What kind of person is drawn to conspiracy theories?

[Sucuk Ekmek]

They benefit from conspiracy, it's hard to work with coincident theories.

[zurew]

12 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

What was that specifically?

It was solved by the hypothesis that your subsconscious mind can pick up on very complex patterns.

In this specific case it was about introducing people(who needs to stare at you) in a pseduo random manner and it turned out that the subconscious can actually pick up on the fact that it wasnt actually random and just from that info they managed to guess better (even if they couldnt consciously recognize the fact that their subconscious actually picked up on the introducing rhythm).

After they adjusted and after they didnt give any feedback anymore  (after each round about whether they managed to guess the staring right or not), the chance went back down to 50%.

12 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

The Fine-tuning argument, in my limited knowledge of it (or rather almost purely intuitive understanding of it), never made much sense to me.

 

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Its very complicated , and it has to do mostly with bayesian reasoning , but some versions includes complex abductive reasoning.

The thing I currently dont like is the fact that most theists run the argument in an unfair way, where they just add a bunch of facts to God's psychology and after you add those facts, of course God will try to create the Universe like this and then they compared that to a shit version of naturalism where it is done by randomness.  But the same ad hoc move can be done by naturalists, where you just add random predispositional facts to the laws of nature or to the meta-laws that then can explain why the Universe is this way rather than some other way.

There are also issues with higher order fine-tuning, where if you bake in certain things about God's psychology, then you need to explain why God has that kind of psychology rather than any other psychology and who or what fine-tuned that? If you take that psychology as a brute fact where there isn't any explanation in principle, then my issue is that I dont see why couldn't we just do that move at the level of the Universe ,why do we need to go one level of abstraction higher to say that the given fine-tuning doesnt need any further explanation.

Once you strip away those added facts about God's psychology, the set of things that God could desire explodes and if it is the case that God can create any logically possible world (where he isn't constrained by nomological laws), then the probability of him creating this kind of Universe becomes practically equal to randomness.

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There is a lot more that can be said about this, but I will need to get read up on this, because it seems to be the case that people who starts out thinking that the argument is trash, some of them flip their opinion once they get actually informed about the underlying problems and issues.

 

8 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

I mean you can say that in principle, but as a fact, you don't know the actual plan of God, and that plan can be studied, and you might find out that it unfolds only in a certain way that only fits with a few narrow hypotheses.

What I said there was just a pragmatic argument mostly, it doesnt show that what you said cant be true or that it is less probable, it just states once we make the move towards supernatualism, epistemically we get more fucked because it becomes much harder to make sense of things and to predict things.

 

Here I question what you gain by affirming supernaturalism:

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1) The harder sense making isn't just about not necessarily understanding God's plan, but it is also about adjusting your priors to other supernatural entities and stuff exiting and or the laws changing . If you just take God to be the Universe consciously intervening and interacting  with parts of itself, the issue surrounding this will go back to the point I layed down about the fine-tuning and about baking in predispositional facts about God's psychology rather than baking in those facts about the naturalist paradigm. Its unclear how NDE happening this way rather than any other way is more expected under supernaturalism than just under naturalism and if it is not more expected, then I dont see what would motivate the move towards supernaturalism.

2) Its unclear to me, what you gain by affirming supernaturalism, but depending on how you define it , its clear to me what you lose by affirming it. For instance, if you take supernaturalism to mean God being the Universe and it also having the ability to change the laws or to act despite those laws, then you introduced uncertainty (unless you know when and why God wants to adjust the laws or act despite those laws). But then I can just compare that with a type of naturalism where you can go with the laws changing because of some kind of higher order law or  I can just say that the laws never changed or will change , its just that we dont understand the laws well enough yet and thats why it seemed like they changed (this is epistemically better , because this dodges the introduced uncertainty). 

So even if we assume that God's psychology is perfectly knowable , even in that scenario (if you want to maintain your ability predict things) what you have is supernaturalism,  where you need to know the laws + God's psychology vs naturalism where you only need to know the laws . The question in this case is just what you gain by going with supernaturalism there?

Here I give further reasons to why reject it:

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The other reason why it epistemically fucks you up (independent from the fact whether you know God's psychology or not) is the fact, that once you take it that God has meta-cognition without it needing to go through a developmental process (like evolution or something similar) to develop that meta-cognition and you also take it that God is disembodied -  then with that move you also open up the door to other disembodied entities having meta-cognition from the start as well. Thats where you open up the door to all sorts of supernatural stuff like ghosts, demons, other invisible entities (that can possibly interact with you and with the world in a causal way). This is why I said in my previous post yesterday, that this makes it so that you need to entertain much more possible hypotheses for any given pnemona or event and it makes your ability to make sense of things much harder.

For instance, if and when your shoe goes missing - you dont just need to check whether your dog stole it or not , you need to also entertain the possibility that there are shoe-stealing invisible fairies.

If you take it that God isn't disembodied then the the point about meta-cognition still goes through (and then we still need to completely readjust our conception of what is needed for something to have meta-cognition and that has potential other issues) but aside from that;  I dont understand what it would mean for God to be embodied and then to create the Universe or to change the laws - because under the naturalistic conception of God the Universe is just God and the laws is how God unfolds, but in the supernatural conception of God  - he supervenes on those laws and I dont understand what it means to be those laws and to also supervene on those laws. 

 

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And yes, I agree with the thing you layed down about naturalism adjusting. Its unclear how we even define these terms in the firstplace and we are possibly challenging the edges and talking past each other. One thing is that there are always moves avalaible in order to maintain naturalism, but not at 0 cost. If I need to give a 1000 auxiliary hypothesis to explain the same set of facts (the set that supernaturalism could explain with one relatively simple hypothesis) then eventually it can become really intellectually dishonest and pressing to leave the fucking naturalist paradigm.

 

Sorry this was a lot, but if you want we can go through this by one piece at a time.

Edit: Added quotes so it can be closed and it wont take up half the page.

Edited 1 hour ago by zurew

[LastThursday]

I'm not sure I believe that a supernaturalist tendency makes you more prone to be a conspiracy theorist. I think anyone can be drawn to it, and even change their minds over time. 

I think most of it comes down a confluence of things, such as how naturally paranoid or anxious one is, or how much one believes what others tell them. Also, it comes from ignorance of how things actually work in real life; conspiracy theorists are uninformed in many different areas and so draw wrong conclusions.

There is often an esoteric or weird vibe to conspiracy theories, in the same vein as folk tales, and that does make them stick in the mind more. In other words it's survival of the fittest conspiracy theories, the ones that stick around are the most memorable, weird and wacky.

[Christoph Werner]

"What kind of person is drawn to conspiracy theories?"

Why is that a question that you find is important?

All kinds of people are drawn to conspiracy theories. A lot of fools off course. But even more fools dont take conspiracy theories seriously.

The wanting to put conspiracy theories and people who are drawn to it into a box just shows someone who is invested in certain beliefs and who easily needs to explain away alternative theories.

And Leo is certainly guilty of that.

Imagine you voluntarily play lab rat for a company that had to pay the biggest pharma fine in US history, a company that is well known for it's corruption. Just because you got triggered by fear and group pressure, the most obvious way of psychological manipulation. And then you even go to your blog to promote your sheepish behaviour... lmao