Some thoughts on the term 'conspiracy theory' and 'skeptic'

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Actually they recently came out with a report saying (denying, imo) that they have no contact with extraterrestrial beings.

You get back to me when they figure out a way to un-break time, 'kay?

They might not even travel there physically. They might, say, transfer their consciousness into a form that can travel at the speed of light, i mean who knows? We can't even imagine the possible loopholes that they might use.

The problem with "hard" conspiracy theories, especially conspiracy theories about secret societies that control the world, is that they are usually damaged pretty badly by Occam's Razor.

I like to promote a more parsimonious viewpoint that I call "soft conspiracy theory". The idea is that the world is set up in such a way that it promotes the interests of a group of powerful people, but this group of powerful people doesn't necessarily literally have meetings where they discuss how to set up the world in order to benefit their interests. It's more of an emergent phenomenon.

I have a lot of issues with Occam's Razor. I mean sure, it has some value, but I think it's very biased by the culture it's in, not to mention used way too often. It's also misunderstood as meaning the simplest, or most mainstream, idea is usually the truth. NOT true. Occam's Razor simply means it's best not to make unneeded assumptions.

In the case of secret societies, it is a FACT that Bohemian Grove and the Bildeberg Group meet up on a regular basis. Sure, it MIGHT be possible that these extremely powerful people are just meeting up to have fun because they're all friends or whatever, but doesn't it at least raise suspicion, especially when, in the case of Bohemian Grove, the rituals they have been witnessed to perform are downright creepy?

I don't know anything about that event, but I will quote sir Humphrey Appleby: In government, there's always something to be discreet about."


Are you referring to anything specific? What other event involved volutarily killing American citizens and destroying major buildings in one of the world's greatest cities to do something which they could have done anyway? When Bush decided to invade Irak, he didn't plant a nuclear bomb in LA or anything, he just made a silly excuse and sent an amphibious task force in the Persian gulf.

If there was indeed a conspiracy, I would first ask to know in whose interest it was. Because it wasn't that of the United States in general.


I don't know exactly what you mean by that, but the fact that he did crimes before does not make him innocent for anything happening later. It is like saying that someone is not a murderer because he was already wanted for armed robbery.


It was rather unexpected, really. Before 2001, "hijacking a plane" was about taking hostages and making political demands.


I agree with you that "Occam's razor" was mentionned way too often in this thread, because it is only valuable to create working hypothesis, not for finding the turht. However, I don't think it is a "cultural" biasis.

The only goals of "Conspiracy Theorists" are to attract attention and inspire doubt - nothing more. They're not trying to prove anything. In fact, they're not really interested in communicating the truth - as long as they can people to pay attention to them long enough to present their convoluted "theories", they stand a chance of making their listeners doubt even the most demonstrable of truths. This usually results in the listeners wanting to learn more "theories" ... more doubt ... more interest ... more theories ... et cetera ... ad nauseum ...

In the end, the Conspiracy Theorists still have proven nothing. Yet they have acquired the attention of others, and affirmed their delusions of importance.

Ignore them, and they will go away.

And this is the point in the argument that most folks would tune out, since you sound exactly like someone making a religious argument. How are they transporting the information that is represented by their 'consciousness'? How are their memories and experiences both going there, and going back? And how in all nine flaming Hells is it moving faster than light?

Making an argument that we can't comprehend extraterrestrials isn't contributing to the debate, it's just announcing that you're walking away from it. It's like when a religious person claims that God is 'beyond logic'. It's not a point. It's just taking your kickball home, and it's about as credible as this guy:

x2

If the US government is so good to cover everything, why don't they just drop a few nuclear bombs on Iraq and pretend nothing happened?

I think what a lot of 9/11 Truthers don't get is that their argument is based on the Bush administration being competent enough to pull it off. If you look at the demographic of Truthers, you would see a good number are liberal.

Yea, that

Not only is there an incomprehensibly big space scale, there's an incomprehensibly big time scale. Earth has only existed for 4.5 billion years and for many of thosde years there was either no life or only bacteria. The odds of intelligent beings not only crossing the gigantic space scales but also evolving intelligence to do so inside the teensy couple billion years when they would have a recordable impact is pretty unlikely. Not impossible, but unlikely. When you shrink the window down to the thousands of years when they would have an impact on humans, the likelihood gets vanishingly small.

Link?

Confirming contact with aliens is a little different than confirming the presence of UFOs. They should confirm them, as I'm sure they aren't totally sure what everything is up there.

http://articles.cnn.com/2011-11-08/poli ... M:POLITICS

And I'm sure all you guys believe that it's the honest truth, because George Washington never told a lie, right?

What Aliens? The universe is so large and light is so slow. How can the possibly get here unless they live a very long time.

Believed when seen.

ruveyn

What if they evolved say, 2 billion years ago or even 100 million years ago and have developed a sustainably technological civilisation? Even IF faster than light travel is completely impossible, and that is still up in the air, if such species had life spans that dwarfed ours, like say, they lived 10 thousand years, they could visit us on what would be to them a regular basis even if they went at only a fraction of light speed. For example Z. Reticuli is only about 40 LY from earth, at 1/4 the speed of light, a round trip would take 320 years, which to a species that lives 10K years is the equivalent of just a few years to us.

This isn't even including the possibility that they come from another dimension or their contact with us involves a reality that our science has no understanding of.