Category: General

A Question of Definitions

A short post this week, I promise! ((Mostly because I have something else I need to write today.)) Last week, whilst riffing on Labour’s dog-whistle racism (which seems to have had no effect on their polling, so well done that team for letting down the Left and failing to get the racists onboard; quality job, well done!), I mentioned briefly how many people became experts on racism last week simply by reaching for their dictionaries.

As you should know, I am a philosopher, and philosophers rarely use dictionary definitions to win arguments. ((Instead, we tend to like to completely redefine words to suit our arguments, and then go “Oh, but you don’t really mean x when you say x; you actually mean y…”)) So, when people reached for their dictionaries to prove that Phil Twyford’s framing of the housing crisis in Auckland wasn’t actually racist, I rolled my eyes. Dictionary definitions are not the be-all and end-all of debate, and if you know anything about language, then you will know that dictionary definitions cannot be considered absolute, complete or even up-to-date.

Let’s look at the definition of racism. Here’s OS X’s built in definition of racism:

the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

Now, that’s a fairly standard short dictionary definition. Compare it to the Oxford English Dictionary definition:

A belief that one’s own racial or ethnic group is superior, or that other such groups represent a threat to one’s cultural identity, racial integrity, or economic well-being; (also) a belief that the members of different racial or ethnic groups possess specific characteristics, abilities, or qualities, which can be compared and evaluated. Hence: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against people of other racial or ethnic groups (or, more widely, of other nationalities), esp. based on such beliefs.

That’s a better definition, but it does not capture the way in which racism is often used these days, which is in terms of systems and institutions. You need to look up “institutional racism” to get the following definition:

racial discrimination occurring habitually or customarily within a society or organization

That was a draft addition to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, which means it is not yet part of the main definition of a particular word, in this case, “institutional”. Note that; even though the defintion is about a form of racism, the maintainers of the dictionary think that the definition should be tagged to the word “institutional”, so even when “institutional racism” enters the Oxford English Dictionary, it will be effectively hidden and not part of the definition of what qualifies as a kind of racism.

Now, I don’t think that getting the defintion of institional racism built into “racism” will solve many, if any problems. People who are offended by the idea that racism can be more than interpersonal bigotry or prejudice will either stop reaching for their dictionaries or claim there is some agenda in changing the “essential” meaning of the word. No one is going to reach for their dictionary and then upon reading a definition go “Oh, wait, hold on a minute… Okay, no, I’m wrong; you’re right!” That never happens. However, talk of institutional racism is part of how people use the term “racism” and “racist” these days, and going to a dictionary and saying “No, you’re wrong” doesn’t prove a thing.

Modern dictionaries describe common usage, and a notable problem in that project is the lag between contemporary usage and when a term actually makes it into the dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary has had, in draft form, “institional racism” on the books for nine years now, and it’s still not teachnically in the printed versions of those dictionaries people reach for. Nine years means the term has been in use for quite a while, since “new” meanings only make it into the dictionary once they are demonstrably in use and commonplace.

Being called “racist” or having a position you agree with described as “racist” can be unsettling, particularly if you refuse to counterance the idea that racism can be systemic and institional (and thus sometimes something you implicitly agree to) rather than exlicit prejudice. However, reaching for a dictionary and telling people “No, racism is…” does nothing to undermine the claim that your view or position is potentially problematic. Dictionary definitions should never be argument stoppers. The final word in what a term means is never a dictionary. Common usage decides that. Dictionaries certainly are evidence of common usage, but even the maintainers of said dictionaries know that by the time a word makes it into a dictionary, it’s likely already in the process of taking on new and interesting meanings.

Talking about dictionaries, in the process of writing this blogpost my computer’s dictionary decided that the word “draft” was not in its dictionary. Weird, huh?

07/27/2015

Sensible Minds Might Not Prevail

A lot of LEDs (or digital ink, if you will) has been spent over the last week discussing the whole “Labour carpet blames the Chinese for the housing crisis”. Now, it’s quite obvious what I think of Labour from that previous sentence; at best Phil Twyford and Andrew Little did not think through how their message would come across (which makes them the kind of people who are unsuited to represent us in Parliament) and, at worse, they knew exactly how the message would come across but decided it was okay to sacrifice Chinese New Zealanders as long as it got the dog-whistle vote. I do not know which end of the spectrum of hypotheses is the most likely, although I do think Twyford and Little’s doubling-down on the “People are just being overly sensitive about this; what we really meant was…” vaguely supports the worse case scenario.

