MichaelShermer

Michael Shermer

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,

  • oversimplification of complex problems,

  • 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

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