suicide was not a
| bigger deal with the general public.
| deorder wrote:
| You might find the following interesting:
|
| 2016 election timeline:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6fyugv/link_you...
|
| 2016 summary of Wikileaks events:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/WhereIsAssange/comments/6nebdk/can_...
| noja wrote:
| For anyone looking for a way of talking to friends or family who
| are into conspiracy theories, this book is good:
| https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Rabbit-Hole-Conspiracy-Theor...
| wrongthoughtbot wrote:
| Normal people with correct thoughts that do not deviate from
| acceptable thought can wear maybe an arm band to self identify.
| That would let the conspiracy theorist vicitms know not to
| waste their time on you. It worked in Germany.
|
| https://www.etsy.com/market/hear_no_evil_shirt
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Is there a book on how to _not_ talk about conspiracy theories?
| I have some formerly right leaning elderly relatives who are
| now just plain crazy. They won 't stop talking about ridiculous
| conspiracies. I don't open emails from them anymore. I've given
| up trying and wish they would at least stop talking to me about
| them.
| lez wrote:
| Send them to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6EzSbI-zOk It
| is from the INSIDE of the Truth movement, and will convince
| them to stop talking to everyone about conspiracies - as
| that's useless and damages human relationships. Also helps
| them to find meaning in their life.
| wolfram74 wrote:
| There's the one upping approach, when they start talking
| about how the moon landing was faked you could call them
| sheep for believing the moon exists.
|
| I don't think it's a good strategy for improving discourse,
| but some people probably find the creative element enjoyable.
| oblio wrote:
| The "Four Yorkshiremen" approach to conspiracy theory
| discussions :-))
| specialist wrote:
| My bro does this. I'm not convinced it works as intended.
| But does give him another dopamine hit.
|
| To give you a sense of his motivations: He's a former
| debate captain, coach, judge. Pendants about grammar,
| punctuation, pronunciation. Still believes logic and facts
| are persuasive. Especially said louder, with more sarcasm
| and derision.
|
| I'm trying to be less like that. Old habits are hard to
| change.
| jl6 wrote:
| Conspiracy theories fill holes in peoples' lives (lack of
| belonging, lack of achievement, lack of recognition). Help
| them fill those holes with something else.
| boredumb wrote:
| We're actually doing a Rust application that downloads the image
| snopes is displaying for that particular conspiracy theory in
| order to feed them into a tensor flow model and predict the
| validity of future conspiracies.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Does nobody else appreciate the irony of using a graph, which
| essentially reduces to a conspiracy chart, to describe conspiracy
| theories?
|
| CT's are just folktales and explanations for things people don't
| understand or control. A conspiracy theory only becomes dangerous
| or harmful when it threatens to upset an established order, which
| makes it oddly self fulfilling, since its real purpose is to
| facilitate organizing people around counter-establishment
| narratives. When you look at this paper as a new way to use
| technology to automatically detect counter-establishment
| narratives, it seems like pretty standard playbook for a secret
| elite coordinating to secure and expand their powers, which is
| hilarious, to me anyway.
|
| However, the conclusion includes criteria for detecting actual
| conspiracies as separate from theories, "We hypothesize that
| three features--a single domain of interaction, a robustness to
| deletions of nodes and relationships, and a proliferation of
| peripheral actants and relationships--are key characteristics of
| an actual conspiracy and may be helpful in distinguishing actual
| conspiracies from conspiracy theories. "
|
| I think they buried the lede on that one, as a heuristic for
| evaluating CT's and accusations of them could be super valuable.
| throwaway91774 wrote:
| I'd say it's fitting, not ironic. Conspiracies do exist, and
| implicit conspiracy-like behaviour does emerge where minds
| converge too.
| tchalla wrote:
| Since the site won't load, an alternative - https://sci-
| hub.st/https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article...
| corona-research wrote:
| My favorite conspiracy: Epstein killed himself.
| Tycho wrote:
| The important thing about 'conspiracy theories'(r) is that you
| have charlatans trying to profit off them by misleading people.
| What I mean is that if they come across information that hurts
| their narrative, they won't share it, while continuing to posture
| as honest investigators in search of the truth. And for the
| readers it's hard to detect this fundamental dishonesty (how do
| you know what you haven't been told?).
