First of all, not all conspiracy theories are stupid. There are actual conspiracies in the world, and therefor there can be legitimate theories about those conspiracies. What I'm talking about here are what we used to call paranoid conspiracy theories, and the reason I'm emphasizing the word "paranoid" is because the paranoid theorist really does think they're out to get him. More specifically, they think that all the evidence against their theory is deliberately concocted as a part of the conspiracy's coverup, an attempt to lead the theorist (and everyone else) astray. To the non-paranoid, a random fact is just a random fact, to be assessed and interpreted impersonally, but the paranoid sees it all as either proof of the conspiracy against them or part of the conspiracy against them.
So that's the kind of conspiracy theory I'm talking about, the ones that involve vast powerful organizations coordinating some kind of plot that they are able somehow to conceal from everyone but our clever conspiracy theorist, who has somehow seen through the illusions to crack the case. And it's these theories that I claim are pretty much always involve a conspiracy that is remarkably stupid, or at the very least commits some remarkably stupid mistake in execution. Here are just a few examples:
The moon landings were faked to show up the Soviets!
It's often been pointed out how ridiculously difficult it would be to successfully carry out a faked moon landing. There were about a hundred thousand people involved in the project, and keeping a secret among that many people is just preposterously difficult. But if you really did have the technical and organizational capacity to pull off this kind of massive undertaking, isn't it just a little weird that you'd make the kind of dumb mistakes that some guy can pick out from his couch? Wouldn't you think a professional moon-hoaxing organization would think to include fake stars in the background or to make a flag that didn't ripple in the windless lunar vacuum? Nope. They get tripped up by amateur mistakes that our sharp-eyed conspiracy theorist with no particular training just happens to be smart enough to notice as unusual.
9/11 was an inside job, a controlled demolition to mobilize public support to invade Iraq!
This conspiracy would be pretty stupid on several levels, not least of which is that if you want to engineer an invasion of Iraq, you don't have to blow up any buildings; all you have to do is make up some story about WMDs. Telling one simple lie is way cheaper and easier than orchestrating a hugely destructive hoax. But hey, let's say that some nefarious conspiracy staged it for some other reason, like to collect on insurance. That conspiracy would still have to be fantastically stupid to make the kinds of mistakes that the conspiracy theorists point to as their evidence of the conspiracy. If some amateur can notice that jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel beams, then presumably the conspirators would also have considered this and chosen something more plausible -- unless, of course, the amateur is just wrong in thinking that steel beams need to be liquified before they'll fail. (A stick of butter right out of the fridge can support considerably more weight than one at room temperature, though both remain solid.)
Big Pharma is concealing the cure to cancer, because it's more profitable to sell treatments than cures!
There are thousands and thousands of very smart people all over the world working to find cures for cancer, and most of them have loved ones who have died or will die of cancer. Can you imagine just how astoundingly powerful a conspiracy would have to be to get all of these people to cooperate with a coverup? Now, if you had that kind of power and influence, why on earth would you need to even pretend you were selling cancer treatments in the first place, since you could almost certainly do much better for yourself by using that power more directly. It's like Dr. Evil demanding One MILLION dollars; you've got this super futuristic orbital base and a global empire of henchmen, and you're using it to chase a mere million dollars?
Sandy Hook was faked to stir up support for gun control!
Right. This dreadfully evil cabal intent upon taking away your guns so they can impose martial law and do away with all liberty, hires a bunch of "crisis actors" and coordinates a fake shooting only to be discovered by a sharp-eyed patriot who recognizes the same crisis actors being used for something else. But somehow the cabal isn't quite smart enough to realize they could achieve the same goal with less risk of being caught if they just, you know, manipulated some loser into shooting up a school for real. Or maybe they wouldn't do that because they're not actually so evil after all. Or something.
I could go on, because there's a whole lot of goofy conspiracy theories out there, but there should be a pretty clear pattern by now: superhumanly competent and powerful and organized conspiracies doing incredibly sophisticated things, but also making really obviously stupid mistakes. The point here isn't that smart people don't make stupid mistakes sometimes, but usually the mistakes they make take some kind of digging to identify, and only really seem stupid in retrospect. Industrial disasters get investigated in great detail by experts who usually have to work very hard to uncover some sequence of subtle but critical failures that all combined to produce a Chernobyl or a Hindenburg. It's usually not some one dumb screwup.
