Hey mr. the GOP is evil, what do you think about your beloved holier than thou Dems ?
H/t Brumar
Czar Sunstein planned to infiltrate your home
In a fascinating 2008 paper (click "download" over there to get the PDF file), the current White House regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, together with Adrian Vermeule - both at Harvard University - argued that the conspiracy theories are dangerous.
In this paper, it is claimed that groups including the global warming skeptics undermine the society and secretly conspire to start a global conflict. "Many millions of people" hold conspiracy theories and they are a threat. These people think that many important things and events were and/or are controlled by the U.S. agents. And all of it is crazy, Sunstein and Vermeule argue. So far, so good. Well, almost.
Moreover, it is hard to disprove such theories because the counter-arguments are often considered to be fabrications and results of propaganda or government's infiltration. Fortunately, Sunstein and Vermeule have a smooth solution how to fight against the conspiracy theorists, and it is the following.
The "best response" according to Sunstein and Vermeule is for the government to "cognitively infiltrate" all the groups of people who believe any conspiracy theories - for example the "extremist group" of 200 million of the U.S. global warming skeptics. Government should take over their lives, "enlist independent groups to supply rebuttals" (I am sure that Real Climate and others have already been enlisted haha), and do many other things that guarantee that only state-sponsored propaganda may be printed in the newspapers or shown on TV.
I kid you not. Read the paper. That's what they propose as a "fix" to the "problem".
You know, I think that e.g. the truthers are nutcases (however, completely harmless ones, as far as I can say after some interactions with them) but these Sunstein and Vermeule folks are pretty much exactly the same nutcases. To "disprove" a "conspiracy theory", they're ready to actually do every single crazy thing that the "conspiracy theorists" just believe to be happening. They are ready to construct a system of mind control that would make Hitler's Third Reich an island of freedom and impartial thoughts in comparison.
In 2008, Mr Sunstein was just a loon at a university. But today, he is literally a part of the White House administration. His thinking about the world follows exactly the same patterns as the thinking of the truthers or those who believe that the Moon landing was staged in New Mexico if not Arizona. :-) The danger is always in a "conspiracy" of a small part of the population and it must be fought against by another conspiracy.
I find these general templates and far-reaching stories about "conspiracy theories" to be irrational. Every single question is different than other questions. Every question has a different answer and a different probability that the answer is Yes or No. The evidence in both directions must be carefully and impartially compared, and only when it's done, one may conclude - in a preliminary way - that something is likely, unlikely, very unlikely, extremely unlikely, or almost impossible.
By comparing the motivations and the required resources and by looking at some key known data, it's clear that it's far more likely that 9/11 was done by religious fundamentalists than the White House. But, as the authors admit, the Watergate hotel was indeed bugged by the GOP officials and LSD was investigated for "mind control" in the 1950s. Just because something "superficially" sounds similar to some hypotheses that have been labeled "conspiracy theories" doesn't mean that it's untrue.
The term "conspiracy theory" is just a summary that may heat a debate up - but this term is surely not an argument in either direction and in any context by itself.
So for example, I do think it's plausible that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Many other kids with similar fathers were born over there and thousands of parents have tried to upgrade their sons and daughters to the U.S. citizens because it has certain advantages. There are arguments on the other side, too. Be sure that I know some of them well.
But the idea to try to use the government to suppress and "cognitively infiltrate" everyone who believes something else than you do is simply a sign of a messiah complex. It's a lunacy. And it can't possibly lead to any improvement in the average validity of the people's beliefs - especially because the people who would be eager to supervise such "regulatory" ideological policies are far less likely to be right about anything than the sane people who realize that many things are uncertain and the best method to distort the opinions is to ban critical and independent thinking.
I am flabbergasted that similar borderline mentally ill people work at the top posts of the U.S. government.
motls.blogspot.com
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What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind
of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy
theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions.
However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5).
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3. Cognitive infiltration
Rather than taking the continued existence of the hard core as a constraint, and addressing itself solely to the third-party mass audience, government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories, arguments and rhetoric that are produced by the hard core and reinforce it in turn. One promising
tactic is cognitive infiltration of extremist groups. By this we do not mean 1960s-style infiltration with a view to surveillance and collecting information, possibly for use in
future prosecutions. Rather, we mean that government efforts might succeed in weakening or even breaking up the ideological and epistemological complexes that constitute these networks and groups.
How might this tactic work? Recall that extremist networks and groups, including the groups that purvey conspiracy theories, typically suffer from a kind of crippled epistemology. Hearing only conspiratorial accounts of government behavior, their members become ever more prone to believe and generate such accounts.
Informational and reputational cascades, group polarization, and selection effects suggest that the generation of ever-more-extreme views within these groups can be dampened or
reversed by the introduction of cognitive diversity. We suggest a role for government efforts, and agents, in introducing such diversity. Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.
In one variant, government agents would openly proclaim, or at least make no effort to conceal, their institutional affiliations. A recent newspaper story recounts that
Arabic-speaking Muslim officials from the State Department have participated in dialogues at radical Islamist chat rooms and websites in order to ventilate arguments not usually heard among the groups that cluster around those sites, with some success.68 In another variant, government officials would participate anonymously or even with false identities. Each approach has distinct costs and benefits; the second is riskier but potentially brings higher returns. In the former case, where government officials participate openly as such, hard-core members of the relevant networks, communities and conspiracy-minded organizations may entirely discount what the officials say, right from the beginning. The risk with tactics of anonymous participation, conversely, is that if the tactic becomes known, any true member of the relevant groups who raises doubts may be suspected of government connections. Despite these difficulties, the two forms of cognitive infiltration offer different risk-reward mixes and are both potentially useful instruments.
There is a similar tradeoff along another dimension: whether the infiltration should occur in the real world, through physical penetration of conspiracist groups by undercover agents, or instead should occur strictly in cyberspace. The latter is safer, but potentially less productive. The former will sometimes be indispensable, where the groups that purvey conspiracy theories (and perhaps themselves formulate conspiracies) formulate their views through real-space informational networks rather than virtual networks. Infiltration of any kind poses well-known risks: perhaps agents will be asked to perform criminal acts to prove their bona fides, or (less plausibly) will themselves become persuaded by the conspiratorial views they are supposed to be undermining; perhaps agents will be unmasked and harmed by the infiltrated group. But the risks are generally greater for real-world infiltration, where the agent is exposed to more serious harms.
All these risk-reward tradeoffs deserve careful consideration. Particular tactics may or may not be cost-justified under particular circumstances. Our main suggestion is just that, whatever the tactical details, there would seem to be ample reason for government efforts to introduce some cognitive diversity into the groups that generate
conspiracy theories. Social cascades are sometimes quite fragile, precisely because they are based on small slivers of information. Once corrective information is introduced,
large numbers of people can be shifted to different views. If government is able to have credibility, or to act through credible agents, it might well be successful in dislodging
beliefs that are held only because no one contradicts them. Likewise, polarization tends to decrease when divergent views are voiced within the group.69 Introducing a measure of cognitive diversity can break up the epistemological networks and clusters that supply conspiracy theories.
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papers.ssrn.com |