|
| This isn't to say that there are no conspiracies, and people
| aren't justified in looking for explanations, but this mechanism
| of deceit is what makes it a controversial/goofball topic.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| now do one for "critical race theory"
| ppod wrote:
| You'd think considering academics do the reviewing, proofing, and
| typesetting for free the $1600 publication fee might enable the
| publisher to at least make a site that can stand up to HN
| traffic. Here's an arxiv version:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.09961
| m12k wrote:
| A headline that truly captures the times we live in. There's
| something poetic about using machine intelligence to detect human
| stupidity.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| I think it's counter-productive to label everyone who believes
| conspiracy theories "stupid". Not only does it make it more
| difficult to talk to and help change their opinion, it further
| polarizes use. Sure, I will readily admit that some people are
| just being obstinate and stupid, but when you have the places
| you get your news from feeding you misinformation, or worse,
| feeding you facts, but not all the facts, or the details get
| lost in transit (e.g. the cdc not recommending masks and then
| recommending masks), it's not hard to see how some things
| become ideas.
|
| We can't help correct misconceptions if we believe they're
| driven solely by stupidity.
| mistermann wrote:
| As a bit of a conspiracy theorist myself I thank you for your
| more thoughtful stance toward myself and my tribe, and can
| confirm that your concerns (that slurs like "stupid", which
| are themselves stupid ironically, do indeed magnify the
| problem) are valid, at least to some degree.
|
| But then on the other hand, I believe that the conversations
| and "thinking" on display in threads like this (and the many
| others that pop up from time to time) are beneficial to our
| cause, as it plausibly results in a kind of effort free
| recruiting. Of course we'll never be popular in intellectual
| forums like HN, but if one pays attention to comments on more
| "super-mainstream" (ie: non-HN, non-Reddit social media, like
| online newspaper comment sections or in YouTube comments from
| local TV stations), I sense distinct growth in average
| sentiments in our favour. To what degree this can be
| attributed to studies like this and the subsequent forum meme
| wars is obviously purely speculative, but I suspect "there's
| no such thing as bad publicity" is applicable here.
| lez wrote:
| I think trying to "help change their opinion" or "help
| correct misconceptions" is also counter-productive. Just
| accept that they have a different opinion and deal with that.
| It can be a challenge, but you can't avoid dealing with other
| ppl's different opinions. It's life.
| MereInterest wrote:
| The problem comes when their misconceptions have
| consequences to those around them. If somebody consistently
| swaps "left" and "right", that is fairly harmless until
| they start driving on the wrong side of the road. If
| somebody believes that there is a child sex ring operating
| out of a pizza parlor, that belief is fairly harmless until
| they take a gun to that pizza parlor.
| TeaDrunk wrote:
| How do you deal with a different opinion that dehumanizes
| people? Eg. If I'm a trans person how do I not attempt to
| correct the misconception that "trans panic" is a socially
| acceptable justification to murder me?
| m12k wrote:
| Sure, I mean, I personally believe in the "conspiracy theory"
| that most of the QAnon conspiracy theories circulating on
| social media either originate from the Russian Internet
| Research Agency/Glavset, or is at least being actively
| nurtured and amplified by them as an attack on their
| geopolitical adversaries and their electorate. A belief that
| I don't have solid proof for, but which I still consider less
| naive than the alternative, that all this viral
| disinformation is really being created and spread by people
| who really believe it themselves, or just for the lulz.
| [deleted]
| throwaway80332 wrote:
| I can't wait until this technology is perfected so that we can
| finally put an end to online disinformation for good.
|
| Those dangerous idiots actually believe that a billionare
| pedophile spent decades inviting high-ranking politicians and
| influential decision makers to his private island for orgies
| with underage girls, and that when he was arrested he managed
| to hang himself while on suicide watch in a maximum security
| prison! They really are that deluded and dangerous. This needs
| to end, now.
|
| The nutcases also believe that the governments are working with
| big tech to eliminate cash so that anybody who doesn't toe the
| line can be "permanently cancelled". Have you ever heard
| anything so ridiculous? I hope in the future we can just have
| an algorithm that disables the bank account of anybody who
| spews such divisive nonsense online. There is no place for that
| kind of hate in a society that strives for any kind of
| progress.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| > I can't wait until this technology is perfected so that we
| can finally put an end to online disinformation for good.
|
| Well, first you need to define "disinformation." It's a non-
| trivial, and probably a concept that's unable to be
| rigorously defined.