So, what do I have to add to the debate (aside from an awful lot of tweets last week poking fun at Labour Party sympathisers)? Very little. However, obviously some people think I should be writing on this, given emails, DMs and tweets all to that extent. And, I can see why; if you think Labour knew what it was they were doing, then it does seem like they have conspired to keep their intentions secret. Then there is the ongoing question of where they got their data from, and the secrecy which still remains about how they moved from a Bayesian analysis of who was buying what to the claim about the non-residential nature of the buyers. Potent questions/issues to be sure, but I really don’t know that I have much to say about.

Compare this case to the Rachinger allegations (the story of which seems to have gone quite quiet, and I am sure certain parties are blaming me and my cronies for that; we were, after all, meant to focus on our common enemy Cam Slater and not question the many interesting details of the story). In the Rachinger case there was an awful lot of publicly available evidence. In the Twyford case (or maybe I should, for consistency, refer to this as the “Twyford Allegations”) there is much speculation but little actual data. Indeed, this was a frequent criticism of the allegations, as shown by Keith Ng, Chuan-Zheng Lee, and Thomas Lumley to count a few. Labour’s response to these criticisms has been disingenuous, and I hate to say it, but none have been more disingenuous than the person who ran the statistical analysis, Rob Salmond. His Sunday Star-Times piece (which can also be read here either deliberately reinterprets the criticisms, or shows that he wasn’t so interested in debating the issue as he was in defending his methodology. Indeed, a more paranoid mind than my own would think, based upon the actions of the Leader, the MP and the Statistician ((A great film title if ever I heard one.)) indicate a concerted effort to wallpaper over the dog-whistling because they know it is doing them harm but they can’t be seen to be in error.

Now, it’s a little known fact but I know quite a bit about Bayesian analysis, since the last two chapters of my book uses such an analysis to argue that in a range of cases conspiracy theories can be inferences to the best explanation. ((There’s no math involved; my talk is entirely in talk of probabilities without the need to delve into fancy equations.)) As such, I read through Salmond’s description of his method with interest. I was struck by this claim:

To estimate ethnicity, we used public NZ census data on the ethnic distribution of neighbourhoods, and also used data we developed privately about the ethnic distribution of last, middle, and first names in New Zealand. We followed some advice – especially about estimating Asian ethnicities – from prominent US academic studies. I won’t be describing that process further, as that is sensitive IP for Labour.

Now, I can understand that, in some cases, claiming “This is sensitive intellectual property!” is a fine thing to say. However, in the case of a Party trying to make hay from an issue, that really is not good enough. If a Party wants to make a claim like “Foreign, non-resident Chinese are buying up all our houses!” and part of the analysis which supports that claim is secret, why should the Public trust the Party particularly when people have already pointed out methodological problems in the data analysis anyway? Hiding behind IP might be a sound business decision, but it should not be an action undertaken by a Party that a) wants to make it into Government and b) would appear to be engaging in racist dog-whistling to do it.

Maybe I’m overly sensitive about this, having written a book chapter on why we should never trust explanations which cite secret evidence. However, the sheer amount of flippancy about the framing of the claims and then a certain amount of secrecy over the alleged evidence which supports them is, if not outright conspiratorial, reason enough to make people sympathetic to a conspiracy theory that says Labour is doing this for reasons other than the ones the Party is willing to admit to.

Another reason to be concerned is Phil Twyford’s claim that the person who leaked the property data from Barfoot and Thompson is a “whistleblower.” Twyford has said:

I think the whistle-blower I dealt with did Aucklanders a favour and put this information into the domain out of a sense of public duty. I think Aucklanders owe that person a debt of gratitude.

A whistleblower is someone who reveals illicit or illegal activities. Whoever the leaker was, they were not a whistleblower. Nothing about the leak suggests Barfoot and Thompson did anything illegal. Not only that, but it seems the leaker was not aware the data they were passing on was making it to the Labour Party (and, it seems, other Parties). That raises some interesting questions about how the leaked data was obtained, which really does not reflect well on anyone.

