For me, conspiracy theorists are the ones who believe easily falsifiable things. Flat earth, microchips in vaccines, lizard people, pedophile rings in the basement of buildings with no basement.. that sort of thing. Stuff you can prove or disprove with an easy to get ahold of apparatus or two and some basic math or logic, or even just your own eyes. There is almost always a strong element of motivated reasoning going on in these cases. I find it hard personally even to have empathy for those people, even though I do try, because there is this weird mix of self-righteousness and laziness that I have a hard time having sympathy for. I do at least recognize that’s my own biases in play.
Calling someone who is doing actual research that doesn’t go with the grain of consensus a conspiracy theorist is surely wrong, but I see a lot more of the former (Surprising thing X must be true because it somehow advantages my tribe or makes me special) on the internet than the latter (Surprising thing X must be true because I did research and the data is not matching up as you’d expect).
>someone who is doing actual research that doesn’t go with the grain of consensus
...gets marginalised. This has always been true in research. But now that we can all do research, of an OSINT sort, this is happening more.
Usually when amateur researchers try to engage with and/or question the consensus/professional researchers, they are met with silence. Even when they point out good evidence; that you might call "inconvenient truths".
I've worked in academia so I have sympathy; you get plenty of approaches from true crackpots [0]. Researchers/academics/professional need to learn to better engage with the amateurs, and those peers they marginalise, who genuinely try to contribute to the debate.
or write a book (or books) or manufacture a miracoulous ointment "that bigfarma doesn't want you yo know about" and get rich appealing to those people that are or feel marginalized because they actually are border-line psycos or are members of a weaker segment of the population.
that has always been true in pseudoscience ("snake oil" comes from a real product of the 1800s) but now this is happening more.
Yeah, and that’s unfortunate. I do still think that’s a different problem to solve than what to do with conspiracy theorists, but I’m sure there’s some grey area there.
Aside from flat Earth, I don’t think the other examples are actually all that easy to disprove. What, for example, would constitute a disproof of lizard people? Genetic testing of every human? Most conspiracy theories are poorly defined, and this provides substantial insulation from reason. A purported disproof might be countered by declaring “ah, but that’s not the real lizard people theory - you see, they have anti-genetic-testing technology”.
I think this is part of the trap that believers fall into: the idea that if you can’t disprove it, then it might be true, and if it might be true, then a fun game of connect-the-dots begins.
Of course, an infinite number of things might be true, so the actual conspiracy theories that people choose to believe in start to be driven by their personality and social network. That’s why we hear about lizard-people but not, say, the equally plausible echidna-people.
Yes (unless you mean "falsifiable" in a very strict logical sense).
Any theory that requires millions of people to systematically lie and hide evidence, with little to gain, across the whole world, and for many decades, is extremely unlikely.
I don’t know enough about it to say, really. That’s the thing where airplanes don’t have condensation trails, but whenever you see clouds behind one they are crop dusting chemicals on people? You’d think by now someone who works on airplanes would have noticed the chemical tanks/sprayers, or sampled where the contrails landed for unexpected chemicals.
Someone who believes in it with just a bit of money could surely fly up and sample the air inside of one of the trails, for example.
Calling someone who is doing actual research that doesn’t go with the grain of consensus a conspiracy theorist is surely wrong, but I see a lot more of the former (Surprising thing X must be true because it somehow advantages my tribe or makes me special) on the internet than the latter (Surprising thing X must be true because I did research and the data is not matching up as you’d expect).