| swebs wrote:
| The entire post is sarcasm.
| wrongthoughtbot wrote:
| No such thing a throwaway account in New Normal. This is an
| automated public service notice.
|
| You'll be happy to know that our AI now has a sarcasm module.
| You've been detected and will be cancelled. "An obedient
| population is a happy population" as all experts agree, and
| you are an obstable to universal happiness.
| umvi wrote:
| > I can't wait until this technology is perfected so that we
| can finally put an end to online disinformation for good.
|
| In case the sarcasm is not obvious... this will never happen.
| Determining what is true and what is false will be one of the
| greatest challenges humans face from here on out. The source
| of disinformation may be from fellow citizens (conspiracies,
| memes), or it may be from the government itself (propaganda)
| or from massive corporations (lobbies, bogus research with
| predetermined conclusions)
| razius wrote:
| I truly hope this is sarcasm
| ignoranceprior wrote:
| Yeah, it obviously is. But something that irks me about the
| comment is that it conflates a well-supported conspiracy
| theory (Epstein, who was actually charged and convicted)
| and a crazy illuminati-level one (Big Tech eliminating cash
| to cancel people, huh?), as if they are equally plausible.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| You'll have a nice beta test to observe in 2021, as
| people who don't take a vaccine will be phased out from
| the society. Restricting payments seems like a good way
| to do it.
| mistermann wrote:
| How will people who don't take a vaccine be phased out
| from society? This sounds like a bit of a conspiracy
| theory to me, but then that by no means proves it as a
| falsehood. Should I be preparing for a purge of some
| sort?
| throwaway80332 wrote:
| Of course it will not happen, it is a ridiculous
| conspiracy theory.
|
| Nobody is getting phased out, the people who chose to not
| take the vaccine will just not be able to buy or sell.
| swebs wrote:
| >a crazy illuminati-level one (Big Tech eliminating cash
| to cancel people,
|
| Its been happening for a few years now. It is an
| unfortunate reality.
|
| https://fortune.com/2017/08/18/visa-paypal-mastercard-
| hate-g...
| boredumb wrote:
| Do we laugh or cry at how this cannot be immediately
| discerned as a joke at this point in time.
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| Linked site won't load so here's a vaguely-related book
| recommendation: Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. I don't want
| to spoil it, but it involves a group of writers who try to come
| up with a single, maximally compelling, conspiracy theory.
| Reading it sets up a super interesting tension -- the book is
| clearly fiction, and yet the conspiracy theory it presents is as
| compelling as any (and in fact incorporates many) of those you'll
| read "in the wild".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault%27s_Pendulum
| KineticLensman wrote:
| I read Foucault's Pendulum and finished it, but it was heavy
| going. I then read "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" [0] which I
| enjoyed much more, because it was more intentionally cranky and
| funny. It is to conspiracy novels as "Airplane!" was to
| disaster movies, and then some.
|
| [Edit] Both of them make Dan Brown look really, really
| unimpressive. If "The Da Vinci Code" is a vaguely thought-
| through concept aimed at general readers, "The Illuminatus!
| Trilogy" is an explosion in a conspiracy theory factory.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy
| Krasnol wrote:
| > Both of them make Dan Brown look really, really
| unimpressive. If "The Da Vinci Code" is a vaguely thought-
| through concept aimed at general readers, "The Illuminatus!
| Trilogy" is an explosion in a conspiracy theory factory.
|
| It's mostly because Browns work is just a cheap simulacrum of
| the original conspiracy theorists who came up with the story:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Blood_and_the_Holy_Gr.
| ..
| wool_gather wrote:
| Illuminatus! is deliberately a send-up of the kind of stuff
| that Dan Brown writes, though. He's sincerely trying to make
| thrillers; Wilson and Shea were (partly) making fun of
| authors like him.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Illuminatus! is deliberately a send-up of the kind of
| stuff that Dan Brown writes
|
| To be clear (for the benefit of others), not specifically
| of Dan Brown. DB was only aged 11 when Illuminatus! was
| first published in 1975.
| User23 wrote:
| Everything you say is true, but the Illuminatus! Trilogy also
| presents some serious philosophy sandwiched between the
| raunchiness and silliness. For example the SNAFU principle is
| a reasonable explanation for a lot of what we see in large
| organizations. Also, expanding Hegelian dialectic by adding
| Parenthesis and Synthesis to fit the Law of Fives is tongue
| in cheek, but in a haha only serious kind of way.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Indeed. I also like how it demands attention from the
| reader, for example by sometimes changing the character PoV
| on a sentence-by-sentence basis, between characters who are
| sometimes themselves unreliable narrators.
| SilasX wrote:
| If that's the plot, then I think Scott Alexander did it better
| with Sort By Controversial, a short story about a team who uses
| machine learning to generate maximally-controversial
| claims/articles, then find themselves ensnared by that very
| same inflammatoriness.
