Conspiracies

Black cloud ERIC KIM

Some conspiracies are true, some are false.

Why do some people really want the conspiracy theories to be true?

In order to blame someone else or an institution or something for one’s personal misery and suffering.

For example real conspiracies in history include the Cataline Conspiracy (known more specifically as the “Second Cataline Conspiracy”). The gist was this:

A Roman senator named Cataline created a conspiracy to overthrow Cicero.

Maccari Hall (Palazzo Madama) - Cicero denouncing Catiline to the Senate (Cesare Maccari, 1840-1919)
Cicero denouncing Catiline to the Senate (Cesare Maccari, 1840-1919) [Source]

What is a conspiracy anyways?

Conspire literally means to “share the same air”(con+spire). Con means “with”, spire means “to breathe”. So imagine a bunch of people sitting in the same physical (soundproof) room together, hatching some sort of plot which will mutually benefit all in the room.

Modern conspiracy theories

The problem —

How do we filter the true conspiracies from the false ones?

Because in truth, there are some conspiracies which are true. For example if an American president (let’s say, Bill Clinton), or a Hillary Clinton made an agreement with foreign governments which somehow enriched them, this conspiracy theory would be true. Or let us say if Coca Cola once upon a time gave a Harvard researcher a lucrative “grant”to study the deleterious effects of meat on the body (not sugar), this might be a conspiracy.

But once again, it is impossible to sift the true and false conspiracies. Why? As Nassim Taleb says… most people, governments, and institutions are far too stupid to actually conspire together in a meaningful or effective way. My thought:

Most of these conspiracy theories (like 5G causing Covid-19 or whatever) is people getting suckered by randomness, chaos, and chance.

We feel anxious, yet we “over-fit”patterns to reality — many patterns which actually don’t exist and aren’t real. For example let us say that I am a professional NBA player and every night I wore my lucky (unwashed) socks I won a game, but the nights I didn’t wear my lucky (very stinky) socks, I lost the game. I might get suckered and fooled into thinking:

These lucky socks are the *REASON* why I won (or lost) the game.

Of course this type of superstition is foolish, but we humans are very superstitious folks.

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