So why is it that these conspiracies always seem to be simultaneously superhuman in capacity, and embarrassingly stupid at the same time?
It's because ultimately, the thing that makes a conspiracy theory take root is that it strokes the ego of the conspiracy theorist; it makes them feel smarter than everyone else. The theorist is the one person, or one of the privileged few, smart enough to have seen through the lies of the conspirators, which have fooled everyone else. And so there is a hard limit on how smart the conspirators can be: they must be just not quite as clever as the conspiracy theorist who has unmasked them.
Notably, the actual organizational details of what the conspirators are actually doing are always glossed over or treated in the abstract. The 9/11 Truther doesn't provide an org chart of who acquired the explosives and who installed them and how they were concealed and how the planes were coordinated; they just say it was done. So they don't really need to conceive of all of the details of the plan, and in this respect there's always a Dunning-Kruger level of incompetence. The theorist has absolutely no idea just how much would be involved in trying to fake a moon landing or conceal a cancer cure, and has no idea even of how little they know about the problems involved. These things are literally easier said than done, and all the theorist has to do is say them.
Similarly, the clues noticed by the theorist that let them unravel the whole conspiracy are always just simple enough to be detected by the theorist's own expertise/talent, which by the conceits of the theory are necessarily superior to everyone else's. So the Apollo skeptic assumes they know enough about the moon and cameras and optics to be able to accurately predict whether stars should be visible, and that the supposed experts staging the faked moon landings wouldn't know this stuff better. The 9/11 Truther assumes they know enough about demolition to spot the mistakes made by the conspiracy's demolition experts. And so on.
And that's why it's so hard to defeat conspiracy theories with facts and logic, because they're ultimately not about facts and logic. They're about feeling superior, special, enlightened.
Thursday 21 May 2020
Sunday 3 May 2020
Some Scary Thoughts About Viruses
There was no vaccine for chickenpox when I was a kid in the 1970's, and it was considered inevitable and indeed preferable to catch it as a kid, since it tends to be more serious to catch it as an adult. I remember it as both a novelty and an inconvenience; sure, I itched a bit, but no big deal, and I knew it would go away soon enough. Most people my age have a chickenpox scar or two, but it was really no big deal.
And that's to be expected in a virus that's been circulating in the human population since forever. There's a principle in evolutionary biology: parasites tend to evolve towards becoming symbiotes over time. That's because parasites eventually need to spread their offspring to new hosts, and if you kill off your host too quickly, you may find it harder to find new hosts to infect (unless you evolve some kind of complex life cycle that involves infecting the animal that eats your current host.) Chickenpox doesn't significantly impact the survivability of the average human child who catches it, so it has plenty of opportunity to infect lots of other human children.
But humans have immune systems, and quickly fight off chickenpox within a week or so, and in the process learn to recognize the zoster virus so you're typically immune to it for the rest of your life. And this is a bit of a problem for zoster, because if it spreads rapidly through a small group of hunter-gatherers, and then everyone is immune, the virus has no new hosts to infect.
Zoster has a clever solution, which I learned about last year. See, you don't actually get rid of the virus entirely. Some of them find their way into the nervous system and hide out there for a few decades, and then make their way back down to the skin and appear as a new disease: shingles. This means that the virus has a whole new crop of young people to infect, who were born after the last outbreak ended. And so the virus persists well into the future.
The virus that causes Covid-19, named SARS-cov-2, had been circulating among some population of bats for a long time, but it only entered the human population about five months ago. That means we have no idea whatsoever what its long term effects are. Most people only suffer a minor cold-like infection and get over it -- we think. Many people have had it and recovered -- we think. But we just don't know what's going to happen one or ten or thirty years after exposure. The initial infection with HIV is very much like coming down with the flu, and clears up after a week or so and is forgotten, but then can take ten years or more before it damages the immune system enough to develop into AIDS. For all we know, people who've "recovered" from Covid-19 might suddenly start dropping dead of mysterious blood clots, six months after getting the all clear. There have, after all, been reports of higher rates of strokes and heart attacks, and strange blood concentrations in the toes of young people; the virus does seem to be having some kind of effect besides just causing respiratory problems.
