MichaelShermer

Michael Shermer

I will also read (or reread) other Shermer books and make notes here. These are "aging failing memory" notes

Conspiracy

2022 Tigard 001.98 SHE

• p003 Bilderberg Group ?Bilderberger?

  • since 1954, annual meeting of 150 invitees discussing free market capitalism
• p010 OJ murder evidence clear, but acquitted because LAPD have often been racist and planted false evidence
• p014 Type 1 error assuming real when not (false positive), Type 2 error assuming not real (false negative)
• p014 in distant past: assume predator, safe, assume no predator, get eaten

• p015 ultimate (deep) causes embellished with proximate (immediate) psychological&sociological forces

• p016 overlaid with motivated reasoning,

  • cognitive dissonance,

  • teleological thinking,

  • transcendental thinking,

  • locus of control,

  • anxiety reduction,

  • confirmation bias,

  • attribution bias,

  • hindsight bias,

  • myside bias,

  • rsimplification/

  • patternicity,

  • agenticity

• p025 The United States of Paranoia Jesse Walker

• p026 A Culture of Conspiracy Michael Barkun at Syracuse University event, systemic, and super conspiracy theories

• p027 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36373879-conspiracies-declassified Brian Dunning

• p027 The 50 60 80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time Jonathan Vankin John Whalen

  • similar on Amazon

• p028 None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen and Larry Abraham

• p028 Manichean Machiavellian

• p028 Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories Rob Brotherton

• p029 Richard Hofstadter 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics

• p033 Christopher Bader list of government coverup beliefs from 9/11 54% to the moon landing 24%

• p033 list includes made-up event "the North Dakota crash" with 33%, indicating foundational distrust in US government

• p035 Defense of Muslim the Lands by Abdullah Yusuf Azzam intellectual founder of al-Qaeda

• p041 Great Replacement ... by 15 million Jews?

  • Jewish birthrates "lowest in the world" 1.9 compared to 2.3 average in the US

• p043 traduce to expose to shame or blame by means of falsehood and misrepresentation

• p048 education vs conspiracism: 42% no high school diploma, 22% with postgraduate degrees

• p048 Hart and Graether Something's Going on Here: Psychological Predictors of Belief in Conspiracy Theories

  • conspiracy believers "are relatively untrusting, ideologically eccentric, concerned about personal safety, and prone to perceiving agency in actions."

• p048 Hanlon's Razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

  • cite Murphy's Law and other reasons why things go wrong by Arthur Block 1980

• p051 closer to Fukushima disaster, more tweets about it

• p052 Whitson and galinsky 2008 Whitson and galinsky "Lacking control increases illusory pattern perception"

• p053 Trump's false or misleading claims total 30573 over 4 years paywall

• p063 we defend our beliefs like lawyers, not test them like scientists

• p063 Leon Festinger When Prophecy Fails 1956 p065 cognitive dissonance

• p067 Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories 2012

• p070 telos purpose of life, teleology

• p070 Pascal Wagner-Egger +3, 2018 Creationism and conspiracism share a common teleological bias

• p071 Transcendentalist (intuitive) vs. Empiricist

• p071 NASA Fakes the Moon Landing - therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax Psychological science (at OHSU)

• p071 Immanuel Kant 1784 “From such crooked timber as humankind is made of nothing entirely straight can be made.”

• p072 Deanna Kuhn et. al. How Well Do Jurors Reason? Competence Dimensions of Individual Variation in a Juror Reasoning Task

• p073 Arthur Goldwag Cults, conspiracies, and secret societies

• p074 LIHOP: Let It Happen On Purpose / MIHOP: MAKE it ...

• p074 Judgement under uncertainty : heuristics and biases

• p075 5/1941 to 12/1941, 58+21+7+7 intercepted Japanese attack messages; Philippines, Panama, SE Asia, west coast US

• p075 Roberta Wohlstetter Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision 1962

• p076 9-11 Commission Report

  • ... As the CIA supervisor "John" told us, no one looked at the bigger picture; no analytic work foresaw the lightning that could connect the thundercloud to the ground

• p076 locus of control internal ... vs external (helpless, tend to believe conspiracy theories

• p077 Alan Moore: Nobody is in control, the world is rudderless

• p079 Rob Brotherton: typical conspiracy theory is an unanswered question

• p080 R.B.: watching JFK Movie eroded viewer's civic engagement

• p080 R.B.: HIV-conspiracy-believing African Americans protect less against STDs

• p080 Keith StanovichThe Bias That Divides Us

• p090 losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good Why smart people make big money mistakes-- and how to correct them Gary Belsky 2009

