Contra Bronski on Deception

Joseph Bronski is an independent researcher attempting to create a science of power, which he calls exousiology. He draws inspiration from the old elite theorists, primarily Pareto, with the intention of rebuilding the field on a rigorous, almost obsessively mathematical basis, incorporating the psychology of individual differences and economic models. His research program concept is parallel to mine, except I begin from a rigorous definition of conspiracy theory as the use of deception by elites and note the connection to elite theory after the fact. He construes power as deriving from three sources: violence, wealth creation, and deception. Recently however he has argued that deception is not in fact real. Given my previously stated bias on this matter, I can only consider this to be a ridiculous and untenable position that would vitiate the entire research program. I begin by critiquing Bronski’s model and then proposing my own model.

Bronski begins by laying out two positions, which he attributes to Mosca and Pareto respectively, the latter of which he supports. The Moscaite position holds that information precedes power and that history can be explained by the rise and fall of ideologies. The Paretian position holds that what people say need have no bearing on how they actually behave, and so inculcating people with false beliefs can’t actually make them display harmful behaviours, it can only make people signal adherence to the dominant ideology. I consider both positions partially true and mostly wrong. The Moscaite position overstates the role of information; though information does not precede power, for those who are already powerful deception can be a more efficient means of control than force or economic coercion. The Paretian position is correct that people may signal through expressing beliefs that don’t align with their behaviours, but incorrect that people cannot be harmed by deceptive information.

To demonstrate the validity of the Paretian position, Bronski limits his real world examples exclusively to the study of Wokism. Noting the increased rates of criminality among minorities compared to whites he focuses on white flight: the tendency for whites to move from areas of high ethnic diversity to homogeneously white areas. Since white liberals claim to love diversity and may be deceived about crime rates, the phenomenon should be limited to conservatives who acknowledge the crime data and hence seek areas where the risk of being victimized is lower. Instead, across the US and the UK, anti-immigration whites are only marginally more likely to move to homogeneous neighbourhoods than pro-immigration whites. This suggests that praise for diversity among white liberals is performative signaling, rather than an honestly held belief. Another example, not included Bronski’s essay, is the Woke slogan “trans women are women”. Despite mouthing the slogan, leftists do not in fact behave as if trans women are women; they are not deceived about the differences between trans and biological women. Such a slogan cannot but be a signal of ideological conformity, seeing as it so frequently and obviously conflicts with objective reality. That being the case, the following Theodore Dalrymple quote is appropriate:

“In my studies of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A variety of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

So while Wokism is an elite-sponsored control mechanism, it is not really intended as deception¹, and to use it as an example disproving deception is fallacious. If he wants to specifically argue that the phenomenon of Wokism is mostly a result of signaling rather than authentic belief that is one thing, but it is disingenuous to either redefine deception or else imply that Wokism is the only kind of deception that exists. Bronski also does not address the possibility of self-deception at all, or other psychological phenomena like irrational emotional attachment to beliefs.

Regardless, the real meat of the argument is a mathematical model that Bronski proposes to disprove deception, so let’s look at that:

The model starts by representing an information receiver as a rational Bayesian utility maximizer (RBUM) that takes whatever action would maximize the expected value of his utility given his beliefs about the state of the world. It models deception as a signal from an information sender about the state of the world intended to modify the receiver’s beliefs and induce him to change the action he takes. The question is, how the receiver will interpret the deceptive signal? “By definition, he does so in a way which maximizes his utility.” Therefore he will only update his beliefs about the world if the update would improve his utility. Since deception would result in his utility being lowered, he will reject deceptive updates. Bronski concludes “rational Bayesian utility maximizers will not be deceived in the long run, because they would revert updates that failed to give their promised utility returns.”

This last sentence is a tacit admission that deception is real, since even under this model RBUMs will not be deceived in the long run. This means that there will be a period of time during which the RBUM will experience a loss in utility due to updating on a deceptive signal. The model provides no information about how long ‘the long run’ is, nor does it explain how a RBUM will know which change to revert once they discover that their utility is reduced. Basically the model is saying, in complex mathematical terms, that if someone realizes they are being harmed by believing a lie they will stop believing it. This necessarily requires that they were harmed by the lie in the first place, which means deception works. The only way deception wouldn’t work is if the RBUM could always accurately assess the future utility cost of updating their world model before making the update, which in the real world would require complete knowledge and infinite computational resources, i.e. omniscience.

Bronski bases his ‘no deception’ theory on a mathematical analysis of Bayesian persuasion and a lab study that tests the model empirically. Crucially, the Bayesian persuasion model relies on a symmetric information environment – both the sender and receiver of a signal have access to the exact same information. When Bayesian persuasion is tested in the lab, the model accurately predicts the receiver’s behaviour 91% of the time, which is good, but it shows that even under controlled laboratory conditions with identical information 9% of people still do not behave so as to maximize their utility. Real world scenarios do not involve senders and receivers with symmetric information, and indeed asymmetric information is a requirement for deception – people can be deceived only when they lack information (or information processing ability). Bronski claims that he has extended the model to the non-symmetric case but offers no mathematical proof of this claim.

People are, of course, not rational Bayesian utility maximizers, though I do agree they are roughly Bayesian. People don’t actually maximize utility, except when maximizing utility is tautologically defined as the result of whatever actions the person decides to take. Utility is subjective, and there is no cardinal operational measurement of it. Even when we substitute something we do have a cardinal operational measurement for, biological fitness (number of gene copies passed on), we still find that people are not fitness maximizers, otherwise all men should be donating to sperm banks. People have genetically-based life history strategies, and evolution selects for individuals who have adaptive strategies given the current ecology, but no one is actually trying to maximize their fitness. A rational Bayesian utility maximizer is analogous to spherical cows in a vacuum but for economists (or exousiologists, as the case may be).

Any model of human behaviour that neglects psychology is bound to be inaccurate. Consider the case of a lost wallet. A utility maximizer would be likely to keep the money in the wallet, especially if it was a large amount of money, since that would maximize their utility. This would be contradicted by the data: a large (n = 17,000) study found that people are in fact more likely to report a wallet missing when it contains money, monotonically increasing for the amount of money it contains (three data points from $0 to $94.15 tested). This is in direct contradiction to the empirically measured predictions of both laypeople and economists. By controlling for other variables, the researchers determined that this behaviour was due to the psychological cost of being a self-perceived thief. By neglecting to model the difficult to measure psychological cost of having to update one’s self-concept in a negative way, the predictive validity of the economic model was undermined.

