[HN Gopher] Where did the idea of the tin foil hat come from?
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Where did the idea of the tin foil hat come from?
Author : gumby
Score : 41 points
Date : 2024-06-10 14:04 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| spacebacon wrote:
| We are all vulnerable to abstractions. Those with thinner
| boundaries of the mind are easier to penetrate with folklore.
| Often these disinformation efforts are emotionally powerful
| enough to transcend science and reason.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundaries_of_the_mind
| blueflow wrote:
| These are called "Tropes" and their workings teached in
| literature classes.
|
| As tropes are fiction and tradited, it is important to be able
| to differentiate between facts and tropes.
| ulfbert_inc wrote:
| >Wearing one signals to others that you're unhinged, have a deep
| distrust of the government, or that you're really worried about
| aliens.
|
| >have a deep distrust of the government
|
| sure Gizmodo, being distrustful of a massive power entity is a
| lunacy /s
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Lunacy is seeing "deep state" conspiracies everywhere. That's
| not healthy skepticism.
| roenxi wrote:
| That is getting in to citation needed territory. The state in
| most countries controls between 30 and 60% of the GDP. It is
| a prime target for corruption and anyone who likes money or
| abusing power will be drawn to it like a magnet. Pretty much
| all of the major powers are spying on almost literally
| everything that happens on the internet and we know that
| reasonably stable societies can go full Nazi in less than 20
| years which is a legitimately terrifying combination.
|
| An entity with that level of power and reach deserves extreme
| scepticism. As we discovered through the noble sacrifice of a
| lot of Chinese and Russians the people in bureaucracies are
| quite comfortable with accidentally causing millions of
| needless deaths through sheer administrative efficiency in
| implementing bad policies.
|
| The problem with deep state conspiracies isn't the level of
| scepticism, it is that the theories don't protect the people
| who hold them. Knowing that a bureaucrat is willing to disarm
| you then starve you to death ... does not help that much when
| the army or secret police gets involved.
| dingnuts wrote:
| > the theories don't protect the people who hold them.
| Knowing that a bureaucrat is willing to disarm you then
| starve you to death ... does not help that much when the
| army or secret police gets involved.
|
| the unelected bureaucrat branch of the US government,
| referred to as the "deep state" by some, is so large and
| powerful due to funding.
|
| The people who use the term "deep state" unironically are
| engaged in political activism where they are arguing for
| dismantling, drawing down, and defunding bureaus that they
| feel are out of control.
|
| it's ironic that these activists are dismissed by you as
| being mere "conspiracy theories". it's like calling BLM a
| conspiracy theory. people who are fighting the power of
| unelected bureaucrats are political activists. They're just
| defamed by the same machine that they're opposed to. What a
| shock! The people in power defame and attempt to discredit
| those who seek to remove them from power.
|
| Truly, if you do not understand the complaints of those who
| decry the undeserved and overgrown power of the deep state,
| you are not thinking about the position of those who hold
| those views long enough to understand them. You don't have
| to AGREE with them, but they aren't touting a conspiracy
| theory. The administrative state exists, is large, has
| power, and these are activists who want to change that.
|
| They want to stop it before there are secret police or the
| army is corrupted. Of course, the CIA is secret police, and
| they coined the epithet "conspiracy theory" that you repeat
| in order to discredit these activists. Coincidence?
| stetrain wrote:
| Corruption, as in individuals working in their own interest
| in a way that best provides them power and/or lines their
| pockets, is different than a grand conspiracy that a large
| percentage of that state is working together on a secret
| project that they have guarded from the public.
|
| The government is not "an entity", it is layers and levels
| of elected and unelected officials working towards their
| own personal goals.
|
| The idea that many of them do things that they shouldn't
| for personal gain is fairly obvious.
|
| Ideas that huge numbers of them are working together in
| secret across both public and private sector to execute a
| singular master plan, fake a moon landing, mess with the
| population via brain wave broadcasts, spread chemtrails via
| commercial aircraft, etc. with zero hard evidence are on an
| entirely different level.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > a grand conspiracy that a large percentage of that
| state is working together on a secret project that they
| have guarded from the public.
|
| But this is a straw man. Do you know any conspiracy
| theorists that believe that a large percentage of the
| state is working together on a secret project that they
| have guarded from the public, or is that just the easiest
| thing to discount? The conspiracy theories I hear about
| are about small groups of people that "control things
| from behind the scenes."
|
| > The government is not "an entity", it is layers and
| levels of elected and unelected officials working towards
| their own personal goals.
|
| This is a false dichotomy. The non-existence of
| government as an entity is a conspiracy theory so wild
| that very few people believe it. It's like saying Apple
| doesn't exist, just some people who happen to be sitting
| at desks near each other that conspiracy theorists
| decided to make a big deal about.
| stetrain wrote:
| > But this is a straw man. Do you know any conspiracy
| theorists that believe that a large percentage of the
| state is working together on a secret project that they
| have guarded from the public, or is that just the easiest
| thing to discount?