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190508
| FrozenVoid wrote:
| A state of art network like GPT-3 fails to appeal to human
| emotions and sounds artificial, so as a wedge-issue(the
| actual term for thing like 'Shiri Scissors') generator it
| wouldn't produce anything on the scale of human trolls(who
| actually understand psychology), besides the reputation of
| new user posting auto-generated trolling content will not be
| taken as seriously. A real troll would construct a narrative
| that is believable and appealing to a wide audience, without
| any controversial content: the controversy would comes from
| implications and analysis of statements in detail, i.e. the
| 'obviously controversial' parts are bad trolling that would
| detract from the position advanced: An AI trained to produce
| controversial content wouldn't understand such subtlety and
| produce directly inflammatory content.
| SilasX wrote:
| That would just mean that "controversial" isn't the best
| term for "whatever that thing is they're optimizing", not
| that that thing is fundamentally machine-unlearnable.
| Triv888 wrote:
| Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum Audiobook Part 1:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyALEomuk9k
| epilys wrote:
| This BBC article says that the Illuminati conspiracy theory was
| the result of an elaborate literary prank
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170809-the-accidental-i...
| sdoering wrote:
| I can only agree with the recommendation. One fun fact I wanted
| to add is that in one of his writings Eco told the story of a
| letter he received because of said book.
|
| In the book there is the description of a fire in Paris on a
| specific date. The reader wrote to Eco, that he must have
| gotten the date wrong, as he was at that place that night and
| that there was no fire.
|
| Eco uses this as an example, that some readers do not
| understand the signifiers of fictionality and that authors
| sometimes have to deal with readers taking their fictional work
| literally.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Second the recommendation, great book.
| throwoutttt wrote:
| Or you could just watch cnn
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| This technology can't come soon enough. I still meet people who
| don't believe Iraq has WMDs and that we invaded simply because of
| the oil.
| haunter wrote:
| I'd much love to read a paper like this applied to conspiracy
| theories that became true (Epstein, PRISM etc). Basically reverse
| engineering
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| Agreed! But did I miss the part where the Epstein conspiracy
| theory was demonstrated to be true?
| corona-research wrote:
| None. Epstein killed himself. Everything else is a conspiracy
| theory of stupid people. We should laugh about them. We are
| so much smarter. People would never do sth like that just
| because of power. All people are nice and have good
| intentions. Questioning the intentions of people in power is
| a stupid conspiracy for morons.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Yeah. Without pulling up sources it's on his second paragraph
| of his wikipedia page, which tends to avoid conspiracies etc.
|
| "He developed an elite social circle and procured many women
| and children who were then sexually abused by Epstein and
| some of his contacts."
| throwaway80332 wrote:
| > Without pulling up sources it's on his second paragraph
| of his wikipedia page, which tends to avoid conspiracies
| etc.
|
| Slightly off topic, but I'm so happy wikipedia has finally
| stepped up an gotten rid of the stupid conspiracy theories
| that used to ruin their articles in the past because they
| turned a blind eye to the racist patriarchy of old white
| men that oppresses the working class and minorities.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| Oh, that part. Absolutely. I didn't even realize that was
| ever considered a conspiracy theory. I thought GP was
| referring to his death!
| nautilus12 wrote:
| Was most certainly branded as a conspiracy theory until
| it was revealed. This is why I think people are more apt
| to believe other conspiracy theories around him as well
| jberryman wrote:
| What do you mean "until it was revealed"? There was some
| pretty exhaustive reporting a decade and a half ago, but
| no one really payed much attention. And certainly his
| high-profile connections weren't a secret.
|
| Conspiracy-minded people imagine a deep shroud of secrecy
| around the Epstein affair that doesn't really exist.
| mistermann wrote:
| > There was some pretty exhaustive reporting a decade and
| a half ago, but no one really payed much attention.