I claim there is also a psychological impetus towards a ‘no deception’ model in Bronski’s case. Bronski has repeatedly stated that he does not believe that there are, barring a few mainstream-admitted examples like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, any hoaxes that could influence the public. He calls such a belief in hoaxes degenerate – as in entropic or disorganized – and ‘schizo’. Certainly belief in hoaxes is not a high status, sexy position, and it incurs scorn from others (a position incurring scorn does not mean it is wrong, cf. Semmelweis). If Bronski wishes to develop an attractive research paradigm, taking the ‘no deception’ position is advantageous in multiple ways: it permits a sexy² and tractable mathematical model, it summarily invalidates potential positions that may draw derision towards the program, and it contests a dominant paradigm in the cultural space in which he is operating (the ‘Wokism as mind virus’ model among the right). Bronski is also twice vaccinated for COVID, at material harm to himself, and defends that decision to this day. As he is someone who emphasizes personal agency and the ability to think for himself, it would incur a large psychological cost to update his beliefs on this matter (see also the Scott Adams vaccine saga). Thus, a priori, deception cannot be real.

Here I present a competing mathematical model of deception, also using a Bayesian model:

Deception proceeds in two phases: in phase 1 a deceptive signal updates an individual’s beliefs, and in phase 2 the update is reversed due to disconfirmatory information. In phase 1 a deceptive signal is sent which may update the posterior of the receiver. The signal may be deceptive because it includes data outside the real range of the distribution (fabrication) or because it leaves out probability mass from the distribution (omission). The magnitude of the update to the posterior is determined by epistemic vigilance, which is a function of both the sender and the content. Certain senders are trusted more than others, and a sender may only be trusted on some content and not others.

Epistemic vigilance scales the update to the posterior. When it is 0 the sender is completely trusted, and when it is 1 the sender is completely distrusted and no update is made.

Where P(A) is the prior. In phase 2, disconfirmatory information D is generated by a Poisson process D ~ Poisson(λ) where λ represents the ease of access to disconfirmation. Disconfirmations are assumed to be generated by direct observation not mediated by a sender, and so are not subject to epistemic vigilance. Any instance of disconfirmation may come with an attendant utility cost u(D) ≤ 0. It is not likely a priori that humans are perfect Bayesian updaters. They may overupdate on some highly salient observations. To model this, we propose that updates are made based on a perfect Bayesian base rate and a salience factor based on utility costs. The size of an update given some observation is greater when the attendant utility cost is greater. This can be modeled by repeatedly updating on the same observation, proportional to the magnitude of the utility cost.

Deception is not possible when λ is large, especially if E[u(D)] ≪ 0.

Furthermore, an individual’s priors can be conceptualized as a hierarchical Bayesian model where a learning rate parameter determines how sensitive higher order priors are to changes in changes in lower order priors. Gell-Mann amnesia is a special case where the learning rate parameter is set too low on the hierarchical model underlying the epistemic vigilance function. Delusional epistemic hypervigilance results when this same learning rate is set too high. The specific design of this model is left as an exercise for the reader.

Based on this model, the most effective deceptions would be those where disconfirmations are difficult to access, especially if there is a high utilty cost when they do occur. Deceptions that have the effect of reducing the odds that an individual will seek disconfirmation are also likely to be effective, e.g. warning that a particular situation is dangerous when it isn’t. Deceived individuals are less likely to seek disconfirmation when they believe that there is risk in doing so. This can reduce the ability to capitalize on available opportunities.

Although I hold that the theory behind this model more closely matches reality than does Bronski’s, in the real world none of these functions are actually operationally measurable and computable (the same applies to all of Bronski’s math). Therefore I present this model not as a complete and accurate model of deception, but as a starting point to begin thinking about the concept. We may hope that in the future there will be ways of empirically estimating these quantities like there is for fixation index (F_ST), but there is much work to be done before that is possible. Despite the difficulties with physical measurement, a simulation model incorporating these concepts could be designed, which could empirically determine under what circumstances deception can reduce an agent’s utility.

In the real world, case studies can be used to assess the explanatory power of the model. The case of the pharmaceutical Vioxx serves as one example. Vioxx was marketed by Merck to treat arthritis and other chronic or acute pain conditions. It was on the market for 5 years, being prescribed to over 80 million people worldwide, and generating up to $2.5 billion per year in revenue. In 2004 it was withdrawn from the market, after it was revealed that Merck had systematically misrepresented the safety data of the drug, including by outright removing evidence of adverse events from clinical trial data. FDA testimony before the Senate Finance Committee revealed that Vioxx had been responsible for up to 55,000 premature deaths from cardiovascular disease, and Merck subsequently paid $4.85 billion in a class action settlement (note that Vioxx is still net profitable even with the settlement).

A ‘no deception’ signaling model model with rational Bayesian utility maximizers might attempt to explain this by saying that patients taking Vioxx were signaling to their doctors that they were good and obedient patients, as this was maximizing their utility. Under my model this would be explained as deception, followed by a very delayed disconfirmatory signal with huge utility cost like death or a heart attack. In the event that the patient is able to identify Vioxx as the cause of the cardiovascular event, they face the question of how far to backpropagate the signal up their world model. Case 0 (no update): the drug is still worth taking, make no changes; case 1: Vioxx is a bad drug, stop taking it; case 2: Vioxx and all drugs like it are dangerous; case 3: all pharmaceuticals are dangerous, never take any ever again. It is not possible to actually calculate the expected utility returns of any of these updates, and so people will update based on their idiosyncratic psychology.

There is actual evidence of this kind of backpropagation of error in the case of the COVID vaccines. If a person is injured by a COVID vaccine, either mildly or severely, they can make the following updates. Case 0 (no update): the illness I feel is a sign that the vaccines are working, I will keep taking them; case 1: I feel ill, I will no longer take the vaccines (Bronski’s case); case 2: I will never take any vaccines ever again. There are numerous self-reported examples of each of these cases occurring, and they are also sometimes accompanied by evidence of an update to the epistemic vigilance function with respect to Pfizer or pharmaceutical companies in general.

