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The outlandish conspiracy theorists — 32 Comments

1. Neo, thank you very much for this very wiser observation:

   “people like to feel that they are smarter than average”

   Hopefully, I’ll remember to ask myself if I’m assuming that I’m smarter than average, before I attempt anything out of the ordinary.

2. AppleBetty:

   Well, of course about half of us really ARE smarter than average, if one thinks about the definition of “average” 🙂 .

   (I’ll leave out a discourse on mean versus median versus mode.)

3. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow describes the propensity of people to rely on heuristics instead of reason. I say “describes” because like so much else in social science these days the studies he describes there don’t replicate. Nonetheless, Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer doesn’t even cite a single study, it’s just one guy’s narrative, so put Kahneman and Hoffer on the same footing, as someone who’s offered a plausible, though not scientific, explanation.

   And the most common heuristic I see is Team Red / Team Blue. If an article of news or opinion is written by someone associated with Team Blue, or sounds kind of like something someone on Team Blue might say, Team Red doesn’t believe it, and widdershins likewise.

   This is an heuristic to follow: decide who your friends are and listen to people who sound like your friends, shun and disbelieve those who sound like they’re not your friends or who your friends don’t like. The problem is that life is just more complicated than that. Most of what we see in media is a selection of facts chosen to support a narrative already in existence, with the exclusion of facts that contradict it, with very few verifiably untrue statements. And our friends who derive their primary income from online opining are looking for clicks and eyeballs from us just as much as our not-friends are from them, are seeking to steer our emotions and attention just as much as they are.

   This is why the Left was so fast on declaring Charlie Kirk to have been killed by “MAGA”. They already had that narrative, already wanted it, and it was very easy to swallow any camel of fact in its favor (the shooter was a product of a Team Red-coded home environment) while straining at every gnat of fact showing the opposite (antifa slogans etched on bullets and confession on Discord).

   And we on the Right are humans just the same with the same tendency and we do the same thing all the time. Even people who are aware of the tendency have be vigilant all the time to avoid it, and sometimes they will fail.

4. Niketas, heuristics also use reason. Often heuristics are the only means available, and sometimes they are the best means available when data is limited or wrong.

   An example: the claim nearly 90% of guns recovered in crime scenes in Mexico came from US gun stores. Heuristics would suggest this is wrong, 90% is remarkably high, Mexico is very corrupt, and Mexico and Central America are awash in Cold War firearms. Further Mexican crime scenes show a lot of military hardware, much of it Soviet Block. Further, the term “trace” is typically used in conjunction with these claims, and if you are familiar with that process as used by BATF you might understand what is going on here.

   As it is, an NGO that studies the international arms trade breaks it down with actual solid data and shows what’s wrong with the 90% claim. But you don’t really need it to realize the claim is sketchy.

5. Much of what drives the conspiracy theories about Kirk’s assassination is the desire to blame it on Israel.

   That’s why those who push them hold them so tight.

6. Many, perhaps most, love to rationalize and contrary facts and reason is an inconvenient obstacle to a cherished ‘explanation’. Conspiracy theories are in a certain sense, the core of a good story and as Mark Twain is reported to have cynically observed, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”.

7. Following a discussion in the comments on the Open Thread, I decided to transfer to this one because the subject was definitely veering into conspiracy theory territory. You can read that thread first, but it’s not really necessary to this one.

   Talk about meeting Niketas’ heuristic for believing “news”!

   https://postcardsfromoceania.substack.com/p/the-defensible-destruction-of-government

   The Defensible Destruction of Government Information is Essential to the Preservation of Our Liberties – Yet plans to create the world’s most powerful AI have prevented government agencies from complying with the Federal Records Act since the earliest days of the Obama administration.
   Don Lueders Sep 09, 2025

   The prologue is quite lengthy about the history and intent of the FRA; the crucial point is an action of President Obama in 2014 that, in Leuders’ view, was planted as a hidden landmine to destroy some essential functions of Government and put Bill Gates in charge of the world.
   That’s the conspiracy theory part.

