It's easy to make everything a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works. amirite?

I've always stood by Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute maliciousness to that which can be explained by incompetence.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

There are a lot of maliciously incompetent people in the world.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

That's a bit different than Hanlon's Razor I think. Malicious incompetence, weaponized incompetence, whatever you want to call it comes from a different place. In those cases, the person is well aware they don't know how to do something or have knowledge of how something works, and make the conscious choice to avoid learning it. That cognizant effort to avoid learning disqualifies it from falling under the umbrella of Hanlon's Razor. The theory is specifically for people who don't know any better. It was somewhat misquoted above, and it isn't incompetence, but stupidity that is mentioned. Big distinction, in my mind.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

i prefer mehrunes razor, personally

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I use Harry's razors

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Hitchen's Razor and Occam's Razor are also great. "That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" and "the answer that makes the fewest assumptions is to be preferred", respectively.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

yeah but i have a link to a crappy website with even crappier scans of crappy xeroxes of heavily-redacted documents that are otherwise indecipherable, so, you know, that's pretty much all the evidence i need

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I also need a 9 hour "documentary" on youtube.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Why are all of these principles called "razors"?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Some philosopher was feeling edgy.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

afaik, they're all named after Occam's razor. Why it's called that, I do not know.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yeah, the problem with all of these razors is that the assertions that are dismissed could still be correct, it's just that you don't know. There's a difference between not having enough information to know if something is correct and dismissing it and knowing for a fact that something is incorrect. That said, don't drink poisoned Kool-Aid.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Or Flavor Aid, the stuff used at Jonestown. I wonder if "big cola" is behind this conspiracy to impugn Kool-Aid.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I would think that in any case, it's quite possible that someone would be inspired to use Kool-Aid in imitation of Jim Jones rather than Flavor-Aid simply because "drinking the Kool-Aid" is a commonly used phrase in our culture. It would also have the advantage that you could tell people: "Look, there is nothing wrong with drinking the Kool-Aid, it's the *Flavor Aid* that poisons you. With your level of spiritual enlightenment, it is now possible to know this fact reserved for initiates and *safely*, due to the power afforded by God, drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. But *not* Flavor-Aid, which may only be imbibed safely by *higher-level* initiates."

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Flavor Aid had better flavors than Kool-Aid, it's no wonder they used it instead.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Right, but it doesn't purport to give you perfect knowledge, just a useful heuristic to approach novel problems with. Like the phrase "when you hear hoofbeats, think Horse, not Zebra", there are of course scenarios where it would be better to first think of a zebra rather than a horse, and there are other scenarios where you'd be right to first think of a horse, but it is actually a zebra. It remains a useful exercise for reminding yourself to start with the simplest explanations for things unless and until you have more information that challenges that approach. When investigating a murder, unless there is clear evidence to suggest otherwise, most police start with the assumption that it was a a spurned lover or some such other common scenario rather than that it was an assassination. If the victim is a world leader, that likely jumps higher on their list of explanations, and even if it's not, it still *could* be an assassination, but that doesn't mean it's wrong to initially dismiss the idea that Janet from maintenance was assassinated rather than killed by a jealous lover, or a home invasion gone wrong or some other such banal explanation. In other words, yes, you will sometimes correctly use Occam's razor and be *wrong*, but more often than not, you will be correct.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I don't know if it has an official name (it's often been misattributed to Carl Sagan), but I'm quite fond of >If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

"Woops." -Eichmann

by Anonymous 1 year ago

PGMOL in a nutshell.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

It always comes down to the details for me. Hit the wrong peddle and rammed a car? Well she is 16, nervous, and first issue on record.. most likely incompetence. Ex school principal claiming he didn't know how a fire alarm works... malicious.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

That's exactly what you'd want me to think! I see right through you.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Beware, OP is a false flag. I mean literally a sentient flag which doesn't correspond to any actual country but looks a lot like it does. False flags have been controlling the world for a long time. The Habsburgs were all false flags of the Moon! The Windsors are all false flags of Uglybourg!

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I forget the exact quote but someone once said something like, conspiracy theorists think that exciting secret powers control the world, rather than the blatant boring malicious powers that do.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

they apply chess board logic to a ouija board world

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Or maybe the other way around? But it's definitely one of those two

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I work on a few high level satellite programs and the number of people I meet giving me the nudge-nudge-wink-wink to let them in on how much I'm getting paid to lie about the Earth being round is just ridiculous.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

So…how much?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Needs more nudging and winking if you want to get an answer 😉

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Big Maps and Big Globes are behind all of it.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Haha idiots. They probably don't even know you signed an NDA so you can't tell them.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I don't believe you. I've never met a flat earther in real life... only on the internet. You're talking like these people are common.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Whatever you say, bud.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Ooo...oooo....I know one!

