If your idea isn't a conspiracy theory in the pejorative sense, then argue that. Don't claim "conspiracy theory" doesn't mean what it means

I’m tired of seeing conspiracy theorist Plandemic-ers pointing to virologists, medical doctors and investors and telling me, “You clearly don’t know anything about this!” These Klaus-Schwabbers are as bad as the Lockdowners saying, “You don’t know The Science!” Invariably, the “experts” pushing the Plandemic conspiracy theories have no expertise in making sense of complex emergent phenomena, much less among masses of brimming-with-fallacies humans. They look as ridiculous as I would if I were to talk about the details of vaccine science or heart disease. 

But, my aim in today’s substack is not to argue against the many conspiracy theorist Plandemic types on my anti-Lockdown side, but to instead address a bizarre obsession they have with claiming that “conspiracy theory” doesn’t mean what it in fact does.

“Conspiracy theory” means what it means, and it’s NOT a theory about conspiracies. It’s an idiom, and means something different than just the combination of the two words. (‘Basket case’ is another example.)

“Conspiracy theory” is used to refer to a common human fallacy in reasoning. In the sense used in sociopolitical contexts, it means:

Conspiracy theory: a radically tangled and complex Occam’s-Razor-smashing hypothesis, that usually over-explains some subset of the evidence, concerning a super-secret and super-powerful organization that manages to coordinate a massive variety of complex events, whereas there are usually many astronomically simpler hypotheses that explain the evidence. In model terms, conspiracy theories are theories that use way too many parameters, and have thereby over-fitted the data. 

I talk about it in this earlier Science Moment…

And people need to stop pretending they don’t know that this is what it means. So many insist to me, “Oh, no, it simply means a theory about a conspiracy.”

1. Are they really claiming to believe that people are using “conspiracy theorist” pejoratively, and yet all they mean by it is, “Your theory is about multiple people working together toward some end”? How could that even be pejorative! Pretty much every idea in the sociopolitical arena concerns people working together toward ends.

2. People are angry at being called a “conspiracy theorist” because they know that the sense in which it’s being used is the way I fleshed it out above.

3. They show they know what it truly means when they work to “own” the term, saying things such as, “Well, so far, 9 out of 10 of my conspiracy theories have turned out true.” It’s funny. And the reason it’s funny is that it’s making the point that the person’s ideas were not in fact conspiracy theories at all. They were actually reasoned, elegant, evidence-based hypotheses, ones that were incorrectly and pejoratively called “conspiracy theories.”

So, no. They do know what it means.

Does the fact that their opponents are sometimes mis-applying the term mean that “conspiracy theory” no longer means what it does?

No. The Left has been calling anyone that disagrees with them a “racist” for a couple generations now, but does that mean “racist” doesn’t mean what it does?

Ok, how about it being a terrible term because, you know, the CIA invented it?

So what if the CIA did! It ends up meaning what it does by the mass action of culture. None of us can change that. And, if the CIA didn’t coin the term, there would just be another word to refer to the same kind of bad theory humans are prone to believing. (And, at any rate, the CIA did not coin the term. It can be found with the same pejorative meaning going back at least to 1870.)

Yes, the Lockdowners have called any counter-narrative view as a conspiracy theory. My response is to argue why it’s not a conspiracy theory; to argue that my theory is simple, elegant, plausible, consistent with the data, not over-fitting, etc. My response is NOT to claim that they’re accusing me of making hypotheses about multiple people working together toward an end, and how dare they! And my response is NOT to claim that that term should never ever be used because I don’t like where I perceive the word to have come from. Don’t be squirrely.

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There are, as it happens, entire areas of academic research trying to understand the human propensity to believe in conspiracy theories. Here’s just a few examples…

And, I myself am part of that world. In addition to studying complex emergent phenomena among human societies (which I often talk about here and in my Science Moment series), I have been deeply involved in understanding fallacious human reasoning, and reasoning generally. Here’s one of my biggest discoveries, my solution to the Riddle of Induction, from a couple decades ago, Chapter 3 from my first book, Brain From 25,000 Feet.