• p91 Bad is stronger than good Baumeister Finkenauer Vohs 2001

• p92 Tolstoy in Anna Karenina 1875 "Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in it's own way."
• p92 Russian proverb: "A spoonful of tar can spoil a barrel of honey, but a spoonful of honey does nothing for a barrel of tar"
• p93 Steven Pinker asymmetry of payoffs, risk aversion less costly than gambling

• p94 Michael Shermer Giving the Devil His Due 2020

• p104 "... sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield" George Orwell, "In Front of Your Nose",1946

• p105 http://www.riseofthemoors.org

• p106 Shermer testifies in Portland 2013

• p107 Sovereign citizens

• p110 Posse Comitatus

• p111 The Believing Brain Shermer 2011

• p111 Ten components of belief
  • 1 The brain is a belief engine
  • 2 Beliefs are reinforced by authority
  • 3 Beliefs are reinforced by peers

    • Robert B. Cialdini 2001 averages of large group guesses

  • 4 Beliefs are reinforced by liking and similarity of other beliefs
  • 5 Beliefs are reinforced by payoffs, success, and happiness
  • 6 Beliefs are reinforced by confirmation bias

  • 7 Beliefs are reinforced by optimism and over-optimism Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman 2011 p113

    • CFOs overconfident market predictions, correlation less than zero

    • also overconfident about own firms, take more risks
  • 8 Beliefs are reinforced by self-justification bias

    • Philip E. Tetlock Expert political judgment : how good is it? How can we know? PSUlib JA74.5.T38 2005

  • 9 Beliefs are reinforced by sunk-cost bias

  • 10 Beliefs are reinforced by an endowment effect

• p123 G. Gordon Liddy most conspiracies false because of competency and leakage

  • bumblers who can't keep a secret
  • echoing Franklin: "three can keep a secret if two are dead"

• p126 Paul Sabin The Bet: Paul Ehrlich , Julian Simon ... Ehrlich lost bet about future of Earth's resources

• p128 Milton Rokeach The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (1964) Multco book Multco DVD

  • Rokeach only cured his godlike delusion that he could manipulate them out of their beliefs

• p137 Conspiracy ANTI detection kit: Patternicity, Agenticity, Complexity, # of People, Grandiosity, Scale, Significance, Accuracy, Paranoia, Falsifiability

• p139 ALSO open or closed society

• p141 John Crowley fantasy tetralogy Ægypt:

  • secret societies have not had power in history, but the notion of them has

• p141 David Aaronovitch Voodoo History: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

• p142 Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan

• p144 Mark Fenster website 1999 book Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture

• p145 Why did the World Trade Center collapse? Science, engineering, and speculation

  • No designer anticipated a 90,000 liter Molotov cocktail

  • 8.25 Mcal/liter -> 7.4e11 cal -> 3.1e12J -> 740 tons of explosive

  • Many Skeptic Society links point to a facebook/meta/scam site??? difficult to access or cite.

• p146 http://www.implosionworld.com dead link Brent Blanchard

• p146-9 nine debunked claims, #8 Steel Frame buildings '''DO''' collapse due to fire

• p150 conspiracists WTC7 Chris Mohr

• p150 conspiracists show north side of WTC7, not nearly as damaged as the other side
• p150 conspiracists claim hole in Pentagon too small for airliner with wings ... but those sheared off

• p151 Skeptic article

• p151 Myths About the 9/11 Pentagon Plane Crash: Debunked

• p153 You Can't Handle the Truther

• p153 George W. Bush 2002 "Fool me once, shame on . . . shame on you. Fool me . . . you can't get fooled again."

• p153 The airplanes ... only 14 fighters on alert in US. NORAD looks outwards, not inward.

• p154 hijackers disabled transponders, plane difficult to track, 4500 blips to search
• p154 "Unusual" UAL and AA trades on 9/10 because of Sunday 9/9 newsletter recommending them
• p155 Inflight calls "couldn't happen?" Seat-back phones, and at 35000 feet, some cellphones would still get signal according to Qualcomm engineering VP

• p157 Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy Vincent Bugliosi 2007

  • "the failure to explain everything perfectly negates all that is explained Louis Nizer

• p157 Among the Truthers 2011 Jonathan Kay

• p158 List of 10 other al-Qaeda and ISIS operations and fatwas

• p159 List of 11 Obama "crimes", including a 142% stock market increase to conceal his socialism.
• p160 Birther BS, in spite of 1961/8/4 7:24pm Honolulu birth certificate (same hospital as my niece Ellery around 1985 )

• p161 John McCain and Republican Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle agree

• p164 House Select Committee on Assassinations 1979 report

  • Case Closed by Gerald Posner 2002

  • Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi 2007,

  • Thinking Critically about the Kennedy Assassination by Michel Jacques Gagné 2022