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I dated a guy once that was just ... really not that bright. And he would come to me with conspiracy theories about basic stuff that had already been proven in science 🤦 just because he didn't know it, he assumed nobody else did either

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Ooh do you have an example? Not to make fun, just to understand his point of view

by Anonymous 1 year ago

There is a limit to how simple a truth can be explained while still being true. There is no limit to how simple a lie can be made.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

This is actually how most religions got started. People didn't know how things worked, so they made up reasons for how things worked.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

God of the gaps. If you don't know how something works, it's God's will. If you challenge God's will, it's blasphemy. Just ask Galileo.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Just a clarification here: this is how *mythology* started. And while most religions also include one or more mythologies (typically, at minimum, a creation myth) the religion part was about establishing common moral, behavioral, and health codes before we had the technology and wealth required for secular legal system.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

the invention of lying if you will

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I swear I haven't slept with anyone. God impregnated me. I'm going to have God's baby. Which is God. You got to have faith ah faith ah faith.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I'd actually say It's easy to make everything a conspiracy when you look it in a ignorant point of view for example: I don't believe in buses. How tf can you enter in a 24,387lbs steel box in a place and leave it in another place??? How can you guys believe it?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I've always seen it as, "sure, I'm not very smart, and I made every attempt to resist education and learning things, and the garbage state of my life is pretty much due to my insistence on making bad and uninformed decisions… but what if nothing was my fault and I was actually super smart because I'm one of the select few who can *see through the lies*??? Yeah, that sounds much better."

by Anonymous 1 year ago

As someone who does penetration testing and security for a living. Knowing more has made me understand just how fragile/exploitable our current world is. We live in a house of glass mate, no conspiracy about it.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Who told you to say that?!

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Someone trying to cover up something, I'd say!

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I've found most conspiracy nuts are people that are dumber than they realize, and they use their lack of understanding to justify believing their conspiracy.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Conspiracy theories have replaced religion for a lot of people. Kind of a lateral move, IMO.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

They fill the same function: to explain the unknown. Is science too complicated?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Omg.....I get it now. They don't understand how it works, so instead of just admitting that in shame, they make up a way that it works that makes sense to them, and act like they know something nobody else has figured out........

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I think it's a bit more meta than that. The conspiracy may be to flood people with wrong conspiracy theories in order to make it hard to see the actual conspiracies that are going on. This actually has a name - disinformation, which is a euphemism for psychological warfare. There is evidence that we are in a very high stakes, huge information war right now. Never attribute maliciousness to that which can be explained by incompetence. However, I think the caveat is that this only applies to situations where there isn't huge incentive to be malicious and where there are many filters for competence - in which case the simplest explanation for incompetence is that it is actually maliciousness disguised as incompetence.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I don't know how an engine works — it must be the rich elite infusing adrenachrome in the gasoline that makes my car move

by Anonymous 1 year ago

That's exactly what they want us to think!!!

by Anonymous 1 year ago

They don't want you to think

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Not a conspiracy but I had a friend give me his revolutionary idea that all life on earth originates from the sun. Which, awesome that he figured that out on his own but also disappointing that he had to figure that out on his own.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

It's also easy when you get to know human nature and know all the terrible things people in power have done.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yeah, listened to last podcast on the lefts MKultra series, and the guys start out with saying that after doing so much research into it, they feel more susceptible to conspiracy nonsense because theres just so much insanity, and almost all of it right under societies nose

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Its a conspiracy that they make things exactly the way that I wouldn't understand!!! -Some idiot somewhere, probably

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Sometimes it is actually a conspiracy!

by Anonymous 1 year ago

"That's now how that works" is almost always my answer when I hear a far-fetched theory.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

When you believe in things you don't understand, then you suffer.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

"The truth does not do as much good in the world as the appearance of truth does evil." -Dying russian man.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

You're explaining religion

by Anonymous 1 year ago

It's not just that they don't know, it's that the evidence indicates that their preferred beliefs aren't true.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

And often that anything is other people. Lots of conspiracy theories tend to forget motives and logistics, overestimate people's competency or ability to keep secrets while also vastly overestimating their own importance. Most tend to fall apart at the how/why though.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

My common sense doesn't care for your facts and peer-reviewed studies.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Well education is just Jewish indoctrination aimed at hiding the flat earth! WAKE UP SHEEAPLEE!!!1

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Birds aren't real...

by Anonymous 1 year ago

When you don't know anything, everything seems possible.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

bro discovered how religions work

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yeah sadly I have friends parents that believe the earth is flat, geology science is a conspiracy and striated rocks are caused by the great Noah flood. Not even satellites are real. One guess which political party they support….

by Anonymous 1 year ago

That's not how that works.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

It how it works, for example, people that say that the government is putting tracking chips in vaccines, doesn't have any idea how technological challenging that is, you need like nanotechnology, battery technology, chip technology, signal technology that doesn't exist. And if it existed the first thing that the people in power will do is use this technology to make themselves young again and immortal.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

it's precisely how that works. see, how it is, is, there are two conjoined triangles of success. you have engineering and sales on the sides, and some other things that are there to add up to total excellence

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Every decade I see more and more corruption, and it's almost never 1 person. It's almost always 2 or more people conspiring for their own benefit. But they don't admit it, they give an official story that absolves them of any wrong doing. It happens constantly at every level. Anyone questioning the official story is a conspiracy theorist until 40 years later we all quietly learn the deception was a mask hiding foul play and bad motives. Name almost any historical event and the official story is hiding the foul play.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yeap, there hasn't been a single conspiracy in the history of the world. All the things that are written in history books are truth.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

The existence of actual conspiracies doesn't make other conspiracy theories true.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Noticed you felt like this was a personal attack, interesting.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

No such thing as conspiracies. People don't understand how many people it takes to have a conspiracy. 13 people minimal.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

And why don't I know how everything works? Cause of the conspiracy.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

This is why we have religion.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

First good one in months

by Anonymous 1 year ago

aka when you're not smart, u dumb!

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Can't you say the same thing when you dismiss every conspiracy?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Couldn't have said it better myself. When we don't understand something, it's easy to fill in the gaps with wild theories and assumptions. But sometimes it's better to admit our ignorance and seek out the truth.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Exactly what a lizard person who can smell our brainwaves would say...

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Have y'all seen the latest apparently Taylor swift and travis kelce relationship is staged by the nfl and her PR team

by Anonymous 1 year ago