Side issue: I frequently find myself reading the comments section over at Public Address (but rarely commenting these days), and what I found truly fascinating was not just the claim that anyone who disagreed with how the Labour Party framed the data “doesn’t care about the housing crisis” but also as “globalists”. I first saw this in a PA comment, and I was struck, going “Huh?” Then Bryce Edward’s started to characterise the difference in views in such terms:

What is going on here? Answers on a postcard, please.

In the end, I think the problem with the analysis of the housing crisis rides on two issues, the denial of the seriousness of which leads to people thinking there is some duplicity or conspiracy on the part of senior members of the Labour Party. The first is the data, which has been put forward as fact when it is nothing of the sort. Rob Salmond’s analysis is a piece of evidence, and it is highly contested evidence at that. A fact is something which is provably true, and Salmond’s analysis has not produced any factual claims (something he admits to, but others seem to mistakenly believe is true of his analysis). Rather, it is evidence of something, where that something is up to interpretation.

The second issue is our old friend institutional racism. It is true that a lot of people became experts in racism last week, but it’s also true a lot of people only became experts in racism because they reached for a dictionary. The standard dictionary definition of racism goes something like:

The belief that members of a race possess characteristics, abilities, et cetera specific to that race which distinguish it as inferior or superior to some other race or races.

The standard dictionary definition doesn’t capture the notion of institutional racism, however, and I’m sure none of us are simple enough to think that you can win a debate on dictionary definitions alone. ((Especially since there is a lag between dictionaries capturing common use and languages evolving.)) Yet many people went “But the framing of the debate doesn’t make out the Chinese are in anyway inferior, so it can’t be racist, you liberal bigots!” That ignores the structural or institutional form of racism, however, and just how easily Labour’s framing of their story (and it’s foolish indeed to claim it’s entirely the fault of the reporting newspaper in this case, given the defence of the story by Messrs. Little, Twyford and Salmond) plays into the systemic othering and denigration of people who aren’t “real Aucklanders”.

In short (since I realise I said I had little to say on this but have written one and an half thousand words since then), whatever we think of the problem the Twyford Allegations are pointing to, the actual substance of those allegations is nowhere near as strong as senior members of the Labour Party would have us believe, and the defence of those allegations looks at the best, fishy and, at worse, like someone thought it might be good for business to alienate people who easily pass as not looking like really they belong here…

07/20/2015

What’s so polite about the polite society?

In the previous post on what I am calling the “Polite Society” hypothesis, I glossed very generally over what politeness with respect to society is. I must admit that I am not using politeness here merely in the sense of “being nice” or “being respectful”; I think politeness can be both explicitly toxic in some cases and also sometimes an example of people acting in an expedient (and thus not necessarily morally virtuous) manner. So, what, precisely, do I mean by politeness here?

Well, in a recent (forthcoming) paper, “Can there be reasonable disagreement about conspiracy theories?” I say the following in a footnote:

How this notion of politeness plays out in any given polite society is open to interpretation. Sometimes a society will be polite because everyone knows everyone else in some nationstate, and thus no one wants cause trouble for the people they know (which might be the case in a small country like Aotearoa (New Zealand). Sometimes the politeness might be a feature of a long history of one class showing deference to another (as we saw in the middle of the Twentieth Century in the United Kingdom). Sometimes a society will be polite because it would be imprudent to mention the possibility that one does not live in a truly open society (which seems to have been the case in the U.S., where journalists had heard stories about the NSA surveillance programme prior to the leaks by Edward Snowden, but did not pursue them). The notion, then, of politeness here could be seen as an extension of what Lee Basham has termed “toxic truths”, evidence of wrong-doing by influential institutions, which the consequence of reporting such activity would be unthinkable. Thus we never speak of said wrong-doing, and thus we inadvertently maintain the fiction that we live in an open society. As such, the polite society is one where toxic truths are allowed to fester whilst people maintain – sometimes explicitly, sometimes unwittingly, that everything is okay.

Footnotes are, depending on who you talk to, either the place where ideas go to die or are the start of someone’s exciting research project. The polite society plays only a very minor part in “Can there be reasonable disagreement about conspiracy theories?”, but it’s something I think I’ll be working on developing in further works, mostly because I think the polite society explains a fair amount of our scepticism of conspiracy theories.

