Conspiracy theories, apophenia, and ascribing order to chaos

[Mongrel]

I do like me some more lighthearted additions to this thread.

[Lottel]

I had a lady come into work the other day after she bought a 5G phone. She did a bunch of stuff against company policy but yelled and complained enough they let her buy the phone outright and got a case for free "for her trouble"

She called back to double check "5G was turned off on her phone." She ended up coming in to have us turn off the 5G switch on her phone. When I told her i couldn't and she should just return the phone and get a non-5G phone, she said i should just take out the 5G chip in her phone.

I sat and thought for a minute. I couldn't lie to this lady nor could I explain anything to her. During this time, she asked about the cloud and said she didn't want to rely on the cloud because weather kept changing all the time and was too unpredictable. That's when it hit me.

"Well, it sounds like you don't want to use the cloud anyway. It's getting blasted with 5G rays anyway."
"Oh no! I'll just use stuff that doesn't touch 5G."
"You know, I hate to say this, but do you know how internet travels?"
"Not 5G!"
"Yes. All of the internet at least touches 5G. The safest thing to do is stay off the internet."

She sat and thought about it for a while, walked over to the flip phones, and left saying she hopes she got an American on the phone when she returned her phone. I offered to help but since my computer used the internet, she was worried her data would be exposed to 5G.


I like to believe without the internet, she'll revert to her regularly awful self instead of whatever it was she became.

[zaratustra]

I do like me some more lighthearted additions to this thread.

If you send me $20, i will send you my revolutionary invention - an enclosure of my own design, which placed around a wifi router, blocks all frequencies that are deleterious to humans, while letting your wifi signal pass through

[Mongrel]

So the latest Q madness is a story going around that the Chinese army tried to invade via the Maine-Canada border(!), but was wiped out by bombs to the last man.

Even for Qanon, that's... uh... that's something.

[KingRoyal]

Trust the plan

[Thad]

Wolverines!

[Mothra]

Sounds badass

[Mongrel]

So Trump orders a substantial amount of the Pfizer vaccine, but turned down Pfizer's offer to purchase a second batch. The first 44,000 vaccines will be sent to military bases around the country. The military will do the final purity check before distribution. Think the white hats don't have the doctors they want in there to do the testing?

The military gets the evidence, and has proof of an attempt to kill US soldiers and citizens. The scientists can now be considered enemy combatants at this point. A mass round-up of all pharma scientists, the FDA and anyone involved in the plot will occur. Treason at the highest levels. All collaborators will be under military jurisdiction. Tribunals and executions to follow.

White hats have put together a plan. Quantum computing allows the white hats to peer into the future so they already know what moves they need to make to reach checkmate. It would be impossible for them to lose, because all future probabilities and results have been taken into account. Game over.

How long ago did the head of Phizer dump a bunch of shares in his own company? Does he know he needs a bunch of lawyers to save his life? We have it all.

Well played Mr.President. Let the popcorn flow. #GodBlessAmerica

*nods conspiratorially*

[Thad]

Study: Folklore structure reveals how conspiracy theories emerge, fall apart

They found that conspiracy theories tend to form around certain narrative threads that connect various characters, places, and things, across discrete domains of interaction that are otherwise not aligned. It's a fragile construct: cut one of those crucial threads, and the story loses cohesiveness, and hence its viral power. This is not true of a factual conspiracy, which typically can hold up even if certain elements of the story are removed.

They go on to compare (sigh) Pizzagate and Bridgegate. Pizzagate collapses if you remove the 2016 Wikileaks/Podesta e-mail dump -- without that one element, it's just a bunch of totally unrelated pieces with no connection to one another. Bridgegate, as a thing that actually happened, does not rely on one single common element to tie all the rest together. There's no single piece of Bridgegate that would cause the internal logic of the conspiracy to collapse if you were to remove it.

[Friday]

They go on to compare (sigh) Pizzagate and Bridgegate.

Sorry, I know nothing about Pizzagate. Are you sighing because it's even more insane than... Qanon?

[Mongrel]

They go on to compare (sigh) Pizzagate and Bridgegate.

Sorry, I know nothing about Pizzagate. Are you sighing because it's even more insane than... Qanon?

Pizzagate is the name for a the Q-spawned theory that the senior Democrats were running a child molestation ring out of the basement of that Pizza place (can't recall the name) in DC some dude tried to go shoot up. Which does not even have a basement.

Various emails from the Podesta leak dump were "decoded" (I forget if Q actually prompted this or left it for his useful idiots to take it and run with it) so that everything pizza-related was them organizing child trafficking, pedo sessions etc. Except, the dems were, y'know, actually just ordering pizza.

[Friday]

Oh, so it was actually part of the Qanon umbrella of complete nonsense cannibal insanity. Okay.

[Blossom]

They go on to compare (sigh) Pizzagate and Bridgegate.

Sorry, I know nothing about Pizzagate. Are you sighing because it's even more insane than... Qanon?

Pizzagate is the name for a the Q-spawned theory that the senior Democrats were running a child molestation ring out of the basement of that Pizza place (can't recall the name) in DC some dude tried to go shoot up. Which does not even have a basement.

Various emails from the Podesta leak dump were "decoded" (I forget if Q actually prompted this or left it for his useful idiots to take it and run with it) so that everything pizza-related was them organizing child trafficking, pedo sessions etc. Except, the dems were, y'know, actually just ordering pizza.

Comet Ping Pong, which according to a friend of mine is a legitimately good pizza place.

[Mongrel]

a legitimately good pizza place.