|
| Considering how the media and public seem to usually
| enjoy getting their panties in a knot when the topic of
| child molestation arises, is this historic lack of
| interest combined with the current lack of interest not
| somewhat suggestive that something a little unusual might
| be going on here?
|
| > a deep shroud of secrecy around the Epstein affair
| _that doesn 't really exist_
|
| Out of curiosity, how does one come to know such a thing?
| Do you have access to a data source that the rest of us
| don't?
| jberryman wrote:
| I don't really understand your comment, but to restate my
| own: the Epstein stuff was basically all a matter of
| public record. I don't claim to have insight into why
| certain news stories and court cases become more popular
| than others.
| mistermann wrote:
| My first comment is an observance that both the public
| and the media usually exhibit intense interest in matters
| that involve the sexual abuse of a child. Considering the
| Epstein affair involves the alleged systemic abuse of
| multiple children over a long period of time, _and_ it
| involves celebrities (which itself usually attracts
| significant attention), the minimal level of interest it
| has received from the public and the media seems rather
| counter-intuitive.
|
| Regarding my second comment, I was noting that you seem
| to have a sense of omniscience about you:
|
| - "...a deep shroud of secrecy around the Epstein affair
| _that doesn 't really exist_."
|
| - "...the Epstein stuff _was basically all a matter of
| public record_. "
|
| Of course, if there was in fact a shroud of secrecy, or
| if some evidence on Epstein was not made available on the
| public record, you would have no way of knowing this.
| Yet, you speak as if you do know.
|
| My armchair psychologist theory is that these sorts of
| incredibly common logical errors (several of which can be
| seen in this thread) are due to subconscious heuristics
| running on binary (True/False) logic rather than ternary
| (True/False/Unknown) logic. The human mind, both
| subconscious _and conscious_ really seems to struggle
| with Null /Unknown. I have the impression that this
| phenomenon is increasing over time (perhaps due to
| increased internet usage, plus Trump), but I don't know
| how one might go about measuring such a thing.
| choward wrote:
| Maybe they're referring to his actual crimes and not the
| conspiracy theory about how he died.
| lsalvatore wrote:
| Right, because there is nothing suspicious at all about how
| the camera footage mysteriously disappeared on the night he
| died.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| Sure. But that is the sort of thing that one says about
| something that is still a conspiracy theory. It hardly
| demonstrates that he was murdered with sufficient clarify
| to elevate this to the realm of accepted fact.
| vpmpaul wrote:
| Epstein was possibly the most high profile case of child
| sex trafficking linked to people in power in all of
| history. Instead of being treated as such every
| procedure, protocol, and standard were botched,
| disregarded, "glitched", ignored, ect. You are never
| gonna get a video of Clinton, ect confessing to buying
| child prostitutes from Epstine.
| [deleted]
| intotheabyss wrote:
| I don't know. I find it more likely that people are just
| incompetent. The world is not nearly as finely run as
| conspiracy theorists like to think it is. Epstein was
| never going to allow himself to rot away in jail, so it's
| zero surprise that he committed suicide. He's never had
| to deal with the consequences of his actions, why would
| he start then?
| User23 wrote:
| Destroying the evidence so blatantly was incompetent. A
| competent group of conspirators that has the resources to
| blackmail US Presidents would have done things much more
| smoothly, including an entirely realistic looking video
| of Epstein killing himself.
| mistermann wrote:
| Conspiracy theory conversations are fascinating to me.
| One the one side you have conspiracy theorists who have a
| rather loose practice of epistemology, relying heavily on
| heuristic intuition and a few "facts" in the formation of
| their beliefs. And then you have their detractors who
| seem to consider themselves intellectually superior, yet
| use essentially the same reasoning methodology (as it
| relates specifically to conspiracy theories).