Why is that (you probably should be asking)? Well, I think it’s clear from the academic literature that much scepticism of conspiracy theories stems from a belief that in open societies (like our own, supposedly) conspiracies are rare and thus conspiracy theories are something we should treat with due suspicion. When people claim that conspiracy theorists are paranoid (Richard Hofstadter, for example), gullible (Quassim Cassam) or fantasist (Daniel Pipes), they are comparing belief in conspiracy theories with the kinds of beliefs people should have given the assertion we live in an open society. People who know they live in open societies should be suspicious of conspiracy theories (they are claiming) because conspiracies are rare in such societies; they get found out and dealt with in a transparent manner, because that is what the open society is all about.

The open society hypothesis also, I think, is a major factor in Noam Chomsky’s response to conspiracy theories. I am no fan of Daniel Pipes (both politically and theoretically), but in his book “Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From” Pipes chastises Chomsky – correctly, in my opinion – for trying to avoid talking about conspiracy theories by simply relabelling the worries he has about conspiracies as instances of institutional malfeasance. ((This is a worry I have about the work of Lance deHaven-Smith, although deHaven-Smith at least is well aware that he is relabelling conspiracy theories as “state crimes against democracy”.)) It seems that Chomsky’s institutional analysis requires that we think individuals conspiring is unlikely in an open society, so we load the worries about conspiratorial activity on to what are essentially malformed and malfunctioning institutions instead. Since institutions operate in an open society, we can tell that they are wonky, and thus we can shine a light on them. ((Shining a light on them doesn’t necessarily fix things, of course, because if more than one institution is wonky, then we might be expecting the fix to come from another malformed and manufacturing organisation.))

Now, the fact we can tell that certain institutions are wonky could be seen as support of the notion that we truly do live closer to something approaching an open society, rather than a polite one. However, it also allows a certain politeness in discourse to creep in. “Don’t accuse them of conspiring,” the Chomskian says, “they are just part of a bad system.” That’s just another way to be polite about conspiracies; it is the claim that we just don’t use that word to describe bad behaviour in our societies because it would be impolite… ((Chomsky doesn’t dismiss all belief in conspiracy theories by saying “Let’s talk about institutions instead!” However, it is fair to say he prefers talk of institutional analysis to talk of the analysis of these things called “conspiracy theories”, which I think allows him to gloss over certain problems as irrelevant to the well-informed citizen.))

I may well be being very unfair to Chomsky here; he’s an anarchist, after all, and looks down upon the modern nation state. As such, whatever kind of society we currently live in is not an ideal one. ((In this way, he’s a lot like Popper, the arch-authoritarian; just because our society is open, that doesn’t mean it is the best or even good.)) Still, I think his (conditional) scepticism of conspiracy theories is grounded in a belief in openness, one that I think is probably best crouched in terms of politeness.

Talking about anarchists, this gets me back very briefly to talk of the Ben Rachinger allegations. I think some of the (lack of) response to the claims Rachinger made are elements of politeness, and some of it is explicable in non-polite terms. On the one hand, there are a variety of polite reasons as to why Rachinger’s allegations seem to have led to little media attention; Cameron Slater, despite losing some cachet as a political figure after the 2014 General Election, is still one of many sources the media likes to turn to and does not want to get off side of. There is also the fact that Aotearoa being a small country, aspects of the allegations and the nature of the person making the allegations have met with silence because people do not want to talk about those aspects.

Yet, there’s also a way of looking at the allegations which explains the lack of media attention which is both polite and impolite; Rachinger’s allegations about Slater aren’t anything particularly big or novel compared to what we found out in Nicky Hager’s “Dirty Politics”. The media tried to cover that story and yet it seemed to go nowhere (at least with respect to a large section of the public). That might have been due to politeness at the time, but it’s at least explicable that people might go “It was a non-story then, so why assume it won’t be a non-story now?”

As I think is obvious, I am still trying to distill how to talk about the polite society in a precise way. The whole #dirtypolitics fiasco fascinates me because it might cut both ways for my analysis. Of course, the problem could simply be that #dirtypolitics needs a multi-variate analysis, of which the polite society is just one factor… Food, as they say, for my thoughts.