Evidently there is already plenty of naturalistic data which supports this model (fraud involves deception and people suffer losses from fraud all the time), but we can propose experiments to test this. In keeping with the previous two examples, have a pharmaceutical company create two new drugs to treat condition X, one of which works, and one of which simply harms the patient for zero benefit. Market both drugs identically as useful breakthroughs in the treatment of condition X. Have doctors randomly prescribe one drug or the other to patients who present with that condition. If patients reject the harmful drug (before suffering its effects) but accept the helpful drug, we can consider deception falsified. Of course this study would never make it past an ethics review board, and yet I feel like this basic premise has been tried before under less formalized conditions…

More seriously, we could propose a study investigating how people react to falsified data on risk. Have subjects attend a psychological study on the third floor of a building that can be accessed either through an elevator or a staircase. Have the subjects read either a control article or an article that exaggerates the risks of taking an elevator, then observe whether people who previously used the elevator to attend the study choose to take the stairs on the way down. Proper experimental design should be used to ensure that subjects are not aware that the goal of the study is to assess elevator usage, to prevent demand characteristics and experimenter effects. Experimental conditions may include having the article be ostensibly written by an elevator expert or by a layperson, to estimate the effects of epistemic vigilance. Any observed effect would suggest that deceptive information can affect the rate at which people exploit opportunities in their environment. I predict that there would be a very small but real effect, especially among subjects high in neuroticism. If this result was found then it would suggest that the rate at which people suffer utility costs due to deception is moderated by psychological variables. As far as I know, experiments assessing the utility costs of deception in a controlled environment are yet to be performed.

Footnotes:

¹ While I agree that Woke beliefs are in large part signaling, I do not agree they are entirely signaling. Transsexuals who later decide to detransition and report feeling tricked or manipulated into their transition are a good example. Surgically mutilating your genitals is just about the most costly signal imaginable, and it would be absurd to suggest that people do it to maximize their utility. When they decide to detransition they are mostly ignored, like many other victims of the medical system, and would hence lose any utility they gained from their signaling. If it is to be argued that such people are simply mentally ill, due to e.g. high mutational load (Dutton & Woodley’s spiteful mutant hypothesis) then it would still suggest that certain genotypes or psychological phenotypes are susceptible to losing utility through deception.

² I wrote this and then heard Bronski say this (punctuation not included in transcript):
“Imagine we get the data we’re expecting and then like in the final product it’ll just be like yeah people maximize this utility function and that’s why ideas aren’t real and deception isn’t real and there’s no mind viruses and power is money right and it’s like we just present the data and present the equations and it’s like the physics of power basically that would be very sexy that’s what we’re trying to build”
(emphasis mine, source).

Conspiracy Survey Discussion & My Answers

After doing a formal write-up of the results of the survey, I would like to make some informal remarks. Firstly I would like to thank everyone who filled out the survey. I could not have done this without your help. Secondly I’d like to discuss some thing that would not fit into a formal journal article. This will consist of 1. my personal answers to the survey questions; 2. my thoughts on the process of writing the survey, getting responses, and finally writing the data analysis and report; and 3. a recap of the study findings in layman’s terms, with informal commentary.

I will start by sharing my answers to the survey (circa 9 months ago, not that much has changed). If you don’t care about what I think and just want to see a summary of the final report, you can skip to the end. I’m not going to try to rigorously justify all my opinions, but I may give a short explanation and a link or two. Note that linking to a source does not imply 100% endorsement of the content, just that I found it useful in some way. I consider many of the beliefs assessed by the questions to be misdirection narratives: that’s just my opinion, but I think it’s the correct opinion (obviously). Before we get started, here is the tSNE embedding with my particular response labeled:

As you can see, I am firmly in the Fakery camp, far away from the Flat Earth camp. I will not be reproducing any other graphs or charts here, so I encourage you to look at them in the full report.

Attitudes:

1. International charity organizations like Amnesty International and the Red Cross have an overall positive impact on the world.

Somewhat disagree – Mostly they are fronts for the elites, but the Red Cross does also provide disaster relief, so its not 100% bad.

2. Closely following doctors’ recommendations is the best way to stay healthy and overcome disease.

Strongly disagree – Pharmaceuticals/allopathic medicine ≠ health

3. People are foolish to believe what they are told by government officials.

Strongly agree

4. When subject-matter experts make appearances on television, they are usually trustworthy.

Strongly disagree

5. The mainstream media does its best to keep the public informed about the most important issues of the day.

Strongly disagree

6. Scientists put the search for objective truth above other considerations like politics or finding results favourable to those funding the research.

Strongly disagree

7. There is such a thing as a ruling class in Western democratic nations.

Strongly agree

8. People who dispute the popular scientific consensus are misguided.

Strongly disagree – They may be misguided but anyone who does not dispute the scientific consensus in any way is certainly misguided.

9. People in positions of power got there because of their integrity and job-relevant skills.

Strongly disagree

10. In Western nations, excluding the US, the court systems can be trusted to provide justice for all persons, regardless of personal wealth or connections.

Strongly disagree – The court system is used as a tool for upholding the status quo. Rule of law as an ideal is very important but that’s not the system we have.

11. In the West, government institutions act in ways that benefit society overall.

Strongly disagree

12. The federal government puts tax dollars to good use.

Strongly disagree

13. What is seen on mainstream television programming is a good representation of the attitudes and beliefs of most of the population.

Strongly disagree – The mainstream media is used to manipulate the Overton window for the benefit of the elites. Insofar as what is seen on TV actually does represent the attitudes of the population it is because the population has accepted the propaganda.

14. It is in the best interests of developing countries to accept the help offered to them by Western governments and institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Strongly disagree – See for instance Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins.

15. In Western nations, on balance, the actions of those with the most wealth and power benefit the middle and working classes.

Strongly disagree

My score on the attitudes scale was 3.93/4.

Beliefs:

1. Vegan and plant-based diets are being deliberately promoted by world governments despite their harmful effects.

Definitely true – See this interview for in depth background

2. All US presidents have been closely related to one another.

Definitely true – See for instance here. The elites are highly inbred due to consanguineous marriage. Miles has done extensive work on this.

3. The US government often assassinates whistleblowers and covers it up.

Probably false – Mostly they fake assassinate controlled whistleblowers. I wouldn’t bet this pattern generalizes outside the West certain Asian countries like Japan, though.

4. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is a bioweapon.

Probably false – Probable controlled opposition narrative.

5. Elections in Western democracies are managed to ensure a particular outcome, or are outright rigged.

Definitely true

6. The theory of anthropogenic global warming was invented in order to control people.

Definitely true – See James Corbett’s documentary Why Big Oil Conquered the World.

7. The ostensible leaders of large religious groups, like the Pope or Dalai Lama, don’t really believe what they say.

Definitely true – The history of the papacy under the Medicis and Borgias should put paid to that idea. I don’t think the Dalai Lama is any different in this regard.

8. Many members of the global elite are not in fact humans, but another kind of being (e.g. aliens, reptilians, or Nephilim) in human form.

Definitely false – Controlled opposition narrative

9. Shakespeare personally wrote all the works commonly attributed to him.

Definitely false – See Miles’ work

10. Many historical figures have faked their deaths.

Definitely true – See Miles’ oeuvre.

11. The COVID pandemic was planned in advance.

Definitely true – See Lockstep document, this paper, etc.