• p167 On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald 5 hours 1986

• p168 Cold Case JFK PBS video

• p168 Truth is the only client vidoe

• p168 40% to 75% believe there was a government conspiracy

• p170 Oliver Stone's 1991 JFK

• p170 Skeptic How the Skeptics Got It Wrong and Why It Matters by David Reitzes

• p170 Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? PBS Frontline Documentary Cran&Loeterman producers

• p171 The Dark Triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy 2002 Paulus and Williams

• p171 Oswald attempts to kill Edwin A. Walker April 1963 using same Mannlicher-Carcano rifle

• p172 Fair Play for Cuba Committee

• p172 October 16 job at Texas Schoolbook Depository, weeks before Kennedy motorcade route chosen

• p173 sixth floor sniper's nest ... fingerprints, 3 shell casings (81% of spectators heard three shots)
• p173 ballistic markings on bullet recovered from Connally matched Oswald's rifle

• p173 Oswald goes home, picks up .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, shoots patrolman J.D. Tippet, 10 witnesses

• p174 Oswald shot by "very emotional" Jack Ruby

• p174 Fair Play for Oswald Committee

• p175 Elizabeth Loftus false memory experiments

• p176 Different witnesses claim many different locations for shots, some claim agents shot back
• p176 Wife of one "witness" said "You didn't see that! We were back in the parking lot when it happened!"

• p177 "Umbrella Man" protester Louie Steve Witt

• p178 "I think if the Guinness Book of World Records had a category for people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing, I would be number one in that position, without even a close runner-up."

• p178 Zapruder film

• p179 Forward/Backward head movement

• p182 illustration showing 1800 fps bullet entering JFK's back, exiting throat 1600 fps tumbling, traverses Connally chest, exiting 900 fps, entering wrist, exiting 400 fps

• p183 John McAdams JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think About Claims of Conspiracy 2011

• p185 Why conspiracy?
  • 1 Cognitive dissonance: proportionality mismatch between size of cause (one crazy) and event (death of world VIP)
  • 2 Fame and Personality: for ordinary murder evidence more than sufficient and convincing
  • 3 Camelot: fans elevated Kennedy to mythic status. If JFK served a second term, his image might suffer
  • 4 Politics: Kennedy was strongly committed to Vietnam War (said RFK), conspiracists claimed opposite
• p190 Real Political Assassinations

• p190 Anna Anderson claims to be Anastasia Romanov

• p190 actual remains found and genetically identified in 2007

• p191 John Wilkes Booth Co-conspirators

• p192 Charles Guiteau assassinates Garfield, hung 1882

• Candice Millard Destiny of the Republic 2011 I Am Going to the Lordy

• p192 William McKinley assassinated by Leon Czolgosz in 1901

• p193 led to formation of BOI in 1908, precursor of 1935-renamed FBI

• p193 Killing the President 2010 by William Oliver and Nancy Marion

• p193 1835 attempt against President Andrew Jackson, Representative Davy Crockett wrestles him to the ground

• p193 1912 Teddy Roosevelt shot by saloonkeeper John Shrank, bullet slowed by eyeglass case and folded speech. "Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot—but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose"

• p195 Castro "If surviving assassinations were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal"

• p195 Operation Northwoods

• p197 Johnson hoped Warren Commission would conclude Oswald acted alone, because he feared investigations of Kennedy plots to kill Castro, and escalation to war

• p199 1919 Justice Holmes "falsely shouting fire" "clear and present danger"

  • a response to 15,000 anti-draft "Assert Your Rights" fliers by Schenck and Baer

• p200 Later used against Victor Berger,Eugene Debs,Emma Goldman,Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Daniel Ellsberg,Chelsea Manning,Edward Snowden

• p201 1966 State of Union, Johnson said "...no doubt of american commitment..."

• p201 Private memo to Defense Secretary McNamara "The present U.S. objective in Vietnam is to avoid humilation. The reasons why we went to Vietnam ... are now largely academic"

• p202 Errol Morris 2004 documentary The Fog of War

• p202 McNamara: " ...learn from your mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the same mistake three times, but hopefully not four or five."