Literally (yes, literally, literally) everyone I know who lives in or around DC has echoed this comment.

All I can offer in return is that if you're trapped in Baltimore, get some Matthew's Pizza or Chicken Rico. Especially the Chicken Rico.

Hilariously, here in Toronto, there's a good pizza place called - of all things - Conspiracy Pizza. Who source all their meat from a place next door known as Adams' Barbecue, which was shut down because the owner became a flag-bearer for anti-maskers, so Conspiracy Pizza had to put out a very visible statement about how they are not owned by Crazypants BBQ, and don't agree with the owner in any way shape or form.

[Friday]

Which all, of course, points to Tom Hanks eating children.

[Thad]

They go on to compare (sigh) Pizzagate and Bridgegate.

Sorry, I know nothing about Pizzagate. Are you sighing because it's even more insane than... Qanon?

I'm sighing because people who name scandals are unoriginal morons and we have to refer to everything as [something]gate.

Pizzagate is the name for a the Q-spawned theory that the senior Democrats were running a child molestation ring out of the basement of that Pizza place (can't recall the name) in DC some dude tried to go shoot up. Which does not even have a basement.

Various emails from the Podesta leak dump were "decoded" (I forget if Q actually prompted this or left it for his useful idiots to take it and run with it) so that everything pizza-related was them organizing child trafficking, pedo sessions etc. Except, the dems were, y'know, actually just ordering pizza.

Pizzagate was actually pre-Qanon; the Pizzagate conspiracy theory started in 2016, while the first Q post appeared in October 2017.

The main vector for promoting Pizzagate was Alex Jones (who eventually apologized and distanced himself from it to avoid a libel suit). I think it's reasonable to say that Qanon evolved out of Pizzagate, not the other way around.

[JD]

In December a mathematician cracked the Zodiac Killer's "340" cipher. Several people had previously claimed to have solved it (including one who got a book deal out of it), but their solutions produced large sections of random gibberish or misspellings which relied on entirely arbitrary "corrections" in order to make sense.

In other words, people who thought they solved it first started with a ideas of what they expected the message to say, rearranged it until they got it to say that, and then arbitrarily changed the rest until it could be reinterpreted to make some sort of sense.

[Thad]

The dilemma there is that code-cracking has to start with making educated guesses about the result and looking for patterns to fit them. (There's a profoundly stupid scene in The Imitation Game where Alan Turing overhears a conversation in a restaurant and has a eureka moment realizing that Nazi communications probably frequently end with the phrase "Heil Hitler", something that the movie would have us believe none of the best code-crackers in the world had thought of prior to this moment.)

So I think your example raises a lot of interesting questions about how we should look for patterns, and how we can determine whether the patterns we find are something pre-existing that we've discovered, or something we've created ourselves.

When a "pattern" produces a bunch of garbage data that you have to ignore or massage in order to make it work, that's a pretty good indication of the latter.



And of course when you've seen a pattern before, you're primed to look for a similar pattern elsewhere. Following the "Tom Marvolo Riddle"/"I am Lord Voldemort" anagram in Harry Potter*, people started looking for anagrams everywhere. "Severus Snape" is an anagram for "Persues Evans"; this is probably unintentional (it requires you to misspell "pursues", after all), but it's an interesting coincidence. Similarly, the Master on Doctor Who has a history of cute assumed names that hint to his real identity; when he showed up on the new Doctor Who series as PM Harry Saxon, fans noted that "Mister Saxon" anagrams to "Master No. Six" (and John Simm's Master would indeed be the sixth incarnation, following Roger Delgado, Peter Pratt/Geoffrey Beevers, Anthony Ainley, Eric Roberts, and Derek Jacobi as the first five). Showrunner Russell T Davies responded to that observation by saying that was unintentional -- sometimes coincidences just line up and make sense, and if you look for a pattern hard enough you're going to find it. That's the real meaning behind the 23 Enigma.

A similar story: there are very definitely neo-nazis within the US government, and I've seen examples of official missives with "1488" references in them that look like they're probably deliberate. (I forget the exact reference and I'm not going to look it up because I don't need to go down that rabbit hole, but I seem to remember a report from CBP or DHS or ICE or somebody that referred to 1,488 migrant deaths. And while that could be a coincidence, in that instance I think it's likelier that somebody deliberately massaged the figures to come up with that exact number.) But the trouble is, once you hear that, you may be inclined to start looking for it everywhere. I remember a conversation in an Avocado politics thread last year where someone pointed out that there was a line somewhere in the congressional budget that mentions 925 miles, and that if you convert that to kilometers you get 1488 (more precisely, you get 1488.643). I tried to explain that congressional budgets involve so much back-and-forth negotiation that it's difficult to intentionally sneak a particular number into them, and that anyway "convert to metric and then round in the wrong direction" is so many layers of obfuscation as to imply apophenia rather than a deliberate code. The person I was talking to didn't believe me and kept insisting that it was clearly deliberate. I tried to demonstrate how apophenia works; I said "Look, I can convert it into 2s and 3s. 9 is 3^2, 2 is just 2, and 5 is 2+3. Look, all 23s, and I didn't even have to convert to metric." They stopped replying to me after that.

* obligatory "fuck JK Rowling", but this is a useful example and one most people are probably familiar with

[Brantly B.]

Multiply the dataset's Confidence Interval by the analyst's Dunning-Kruger Bias to determine the likelihood that their conclusion is Stupid.

[Mongrel]

In December a mathematician cracked the Zodiac Killer's "340" cipher.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Cruz talk!

(sorry, sorry)