   What Leuders does not explain very clearly, probably because he knows what he meant and thus it should be obvious to everyone, is that by adding such a vast number of electronic records to the system, it became overloaded, and the actual useful functions of the FRA became unmanageable: contrary to its purpose of managing historical records for preservation. (One of Alinsky’s Rules, IIRC)

   He also neglects to specify the content of Obama’s Executive Order 13489, which established protocols for claiming Executive Privilege to delay or suppress the publishing of any Federal Records disputed by the President, which is kind of an obvious “tell” that Obama intended to do that very thing.

   https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/presidential-records

   Back to Leuders’ narrative:

   US Law Requires Nearly All Government Recorded Information to Eventually Be Destroyed
   …

   In 2014, the Obama administration amended the Federal Records Act (FRA) to redefine a Federal record to include “all recorded information”. Virtually overnight, this little-noticed change meant that every item of recorded electronic information created or received by the Federal government must be managed throughout its natural lifecycle (creation, distribution, use, maintenance, and disposition) in compliance with the FRA and according to a disposition schedule approved by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

   Few people outside of the Federal government understand that agencies divide all records into two categories: ‘temporary’ or ‘permanent’. Temporary records make up the vast majority of government recorded information. By NARA’s own estimates, this is 97% to 99% of all Federal records. By law, all temporary records must be assigned a NARA-approved retention schedule that provides a period of time that the agency must maintain the record in a demonstrably immutable format. At the end of the retention period – and only at the end of its assigned retention period – the temporary record must be forensically destroyed.

   By contrast, permanent records are those items of recorded information that are considered to have enduring historical, legal, or research value. These records, just 1% to 3% of all agency recorded information, are required to be preserved at the agency for a NARA-approved retention period and then transferred to NARA for permanent preservation.

   The FRA requires the destruction of temporary agency records for a long list of very good reasons. These include operational efficiency, cost controls, information security, data breach risks, and, of course, personal privacy.

   But tragically, no Federal agency has complied with the Federal Records Act or any other information lifecycle management laws requiring the preservation and legal disposition [including destruction] of their electronic records since the very first days of the Obama administration.

   When people learn the Obama administration intentionally dismantled the government’s records management system, they assume it was intended to prevent government bureaucrats, the media, and corrupt politicians from being held accountable for their criminal behavior. This would include such scandals as the Russia Collusion Hoax, COVID response failures, deadly vaccines, the Epstein matter, and both attempts on President Trump’s life.

   The truth is, avoiding accountability for these and other crimes was just a fortunate byproduct of this decision.

   [AF: IOW, I interpret, by burying the essential permanent records (needles) in the vast deluge of inconsequential temporary ones (haystack). That may yet come back to bite them, however. Am I getting that right?]

   Information is Power – Especially in the Hands of Government Bureaucrats

   Information is the world’s most valuable currency. The most powerful government on the planet is no longer the government with the most money. The most powerful government in the world is the government with access to the most information.

   The notion that the government would intentionally destroy information – even though Federal law specifically required it – was repugnant to the Obama administration and its primary globalist big tech ally, Bill Gates, long before Obama entered the White House in 2009.

   Subsequently, beginning on his very first day in office with the release of Executive Order 13489, the Obama administration set about dismantling the systems in place designed to destroy government information in compliance with Federal law.

   [AF: then Obama gets rid of his meddlesome priests.]

   The release of Executive Order 13489 was quickly followed by the nomination and confirmation of career librarian and political progressive, David Ferriero, to lead NARA as Archivist of the United States.

   Not long after Ferriero’s swearing in, NARA’s dangerously honest then-Inspector General, Paul Brachfeld, was accused by NARA leadership of making racist and sexist comments and put on indefinite paid leave. After two years and $400K of paid leave, Brachfeld quietly retired from civil service in 2014. He has not been heard from since. [AF: notice the date]

   NARA Becomes the Government’s Default IT Department

   Unlike every other large organization in the world, the Federal government has no centralized information technology department. (The government does have a human resources department, the Office of Personnel Management, but no IT department.) This came about for a number of reasons, but the primary reason was, not surprisingly, financial.

   Every Federal agency has its own IT department. More often than not, different organizations within the agencies also have their own IT departments. These departments account for substantial portions of every agency’s annual budget, so they are carefully guarded by agency leadership, lest next year’s funding is less than this year’s funding.

   The Obama administration recognized this wasteful arrangement and chose to exploit it to their advantage. This explains their 2014 amendments to the FRA that redefined a Federal record as “all recorded information”. If all recorded information is a Federal record, and NARA is responsible for the management of all Federal records, NARA became the default IT department for the entire Federal government.

   Not only did this new status empower NARA to dismantle agencies’ sincere attempts to manage information in compliance with the Federal laws, but it also put the agency – and its politically biased leadership – in a position of authority over all agency acquisitions of information management technologies and cloud environments. This was a position of power no other agency had ever had before.