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Right, but he was kept on suicide watch, given paper
| clothes and sheets, and placed in a special jail cell
| specifically designed to prevent suicide, as they are
| currently doing with Ghislaine Maxwell:
| https://nypost.com/2020/07/09/feds-take-ghislaine-
| maxwells-s...
| throwaway80332 wrote:
| Only insane far-right conspiracy theorists think about
| Epstein or Maxwell. If you listen to even a tiny bit of
| what they're spouting, you immediately see that it's
| complete nonsense. Therefor it is very important that
| they are not allowed to poison the debate and spread
| their dangerous lunacy.
| throwaway80332 wrote:
| And thankfully, the new algorithm will be able to quickly
| identify the perpetrators who spread those insane
| conspiracy theories so they can be Epsteined as well
| lsalvatore wrote:
| Well the footage of his death was "accidentally" erased.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51053205
| thamer wrote:
| That's pretty bad. It's also not particularly surprising to
| see more incompetence from a prison where guards did not do
| their job correctly and even went as far as falsifying
| records about their activities on the night of to cover
| their asses (regarding a detainee that had just been on
| suicide watch, no less). Their trial for these actions is
| set to start in June, after multiple delays.
|
| You need a seriously screwed-up culture in the detention
| facility for this to even be considered by guards, much
| less attempted. Why would anyone assume that only the two
| guards that were indicted are somehow the only bad apples
| there and that everyone else is great at their job?
|
| It would be interesting to compare the guards at this
| facility with others on topics like complaints from
| detainees or disciplinary actions, to get a better idea of
| how unusual this behavior was. So far 100% of the COs
| involved have demonstrated to be highly incompetent and
| even dishonest.
|
| I have no particular opinion about what exactly happened to
| cause his death (mainly because I don't pass judgment based
| on the little evidence I have) but it's easy to see why
| many would consider these actions proof of a conspiracy
| though.
| joshdick wrote:
| The paper does analyze a real conspiracy: Bridgegate.
| djsumdog wrote:
| COINTELPRO, Operation Mockingbird, Bay of Pigs, the Sept 11
| 1973 CIA backed coup in Chile, Iranian-Contras, non-existant
| Weapons of Mass Destruction/Iraq, MKUltra, Tuskegee Syphilis
| Study, Church Committee ... the list is as long as you want to
| make it.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Yeah, this paper does little to indicate this tool's
| effectiveness at distinguishing between "conspiracy" and
| "conspiracy theory". To me, a Conspiracy Theory is an
| unconfirmed Conspiracy that lacks a preponderance of
| evidence. I'd rather see some sort of weighted approach that
| factors for new evidence as it comes in, if it comes in at
| all. Even in a broad Conspiracy Theory, there may be parts of
| it that are true and parts of it that are untrue, it isn't a
| binary thing.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| From the abstract, the authors are claiming that the big
| differences between real conspiracies and conspiracy
| theories is that real conspiracies involve a single domain,
| while conspiracy theories cross domains.
|
| They explicitly contrast Bridgegate and Pizzagate.
| Bridgegate was real and only involved New Jersey politics.
| Pizzagate of course is a grab bag of everything.
|
| Of course we can make a Bridgegate conspiracy theory by
| simply pointing out the fact that Chris Christie's name
| translates as "Christ Christ", and he was opposed by Mark
| Sokolich. And what's another word for "opposed" or
| "opposite"? That's right "anti", as in the antichrist.
|
| Now you might be suspicious, but we know from analyzing
| transcendentalist literature that the pronunciation of
| names is a symbol. "Chris Christie", in addition to meaning
| Christ, leaves your mouth with a smile, while "Mark
| Sokolich" leaves your mouth harsh and jagged, like evil.
|
| Furthermore, governor of New Jersey ordered the closures of
| the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge. Which isn't
| surprising because George Washington was famously a
| Freemason, a group that's connected to Hermeticism, which
| has the famous saying, "As above, so below." Close the
| upper deck, close the ground.
|
| "Ground" is just another word for "Earth", and so what is
| above the Earth? That's right the heavens. And what lives
| in the Heaven? That's right God. But not just any god, the
| false gods, those from the heavens, the ancient travelers
| from the stars.
|
| So you see, by closing two-thirds of the toll booths
| dedicated to the town, the governor of New Jersey performed
| a magickal working to ensare and imprison an alien battle
| fleet, commanded by the the reptilian demon that had
| replaced the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey.
|
| This is just facts. It's just that the whole is
| considerably less than the parts.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The connection of more than one domain does not
| automatically discredit a conspiracy theory. While your
| elaboration on Bridgegate is creative, as the poster
| above mine mentioned, other conspiracies involving
| multiple domains have been found to be true or at least
| partially true. Epstein island, MkUltra, etc.
