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[Reelya]

That's probably got to a point where "good for your guts" is as meaningful on a yoghurt label as "is red and tasty" is on an apple.

[Culise]

That's probably got to a point where "good for your guts" is as meaningful on a yoghurt label as "is red and tasty" is on an apple.

True, but I'd go one further and say it's less so.  "Red and tasty" at least has use in ruling out pure green, yellow, and orange cultivars. 

[wierd]

Only due to the subjectivity of "tasty."

some people love red and golden delicious apples. Personally, I find them overly sweet and mealy feeling in my mouth. I hate them. However, I love sour apple cultivars, like granny smith.  There are several red skinned cultivars of sour apple.

Any particular apple may be red, but the subjectivity of "tasty" makes the statement dubious. Other people may not share mu opinion on what a tasty apple tastes like.

[Flying Dice]

wierd, you're conflating western medicine with the pharmaceutical industry and assorted other capitalistic medical institutions. Those have arisen from it, but they're members of the set, not the whole set, so to speak.

[LordBucket]

Things that I have seen recently:

International space station doesn't exist
Holocaust did not happen
Moon landing are a hoax
9/11 conspiracy shit
Nukes don't exist

and of course:

The flat earth society

Oh, yes. All sort of ludicrous nutcase conspiracy theories out there. Let's also not forget:

 * The CIA engaged in illegal mind control experiments using drugs on human subjects without their knowledge or consent
 * The CIA proposed committing acts of terrorism against US civilian targets with intent to frame it on Cuba to start a war
 * The president's administration arranged an office break-in and then attempted to cover it up
 * The US and UK governments conspired together and overthrew a democratically elected government in pursuit of oil interests

I mean, who would believe crazy stuff like that, right?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason

I don't think it's really "conspiracy theories" or "failure of reason" that you're objecting to, though. It's consensus culture. The official explanation and consensus belief about 911 is that it was a conspiracy. The official explanation and consensus belief about Watergate is that it was a conspiracy. You probably don't question these consensus beliefs. It's not "conspiracy theories" you're objecting to. It's non-consensus belief.

But why do you believe the things you do? Why do you disbelieve the things you don't? What magic portal to objective reality do you claim access to? "Other people believe X" and "I was taught X" are not good reasons to believe in X. If you grew up surrounded by people who believed in a magical bearded sky faerie who gets angry when you masturbate and lived your life being taught to belief in it, you'd probably believe in it. If you grew up surrounded by people who believed in bipedal lizard giants you'd probably believe in those too. And yet lots of people believe in magical sky faeries and bipedal lizard giants.

In fact, if you clicked one of those previous two links, you might even now be feeling an irrational urge to defend the existence of one of those things, because of course they're real and how dare anyone not believe what you do.

Examine that feeling.

why reason is failing to resolve the debate.

Because people generally don't believe what they believe because of reasons. They beleive what they believe because they were trained to believe and think a certain way at a young and impressionable age. Very few people ever overcome early childhood training, and when they do, they don't do it for reasons of logic or evidence. They do it because of emotion.

No amount of a logic or evidence will convince a trained athiest to believe in god. No amount of logic or evidence will convince a trained religious person to give up belief in god.

But oh....one emotionally significant event in their lives, and lots of people will change their beliefs.

Reason is not "resolving the debate" because reason is not a particularly significant force in the process of belief.

[Bohandas]

Things that I have seen recently:

International space station doesn't exist
Holocaust did not happen
Moon landing are a hoax
9/11 conspiracy shit
Nukes don't exist

and of course:

The flat earth society

Oh, yes. All sort of ludicrous nutcase conspiracy theories out there. Let's also not forget:

 * The CIA engaged in illegal mind control experiments using drugs on human subjects without their knowledge or consent
 * The CIA proposed committing acts of terrorism against US civilian targets with intent to frame it on Cuba to start a war
 * The president's administration arranged an office break-in and then attempted to cover it up
 * The US and UK governments conspired together and overthrew a democratically elected government in pursuit of oil interests

I mean, who would believe crazy stuff like that, right?

That's kind of the point, if they couldn't even keep a lid on that stuff how could they hide this supposed bigger shit?

Furthermore, a tenet of conspiracy theiries is that this kind of stuff actually works, when in fact it failed.

Furthermore, most legitimate conspiracies aren't even on kook radar. Almost nobody knows about Project Mogul or Operation Infektion even after they were decalssified.

[Reelya]

Well, Project Mogul wasn't really a "conspiracy" so much as a basic classified research project. And since it conflicts with established conspiracy theories of course they don't tell you about it. I'd only call it a conspiracy if they did something illegal and unethical and tried to cover that up, rather than just keeping it hushed up because they didn't want the Soviets to find out about it.

Project Mogul therefore isn't the best example, but I agree with your basic point. You never hear conspiracy types talking about the Iran/Contra affair for example, or basically any of the secret wars run by Reagan. And all of those are true stories but mind-boggling in how far the administration went over the line of legality, involved themselves in arms-smuggling, potentially funded missions with drug trafficking, overseeing torture and murders of civilians in the target countries. It makes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan look like a cakewalk compared to what happened in the Reagan era.

[LordBucket]

legitimate conspiracies aren't even on kook radar

But what makes a conspiracy "legitimate?"

If your answer is "being real makes it legitimate" you're forgetting that we don't generally have the benefit of magically knowing things. At one time, Watergate was perceived as a "silly conspiracy that couldn't possibly be true." Now it's consensus reality.