07/06/2015

Episode 55 – Getting with the Agenda (21)

In which Josh and Matthew talk about the U.N.’s dastardly plot to bring sustainable development to the First World via the machinations of Nazi Homosexual Communists!

07/01/2015

The Polite Society

Karl Popper loved the idea of the Open Society. It grounds his arguments against what he calls the conspiracy theory of society, the notion that history can be explained by reference to a sequence of successful conspiracies. Because it is obviously false – according to Popper – that history is not a succession of conspiracies, belief in the conspiracy theory of society must be false and thus belief in conspiracy theories is irrational.

An open society is one in which governments are largely transparent in their operations, and bad behaviour on the part of members of those governments are easily found out by interested citizens. It seems to fall out of that characterisation that conspiracies should be rare in such societies, and so we get our case for a scepticism of conspiracy theories.

Popper’s “The Open Society and Its Enemies” was published in the mid 1940s, and aspects of the open society (the idea, rather than the book itself) seem quaint and just a little naive. As history has shown us, the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s… Well, up till the current day, has been replete with conspiracies and cover-ups. Notably, in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” Popper twists himself into knots to try and describe the Shoah (The Holocaust) as not being the result of some conspiracy because it wasn’t ultimately successful despite the fact that whilst the Nazis might well have failed to exterminate the entire Jewish people, they still ran concentration camps with frightening efficiency for quite some time. Post the publication of “The Open Society and its Enemies” we have had other notable conspiracies like Watergate, the Gulf of Tonkin, 9/11, Dirty Politics and more besides; our supposedly open society is not quite as immune to conspiracies as Popper would have had us believe.

Now, it is unfair to sling Popper with this criticism; after all, he was not necessarily convinced that our society was an open as it could be. Instead, it was more open than it had been. Popper was comparing the world of the 1940s with that of the 30s and 20s, and the world post WWII was, indeed, a more open society than its forebears. However, the trajectory of openness that Popper thought the new world of the Forties promised was not quite the world of the 50s onwards; governments were both loath to reveal more of their inner workings and, of course, there was that Cold War thing. Nothing like having an enemy which is set on infiltrating your governments to make you paranoid about anyone finding out anything of what you are up to.

Which brings me to the Polite Society hypothesis. I have been thinking a lot over the last few years about how to respond to people who base their scepticism of conspiracy theories generally on some version of the open society argument. Some of this work appears in my book, where I look at the notions of Public Trust Skepticism (which I associate closely with both the works of Popper and Brian L. Keeley) and the Openness Objection (which I find in the works of Lee Basham). Some of it comes out of discussion with Basham about these things he calls “toxic truths” (information people refuse to investigate because such an investigation would be deleterious to them or their society), which I mention briefly in the book. A large part of it, however, simply comes out of trying to work out why the numerous scandals in the governing National Party have simply failed to materialise in falling poll numbers.

What is a Polite Society? Well, a polite society is one which thinks or even loudly claims to be an open society, but often overlooks what appears to be bad behaviour on the part of members of its influential institutions on the grounds of politeness.

Take, for example, rumours that a relative has been engaging in inappropriate behaviour with with a minor. You could ask questions of your other relatives to fact check this claim, but that would be impolite; it would cause bother. You don’t want to ask the relative in question because if it turns out the rumour is merely gossip, that would be embarrassing both to them and to you. So, you ignore the rumour because acting upon it would be impolite.

A situation like that, I take it, is the kind of thing Basham is concerned about when it comes to truths which are toxic. In the polite society, however, it would turn out that you are the kind of person who opines that if you heard a good rumour that someone was behaving in such an inappropriate way, you would definitely investigate it.

Imagine, then, that kind of polite behaviour coupled with expressed opinion to the contrary being expressed not just by a few individuals but as society as a whole. “Yes”, members of the polite society say, “we are definitely interested in holding MPs to account for the things that get uncovered!” Yet when it comes to investigative reporting about what MPs might get up to, they invent a whole bunch of excuses for being politely disinterested in such stories.

The problem, then, for a polite society is that members of the polite society are likely to claim they belong to an open society whilst not actually pursuing any active policy towards openness and transparency. Members of a polite society, then, express fealty to the standards of openness and transparency whilst acting otherwise.