   Microsoft Captures Control of Nearly All Government Information

   Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are nothing new. The first AI solutions were built back in the 1950s. Despite what many believe, AI solutions are not particularly difficult to create. Even modern AI systems are only a few thousand lines of code. The key to creating powerful AI solutions is having access to the most information possible to feed into the large language models (LLMs) on which the solution is trained.

   [AF: Here comes the meat of the Conspiracy]

   This is the reason Bill Gates convinced his close allies in the Obama administration to dismantle the Federal government’s records management program. Gates has always coveted the Federal government’s massive corpus of untapped digital information as input to Microsoft’s LLMs. But a fully compliant electronic records management program would destroy more than 97% of all agency digitally recorded information, thus significantly reducing the amount of information available to Microsoft LLMs.

   With the Obama administration’s destruction of the Federal records management program, [with systemic overload] the legal destruction of recorded government information quickly ground to a halt. As a result, the government is now sitting on 17+ years of untold petabytes of electronic information – much of it entirely untouched by Federal agencies for many years.

   After the 2014 amendments to the FRA made NARA the government’s default IT department, the Obama administration – followed later by the Biden administration – was able to force agencies to implement the information technologies of their preferred vendor, Bill Gates’s Microsoft. This was often done in profoundly illegal ways. [A side conspiracy]

   Microsoft currently maintains approximately 85% of the government’s productivity software. The bulk of which comes from the company’s Microsoft 365 (M365) platform. Microsoft has just begun building LLMs from the government’s massive corpus of untapped electronic information. As these LLM’s are built, they will be fed into M365’s Copilot AI solution (really just OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 with Microsoft branding). When they are done, not only will this AI be the most powerful ever created and eventually take up a significant portion of the government’s responsibilities, but it will also be carefully curated to shape the government’s narrative to align with the policies of the Obama administration, Bill Gates, and the rest of the globalist members of the World Economic Forum.

   I’m not exactly sure how a bunch of office memos are going to Control the World, but go back up to the reasons for controlled destruction, which include some things that a World Dictator might find useful: “information security, data breach risks, and, of course, personal privacy.”

   This is, by the way, the reason why Leuders prefaced his post with a story from WWII:

   History has taught us that the risks of maintaining government records longer than their useful life far outweigh the benefits. Here’s just one of many examples.

   Prior to the Second World War, the Netherlands kept detailed records of its population’s religious affiliation. This meant that the Nazis, by looking through Dutch government records, were able to locate and murder some 73% of the Netherlands’ Jewish population.

   Conversely, in France, where they did not keep such records for privacy reasons, it was not as easy to know which members of their population were Jewish, enabling the Nazis to identify and assassinate some 25% of the country’s Jewish population.

   This may be the Mother of All Conspiracy Theories — and it may even be true!

8. @Don:Niketas, heuristics also use reason. Often heuristics are the only means available, and sometimes they are the best means available when data is limited or wrong.

   I did not say it was always wrong to use an heuristic, and I thought the reference to Thinking, Fast and Slow made it clear enough what I meant… But people are indeed using them when they should not, and dismissing data that disagrees with what they’ve already decided must be true.

9. I clicked on the link Neo relayed from Niketas and got a clip from the Simpsons – somehow that was not a surprise.
   “maybe the RAND corporation, under the supervision of the reverse vampires, are putting something in the water.”

   The bonus was a link in the YouTube sidebar to this post, which was a very interesting historical narrative of what happened to the Manhattan Project teams after the end of the war.
   I know nothing about the presenter, but he had a good on-line presence for a talking head, some old pictures, and a list of sources. Also links to other reports in his series on the Cold War.
   So: credible or conspiracy theory?
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1mH_O7MzJk
   How the RAND Corporation created American strategy

10. Mostly we rely upon heuristics because it’s all we have.

    However, there are issues with “the data”. One is that presenting data tends to awe many, and presenting dubious data is a way to win debates. Further, there’s lots of fake data out there. I mentioned the Mexican gun crime data, but there are lots of other uses of “data” and “studies” to win debates and push narratives where the data and studies are dubious if not fake, and it helps to approach it using heuristics.

11. @Aesop Fan:I clicked on the link Neo relayed from Niketas and got a clip from the Simpsons – somehow that was not a surprise.

    The reverse vampires substituted the Simpsons’ clip for the actual link that went to all my evidence. They do this at every site I try to post the truth about them.