|
| The moon landing conspiracy theory is a good example. It
| would involve hundreds of thousands of people across
| public and private sector all keeping such a secret. It
| would even involve the governments of other countries
| (namely Russia, or Australia who received and relayed
| many of the lunar broadcasts on the US's behalf) who had
| their own tracking and radio equipment and could have at
| least attempted to discredit the mission, but did not.
|
| Chemtrails is a common conspiracy theory as well that
| again would require cooperation and secret keeping among
| thousands across both public and private sectors.
|
| Part of my point is that a small number of people keeping
| a secret for a short time is plausible, but as the number
| of people and length of time scale up it becomes less
| plausible due to human nature.
|
| In countries with extreme state corruption, secret
| police, rigged elections, people being "disappeared",
| etc. those things are not secrets, and the problem is not
| a lack of evidence of the corruption.
|
| The citizens know that the secret police exist and that
| you are at risk of being detained by the secret police
| for publicly stating forbidden positions. The citizens
| know the autocrat will always win each election. They are
| just powerless to change it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Unless you're talking about any of America's current enemies
| list, where _not seeing_ state conspiracies everywhere is not
| healthy skepticism.
|
| The real question is when will they start treating skepticism
| as a medical condition, and how can I invest now in the drugs
| that will be advertised to treat it?
| zamadatix wrote:
| Deep distrust in this context is more like "lizard people are
| running the government as a tool to control us" where the
| entity secretly exists for a nefarious purpose rather than the
| stated one and there can be no level of trust with anything
| from it as a result. It's not the same as general distrust
| which would be more like "I don't trust all politicians
| inherently have our best interests at heart or that they will
| never abuse their power" where you don't blindly take
| everything at face value but you also don't blindly dismiss
| everything as outright untrustworthy either.
| bee_rider wrote:
| These days, conspiracy theorists seem to be some of the most open
| to manipulation folks out there.
|
| > Even though "tin foil hat" is the expression, most people use
| aluminum foil these days.
|
| This is probably why, we've been duped! They replaced the tin
| with aluminum. Everyone knows aluminum has mind control
| enhancing, not reducing, powers.
| throwup238 wrote:
| I think that has always been the case. Dale Gribble predates
| the latest round of conspiracy madness by a few years and he
| was just as gullible. He's the archetypal conspiracy theorist
| of the 90s.
| bee_rider wrote:
| But nowadays with TikTok and YouTube, Dale Gribble can become
| an influencer, and at home video editing is so good that he
| can have his own green-screened newsroom with all the
| accoutrements of respectability. Or he could just start a
| podcast.
| tombert wrote:
| Very tangential, but the voice actor of Dale (Johnny
| Hardwick, RIP) actually had YouTube videos playing Dale as
| Rust Shackleford in The Rusty Report. My head canon says
| that this is where Dale ended up.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wiVDr-Pr5o
| drewcoo wrote:
| > These days, conspiracy theorists seem to be some of the most
| open to manipulation folks out there.
|
| "Conspiracy theories" are narratives counter to the status quo.
|
| Arguably more people are "manipulated" into following the
| status quo.
|
| Thus, I would argue that "conspiracy theorists" may be the
| least likely folks to be "manipulated."
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah, that's the default assumption. But nowadays media is so
| fragmented, bubbled, and algorithmic; you can have a whole
| YouTube or TikTok ecosystem around building an alternative
| narrative.
| pessimizer wrote:
| A popular theory a few years ago is that people who believe
| in _extremely unlikely and sometimes nonsensical explanations
| of current events_ are actually _too_ shrewd. They understand
| better than most that all of the information they receive is
| compromised for the benefit of powerful others, but in the
| desperation for information that isn 't mercenary, they turn
| to random gurus who aren't connected to or knowledgeable
| about anything.
|
| You see that impulse a lot on HN and other forums, when they
| decry some study as "biased" because the author of the study
| is well-known to believe that what the study shows is true.
| For them, the people who initiate studies would ideally be
| people with no knowledge about or interest in the subject
| that they are studying. Anything less than that is
| _obviously_ an intentional manipulation.
| gumby wrote:
| I still mask (and wear a flo mask to boot!) -- now I wonder if
| people think I'm a conspiracy theorist?
|
| I have a soft spot for conspiracy theorists: they have such a
| charitable view of humanity that they believe a large number of
| people can keep a secret.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'd tend to assume you are immune compromised or were dealing
| with some other none-of-my-business thing like that.
| swader999 wrote:
| Shout out to the Kozyrev mirror re the aluminum reference. Go
| see the why files YouTube episode on that for a fun hour.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I just happened across the aluminum bit on Wikipedia, I guess
| I'll have to look up that YouTube.
| swader999 wrote:
| Here you go:
| https://youtu.be/a9hwXoCrEUs?si=QuXoCOWQi_ifGcsr
| swader999 wrote:
| The biggest conspiracy theory I would be accused of holding at
| the moment is that the politicians in power and the main media
| are sleepwalking us into nuclear war. There's zero awareness,
| protest or discussion atm. Arguably we are closer to the brink
| than in the sixties with no diplomatic way out, just
| escalation.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Conspiracy theories often posit grand organizations that
| control things behind the scenes. The idea that we're
| sleepwalking towards disaster seems more like the opposite of
| a conspiracy theory to me.
|
| I suspect there's something a little like a conspiracy to not
| blow ourselves up. But it is just, like, a system of official
| treaties and organizations, as well as a bunch of back-
| channels and informal give-and-takes. It probably isn't
| anywhere near as robust as we'd like it to be.
| swader999 wrote:
| It's the media complicity in this, them not questioning the
| escalation, that leans towards my conspiratorial angle.
| mistermann wrote:
| > But the truth is, there's really no evidence that a centralized
| power is trying to control your brain through electromagnetic
| waves entering your brain stem.
|
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a...
|
| > But the truth is...