For that matter, maybe they develop superhuman endurance and a ravenous hunger for human brains, and this is the start of the zombie apocalypse for real.
Now, I don't think that's likely at all. I'm not a biologist or a physician or an epidemiologist, but I suspect that we probably won't see too much in the way of unexpected long-term effects from the virus. But the point is that we just don't know right now.
If we assume that Covid-19 is just a really, really bad cold that kills 1-2% of the people who catch it, then you can sort of make the argument that once we've had enough people get sick and recover, the health care system can handle anyone who gets infected later when we ease all the mask wearing and social distancing rules. We haven't reached the point where that's a good idea yet, but you can make the argument.
But I argue that since we do not know what else this virus may do in the long run, we should therefore be a little more cautious about opening everything up than we would be if we knew this was just a very bad cold. Spreading out the infections over a longer time is better than having them all at once, even if everyone is eventually infected, but it's still better yet never to be infected at all, especially with such a new and poorly-understood virus. So I urge patience. Let's beat this thing.
And that's to be expected in a virus that's been circulating in the human population since forever. There's a principle in evolutionary biology: parasites tend to evolve towards becoming symbiotes over time. That's because parasites eventually need to spread their offspring to new hosts, and if you kill off your host too quickly, you may find it harder to find new hosts to infect (unless you evolve some kind of complex life cycle that involves infecting the animal that eats your current host.) Chickenpox doesn't significantly impact the survivability of the average human child who catches it, so it has plenty of opportunity to infect lots of other human children.
But humans have immune systems, and quickly fight off chickenpox within a week or so, and in the process learn to recognize the zoster virus so you're typically immune to it for the rest of your life. And this is a bit of a problem for zoster, because if it spreads rapidly through a small group of hunter-gatherers, and then everyone is immune, the virus has no new hosts to infect.
Zoster has a clever solution, which I learned about last year. See, you don't actually get rid of the virus entirely. Some of them find their way into the nervous system and hide out there for a few decades, and then make their way back down to the skin and appear as a new disease: shingles. This means that the virus has a whole new crop of young people to infect, who were born after the last outbreak ended. And so the virus persists well into the future.
The virus that causes Covid-19, named SARS-cov-2, had been circulating among some population of bats for a long time, but it only entered the human population about five months ago. That means we have no idea whatsoever what its long term effects are. Most people only suffer a minor cold-like infection and get over it -- we think. Many people have had it and recovered -- we think. But we just don't know what's going to happen one or ten or thirty years after exposure. The initial infection with HIV is very much like coming down with the flu, and clears up after a week or so and is forgotten, but then can take ten years or more before it damages the immune system enough to develop into AIDS. For all we know, people who've "recovered" from Covid-19 might suddenly start dropping dead of mysterious blood clots, six months after getting the all clear. There have, after all, been reports of higher rates of strokes and heart attacks, and strange blood concentrations in the toes of young people; the virus does seem to be having some kind of effect besides just causing respiratory problems.
For that matter, maybe they develop superhuman endurance and a ravenous hunger for human brains, and this is the start of the zombie apocalypse for real.
Now, I don't think that's likely at all. I'm not a biologist or a physician or an epidemiologist, but I suspect that we probably won't see too much in the way of unexpected long-term effects from the virus. But the point is that we just don't know right now.
If we assume that Covid-19 is just a really, really bad cold that kills 1-2% of the people who catch it, then you can sort of make the argument that once we've had enough people get sick and recover, the health care system can handle anyone who gets infected later when we ease all the mask wearing and social distancing rules. We haven't reached the point where that's a good idea yet, but you can make the argument.
But I argue that since we do not know what else this virus may do in the long run, we should therefore be a little more cautious about opening everything up than we would be if we knew this was just a very bad cold. Spreading out the infections over a longer time is better than having them all at once, even if everyone is eventually infected, but it's still better yet never to be infected at all, especially with such a new and poorly-understood virus. So I urge patience. Let's beat this thing.
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