    The RAND Corporation published a very interesting book that generated some great reviews on Amazon, example below:

    This book literally contains everything I could ever ask for in a book. Recipe for spanokopita? Check! Name of every person ever born? Check! Next week’s powerball, bingo, MLB, and NASCAR results? Check! By randomly combining and recombining the contents at random, I have read the works of Shakespeare, Harry Potter 8: the Tomb of Crying Stilton (to be released in 2014), the Bible AND the REAL Bible. I threw out my other books when I realized I could just jump around in this book and derive any other book I wanted. I think Borges wrote a story about this, but it’s taking me a while to find that story in my book. I did find some steamy erotica this morning, though, so who’s complaining?

12. @Don:…there are lots of other uses of “data” and “studies” to win debates and push narratives where the data and studies are dubious if not fake, and it helps to approach it using heuristics.

    Okay. Is Charlie Kirk being murdered by a secret cell phone gun from a few feet away one of these situations? I’m interested to know if you think so and why. I’m pretty sure the people expressing this belief are abusing heuristics in a pretty obvious and flagrant way but I’m open to being persuaded otherwise.

13. There’s such a difference between cultivating skepticism about mainstream explanations, once mainstream sources have proved themselves unreliable–and latching onto a wild alternative explanation with little to back it up.

14. People like complete patterns. When Authority leaves strings flapping in the breeze and dots unconnected, it’s normal to try to make the things fit together. Of if the connectors provided by Authority look silly, he presumption is that there’s a better answer, which is the conspiracy theory.
    And then there’s the issue here, which is how easy would it be to get away with the cell-phone gun thing in front of hundreds as opposed to inducing some nutcase who’s so far out that the prospect of being caught can be snorted away, using a scoped full-power rifle from a resting position.

15. But I want to emphasize something else here, which is that people like to feel that they are smarter than average, and much less gullible than average, and some people do this by rejecting the obvious explanations that are supported by the actual evidence and prefer to latch onto something more obscure and even contradicted by the evidence.

    –neo

    That cuts both ways.

    When I was studying the JFK assassination it became obvious to me that there were people who liked to feel smarter by rejecting conspiracy theories.

    There were many legitimate questions about the assassination. Bugliosi’s tome, “Reclaiming History” which settled most of them, was not available until 2007.

    Those who were convinced in the 60s-90s that Oswald acted alone were betting based on their predispositions just as the conspiracy theorists.

16. huxley:

    Whatever “legitimate questions” I saw back then about the JFK assassination, none of them seriously undermined the mountain of evidence of Oswald as a lone assassin. Yes, there were questions that were worth asking. But they didn’t go along with evidence that would have supported a conspiracy theory.

    For example, to the best of my knowledge, the questions about the so-called magic bullet seemed at the time to be warranted by the state of forensics at the time, but there was no solid evidence of the truth of any competing theory. And even way back then the evidence against Oswald was overwhelming and there was no reason to believe anyone would have recruited Oswald as an assassin. He was unstable and unreliable. Plus, he got the job at the Texas Book Depository long before the parade route was chosen, so how could someone have recruited him in only a few days, between the time the route was chosen and the time of the shooting? He also was known to have retrieved the gun stored in a friend’s garage the day before the shooting.

    These things were known quite early on and the conspiracy theorists could not get around them. They had to rely on fake “facts” like the lies and distortions in Oliver Stone’s movie and the writings of people who promoted other lies and omissions.

17. neo:

    Then we see those things differently. I don’t care to relitigate the JFK assassination.

    However, I stand by my point that some people like to feel smarter by rejecting conspiracy theories.

18. The human mind’s talent for seeing patterns is both our greatest strength and greatest weakness. For many people, it’s more comforting to believe Satan is running the world rather than the world being run by random chance.

19. @ BJ > “The human mind’s talent for seeing patterns is both our greatest strength and greatest weakness.”

    The strength is amply demonstrated by a LOT of scientific discoveries, where seeing patterns leads to investigation leads to hypotheses leads to credible theories leads to practical inventions.

    The weakness is conspiracy theories, not the least of which manifest in individuals as paranoia leading to seriously messed up behavior, and sometimes outright evil.

    Or the belief that Jews are ruling the world, or that the Illuminati are ruling the world (are they Jewish too? I don’t know!), or that the WEF and Bill Gates are (in the process of) ruling the world.

    Or that Satan is behind everybody who wants to be ruling the world because they are his agents on earth.

    Which can look like random chance because some of his agents are at least marginally insane, and paranoiac.

    Or it could all be the work of the nefarious Pinky and the Brain, or Dr. Doofenshmirtz.