|
| So the approach I would take would be to isolate each
| claim in a conspiracy and assign some weighted value to
| each claim. Connecting aliens to Bridgegate would be
| obviously a tiny fraction of a percentage of likely to be
| true. But if someone were to make the claim that
| Bridgegate was connected to payouts from a lobbyist firm
| or that Chris Christie was associated with Jeffrey
| Epstein, I wouldn't necessarily dismiss that claim
| outright. It would remain an unverified but reasonably
| possible claim that would need further info or
| investigation.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| That seems to speak to your own biases.
|
| Now if I spun this conspiracy to say that Chris Christie
| created a traffic jam so that child sex traffickers
| protected by the mayor of Fort Lee couldn't easily
| escape, while the New Jersey state police conducted a
| raid on secret bunkers under the GWB. Would you believe
| that? Because if you do, I have a bike to sell you in the
| basement of the Alamo.
| corona-research wrote:
| Is mass surveillance a conspiracy theory?
| samizdis wrote:
| A few minutes ago I posted the Ars Technica piece about this, but
| that was before I'd noticed this one referencing the study
| directly. I duly deleted the Ars piece, but if anyone wants to
| read it it is at:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/01/study-folklore-struc...
|
| Edited to add: I remembered a piece posted six months ago,
| referencing UCLA, along the same/similar lines and have just
| found it:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23681232
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| The important bits of the abstract to me.
|
| > how conspiracy theories ... and their factual counterpart
| conspiracies... We show how the Pizzagate framework relies on the
| conspiracy theorists' interpretation of "hidden knowledge" to
| link otherwise unlinked domains of human interaction, and
| hypothesize that this multi-domain focus is an important feature
| of conspiracy theories. We contrast this to the single domain
| focus of an actual conspiracy. By highlighting the structural
| differences between the two narrative frameworks, our approach
| could be used by private and public analysts to help distinguish
| between conspiracy theories and conspiracies.
|
| I'm not sure how to interpret this new classification of true
| conspiracies as just "conspiracies" and false ones as "conspiracy
| theories" that they seem to be pushing in this paper. Many things
| others called conspiracy theory were eventually proven to be
| true, at least in some degree, and those things are often still
| called conspiracy theories because they have uncomfortable truths
| that people would rather not acknowledge as factual. This seems
| like an abuse of terminology in some way to me.
|
| Before I delve to deeply into this, I will first say, however; As
| an open conspiracy theorist, (doing my best to "take back" the
| phrase), who tries to stick to the facts as much as possible, I
| have long thought about how a scientific approach could be used
| to prove the likelyhood of what others call conspiracy theories,
| and the longer I have thought on the matter the more I have great
| hope that some researchers or other would stumble upon this
| likely-career hurting approach to said theories. While I disagree
| with the papers characterization of certain theories as true and
| certain ones as false, both due to the black and white label and
| the lack of context primarily surrounding the accusations of the
| narrative framework of the true to be one that is in more flux
| and single domain vs the one of the untrue being constantly in
| less flux and multi-domain, I think this approach could be
| modified and put to better use beyond the limitations of this
| paper itself, primarily because the root of their study is the
| same as a serious conspiracy theory researcher: "actants (people,
| places, things), relationships between actants, and a sequencing
| of these relationships".
|
| It is only in the application of this approach to center on
| stories and social media that a series of methodological mistakes
| emerge to weaken the paper. I could go into some of the details
| if wanted about these weaknesses, but in general on HN I try to
| keep the discussion more meta on the topic of conspiracy theories
| in order to not devolve the conversation too much. One example I
| will give however, is their overreliance on certain sources of
| data (twitter, reddit) that were considered at best secondary to
| the more deep and open conversations (the chans, irc, etc) being
| had on certain topics (pizzagate for example) juxtaposed against
| the reliance on UCLA aggregates of NJ newspapers on the topic of
| Bridgegate. I know, I was participating in all of the above when
| the last post which "broke the last straw" on reddit caused the
| sub to be banned. [1] Again, I don't say this to start a
| discussion on pizzagate as it is likely to devolve quickly, but
| rather to show I'm not making up my accusations of methodological
| weakness based on nothing. This sort of snowball methodological
| weakness then undermines their conclusion, which quickly goes off
| the rails into so many tropes and cliches not backed by their
| data and research it quite surprises me to see the the authors
| take a semi-defensible approach and allow it to be deteriorated
| by such a series of erroneous "conclusions". Go read the
| conclusion section for yourself if you think I am exaggerating.
