By shoving polls in the public's faces, you make them support the frontrunners.
I'll explain that in detail...
the media tells you that Obama/Clinton/McCrazy are at the top of the polls, and mentions no one else. (yes, Huckabee less now..)
You interpret that as "only these people have a decent chance of winning", or for a surprising amount of people "only these candidates are in the race", if I choose anyone else, I'll be wasting my vote.
This turns voting into a betting game. The force of the "majority" leads the sociable individual to take that as peer pressure, to believe in the same things and people.
At this point, it leads to a breakdown of what you need for democracy.
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Conspiracy theories cannot be rated as true or false. It isn't the normal type of theory that scientists come up with. Conspiracy theories can only be counted as "plausible but inconclusive" or "low plausibility".
And even if they do happen, conspiracy theories can be easily dismissed, as being a co-incidence because conspiracy theories don't have much solid evidence.
Finally, conspiracies can act like opinions - they are like vectors generated by logical thinking linking many correlative points of evidence together (like a line of best fit). Projecting it ahead, conspiracies point to an event, or a range of events that it predicts will happen in the future.
If these above are so, then what's the difference between a conspiracy theory and any other theory in politics or even science?
1 comment:
Personally, I would like to think that conspiracy theories are like religion. Conspiracy are unprovable, for what ever the reason, be it gov. secrets or inaccurate data. However, scientific theories are based on evidence, and can be proved repeatedly by tests.
If I pick up a pen, lift it 10 cm, then let go, then the pen will fall down. From that observation, I can deduce that there is some kind of attraction between the ground and the pen.
I can test this as much as I like - I can just pick up a pen and release it, over and over again, getting the same result.
HOWEVER, if there was to be some unexpected result, such as if the pen flew upwards when I released it, then the theory does not hold. The theory is scrapped and a new one is made for the pens flying upwards.
Maybe you could put some conspiracy theories here and we can dissect it.
Now why I think conspiracy theories are similar to religion? Because it's a belief, really, and they try to find evidence to support their belief. Science (as least ideally) is to start from the evidence, then in the end build up to a rational conclusion.
To put it in another way, conspiracy theory logic goes like this: X is evil/bad/plotting-to-take-over-the-world/related-to-Y because evidence A, B, C shows so.
Science, however, goes like this: After looking at evidence A, B and C, the evidence lead to the conclusion that X will happen when Y occurs because [some_boring_theory]. To test this, when prerequisite S is in P state, make Y happen and X will happen. If not, scrap this.
Even when the evidence for conspiracy theories change, turn out to be false or was just misinterpreted, those people just either ignore it, refuse to believe it and use some other evidence.
SUMMARY: conspiracy theories are conclusion-based, while science is evidence-based.
To give the conspiracy theory people some credit, they do have some kind of "test", but those are almost impossible to prove. Some, like the 9/11 conspiracies, are impossible to prove as evidence lies inaccessible or in the past.
For your reading pleasure - http://xkcd.com/202/
P.S. Funny how I ignored your first bit and replied only to the second bit. Hmm.
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