    An argument for believing and then acting as if Satan is pulling the strings does at least, for some people, lead to behavior designed to keep them from being his puppets, which is generally a good thing for them and everyone else, while a belief that it is all random chance eliminates that particular motivation, although a lot of fine people come up with other commendable ones to guide their lives.

    I guess we’ll have to wait until the credits roll to find out for sure.

20. @BJ:For many people, it’s more comforting to believe Satan is running the world rather than the world being run by random chance.

    The ‘conspiracy theory of society’ is a typical result of a secularization of a religious superstition. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups – sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from – such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists… [The conspiracy theory of society] comes from abandoning God and then asking: “Who is in his place?

21. @ Niketas and Don – one practical use of heuristics, as I understand the conversation, is at the core of a story from our son the architect from his college days, in his civil engineering class. The students were supposed to design a drain pipe system for something or other important (I don’t remember all the details), and one of them did some calculations per the specified formulas that showed the water running off at 21 mach*, and turned it in.
    Our son remarked that his colleague obviously didn’t know enough to realize that his calculations were off because that was a totally impossible result.

    Back in the day when schools actually taught math, we did what used to be called “word problems,” and were taught to first estimate a range that our answer should fall into, using round numbers, then do the calculations with the actual numbers, and see if the result was within our approximations. You can catch a lot of mistakes that way.

    * In fluid dynamics, the Mach number is a dimensionless quantity representing the ratio of flow velocity past a boundary to the local speed of sound

22. @ Niketas – I’ll have to get that book.

    Thanks for the links in your original comment; the one about the cell phone gun was very interesting.
    The explanation of the author’s reasoning was quite informative, and the video of the actual cell phone gun made it pretty clear that one of those was not the murder weapon.
    He seems to be a credible source, but that could be my Team Heuristic kicking in.

    https://www.shootingnewsweekly.com/gun-nation/no-charlie-kirk-was-not-shot-with-a-380-acp-cell-phone-gun/

    With the official line precisely matching what we had deduced within a minute of watching the video, it was easy for me to ignore all the conspiracy theories. Those sophisticated social media algorithms tried to feed me conspiracy videos asserting that the security dudes — or whoever they are — standing behind Charlie were somehow involved.
    …
    Here’s a reality check. IF the white shirt guy had been holding an IC380, he’s holding it in a manner that’s entirely inconsistent with being able to shoot at Charlie.
    …
    You can’t convince me that a guy standing right next to the center of everyone’s focus, Charlie Kirk, who was himself highly visible and exposed, fired at the victim and there was no reaction to that from the people around him, the [other] security guy(s), etc., or from the “shooter.” No witnesses have said anything that corroborates white shirt guy as a shooter. No one tackled him, no one ran away from him, no one reacted as though he was the threat. He didn’t react as though he needed to escape.

    Sorry, no, white shirt guy didn’t fire a pistol in full view of thousands of people and then just behave as if he didn’t do it while everyone else played along, too.
    …
    Today’s episode of The Daily Wire’s Morning Wire features white shirt guy, who’s actually Charlie’s good friend Frank Turek: [video] (“a prominent Christian apologist”)

    Turek’s comments are a moving personal witness of the shooting, and some thoughts about the conspiracy theory about him.

    I have read Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and it’s a start on an explanation, which clearly needs more investigation. Sadly, the social sciences are so badly corrupted now, we may not be able to get any credible studies.

    Of course, the Other Team doesn’t believe that any corruption exists.

23. That video with Frank Turek was so good, I wanted to post a direct link to it.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Qyx-C-nKc

24. Niketas Choniates – Have you ever read Ian McGilchrist? He’s a psychiatrist who writes about a theory of the roles of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. His conclusion is different than Kahneman. (He says that Kahneman based his book on a few special cases and that his conclusions are, therefore, incomplete.)

    Basically, McGilchrist writes that the left hemisphere handles details and develops rule-based models to explain reality. The right hemisphere handles context and what we call intuition – not quite the heuristic-based fast system of Kahneman, actually much more. McGilchrist speculates that the evolutionary role of the left hemisphere was to find food while the evolutionary role of the right hemisphere was to avoid becoming food – detail versus big picture. The two hemispheres are intended to work in concert. The complexity of reality makes it impossible for the left hemisphere to develop a comprehensive model of reality. Whatever model the left hemisphere develops is going to fail at the perimeter. The role of the right hemisphere is to see the big picture and direct the left hemisphere. When unsupervised, the left hemisphere tends to stick to its models. If it receives contradictory evidence, it tends to ignore it or even fabricate evidence to keep its model from failing. It is the role of the right to re-calibrate the left and direct it to develop new models (heuristics?) to account for new big-picture information.