12. Eating GMO foods is hazardous to one’s health.

Definitely true – GMO can be harmful for a variety of reasons. If it is engineered to be pest resistant it may do that by synthesizing a toxic protein. If it is engineered to be pesticide resistant it will be drenched in pesticides while growing. GMO “terminator seeds” that are only good for one growing season are evil and subjugate farmers to the agribusiness cartel. If GMO crops/animals are not properly contained they can leak genetic material into the greater ecosystem and disrupt it. This is not an exhaustive list. I don’t believe GMO is bad a priori but it is best to avoid it and especially the people pushing it.

13. The government publicizes fake stories of dissidents being punished in order to frighten people into submission.

Definitely true

14. The Earth is much younger than 4.54 billion years old.

Definitely false – I haven’t seen any theories contesting this that don’t veer off into either Flat Earthism or creationism. I am open to the idea that the age is wrong, seeing as it relies on indirect evidence and uncertain assumptions, but I have not seen any credible competing theories. I would be very surprised if it’s off by any more than an order of magnitude.

15. The Earth is not a globe.

Definitely false – Controlled opposition discredit-by-association narrative.

16. DNA is not real, or is not responsible for heredity.

Definitely false – This is incoherent unless you think literally all of biochemistry has somehow been faked.

17. Humans did not build the pyramids.

Definitely false – I think Joseph Davidovits’ theory that the pyramids are made of geopolymer concrete is probably mostly correct.

18. Most famous people are closely related to one another.

Definitely true – See Miles’ oeuvre or Famous Kin.

19. China, Russia, and America are controlled by the same parties behind the scenes.

Definitely true – The global interrelated ruling families have consolidated power over thousands of years; WWII solidified that control.

20. Zionist organizations wield a disproportionate amount of power, compared to other special interest groups.

Definitely true – see AIPAC, ADL, etc.

21. The global elites wish to reduce the world population to 500 million people.

Probably false – They want to practice population control an eugenics/selective breeding of people, but I don’t think they want to collapse the population, otherwise they wouldn’t be fueling a population explosion in Africa. I think the Georgia Guidestones are a pop-conspiracy misdirection narrative.

22. No planes flew into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Definitely true – The footage was faked, and the controlled demolitions did not require any planes.

23. Fake trials are filmed and broadcast to propagandize the public.

Definitely true – See Scopes Monkey Trial, OJ Simpson, etc.

24. Organized religion is primarily a tool for controlling the population.

Definitely true

25. The world is controlled by secret societies like the Illuminati or Skull and Bones.

Probably false – as I discuss elsewhere, secret societies are a tool of the ruling class, not the top player.

26. Bacteria are a consequence of disease, rather than the cause of it.

Definitely false

27. Human activity has little to no effect on the global temperature over time.

Definitely true – See Miles Mathis’ charge field theory and specifically how it applies to the temperature of the Earth.

28. The government is constantly collecting surveillance data on its citizens through phone data and internet usage.

Definitely true – And admitted.

29. Top US officials in government and the military helped plan the September 11 attacks, or otherwise knew about them and did nothing to stop them.

Definitely true

30. Some historical military battles only happened on paper.

Definitely true – See the Battle of Midway, Battle of Aegospotami, Battle of Prokhorovka, and many others.

31. Public education is meant to produce obedient workers, rather than informed and empowered citizens.

Definitely true – See An Empirical Introduction to Youth by Joseph Bronski for the history of public education in America.

32. The government is engaged in atmospheric spraying of aerosolized particles (chemtrails).

Definitely true – Much of the geoengineering narrative is probably misdirection but I do believe something is being sprayed. Various experiments in atmospheric spraying have been admitted to.

33. Man did not evolve from apes.

Definitely false – I think Eugene McCarthy’s Stabilization Theory has a decent chance of being correct.

34. Often both sides of a military conflict are funded by the same parties.

Definitely true

35. Miscegenation is being deliberately promoted by Western elites.

Definitely true – Burgers?

36. New and advanced technology which would harm current industry is being suppressed.

Probably true – Science that is harmful to current agendas is clearly being suppressed, and with new science comes new technology. No specific examples to list though.

37. The primary purpose of the media is to manipulate the public for the benefit of the elites.

Definitely true

38. Jesus was a real historical person.

Neutral or unsure – Haven’t read into it. I lean towards no.

39. Global elites seek to create a global digital currency.

Definitely true

40. We are living in a simulation.

Definitely false – Controlled opposition narrative peddled by fake physicists and Elon Musk.

41. The government perpetrates psychological warfare campaigns on its own citizens.

Definitely true – And admitted.

42. Man-made satellites orbiting the Earth do not exist.

Definitely false

43. Dinosaurs like tyrannosaurus. stegosaurus, or triceratops never existed.

Probably true – I think we have fragmentary collections of ancient bones that can’t be attributed to any known creature and have constructed a Hollywood-sci fi edifice around them. I think much of paleontology is wild conjecturing in the absence of solid data. Unfortunately I haven’t seen anyone tackle this issue from a rigorous scientific perspective, and I’m not a creationist. I talk about this issue briefly here.

44. The richest people on Earth are left off Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people.

Definitely true – The richest people on Earth are part of families like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds and have trillions of dollars in dynastic wealth in different kinds of holdings.

45. High levels of immigration into Western countries is meant to weaken those countries.

Definitely true

46. The government stages false flags in order to start military conflicts.

Definitely true – And admitted in a few cases.

47. Serial killers do not exist in real life, and any stories about them only happened on paper.

Definitely true – Sociopaths exist, sexually deranged serial killers who jump out of the bushes and abduct women to eat them do not. See Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Zodiac, etc.

48. Wars do not happen for the reasons given to the general public.

Definitely true

49. Governments possess high tech mind control technology.

Probably false – Depends on how you interpreted the question. If you include the media then it’s definitely true. If you take it to mean controlling people by beaming microwaves into their brains then definitely false. Fields like magnetogenetics are moving in that direction though. See this study which uses transcranial magnetic stimulation to modulate group prejudice and religious belief. This kind of research falls under the purview of cognitive warfare.

50. Vaccines are not responsible for the historical decline in mortality from diseases like measles and polio.

Definitely true – Mortality rates from infectious disease were falling long before vaccines became available, and diseases like scarlet fever for which there is no vaccine saw comparable declines in mortality.

51. Carbon dioxide is not a real threat to the environment.

Definitely true – It’s what plants crave! See Denis Rancourt’s paper on radiation physics.

52. The Covid vaccine contains ingredients not disclosed to the public.

Probably false – Graphene, or nanobots, or snake venom, or whatever, I think is all a crock of shit. Some of the vials probably only had saline, and I don’t doubt there was poor quality control and hence wide variability in what actually made it into the vaccines. Recent research has found plasmids coding for the spike protein contaminating the vaccines.

53. Dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans.

Definitely false – Not a young earth creationist.

54. Many western elites are involved in extensive child sex trafficking and pedophilia.

Probably false – Some amount of sex trafficking and related blackmail probably does happen, but I think the Epstein narrative is misdirection (and he faked his death).

55. Childhood vaccination is the primary factor behind the rise in autism rates.

Probably false – Jim West believes it’s fetal ultrasound. The rise in autism is surely caused by some kind of toxic exposure, though. I should have phrased this question as “Childhood vaccination is an important contributing factor in the rise of autism rates” and I would have said definitely true.

56. Nazi Germany did not systematically exterminate Jews during World War II.

Definitely true – Jews in concentration camps died of starvation and disease, mostly in the latter part of the war.

57. The government hires people to spread pro-government propaganda on internet forums.

Definitely true

58. 5G technology is a significant health risk to the population.

Probably true – See The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Firstenberg (summary here).

59. JFK was assassinated, but there was more than a single shooter.

Definitely false – Assassination was faked.

60. There is no such thing as pathogenic viruses.

Definitely false – I don’t buy terrain theory as a paradigm shift that can replace virology. See A Midwestern Doctor’s take on terrain theory, or my own (oppositional) take on vaccines and the discussion in the comments.

61. Crisis actors are involved in faking terrorist attacks or shootings that are promoted as real events by the media.

Definitely true – see Sandy Hook, Boston Bombing, etc.

62. IQ tests are not a valid measurement of intelligence.

Definitely false – They are the best substantiated tool in psychometrics, and are broadly valid, with the caveats that they have of limited accuracy above ~140 IQ, you can study the kinds of questions they ask to inflate your score, etc.

63. Economic downturns and depressions are deliberately engineered by central banks.

Definitely true – See Great Depression, Greek austerity crisis, etc.

64. The Earth does not orbit the sun.

Definitely false – And I have personally refuted one such theory here.

65. Hollywood elites harvest adrenochrome from children and consume it as a drug.

Definitely false – Controlled opposition narrative. One of the more ridiculous ones.

66. Middle Eastern terrorist groups are financed and armed by Western intelligence agencies.

Definitely true

67. JFK faked his death.

Definitely true – See Miles.

68. The SARS-CoV-2 virus does not exist.

Neutral or unsure – Recently I’ve been more convinced by J.J. Couey’s position that it could only exist as an infectious clone (recombinant virus) with no pandemic potential, rather than a zoonotic virus or virus created by serial passage and gain of function. Irrespective of the existence of any putative virus there was no pandemic caused by a particularly virulent pathogen that went around the world: see Denis Rancourt’s work on all-cause mortality.

69. Nuclear bombs do not and have never existed.

Definitely true – see Miles, or Death Object, or Hiroshima Revisited

70. Many well known figures who discuss conspiracies or criticize the government are actually working for the government themselves.

Definitely true – Alex Jones is an obvious example.

71. Many members of the US ruling class worship Satan and participate in Satanic rituals.

Probably false – I don’t deny the spirit cooking or the picture of Marina Abramovic and Jacob Rothschild in front of a painting of Lucifer, but I think the overt Satanism is misdirection; an act. I agree with Miles’ thesis on this point that he presents in his paper on Kabbalah and the occult.

72. Water is fluoridated for reasons that have nothing to do with dental health.

Definitely true – See The Fluoride Deception.

73. Jews are vastly over-represented in positions of power and influence around the world.

Definitely true

74. Most famous people have Jewish ancestry.

Definitely true – See Miles’ oeuvre.

75. Much fewer than 6 million Jews died during the Holocaust.

Definitely true – Based on their own numbers Hitler would have needed to kill every single Jew in Western and Central Europe along with Poland and Romania to kill 6 million. World almanacs from the time period do not substantiate a large drop in the Jewish population. The specific ‘6 million’ figure was also often used in allegations of Jewish persecution prior to WWII, for instance the June 6, 1915 edition of the New York Sun. This document lists 200 cases from 1900-1945.

76. HIV does not cause AIDS.

Definitely true – See Inventing the AIDS Virus by Peter Duesberg or Virus Mania by Torsten Engelbrecht, Claus Köhnlein and Samantha Bailey

77. Global elites are in contact with intelligent, non-human species.

Definitely false – Controlled opposition narrative. See for instance here (although I don’t trust this guy either).

78. Certain public personalities are really simulated people created by CGI and artificial intelligence.

Definitely false – Someone tried to argue that Edward Snowden wasn’t a real person once and I found it very unconvincing. This kind of thing may become possible in several years with generative AI models.

79. There are large differences in personality, intelligence, and behaviour between different races.

Definitely true – See all research into human biodiversity. Evolution does not stop above the neck. I should have phrased this question as “There are important differences in intelligence, personality, and behaviour between different races”

80. Transsexuality and homosexuality are being deliberately promoted by Western governments.

Definitely true – This should be obvious to anyone paying attention.

81. Humans have never landed on the moon.

Definitely true – See American Moon by Massimo Mazzucco and Miles’ response to it.

82. Hitler died at the end of World War II.

Definitely false – Faked his death and probably went to South America

83. Most billionaires worldwide are Jews.

Definitely true – Even mainstream Jewish publications admit that 30% of the Forbes 100 richest people are American Jews. This obviously does not include Jews hiding their Jewish ancestry, which would almost certainly bring the number far above 50%.

84. It is known that aliens exist and this information is being hidden from the public.

Definitely false

85. Black holes, as commonly portrayed in pop-science media, do not exist.

Definitely true – see Stephen Crothers or Miles Mathis

My score on the beliefs scale was 2.84/4. (The highest score on the beliefs scale was 3.58)

Process of Writing the Survey and Report

You may notice that I am pretty confident in my answers – most of them are “Definitely” one way or the other. That’s because I wrote the questions, and I have had the time to give them each a fair bit of thought. If I remain unsure about any of them it’s because I don’t think there is enough data to decide, or it would be too time consuming at the moment to do the original research I feel necessary to answer the question. All the same I think the questions represent a good overview of conspiracist thought as it exists today. There are some questions that I was not able to include in the survey, either because they were cut for length or because I thought of them after the survey had already been made. I list them below with what my answer would be, along with where I think they would load on the survey factors:

The CIA was or is involved in dosing civilians with drugs like LSD without their knowledge or consent.

Definitely true – See MK Ultra. Probably loads on Generic Conspiracy.

Intelligence agencies use brainwashing or mind control techniques to turn people into assassins.

Probably false – I think Project Monarch is either misdirection or a cover for something less sexy than Manchurian candidates. Probably loads on Aliens & Satanism.

