There's almost no secret masterminds or shadowy cabals behind it, just selfish short-sighted power-seeking behavior.
How do you know this?
1.5 is "think tank is publicly incorporated, takes funding in mostly-public ways, and publishes position papers with it's name (and the name of members) on it", right? I'd classify that as "normal, if imperfect, power relationships", not "conspiracy.
Yeah, I think this is usually how it works. However I also think the way these are written makes them almost impossible for people not in the know to understand them or know that they exist.
Do you think it would be accurate to call the soviet union a conspiracy? In it there were rarely explicit lies, although they happened, people in a sense knew that the power structure was manipulating them and not working in their interest yet regular people (I think) didn't pay this too much mind.
While I don't disagree that "incentive systems causing corruption" is similar to what I would call conspiracy there seems to be a problem of the mundanity of evil. "Everyone knows" "capitalism" is unfair and corrupt, "everyone" doesn't have a very specific understanding of how it is corrupt nor do they really think it can be addressed. It's one of these unsolvable problems of "the system".
Compare that to conspiracy people who for example actively distrust the media, actively resist the idea of large corporations running important parts of their lives such as the town-square. If we buy the idea that the system we have in place right now is systematically corrupt then these... (read more)
J. Edgar Hoover used blackmail on presidents to be in control of one important lever of power. If there was a conspiracy that did not have J. Edgar Hoover as part, why would they let Hoover get away with that?
I can't speak to this because I know very little about J. Edgar Hoover.
I'm not sure what you mean with group. Of how many groups are you a member yourself? Is this forum a group?
I think groups should be seen more as a spectrum than as clearly defined entities, even more so when they are not formal, yet I would say that groups definitely exist and identifying them is usually pretty easy even if the border is fuzzy.
My model of the conspiracy is that it is made up of several fuzzy groups of at least three social groups:
I can't speak to J. Edgar Hoover or Robert Moses (don't know enough about them). The argument that they should be included in any conspiracy because they held two seemingly high positions of power and since they didn't get their way there can be no conspiracy seems like a suspect argument.
If I would have to make it more clear what I mean by conspiracy theory I'd probably define it in terms of a small group of people that have:
Does this seem like fair criteria to you or do you feel like they are overly broad? What would you define it as?
I feel like you expect this to be obviously true, but I'm at least a little well-read and plenty cynical about society, and I'm not seeing what this refers to
You are correct, I expect this to be true but I don't have a more specific example in mind more than intelligence services such as the CIA seeming to have a thought-out structure which is good at combating leaks and betrayal in different ways.
If you are well read on this, do you remember some resource that makes you think this is not the case? Are you saying conspiracies are really difficult to contain because it is near-impossible to organize in a way to... (read 387 more words →)
It's just that there are pretty few very-long-running, hidden, effective organizational conspiracies. They get eaten in their infancy by the banal inter-conspirator conspiracies against each other. I can't guarantee none, but it's certainly a lot less than hucksters would have you believe.
Why do you think the long-running and hidden conspiracies get eaten by inter-conspirator conspiracies? I'm interpreting this claim as the idea that ruling elites only cooperate for short amounts of time and then try to screw each other over.
Here are my off-the-top-of-my-head reasons for why this wouldn't be true:
I read a prominent rationalist talk about conspiracy recently, he seemed to counter-signal the idea, or at least the more common core of the idea. In the comments there was a reply that I thought went through a lot of the basic justifications for the core believes of conspiratorial thinking and I realized I've never seen rationalists discuss the topic in a way that have really convinced me.
Something that is not mentioned in the post which I realize might impact whether people find this to be an appropriate place to discuss this is that a world where the "core" conspiracy of a small group of high ranking elites have massive unseen influence... (read 1492 more words →)
Yes