The measure of a kook isn't how accurate their beliefs are, it's how closely their beliefs resemble the consensus.

[Reelya]

An analogy is belief in exotic animals. At one point, Europeans believed gorillas were a myth and unicorns were real. At that time, they had unicorn horns to prove it (which later turned out to be narwhal tusks), but what physical evidence did they have for gorillas? So, educated Europeans might have pointed to the physical evidence for unicorns and mock those who believed in gorillas as gullible fools.

Would it be "scientific" to believe in gorillas, but not in unicorns, if you had equal (zero) evidence of either's existence? How about stripy horses vs horned horses? In the absence of evidence you should be equally skeptical about the existence of either one, but we'd label the person who just happened to believe in gorillas or zebras as "prescient" and the person who just happened to believe in unicorns "foolish". But all of that is about hindsight judgements and belief in one of the other in no way was correlated by intelligence, merely luck.

[mainiac]

[GoblinCookie]

That's kind of the point, if they couldn't even keep a lid on that stuff how could they hide this supposed bigger shit?

Furthermore, a tenet of conspiracy theiries is that this kind of stuff actually works, when in fact it failed.

Furthermore, most legitimate conspiracies aren't even on kook radar. Almost nobody knows about Project Mogul or Operation Infektion even after they were decalssified.

That really is not a rational line of reasoning.  The reason is that you do not the total amount of conspiracies there are going on in order to know what % of the total conspiracies that we know about are of the total number of conspiracies in existance.  For all we know the success rate is 99%, so the known conspiracies are only 1% of the total amount of the conspiracies that there are in existance. 

There is also the question of whether there is super-conspiracy involved, a large number of seperate groups whose goals fit together to achieve a wider goal that not all the groups necceserily know about.  A well designed conspiracy is made up of a number of seperate cells acting independantly towards the same goal so that if one of the cells is exposed the plan as a whole can go on unaltered towards it's completion.  The exposed conspiracies then can simply be exposed cells rather than the whole network, possibly even exposed by other cells of the conspiracy in order to save their own skin or due to internal infighting. 

An analogy is belief in exotic animals. At one point, Europeans believed gorillas were a myth and unicorns were real. At that time, they had unicorn horns to prove it (which later turned out to be narwhal tusks), but what physical evidence did they have for gorillas?

Would it be "scientific" to believe in gorillas, but not in unicorns, if you had equal (zero) evidence of either's existence? How about stripy horses vs horned horses? In the absence of evidence you should be equally skeptical about the existence of either one, but we'd label the person who just happened to believe in gorillas as "prescient" and the person who just happened to believe in unicorns "foolish". But all of that is about hindsight judgements and belief in one of the other in no way was correlated by intelligence, merely luck.

As I understand it there are two opposing ways of look at the world, the Rationalist and the Empirical ways.  The former believes in conspiracies more easily than the former because it looks for rational explanations for events, the latter on the other hand is easily fooled *by* conspiracies because it bases it's understanding upon what it can see, while hidden things cannot be seen and can manipulate what is seen as well. 

So the Rationalist ends up believing in conspiracies that do not exist because they make sense while the Empiricist refuses to believe in conspiracies that do exist because he cannot observe them.

[Reelya]

"cool story bro"

I'm not sure what you're objecting to exactly, but I assume you think it's bullshit that Europeans simultaneously belived in unicorns and disbelieved in gorillas?

http://listverse.com/2010/04/16/10-beasts-that-used-to-be-mythical/
^ attested as least as early as 1625, European scientists disbelieved stories about gorillas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn#The_hunt_of_the_unicorn
Meanwhile, we have unicorn hoaxes that were widely believed at least as recent as 1663. Leibniz and da Vinci being amongst rennaisance-era believers.

And that's just a cursory glance at sources that took me two minutes.

[mainiac]

I'm not objecting, it's a cool story, bro.

[Bohandas]

"cool story bro"

I'm not sure what you're objecting to exactly, but I assume you think it's bullshit that Europeans simultaneously belived in unicorns and disbelieved in gorillas?

http://listverse.com/2010/04/16/10-beasts-that-used-to-be-mythical/
^ attested as least as early as 1625, European scientists disbelieved stories about gorillas.

I'm surprised they left out the platypus, which was initially believed to be a hoax.

[Morrigi]

The issue with conspiracy theories is that governments often do all kinds of heinous things to advance their interests. The CIA ESP experiments are no conspiracy theory, they're conspiracy fact. The same is true of Operation Northwoods which included a plan to shoot down a civilian airliner and blame it on Cuba, using that as an excuse for war. And of course, ten years ago, the idea that the government was spying on just about all internet communications would have been dismissed as yet another conspiracy theory. We know now that it's actually happening.

...And then there's stupid ideas like the moon landing hoax bullshit.

As for the Holocaust, even most actual Nazis on /pol/ don't sincerely claim that the Holocaust never happened. They do, however, dispute the number and method of deaths. The only way that could be construed as claiming that it never happened is if your definition of "Holocaust" is extremely narrow, in which 6 million Jews were maliciously gassed to death with cyanide, and the bodies subsequently incinerated. Is an argument that 3 million Jews died of starvation and disease through maliciously terrible conditions Holocaust denial? Where do we draw the line between historical inquiry and conspiracy theory?