There was once a nation called Tartaria that has been erased from history.

Definitely false – Controlled opposition narrative. See Miles’ paper. Probably loads on Aliens or Flat Earth.

The historical chronology has been altered; it is not really the year 2022.

Definitely false – See Miles’ response to Fomenko. I was once intrigued by this idea for a week or two. Probably loads on Aliens or Flat Earth.

There used to be a worldwide civilization that was destroyed in a calamity thousands of years ago.

Unsure – History has definitely been falsified but there is too much garbage out there for me to bother sifting through. Probably loads on Aliens.

Pornography is promoted as a means of rendering men passive.

Definitely true – Probably loads on generic or Jewish conspiracy.

The identity politics movement was created in order to derail the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Definitely true – See this infographic. Probably loads on generic conspiracy.

White Supremacy is not a real threat to America.

Definitely true – We are now at the point where the ADL is calling “It’s Okay To Be White” a hate symbol. Plus all the promoted white supremacists are feds. Probably loads on Jewish conspiracy.

Some celebrities are really transsexuals that pass as the opposite sex.

Probably false – This may be true in very rare cases, although there aren’t any I would endorse, and I think “transvestigations” in general is ridiculous and adds nothing to our understanding of conspiracy theory. Not sure where this loads.

Many famous womanizers of history were really homosexuals.

Probably true – Although I’m not convinced they were all necessarily exclusively homosexual. See Miles’ paper on Henry VIII for the last two points. Probably loads on fakery.

Gematria (assigning numerical values to words or phrases) can be used to search for hidden messages in text like books or news articles.

Probably false – Again I won’t rule out that this is true in some cases but I think in general gematria is just a practice in confirmation bias. There are so many different ways to do it you can just choose whatever one gives you the result that you want. I have never seen an analysis using gematria I that was remotely reliable. Probably loads on aliens.

Numerological markers with secret meetings are often deliberately inserted into documents like news articles.

Definitely true – Mostly the numbers 18 and 33. Inserting numerology is also much easier than inserting gematria, although I still wouldn’t take it as proof of anything – moreso a clue that something may warrant a closer look. Not sure where this loads.

Matter is not composed of atoms.

Definitely false – Is there even a real competing theory here? Probably loads on flat Earth.

Events are inserted into media like films and music to prepare the public for those events to occur in real life (i.e. predictive programming).

Definitely true – But it’s more about seeding concepts into the public consciousness than forewarning about very specific events. This is the point of shows like Altered Carbon, or of futurist writers like Neal Stephenson (who was chief futurist for an augmented reality company). This also goes back to past writers like H.G. Wells (who wrote The New World Order and The World Set Free with nuclear weapons) and Aldous Huxley. At the same time, the predictive programming in The Simpsons is amusing (if subject to confirmation bias). Probably loads on generic or aliens.

I enjoyed writing the questions; actually making the survey was kind of a pain. I considered creating a web page and self-hosting it to collect the data, but I figured this problem had been solved before and it didn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel. I didn’t want to use Google Forms because a. I didn’t want Google to have the data, and b. I figured other truthers would feel similarly and not want to fill it out. I eventually decided to use Psytoolkit, which was designed specifically for creating psychological instruments. It had some annoying faults, like not being able to edit the survey formatting after making it live, but oh well. Speaking of, there were a couple problems with the survey – like the fact that the Likert scale reverses after the first set of questions – that were the unfortunate product of me trying this for the first time. Despite this, I think the survey itself more or less worked.

I was inspired to conduct the survey after I learned about Brotherton et al.’s 2013 work in creating a Generic Conspiracists Belief Scale. I took the 15 question test and got 3.4/5, despite the fact that I would say I am deeper down the conspiracy rabbit hole than 99.9% of the population. But since I think that aliens are a hoax I get 1/5 on that factor. That made me want to create my own scale fixing some of the issues I noticed in the GCBS, and so I wrote my own scale with the above questions. I later designed the analysis using Brotherton et al.’s paper as a guide for the kind of metrics I should include.

I started trying to collect data by posting on Reddit and communities.win, specifically the conspiracy-inclined subcommunities. Unfortunately – understandably – truthers don’t tend to like people collecting any kind of information about them, and I got a lot of responses like this: “It is my belief that surveys are just honeypots made to harm us.” I specifically didn’t collect the IP addresses of respondents, even though that would have made it easier to filter out multiple responses, for this reason. I ended up posting the survey on a wide variety of platforms over a couple months in order to get enough responses. I also posted it on some forums where I participate where it was well received (thankfully, since I was somewhat apprehensive about doing so). Ultimately I started writing the report at 191 respondents because I was tired of trying to get any more, despite the fact that you want 3-10 times more respondents than questions for a factor analysis.

Writing the data took a long time, since I had to learn all the frequentist statistics relevant to the study. I had a good background in Bayesian statistics from university but no formal training in scientific statistics (e.g. ANOVAs, chi-squared tests, cronbach’s alpha, etc.) Factor analysis as a technique is also full of ad hoc decisions based on your particular theoretical model and your data, so it took some time to figure out the best approach. It really feels like more of an art than a science; people have written decision guides advising you on how to perform your factor analysis. I used an oblique rotation because I expected the extracted factors to be correlated, and I chose oblimin over promax because it produced more coherent factors with max factor loadings < 1. I was tempted to drop the climate change factor because it seemed to be a collection of leftover questions with no theoretical basis but that felt dishonest so I left it in.

The analysis that took the longest was the partial ordering of the two streams of conspiracist ideation. I spent a couple days seeing if there was any existing test to demonstrate that for two random variables A and B, B is greater than or equal to A. I considered about 10 different techniques, asked Stack Overflow and ChatGPT, but couldn’t find any non-symmetric metrics I was looking for. If I knew more information theory I probably could have found something, but I ended up inventing my own. It feels a little handwavey but I think it reflects the data that I collected.

Once I figured out all the graphs I needed writing the paper wasn’t too bad. I based the layout of the paper on the Brotherton et al. 2013 Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Survey paper. Every paper on conspiracy theories starts by talking about how conspiracy theories are baseless and dangerous, but I was careful to phrase everything in a neutral manner, neither saying that conspiracy theories are true nor false. Obviously I think many conspiracy theories are correct so neutrality was my compromise between my position and the standard position in academic psychology. Getting the paper typeset correctly was the most annoying part, and I ended up just writing it in Libre Office, exporting it to HTML, fixing the layout of the figures, pasting in the raw HTML of the factor loading tables, and then using Chrome to print it to PDF.