|
| 1. https://archive.md/MrsGu
|
| edit: in particular I would like to call out their overreliance
| on calling conspiracy theory discussion some variation of
| "imaginative interpretations of "hidden knowledge"". In reality,
| and this is something I frequently like to stress to my more
| logical/scientific friends who are skeptical of certain
| conspiracy theories, what many conspiracy theories rely on, often
| without being aware of it (to their detriment) is a series of
| inductive logical conclusions, as opposed to a series of
| deductive logical conclusions. Rightly so I say, because in the
| domain of conspiracy theory you often lack the hard evidence to
| back claims, and therefor _must_ often rely on inductive logic
| instead (and the lack of deductive evidence does not alway
| indicate untruthfulness as is often assumed). This is one of the
| keys that helped me get past many issues, because when it comes
| to conspiracy theories true or not, the real crux is the
| probabalistic likelyhood of truth which can be modified as more
| data points emerge, not some black and white true and untrue
| label.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> This is one of the keys that helped me get past many issues,
| because when it comes to conspiracy theories true or not, the
| real crux is the probabalistic likelyhood of truth which can be
| modified as more data points emerge, not some black and white
| true and untrue label._
|
| I think part of the problem here is that most of what we call
| conspiracy theories that are true aren't actually
| _conspiracies_ per-se, except in the loose sense of "a
| conspiracy of silence", and don't particularly intersect with
| things like secret societies. I mean, sure, there are efforts
| made to conceal things from the public, and yes, there is a
| certain amount of coordination among powerful actors where
| their vested interest align, what else would you expect to
| happen in the real world? For every amoral person to act as a
| solitary megalomaniacal villain?
|
| But none of that particularly implies that this sort of thing
| is planned ahead or centrally organized in any particular way
| or there wouldn't be any need for in-person meetings like the
| Bilderberg Group (which didn't even meet in 2020). It certainly
| doesn't imply that such conspiracies deliberately interlock
| with each other except as you would expect simply from
| survivorship bias.
|
| I mean, organized crime is a conspiracy. A large corporation
| evading responsibility for a chemical spill is a conspiracy.
| Cartels doing price fixing is a conspiracy. The US military
| flexing in support of private interests is a conspiracy.
| Lobbyists getting exceptions and loopholes enacted into law is
| a conspiracy. Politicians accepting bribes is a conspiracy.
|
| So conspiracies as such aren't unknown. Such things come to
| light all the time in part because maintaining secrecy is so
| damn hard and there are many interests aligned in exposing
| them. We should encourage that where and when we can.
| hammock wrote:
| >We show how the Pizzagate framework relies on the conspiracy
| theorists' interpretation of "hidden knowledge" to link otherwise
| unlinked domains of human interaction, and hypothesize that this
| multi-domain focus is an important feature of conspiracy
| theories. We contrast this to the single domain focus of an
| actual conspiracy. While Pizzagate relies on the alignment of
| multiple domains, Bridgegate remains firmly rooted in the single
| domain of New Jersey politics
|
| This study is interesting work to be sure, but the cause behind
| their hypothesis might be rooted in how journalism works, rather
| than whether it's truthful/factual or not.
|
| Papers have a NJ politics "beat", with an editor and reporters
| who are experts in that single domain and are expected to produce
| work rooted in that specific domain.
|
| Or worse, the "single domain" in some instances might be
| appearing because it was a story fed to the paper by a three-
| letter agency.
|
| Citizen journalists (or whatever less charitable term you want to
| use) don't really have that. They can focus on whatever they
| want, and it's much easier to build a narrative that spans
| multiple domains.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| " Papers have a NJ politics "beat", with an editor and
| reporters who are experts in that single domain and are
| expected to produce work rooted in that specific domain."
|
| I suspect that this is increasingly less true every year as
| local reporting is actively dying.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> " Papers have a NJ politics "beat", with an editor and
| reporters who are experts in that single domain and are
| expected to produce work rooted in that specific domain."_
|
| _> I suspect that this is increasingly less true every year
| as local reporting is actively dying._
|
| This isn't a new concern, of course[0], but in 2021 local
| reporting has probably already mostly died as much as it is
| going to. There just isn't that much money left to take away.
|
| [0] https://www.poynter.org/newsletters/2017/the-west-wing-
| total...
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