A good close look at conspiracy theorists

I am frustrated and outraged to various degrees with conspiracy theorists, over and over. It is hard for me to understand exactly why conspiracy theories are so appealing. People seem to lose all rationality when they start dealing with conspiracy theories.

I have recently volunteered to help with the Obama Eligibility Controversy. There are a number of proponents of the position that there is some issue with President Elect Barack Obama's eligibility. Most have dismissed those holding this position as mere "conspiracy theorists". And I did so myself for weeks and months. Then, I realized that Obama's and his associates were prepared to spend large sums of money in legal proceedings for months on end rather than produce the documentation that would show convincingly he was eligible. Documentation that I would have to show to get a US passport. And he was not willing to do so.

Now I became more interested. After all, where there is smoke, there is fire. I looked in a bit more deeply, and found other troubling evidence.

However, for the first time in a long time, I found myself part of a movement populated by a HUGE number of conspiracy theorists of various flavors. And the fact that there was a controversy about Obama's eligibility was latched onto by them as the perfect vehicle for them to promote their favorite conspiracy theory, including:

*The USSR never broke up but still is secretly in existence. The breakup was staged to trick us as part of a multi-decade plan. Condeleezza Rice is part of this plan, and is a secret KGB agent. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is also a secret KGB agent. And on and on. And the proof of this? Obama's reluctance to produce a birth certificate.

*Obama is the Antichrist. And the proof of this? Obama's reluctance to produce a birth certificate.

*Obama plans to institute Sharia Law as part of a Worldwide Caliphate, since he is a secret Muslim. And the proof of this? Obama's reluctance to produce a birth certificate.

*The world is coming to an end any day now. And the proof of this? Obama's reluctance to produce a birth certificate.

*Obama is a secret Nazi. And the proof of this? Obama's reluctance to produce a birth certificate.

*Obama's presidency will be the first step in a communist takeover of the US. And the proof of this? Obama's reluctance to produce a birth certificate.

*Obama is an artificial human, an android or a robot, the product of a laboratory in the military-industrial complex. And the proof of this? Obama's reluctance to produce a birth certificate.

*There is a secret shadowy one world government/cabal controlling everything behind the scenes. And they are called or associated with the Bilderbergers/The Trilateral Commission/The Illuminati/The Nazis/The Jews/The Council on Foreign Relations/The Rothschilds/The Marxists/The Masons/The British Royal Family/The Vatican/The Masons/Skull and Bones etc. And the proof of this? Obama's reluctance to produce a birth certificate.

*Bush and Cheney are secretly members of Hamas and Hizbollah, and are attempting to destroy Israel. But God saw this, and ordered the Israeli Air Force to attack the rockets in Gaza as a warning to Bush and Cheney. And the proof of this? Obama's reluctance to produce a birth certificate.

One young lady believes that the best way to get publicity for Obama's reluctance to produce a birth certificate is to enlist the help of people in the media. She has chosen Valerie Plame, the outed CIA field agent, and Thomas Tamm, a whistleblower who revealed the warrantless wiretapping program to the press and now is fighting to stay out of prison. She believes that these two people are perfect for revealing the truth about Obama's reluctance to produce a birth certificate and that everyone will listen to them and will rally 'round and join the cause.

When I try to work with these groups, things go along fine as long as I do not touch on their own personal beliefs, particularly the beliefs of those that subscribe to one or more of the assorted conspiracy theories. However, over and over, eventually they cannot seem to help themselves, and cannot stay quiet any longer about their pet theory (which always seems to have very limited evidence to support it). And they want to crow on and on and on about their own personal theory. Discrediting themselves and the movement completely.

And when I try to stop them, I am attacked. Visciously.

Look, some of these wild conspiracy theories might be correct. However, most reasonable people do not subscribe to them, and will just dismiss anything else said if statements are riddled with conspiracy theory nonsense. Even if you have 5 solid pieces of evidence that Obama has an eligibility problem, the instant you bring a poorly supported conspiracy theory into the mix, any credence you might have had goes out the window.

And over and over, I see people unwilling to just put the conspiracy theories aside until there can be evidence developed to support them. They don't seem to want to care about getting the evidence. They want to preach about the conspiracy theory. And the original substantive issue, with all its evidence, gets lost in the noise.

Wow.

Evolutionary adaptations

After a few months visiting Skypeland, it strikes me that there are many features of human beings that might be the remnants of evolutionary adaptations that now are less useful than they were originally, but still persist:
(These are something like spandrels)
*colorblindness helps some to see camouflaged animals in low light conditions and to assist with hunting.
*tribal instincts might have helped early humans survive, but now are somewhat counterproductive, leading to hatreds and wars
*homosexuality is present in about 300 animal species, possibly there because it confers some evolutionary advantage
*religious beliefs might have been useful to help early humans survive
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Detection)
*the pattern recognition abilities of humans useful in hunting and planning can run rampant in the modern world and lead to adherence to illogical ideas like conspiracy theories (apophenia).
I wonder how it is that some have overcome these traits, and others have not been able to...

Karaoke worldwide

One of the most amazing and enchanting features of Skypeland is the existence of casts where people from all over the world sing for each other and play instruments. Sometimes people sing together and sometimes jam together. Some of the people who do this are professionals and an amateur like me completely embarasses themselves by attempting to join these rooms. Sometimes all new visitors to these casts must sing a capella renditions of songs for the others.

Why do I have two blogs?