Summary of Survey Results

The intention of the survey was twofold: to test whether trust in institutions and authority figures correlated with belief in conspiracies, and to determine what kinds of conspiracist beliefs cluster together. My hypothesis going in was that trust in authority would strongly correlate (negatively) with belief in conspiracies, and that there would be several clusters of conspiracist belief, a religious cluster (believes the elites are satanic, denies evolution, etc.), a “controlled opposition narratives” cluster (believes in adrenochrome harvesting and reptilians, etc.), a flat Earth cluster (rejects all conclusions of mainstream science), a fakery cluster (believes serial killers, nuclear bombs, the moon landing, etc. were all fake), and a “right wing” cluster (believes Jews run the world, race realism, IQ research, etc.) The results aligned relatively closely with my hypotheses.

The correlation between the questions assessing attitudes towards elites and beliefs about conspiracies correlated at 0.8, which means 64% of the variation in belief in conspiracies can be attributed to how much you trust the elites. I wanted to investigate this because mainstream research on conspiracies tries to come up with asinine reasons why people believe conspiracy theories and studiously avoids the fact that people mostly believe conspiracy theories because they recognize that the ruling elites are duplicitous liars and don’t believe them or their rubberstamped narratives. Of course most academics are scholar-bureaucrats working within the confines of propaganda narratives on behalf of the elite so they wouldn’t be in a hurry to point that out.

Factor analysis was used to extract the clusters of beliefs from the survey results. Factor analysis works under the assumption that given a set of questions, the responses to certain subsets of questions will all be correlated. The correlated groups of questions can then be assumed to arise from the same latent (not directly measurable) variable. For instance, if a set of questions like “I often feel sad” and “I have high levels of anxiety” and “I am easily stressed” all correlate together when answered by many people, then the responses can be theorized to arise from a latent “neuroticism” factor. This is how personality is measured in psychology.

Based on statistical analysis of the data set, it was broken into six factors. Four of the factors (Aliens & Satanism, Flat Earth, Fakery, and Jewish Conspiracies) mapped very closely onto the factors I had hypothesized. The other two factors were the Generic Conspiracies factor and the Climate Change factor. Furthermore it was shown that there were two paths of conspiracy belief you could go down, starting with belief in generic conspiracies and conspiracies relating to climate change. The first was the aliens and satanism path, and the second was the Jewish conspiracy -> Fakery -> Flat Earth path. This wasn’t something I was necessarily looking for or expecting to find, but I noticed it after looking at the 2D embeddings and then the factor scatter plots. It also maps onto the stages I went through in waking up: I learned about the generic and Jewish conspiracy factors first, and then the fakery factor later, and was never convinced by or interested in the aliens or flat Earth factors.

The factors produced by a factor analysis are ordered by the amount of variance they explain in the data set. So, the first factor explains the most variance, and the last factor explains the least variance. The first factor extracted was the generic conspiracy factor, which explained a little over double the variance of the last factor. It’s not particularly interesting. The first 13 most endorsed questions all come from this factor.

The second factor extracted I called the aliens and Satanism factor, since the first several questions had to do with those two topics. I called it that for the sake of neutrality – really I think it’s the mainstream conspiracy/QAnon/controlled opposition narrative factor. Basically every question on this factor I consider to be misdirection (some obviously so, like the elites being reptilians, which was the third-least endorsed question on the survey with only 18/176 respondents agreeing with it). The only two I think are legitimate are the 5G health risk and chemtrails questions, although there is lots of BS on those two topics as well, and in any case those questions loaded only weakly on the factor. I think the constellation of beliefs characterized by this factor is probably held by a plurality of all self-identified conspiracy theorists. All the questions involving the paranormal load onto this factor, and the reason this factor is so seductive is because all the most exotic narratives (aliens, Satanism, living in a simulation, etc.) come from it. If you are someone who scores highly on this factor I suggest reading some of the sources I link above in the first section, and recognizing that the elites use these kinds of thrilling narratives to distract from more mundane but enlightening points of view.

I will skip the flat Earth factor for now. The fourth factor that was extracted I called the Jewish conspiracy factor. A mainstream academy study would probably call it the antisemitism factor, but that’s a political choice and I don’t use that word once in the actual paper. This factor basically just represents how much you believe Jews are disproportionately wealthy and powerful, and how much you think the Holocaust was exaggerated or faked. As it turns out those two questions are pretty tightly correlated, at least in this sample. I guess that’s why Jewish organizations are so quick to shut down the “antisemitic canard” that Jews are overrepresented in positions of power. This factor also has elements of race realism, with the question about race differences in intelligence and behaviour being the only other question that loads strongly here. This is the only factor that predicts belief in the legitimacy of IQ tests (see race realism again): IQ tests being a valid measurement of intelligence loads negatively on the generic, flat earth, and fakery factors.

The fifth factor that was extracted was the fakery factor. This is where I personally fall, and I don’t claim to be unbiased writing this (clearly). The factor mainly has to do with faked events and faked deaths, all questions concerning which load onto this factor with the exception of the moon landing question, which loaded slightly higher on flat Earth. This factor is the least correlated with the aliens factor, being a third option opposed to both the mainstream and conventional conspiracy narratives. Instead of crazy stories about Satanic rituals and Project Monarch assassinations you just get that it was all faked, pretty much every single time. It’s not as sexy, and it’s also harder to reconcile with the mainstream narrative, at least until you get enough data points to put a new coherent narrative together. This factor also hints at the elites being a large family of related (Jewish) individuals who control America, Russia, and China behind the scenes. This factor represents radical skepticism about historical narratives (though not necessarily the general arc of history) and the extent to which things actually transpired the way that historians tell us they did.

We now come back to flat Earth, which was the third factor extracted. This factor extends the historical skepticism of the fakery factor to a skepticism about anything not directly observable. Neither the shape of the Earth, the existence of viruses, the existence of dinosaurs, nor the action of DNA is directly observable: these things must all be inferred from scientific evidence. If you can’t collect or interpret any of this evidence yourself, and you believe that the establishment is lying all the time about everything, you may end up here. I consider this a form of scientific anti-realism which “applies chiefly to claims about the non-reality of “unobservable” entities such as electrons or genes, which are not detectable with human senses.” (Wikipedia). I don’t claim that this philosophical explanation would apply to all flat Earthers; there are flat Earthers who hold those beliefs on the basis of biblical exegesis. However, I do think anti-realism based on a fundamental mistrust of the scientific establishment is the epistemological foundation of this factor. People who accept terrain theory may be offended to be lumped in with an obvious discredit-by-assocation psyop like flat Earth, and I have some sympathy for that since there are some aspects of terrain theory that are valuable and defensible, but the most extreme forms of it (e.g. viruses flat out don’t exist, period) are wrong and put it in the same discredit by association bucket.