• p203 WikiLeaks documents include

  • 92,000 Afghanistan documents 2004-2009, 109,000 deaths including 3,700 civilian "friendly fire"

• p207 emperor Franz Ferdinand vs irredentist Bosnian Serbs

• p214 led to the most atrocious (and arguably pointless) war in history, and World War II that followed

• p216 The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Hathaway and Shapiro

• p218 Correlates of War project

  • Hathaway and Shapiro find
  • Between 1816 and 1928, 1.21 conquests per year, 295486 km² (11 Crimeas) per year
  • After WW2, 0.26 conquests per year, 14950 km² per year. The chance of conquest for average state was 0.17%/y
• p220 Acton 1887 "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men"

• p221 Kathryn S. Olmstead Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11

• p224 Kathleen Taylor Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control Ox U Pr 1004

• p225 Shermer Understanding the Unidentified 2021

• p225 Office of the Director of National Intelligence Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

• pxxx A Roswell Requiem

• pxxx Donald R. Prothero and Timothy D. Callahan (?) UFOs, Chemtrails, and Aliens: What Science Says

• pxxx Karl T. Pflock Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will To Believe

  • also Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist 2002

  • Early 1970s, UCB classmate B. Maritano described a teen prank: vaguely describing his "UFO sighting" to the San Diego Union newspaper, which embellished the "story" into a two page spread, with photos.

• p227 1947 June 24 Kenneth Arnold Kenneth Arnold 1947 UFO sighting

  • "crescent shaped" "moved like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water" "flew in saucer-like fashion"

• p227 1947 July 8 Roswell Daily Record RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region RAAF = Roswell Army Air Force base

  • p227 1947 July 9 "Gen.RameyEmptiesRoswellSaucer" "When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick. In all [Brazel] estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds"

• p228 The military described ... remains of a weather balloon.

  • Not on 1967 Ted Bloecher list of 853 UFO reports for 1947 . . 75th anniversary

• p229 2013 Freedom of Information Act request revealed Area 51 missions

  • 1955 test flights of the U-2 Spy plane

  • 1962 Project Oxcart development of the SR-71 Blackbird

• p230 2850 OXCART A-12 test flights

• p230 Leslie Kean UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record

• Donald Prothero Area 51: What is Really Going On There? UFOs and U-2s, Aliens, and Q-12s

• p231 Carrie Elizabeth BuckOliver Wendell Holmes "Three generations of imbeciles is enough."

  • Thomas C. Leonard Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era

  • Edwin Black War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

  • Dan Kevles In The Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity 1995

  • Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?

• p232 James H. Jones 1981 Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment Wikipedia

• p233 Industry planted doubt: tobacco, food additives, chemical flame retardants, carbon emissions

• p233 Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway Merchants of Doubt (recently read)

• p233 Lisa A. BeroTobacco Industry Manipulation of Research "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public."

• p234 Robert Kenner director Food Inc. DVD

• p235 Tobacco lobbyist Peter G. Sparber promoted flame retardant furniture: "you have to fireproof the world around the cigarette"

  • Big Tobacco wins fire marshals as ally in push for flame retardants

• p236 Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum A Lot of People are Saying

• .. or bare assertion "Rigged!" This is conspiracy theory without the theory.

• p238 Hugo Mercier Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe Multco

• p241 Jonathan Rauch The Constitution of Knowledge

• p252 Keynes? Moynihan? "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

• p255 Pew Poll 2020 Sep 14 "Americans’ Views of Government: Low Trust, but Some Positive Performance Ratings"

• p255 Kashmira Gander Lying Has Become More Acceptable in American Politics: Poll

• p256 Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins 2020 How Information Became Ideological

• p258 Alex Wellerstein A “purely military” target? Truman’s changing language about Hiroshima

• p258 James B. Conroy Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865

• p260 Gordon Pennycook et.al. On the Belief that Beliefs Should Change According to Evidence: ...

• p260 Valorize norms of reason and rationality

• p262 Cass Robert Sunstein Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide

• p262 Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures

• p262 echo chamber effect

  • implications: talk hot-button issues with people who differ, read editorials by authors who differ, etc.

• p263 develop scout mindset, seek unexpected evidence

• p264 technique rebuttal instead of topic rebuttal

  • 2019 Philipp Schmid Cornelia Betsch Effective Strategies for Rebutting Science Denialism in Public Discussions

• p266 Constitution of Knowledge Rauch

• p267 10 Features: Fallibillism, Objectivity, Disconfirmation, Accountability, Pluralism, Civility, Professionalism, No Bullshitting, Commitment to scientific naturalism and Enlightenment humanism, Accentuate Free Speech and Open Dialog, Attenuate Censorious Behavior

• p270 Steven Pinker "Enlightenment Now" 2018

• p271 John Stuart Mill about silencing others

  • [Government silencing of speech] is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

• p276 skeptic Meet the researchers

• p299 perhaps Jeffrey Epstein's pederasty is conflated with his association with politicians and celebrities

• p301 imaginary conspiracist: "I don't know if the Pizzagate conspiracy theory is true, but it's the sort if thing Democrats would do!"