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/
|
| Relevant:
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cogn...
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/
| bregma wrote:
| Of course any kind of non-ferrous headgear is not going to work
| to block the kind of radiation that the gov't uses for control.
|
| At least, that what they want you to believe since this kind of
| low technology is so accessible and effective.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Ha! As if it required an entire system to control you, I could do
| it with a TV or the hypnotic trigger of "tell me more about
| yourself." -Edward Teach M.D.
| blue_dragon wrote:
| The CIA popularized the "tinfoil hat conspiracy nut" as a
| reverse-psychology trick back in the '60s as part of Operation
| Mockingbird.
|
| The government had seen promising results in its experiments to
| control human emotions via radio-wave emissions, and they wanted
| to deploy this technology on a national scale. However, one
| recurring problem was that thin films of conductive material,
| such as aluminum foil, had a tendency to scramble the control
| waves and render them useless. In response, the CIA launched a
| massive press campaign intended to smear and delegitimize the
| wearing of tinfoil hats, with the ultimate goal of preemptively
| convincing the public not to wear them via threat of social
| ostracization.
|
| Considering the widespread mockery levied at the tinfoil
| community today, I'd say their efforts have worked quite well.
|
| You can read more about Operation Mockingbird here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
| golergka wrote:
| > The government had seen promising results in its experiments
| to control human emotions via radio-wave emissions
|
| There's no mention of this in the Wikipedia article.
| moralestapia wrote:
| ???
|
| Is this /s? ChatGPT? Both?
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| I suspect a ,,flood the channel with shit" background.
|
| I'm starting to see this pattern more regularly lately: on a
| social media site, mix some nonsense into some real context
| "Foo", and add a link to the Wikipedia for "Foo".
|
| Enough readers will be too lazy to actually read the
| Wikipedia article to find out that "Foo" didn't contain the
| crazy parts, but will vaguely remember "there was this Foo
| thing with this really crazy stuff, but it wasn't made up --
| it's all official, it's on Wikipedia!"
|
| The gp is a prime example -- even in the well educated HN
| crowd, there are now probably a handful of people that will
| vaguely have in the back of their minds: ,,there was a CIA
| media influencing campaign in the sixties, they even used
| radio waves for mind control."
|
| Only the first part is true, but both information now live
| rent-free in their mind, intermingled, and have the same
| ,,truthiness value".
|
| Edit: could aim at machines as well as humans. It's just a
| tiny signal, but one more signal for Google Search, Bing, GPT
| etc. that ,,CIA" and ,,mind-control radio-waves" are somehow
| related to each other.
| nilamo wrote:
| That sounds completely made up. I simply do not believe that
| nobody in the CIA conceived of a layer of tinfoil inside of a
| normal hat, which would not be visible to anyone.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It isn't necessarily true but the origin of the meme _is_ a
| supposed CIA mind control defense. It was current in 80s meat
| space before internet conspiracy culture flourished.
| hooverd wrote:
| wouldn't the tinfoil hat act as an antenna? clever play by the
| CIA, delegitimize the tinfoil hat and thus convincing the
| people most likely to be effected their brainular wave
| manipulation to don one.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > The tin-foil hat can be traced back to 1927, first spotted by
| Business Insider roughly a decade ago, in a short story titled
| "The Tissue-Culture King." It's a strange short story written by
| Julian Huxley, whose brother Alduous was a prolific writer and
| author of Brave New World. It was Julian, however, who was
| possibly the first to mention wrapping your cranium in foil.
|
| I absolutely guarantee that this isn't the origin of the term
| "tinfoil hat" or of people accusing people that they want to
| discount as "wearing a tinfoil hat." What happened was a writer
| came across an early mention in fiction of somebody using a metal
| shield to fend off mind control rays that no one read and that
| inspired no one, and they thought they might be able to build an
| article around it. Using a metal shield to fend off a charge is
| obvious, although when it comes to a Faraday cage around your
| head, your neck is a problem.
|
| "Tinfoil hat" is an accusation. Find the first person recorded
| accusing someone else of wearing a tinfoil hat. Find out of the
| reference confused people, or if it seemed familiar to people. If
| it confused people, try to find whether he/she was asked to
| explain it. If it was familiar to people, look for other
| contemporaneous mentions and try again.
| blueflow wrote:
| TvTropes at it was first:
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TinfoilHat
|
| Feel invited to click around that site. It is a useful thing to
| be aware what "Tropes" are as they are fiction.
| interludead wrote:
| I remember running around with friends in those hats when I was a
| child.
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