The last factor extracted was the climate change factor, which I named after the first three questions loading on it. It didn’t appear to have any coherent theoretical basis; I assume it was just accounting for leftover variance that was not explained by the previous factors. I was surprised that the question about evolution loaded onto this factor, since I don’t think it’s true in general that disbelief in climate change is particularly correlated with disbelief in evolution. The biggest predictor for disbelief in evolution was religiosity, with 26% of atheists and agnostics endorsing that man did not evolve from apes, compared to 58% of the religious sample. Several questions on this factor seemed to reflect young Earth creationism (Jesus was real, man did not evolve from apes, and the Earth is much younger than 4.5 billion years) which has a coherent theoretical basis but no clear link to climate change. Overall I don’t think this factor can tell us much.

Pretty much every academic research paper on conspiracy theory ends with a discussion about how we can use what we’ve learned to prevent people from believing conspiracy theories. When I was soliciting replies to the survey there were a number of people who were concerned that the data I was collecting was going to be used against conspiracy theorists in some way, and I countered by saying this data is important for helping people not get sucked into QAnon or flat Earth-like misdirection narratives. So, I’m going to end this by discussing how we can make sure people believe the correct conspiracy theories. I think this starts by having a rigorous definition of what conspiracy theory as a field of inquiry is, which I laid out in a previous essay. There I lay out how conspiracy theory is a field of sociology that investigates how elites use deception to exploit the masses. Once you have that, and an understanding of the factor structure of conspiracy landscape, it should be easier to navigate towards the truth.

The Factor Structure of Conspiracist Beliefs

I have now finished writing the report on the survey I began back in May of 2022. You can read the full report here, and the supplemental materials here.

The report contains technical language, so I have also written an informal writeup that includes my answers to all of the questions and a discussion of the survey and the results. You can find that here. If you would like to read the report but don’t have experience reading scientific publications, I recommend reading the abstract, the first part of the introduction, and the discussion.

Survey on Conspiracist Beliefs and Attitudes

I have set up a psychological survey [edit: leaving link up] that asks questions pertaining to the individual’s belief in conspiracies. I find that the existing psychological research in this field is poor, partly having to do with the fact that the researchers do not themselves believe in conspiracy theories. That is, as academics, they have strong incentives against seeing that the elites are lying to us all the time about everything. Consequently the working definition of a conspiracy theory in the psychological literature is “the unnecessary assumption of conspiracy when other explanations are more probable.”

The goal of this survey is to deduce the factor structure of conspiracist belief: the way in which belief in various conspiracies is correlated with belief in other conspiracies. For instance, what constellation of beliefs are you likely to hold if you believe JFK faked his death as opposed to being assassinated by a second shooter. Or likewise for if you believe the COVID virus doesn’t exist, as opposed to believing it is a bioweapon. My hypothesis is that there are several overlapping but distinguishable sets of beliefs that conspiracy theorists may prescribe to, and I suspect it is heavily influenced by where they get their information.

The survey consists of 100 questions about both specific conspiracy theories, and general attitudes about the world. Demographic questions are included but are optional. It should take around 10 minutes to complete. You do not need to self-identify as a conspiracy theorist in order to take the survey. Once enough submissions have been made and I can do a statistical analysis of the data I will be posting an update here.

Any kind of data collection on truthers will be viewed with suspicion, and justifiably so. Do I not think that collecting and reporting on this data plays into the hands of TPTB? Ultimately I think the elites have more than enough data already, and any data I collect or analyze here will have next to zero marginal utility for them. Understanding the structure of conspiracist belief could also be helpful to truthers who want to help those stuck in controlled opposition rabbit holes, or to help normies see the way the world works by introducing the most palatable conspiracies first. So no, I don’t think collecting this data is dangerous, and if you are suspicious of my intentions then you are free to not complete the survey or read my blog. I’m also doing this as a personal project to build my statistics and data analysis skills. I’ve always been interested in psychometrics, so I’m starting here.

January 13: Currently I have n = 191, and I am working on the report. I have decided to leave the survey up in case more people want to complete it.

On the Need for Certainty

A common refrain from ‘coincidence theorists’ is that those who understand the prevalence of conspiracies have a pathological need for certainty¹. The argument goes that the inherent randomness of the world is too much for some people to bear, and that these people will latch on to theories that explain away the unpredictability with an overarching theory, such as world events being manipulated by a global cabal of Jewish bankers.

But this does not explain the origin of conspiracy belief. Rather a pathological need for certainty results in the abdication of personal responsibility for forming ones worldview, and outsourcing this responsibility to a person or group of people whose pronouncements are accepted without critical appraisal. Most often the institutions vested with this responsibility are the government, mainstream media, or organized religion, though for a small subset of people alternative media personalities fill this role. The world is, indeed, quite complex and random. By latching on to a particular authority figure, the requirement for energetically expensive cognition is reduced, and cognitive dissonance is eliminated, so long as you don’t venture outside the bubble of your self-selected information outlets. Once the ego has been invested in a particular interpretation of the world, it is extremely psychologically painful to dispense with it. This is seen in followers of the mainstream media, just as it is seen in followers of Trump or Alex Jones.

Writing off the world as inherently random obviates the drive to make sense of it. If the universe is too chaotic, and world events too unpredictable, then it is fruitless to try to look for patterns that might offer some predictive power. In this way it is an inherently anti-scientific position. Nothing to see here, don’t bother trying to study this, it is impossible to make sense of. What follows from this is that since the world is so mysterious and complicated, there is nothing you can do to change it. All you can do is to try to be a good person. Usually this comes down to obeying your government and not asking too many questions (Why would you? You’ve already chosen the government as your arbiter of truth.)

In fact, if you acknowledge the existence of conspiracies, you have far less certainty about the world. You start from the position of knowing that you have been lied to about just about everything. Even those who aren’t lying to you are just repeating what they’ve been told by liars. Like members of the Party in Orwell’s 1984, all they know is the accepted lie, which they will dutifully repeat back to you if asked. As Voltaire said, “History is the lie commonly agreed upon”. You no longer have an authoritative guru to whom you can appeal, so you are completely responsible for your own beliefs. Every claim must be carefully weighed and considered before it can be accepted, with no recourse to authority. Obviously this is difficult, which is why the vast majority of people (even the educated and intelligent) don’t do it.

The epistemologically informed among us know that certainty, outside of tautologies and strict deductions from axioms, is in any case unachievable. All you can do is construct the most parsimonious model of the world that maintains predictive validity and has survived attempts at falsification. And, well, the model of reality expounded in the mainstream has been falsified countless times.

1. See here: “conspiracy theories give a sense of meaning, security and control over an unpredictable and dangerous world”
   And here