Do we really live in a polite society? Do we live in such a society out of choice or because we are told to, or because it is expected of us? These are the questions which vex me; am I buying into some conspiracy theory about our society or is this a real diagnosis of a societal ill? ((I’m not saying this diagnosis is unique to me; similar theories can be found in the work of other theorists concerned with public discourse.)) More, next time.

Next time: Some further rumination on the polite society hypothesis (and some objections to it) and a bit of #dirtypolitics.

06/29/2015

How to deal with a conspiracist – some initial thoughts

Comrade Gio recently asked me “How do you deal with conspiracists?” It seems they have been getting up in his hood recently, causing no end of a spot of bother. Given that I deal with conspiracy theorists all the time, I know a little bit about the sub-species of conspiracy theorist, the conspiracist, and what they are like. I’ve also just finished writing a paper begging the academic community to stop conflating conspiracy theories generally with the sub-set of conspiracists, so I kind of feel like doing a bit of public outreach on this matter (if only so, in a few years, I can look back on this post and go “What was I thinking; that’s terrible advice!”).

Let’s start off with a bit of terminology. A conspiracy theory is simply any explanation of an event which cites a conspiracy as a salient cause. That’s a nice, general and non-pejorative definition. As such, the following definition of “conspiracy theorist” naturally falls out of it:

Conspiracy theorist: someone who believes a conspiracy theory.

Now, usually people go “Aha, but conspiracy theorists are weird, right?” at which point I reply “No, you are talking about conspiracists!”

Conspiracist: someone who believes a conspiracy theory without adequate reasons.

“Without adequate reasons” is doing an awful lot of work here, isn’t it? A conspiracist is someone who believes a conspiracy theory not because of good evidence and arguments but for some other reason.

Conspiracists (and the thesis of conspiracism) are frequently talked about in the academic literature, although most theorists conflate conspiracists with conspiracy theorists and conspiracism with conspiracy theorising; my recent paper (now under review) attempts to disentangle the terms and then argues that we should restrict talk of problematic belief in conspiracy theories to talk of conspiracism, in order to properly answer the question of whether belief in conspiracy theories is really irrational.

Now, here’s an interesting point; I’m agnostic as to whether there are many conspiracists in the world, because I have a fairly open and generous notion of “adequate reasons”. Oh, like many a philosopher I think there is some notion of rationality which is pretty prescriptive as to what counts as a good argument in the logical sense (valid argument form and sound premises, yadda yadda yadda), but when it comes to explaining why people have the beliefs they do, I think we often do people a disservice by dismissing their reasons on the grounds that they cannot put their arguments into standard form, et cetera, et cetera.

So, for example, I think that being suspicious of influential public institutions because of their past complicity in malfeasance and cover-ups is a good reason to engage in a little, light conspiracy theorising. After all, the fact of past complicity in conspiratorial activity has some bearing on the possibility of being engaged in a cover-up right now. I also think that living in a culture where your government is rarely transparent in its dealings, and is wildly rumoured to function mostly on graft would be grounds to be very suspicious of what it is up to, even in a case where there is little positive evidence of an actual conspiracy. These are reasons to be suspicious, and thus reasonable grounds to be a conspiracy theorist.

However, the lesson here is that whilst it can be reasonable to engage in conspiracy theorising on the basis that background information about your society makes suspicions that conspiracies exist natural to entertain, if you want to assert some specific conspiracy theory, then you really do need to be able to engage your audience with something more than “Sheeple, listen to me!” Just continuing to assert some conspiracy theory is true is not an argument, and it’s liable to get you labelled a conspiracist (at least in my terminology).

Take, for example, the 9/11 Truth Movement. Let’s say I’m an agnostic as to whether 9/11 was the result of the actions of Al-Qaeda or an Inside Job (I’m not, but let’s pretend). Many Truthers insist that people should entertain seriously the thesis that George W. Bush and his cronies were responsible for the terror attacks on September the 11th, 2001, despite the fact that there are also good reasons to believe the rival (and official) conspiracy theory that the attacks were the work of a group outside the USA. Said Truthers often get very annoyed that people do not accord their views with the right amount of respect, and you can understand why this is the case. The US has engaged in some dodgy dealings (Watergate), been involved in at least one false flag operation (the Gulf of Tonkin), and may be the product of a corrupt electoral system. There seems to be a lot of evidence that the US Government misleads the public all the time, so why believe that government’s particular version of events surrounding 9/11?