A number of people have asked why I have two different blogs about Skypeland, this one and "Skypeland Adventures". However, there is method to my madness.

"Skypeland Adventures", my other blog about Skypeland, is much more raw and crude than this one. A lot of it consists of direct quotes by angry people, or mentally disturbed people. Admittedly, the posts there are much more comical than the posts in this blog, but they are more outrageous and offensive as well. Sometimes stimulating conflict and engaging in difficult discussions teaches me something. Hopefully others learn something from these descriptions as well.

For example, the discussions of the Mohammed Cartoons actually has some serious components to it. The investigation of aniconism in Islam and other faiths and how it has evolved with time and differs with location and culture is fascinating.

The discussions of conspiracy theories are also interesting, because they show how people reason and make connections. I suspect these are evidence of apophenia, confirmation bias, clustering illusions, syncronicity misinterpretation, misapplication of Occam's Razor and other logical fallacies. The fervor with which the subscribers defend these conspiracy theories is astounding, and is an impressive sight to behold.

As discouraging as some people find these accounts, they do constitute raw data which we can study and learn from. There are clear patterns to these belief systems, and they are astoundingly widespread. It is quite interesting to ponder why they exist, and what comfort the proponents and inventors of these theories draw from them.

When I survey these data, I am positively impressed by the contributions that the scientific method has made to everyday life, even though many do not appreciate this. These discussions are a window back into the "demon haunted world" that Carl Sagan warned us about, and make it easier to appreciate many past beliefs and practices which now seem hopelessly nonsensical.

Intellectual stimulation

One positive aspect of Skypeland is the ability to connect with others who have similar interests and share information. For example, there is a group of scientists, largely centered in Brazil, that meets in the evenings to talk about research results in medicine, neuroscience, biology and related fields. A friend from California often hosts casts that deal with language and brain function. We swap references, links to podcasts and videos and ideas. I sometimes muse about the nature of consciousness and like to hear the ideas of others on this topic.

One of my favorite areas to investigate is the origin of various foods. I also like etymology. I was talking with a friend about profiteroles (the French name for cream puffs) and found out that they were made from "choux" dough. I realized that the French words "choux" and "chou" (meaning cabbage) were homonyms.

The word "chou" is often heard in the expression of endearment common in French, "Mon petit chou", which always struck me as a little strange. Cabbages have many deep connections to history:

The brutal Roman Emperor and persecutor of Christians Diocletian refused to
return to power after he retired to grow cabbages, saying "Have you seen my
cabbages?"

and culture:

For example, cabbages appear in the poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis
Carroll, pseudonym of mathematician Charles Dodgson.

These are the kinds of bits of trivia that I find fascinating. Even something as prosaic as a cabbage can be interesting.

There are words that are not homonyms in their native language, but sound like homonyms to native speakers of other languages. There might be a fancy term for this, like "pseudohomonym" or something, but I don't know of one. The French words "cou" (neck), "coup" (strike), "queue" (line) and "cul" (posterior) sound very different to a native Francophone, but to English ears sound almost identical. There are similar families of words in Chinese that sound the same to Anglophones. The "r" and "l" sounds that sound so different to Anglophones are difficult for Japanese and Chinese speakers to distinguish, which is a common source of comedy and confusion. (According to a linguist I asked, Chinese has no "r" sound, and Japanese has no "l" sound, but both have a trilled-r sound. The Japanese apparently substitute an "r" sound for an "l". The Chinese substitute an "l" sound for an "r", called lallation, a type of lambdacism, which are classified as an inability to prounce the "r" sound, called rhotacism.)

This appears to be associated to the existence of these sounds in a given language, and the programming of the brains of the people to be able to hear these different sounds. This might be part of the reason that all dog barking sounds like nonsense to us, when dogs have been shown to be able to make hundreds of different barks that carry information from one dog to another, as has been discovered by recent research. I wonder about human difficulties in decoding cetacean sounds and songs in spite of decades of effort.

There is clear evidence of animal ability to pass on information from generation to generation. For example, animals are afraid of humans on those islands in the Galapagos where humans slaughtered the animals 100+ years ago. On neighboring islands that have no such history, the animals show no fear at all of humans.

There is tremendous conceit among humans when it comes to our language abilities.

Addendum: Somewhat related to the concept of spoonerism, it is common in English to alter the order of phonemes in a word. Sometimes, as in the case of "ask" and "axe", this has roots in Old English, when ascian and axian/acsian were both in use. Similarly, aspen and apse both were common names for a type of tree. However, this can also be just an error, and in that case it is called metathesis: (pretty/purdy, nuclear/nucular, introduce/interduce, etc).

Dog races

One friend in Skypeland works on weekends at a dog race track run by her grandmother. It is not like the dog tracks in the US, where things are very competitive and dogs are treated cruelly. Any dog can run at her grandmother's track, even old dogs. They chase a sock with a "squawker" in it, around and around. Some dogs get smart and cheat, and run to the finish line by taking a short cut so they can get the sock first. Once in a while dogs strain their muscles and need to have massages and pain killers. It sounds like fun.

A dog and cat hotel

I met a nice lady from Israel whose family runs a dog and cat hotel in the north of Israel. It sounded very interesting. They have room for 20 to 30 dogs and cats at any given time. She takes the dogs for walks 3 times a day. She does not walk the cats, so they have large cages. Her speciality is to clean up the poop. Her aunt has an orange cat who learned to use the toilet himself, with no training. The funny thing is, she is allergic to dogs and cats.