    McGilchrist theorizes that modern culture has empowered the left hemisphere over the right. Basically, the models of the left hemisphere provide us with the capability of manipulating the material world and the triumphs of science, engineering, and modern economics have conditioned us to trust the left hemisphere and ignore the right.

    Getting political, the model that leftists apply to the political world involves the assumption that most, if not all, political violence comes from the right. Therefore, when political violence comes from the left, without a healthy and well-formed right hemisphere, the left hemisphere just makes up whatever it needs to so that it can continue analyzing politics with the same model.

    I’m not remotely qualified to opine on the accuracy of McGilchrist’s theory – but it sounds plausible and provides an explanation for the effect that neo describes.

25. My intimate knowledge of forensics comes from broadcast television, but I do have a bare minimum idea of interior, exterior, and terminal ballistics.

    What do you think of this?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltakvGyzfZs&rco=1

26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XoHKCbX8oA

27. There are some good youtube interviews of Ian McGilchrist.

    Aside from right wing violence, there are many other areas corrupted by bad data. Claims that “immigrants” have low crime rates, for example. Much involving covid. The source of Mexican crime guns I mentioned above. Disproportionate killing of blacks by police. Even things like guns vs spray for bear defense.

28. @Don: there are many other areas corrupted by bad data

    Is Charlie Kirk’s assassination one of these “areas”, where it’s a good use of heuristics to think he might have been killed by a “cell phone gun” at close range?

    If you think I’m saying “heuristics are bad”, I’m not and never have. Heuristics are bad when used in preference to good data and sound logic.

    If you think Charlie Kirk’s murder is one of these times where data is bad so we should reject the “facts” and go with heuristics I’m open to being persuaded.

29. Bad data or lying liars who lie. The left lies about everything. EVERYTHING.

30. What’s astounding is that folks of normal (or exceptional) intellect will believe anything at all.

    Members of the flat earth society; those who believe the moon landings took place in a Hollywood studio; the 9-11 terror attack was conceived and carried out by Bush, Cheney, Halliburton and the Israeli Mossad.

    And the greater the brain power of “true believers,” the greater their ability to present arguments affirming their belief system and explaining away any evidence contrary to their beliefs.

    Believing the unbelievable is independent of one’s level of education or IQ or any other measure of intellect.
    We see this amongst academics , many of whom express support for, say, a Marxist-Leninist govt, despite the irrefutable fact that this form of govt has a perfect record of failure.

    I think Neo hit it on the head when she said what motivates some folks to believe in crazy things is that it sets one apart from the hoi polloi and gives the believer a sense of superiority.
    Some folks cannot abide not being just one of the crowd; their personality demands they stand out, stand apart , and thus bring attention to themselves.

31. Niketas Choniates on September 23, 2025 at 1:00 pm said:
    Is Charlie Kirk’s assassination one of these “areas”, where it’s a good use of heuristics to think he might have been killed by a “cell phone gun” at close range?

    If you think I’m saying “heuristics are bad”, I’m not and never have. Heuristics are bad when used in preference to good data and sound logic.

    My central heuristic on the Kirk assassination centers on: the guy running on the roof and jumping off is the guy who did it.

    I don’t see that heuristics favors conspiracy here.

    The people pushing the conspiracy theories want to blame Israel . Much of the approach is to size apparent inconsistencies to try to spin an alternate narrative. For example to claim he didn’t leave the roof with the rifle (if you look at magnified stills you can see that he appears to be carrying an object like a rifle in a towel).

32. JohnTyler on September 23, 2025 at 2:02 pm:
    ” Believing the unbelievable is independent of one’s level of education or IQ or any other measure of intellect.
    We see this amongst academics …”
    Incredibly it took me until just a few years ago to recognize this rather obvious characteristic, although I was applying it to religious belief and to the intelligent people I knew who also believed some illogical ideas (or at least what I consider illogical ideas).

    I have now postulated that we have evolved brains that supply both intellect and transcendence/ belief/ agency features, wherein both (and maybe more?) contribute to our survivability as a species, presumably via enhancing within group and between group cooperation (& trust).

    I have found Michael Tomasello’s book The Evolution of Agency [2022] supplies some supporting ideas around this view.
    Perhaps if/when I can delve into the Ian McGilchrist oeuvre there will be a further match up related to this possible dichotomy; or not.

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