Now, what I’ve given here is an argument for doubting the official, conspiracy theory of 9/11 – that it was the actions of Al-Qaeda. That is not, in itself, sufficient reason to come to believe the Inside Job hypothesis. For that you need to show it’s more likely than not that the destruction of the Twin Towers, et al., were the result of a conspiracy by the US Government. Some conspiracy theorists about 9/11 claim to do this work, citing expert opinion on civil engineering, the allegedly unlikely ability of barely trained pilots to crash 747s into huge buildings and the like. Many of these conspiracy theorists are, when you talk to them, reasonable people who you can have quite interesting debates with, particularly over how evidence is presented and then weighed to support one explanation or the other.

Then there are the conspiracists, the ones who just assert that the conspiracy must be the more likely and who – if you dare question that assertion – claim you are a sheeple, that you don’t understand Marxism properly ((Gio knows what I am talking about; it’s no dig at him.)) or that you work for the powers in question. ((I kind of wish I did. I suspect I’d get paid more than I currently do.)) These views are not usually the result of actual paranoiac ideation (as distinct from Richard Hofstadter’s notion of the Paranoid Style, which claims such belief are similar to paranoia). Often they are based upon assumptions or suspicions which are not shared universally across a group. So, for example, many medical conspiracy theories are predicated on examples of past medical malfeasance, which explain why there has been an attendant loss of trust in medical institutions. However, often the conditional nature of that loss of trust is skipped over; no one seriously doubts medical professionals in the past often acted unethically and that some of the associated professions covered up their malfeasance. What people debate is the extent of the problem now. Many conspiracists insist we should take the history of malfeasance as prima facie evidence of continued malfeasance, and this is a problem, because the question of continued malfeasance is what is being debated. The conspiracist angle presumes the answer to the question; the analysis, effectively, is back-to-front.

My, but this post has gone on and on, and in a slightly different direction than I intended it to. So, in answer to the question which motivated this first pass analysis, how do you deal with conspiracists?

Well, one thing is to engage in a discussion not about the conspiracy theory in question but about the background assumptions which drive the claim of conspiracy or non-conspiracy. Take 9/11. No one disputes that the USA engages in some fairly dodgy activities, and no one concedes much ground if everyone admits that the Gulf of Tonkin incident is a legitimate example of a false flag. Rather, if you are a sceptic about the Truther position, centre the debate around how you weigh the evidence for the conspiracy. Admit that it’s always possible that the US government may have conspired to cause the events of 9/11, but how you think that is unlikely given the other available evidence. Respect your interlocutor and their intuitions without necessarily agreeing with them.

Of course, you can’t just say “I think it’s unlikely” and leave it at that. That’s really the same problem the conspiracist suffers from. You do have to put forward some detailed reasons as to why you think it’s unlikely, reasons which might come to bear on the assumptions of the conspiracist. Essentially you are debating probabilities, and thus explaining why you think some claim of conspiracy is unlikely in this case.

Which, of course, leads back to a perennial problem in these debates. It may turn out to be the case that you are not dealing with a conspiracist. You might find out during your conversation that your conspiracist interlocutor is actually a conspiracy theorist with fairly detailed arguments and good evidence for their particular theory. That does not necessarily mean you are going to have to concede; a conspiracy theorist may have adequate reasons to believe some conspiracy theory, but that just means the theory is plausible (but not necessarily the best explanation). It might mean you have to become agnostic about said conspiracy theory, though. Which should be no great harm. If it is, then maybe you have a little too much invested in opposing conspiracy theories, which is itself – as Peter Knight has argued in various places – an interesting form of conspiracism in itself.

A final point before this post decides to implode under its own mass of verbiage: you might think having to explain your priors (as a Bayesian might say) is a tad arduous. However, I don’t think we live in a society where it is reasonable to simply dismiss the existence of conspiracies off hand. In a future post I think I’m going to need to go through some ideas I’ve been mulling for a while now, specifically the idea that we live in what I call a “Polite Society”, one which maintains the idea we live in an Open Society without necessarily embodying said ideals. But that is for future Matthew to write; current Matthew is happy to close this particular discussion just as he hits 1720 words.

06/22/2015