Ben Shapiro (46:27)
This is a great way of simply alienating everybody who doesn't agree with you and calls for evidence. It's because you, you must be a part of it. It's you. It's very emotionally satisfying because you feel like you're in the know. You feel like you, you've gained the secrets of the universe, but it's totally intellectually stunting. The truth is that reality is really complex. Most events result from a mixture of intentional actions, unintended consequences, systemic factors, lots of random chance. That's life. You know that in your own life. Reducing that complexity to heroes and villains makes for great movies, but it makes for really, really bad analysis. And then there is confirmation bias and something called apophenia. Confirmation bias is where you interpret information in a way that confirms your preexisting beliefs. So if you believe in a conspiracy, everything becomes evidence for the conspiracy. Any contradictory evidence, you just dismiss it as part of the COVID up. So let's say that you believe that JFK was assassinated by the mafia. And then it turns out that actually Oswald didn't have any ties to the Mafia. You say, well, that's just because we haven't looked hard enough. And anybody who makes that claim is probably in on it. And then you pair that with apophenia, which is seeing meaningful patterns in random data. And this happens all the time. Human beings, our brains, they look for patterns. But as sort of the famous joke goes, conspiracy theorists see words in their Cheerios. And so you can do this really easily. And you see the media actually do this sometimes. These three unrelated politicians all visited the same city in different years. It must be a conspiracy. Well, no, it's just a coincidence, which is a real thing that exists in our universe and other obtains in your life pretty much every day. Okay, finally, so we've done the fake questions, the fake evidence, and you finally get to the fake defenses. And this is where somebody asks for evidence just over and over, what's your evidence? Show me the evidence. And so now you need a defense. So your defense for not having evidence for your theory or not plausible evidence, or not enough evidence, or not convincing enough evidence, you have a bunch of tactics you can use. 1 is non falsifiability the hallmark of pseudoscience. Things that are not scientific. And again, there are many things in life that are not scientific. That's fine. You can't falsify love, for example. It's a personal feeling. But when it comes to claims about the world itself, you should have a falsifiable theory. Is Karl Popper pointing this out? The philosopher? Conspiracy thinking is non falsifiable. You structure a claim so it can never be proved false. A good theory makes predictions that could be disproven. I've asked this to. You heard me ask this about the Derek Chauvin trial, to, for example, Stephen Nismeth. I said, is there any evidence that could possibly change your mind about this? And he said, no. So, well, that's not a rational inquiry, because if, if, if nothing can change your mind about a thing. It is now a religious belief. It is not a rational inquiry. And there's a place in life for religious beliefs. But that's not the place for unspooling a theory about, you know, like an assassination. Conspiracy theories rarely do this because their theories are designed to be immune to evidence. They don't want to actually provide a falsifiable thing. Then there's moving the goalpost. When it comes to global warming, for example. Global warming, there are a couple things you can say that are plausible and falsifiable. One, is the world getting warmer over time? Two, does it correlate with human activity with regard to carbon? The answer to both those is yes. What is the level of causation? Is still an open question. What is a conspiracy theory is where they say the world's gonna end in 2012, and then it doesn't end in 2012, Greta Thunberg style. And then you're like, okay, well. And she's like, well, I really meant 2024. And then it doesn't. And then it's like, well, what I really meant was 2036. You see this in Nostradamus a lot. We'll just move. Move the timeline out. Just move the timeline out. Okay. Well, usually in the real world, if you have a predictive fail, you have to revise your theory. In conspiracy thinking, you simply revise the prediction. One of the most common tactics here is circular reasoning. So what you say is, we know that you're corrupt because you won't report on this conspiracy theory, and we know the conspiracy is real because you won't report on the conspiracy theory. It's a closed logical loop. No external information is possible. You're lying Cuz the conspiracy theory is true. The conspiracy theory is true because you're lying. And around the circle you go. And at no point does evidence ever enter the equation. At any point. Then there's the Kafka trap. The Kafka Trap is named after Franz Kafka's short story, the trial where denial of guilt is taken as evidence of guilt. This is so common on X. So you'll say, no, I'm not involved in a conspiracy, nor do I think that that conspiracy is credible. Say that because you're involved in the conspiracy, that's why. So it goes directly. It's a character attack, essentially. It makes the accusation unfalsifiable because whether you deny or whether you confirm, both taken as confirmation. Denial, silence and confirmation are all the same under the Kafka Trap. If somebody accuses you of complicity, for example, in putting microchips in the blood of your enemies, and you deny it, well, you're only denying it because it's true. And if you confirm it, it's because it's true. And if you stay silent, it's because you won't answer because it's probably true. That's the Kafka trap. There's information overload as well. So you see this a lot when challenged for evidence. What you will get is a bunch of unrelated gobbledygook facts that are stacked on top of each other super fast. That sort of thing is very difficult to combat because it's sort of the equivalent of a terrorist rocket barrage. It's a bunch of $50 rockets that are sent up and then it requires $50,000 in Iron Dome to take down each one of those argumentative rockets. And by the time you've done that, they're already firing the next argumentative rocket. That has nothing to do with the central argument, but is incredibly time consuming. And so people just sort of give up to defending the truth because it's so tiring. Again, good tactic, bad logic. Another tactic here, weaponizing doubt. Conspiracy theorists excel at weaponizing doubt. So what they will do here is they find a minor error in the official account of an event and then they're like, okay, well the entire thing is wrong. So they'll say, well, you know, there were initial reports from the government. They got the time wrong by 5 minutes. That means the whole report is BS. The whole report is flawed. This usually comes right after an event. So right after a complex event is reported, there are usually errors. This is why the best thing you can do on X or anywhere else in social Media, when there's a controversial event, wait 48 hours. Wait 48 hours to comment on it. Because usually it takes a while for the truth to be established. But what usually happens is people jump to a conclusion. That conclusion is then used to discredit the actual truth because somebody made a mistake when they first reported the thing. Then there is false equivalence. Again, this is a defense mechanism for a bad conspiracy theory where you say all sources are equally biased. Sure, my evidence comes from some schlub in a YouTube video who doesn't know anything about the topic and has no credentials and hasn't studied anything. But. But also, the legacy media lies. Okay, well, yes, the legacy media does lie. That does not mean that all people are equally dishonest or that all cases are equally verifiable or have equal veracity. You have to actually establish this by the evidence.
