I strongly upvoted this post because I believe epistemic empathy is important.
The word “irrational” has too many meanings, and I try to avoid it. And I try to direct criticism at arguments rather than people. But I do want to answer your final question as best I can. I’ll just phrase it as problems with arguments rather than people’s irrationality.
In my experience, the problem with arguments against COVID-19 vaccines is that they mainly consist of evidence that there’s risk involved in getting vaccinated. To usefully argue against getting vaccinated, one needs evidence not only that vaccine risks exist, but that they’re worse risks than those of remaining unvaccinated.
Similarly, arguments against masks are usually arguing against the wrong statement. They argue against “Masks always prevent transmission”, when to be useful, they should be arguing against “Masks reduce transmission”.
In my experience, the problem with arguments against COVID-19 vaccines is that they mainly consist of evidence that there’s risk involved in getting vaccinated. To usefully argue against getting vaccinated, one needs evidence not only that vaccine risks exist, but that they’re worse risks than those of remaining unvaccinated.
In the most extreme cases they also assume vast conspiracies that I assign a very low prior probability to simply based on “people can’t do that sort of thing on that scale without screwing up”. Paradoxically enough, very often conspiratorial beliefs assume more rationality and convergent behaviour (from the elites seen as hostile) than is warranted!
I’d say the main flaws in conspiracy theories are that they tend to assume that coordination is easy, especially when the conspiracy requires a large group of people to do something, generally assumes agency/homunculi too much, and underestimates the costs of secrecy, especially when trying to do complicated tasks. As a bonus, it also suffers from the problem of a lot of claimed conspiracy theories being told in a way that talks about it as though it was a narrative, which tends to be a general problem around a lot of subjects.
It’s already hard enough to cooperate openly, and secrecy amplifies this difficulty a lot, so much so that conspiracies that are attempted usually go nowhere, and the successful conspiracies are a very rare set of the set of all conspiracies attempted.
Counterpoint: PRISM, which was a very large, very complex operation dispersed over dozens or hundreds of locales, multiple governments, many private companies, etc., that managed to stay secret for at least a decade.
I wouldn’t be surprised if something a bit less ambitious could be hidden for at least half a century.
That is an interesting counterpoint, but there’s the fact that things like PRISM can exist in at least something like a pseudo-legal space; if government spooks come to you and ask you to do X and Y because terrorism, and it sounds legit, that’s probably a strong coordination mechanism. It still came out eventually.
To compare with COVID-19, there probably are forms of more or less convergent behaviours that produce a conspiracy like appearance, but no space for real large conspiracies of that sort I can think of. My most nigh-conspiratorial C19 opinions are that early “masks are useless” recommendations were more of a ploy to protect PPE stocks than genuine advice, and that regardless of its truth, a lab leak was discounted way too quickly and too thoroughly for political reasons. Both these though don’t require large active conspiracies, but simply convergent interests and biases across specific groups of people.
if government spooks come to you and ask you to do X and Y because terrorism, and it sounds legit, that’s probably a strong coordination mechanism.
There’s no way that would apply to the people working at a facility intercepting high end Cisco routers by the truckload and planting backdoors on them, likely mostly bound for large enterprises of certain countries. No credible terrorist groups, or even all of them combined, would order so many thousands of high end routers month after month.
I strongly upvoted this post because I believe epistemic empathy is important.
The word “irrational” has too many meanings, and I try to avoid it. And I try to direct criticism at arguments rather than people. But I do want to answer your final question as best I can. I’ll just phrase it as problems with arguments rather than people’s irrationality.
In my experience, the problem with arguments against COVID-19 vaccines is that they mainly consist of evidence that there’s risk involved in getting vaccinated. To usefully argue against getting vaccinated, one needs evidence not only that vaccine risks exist, but that they’re worse risks than those of remaining unvaccinated.
Similarly, arguments against masks are usually arguing against the wrong statement. They argue against “Masks always prevent transmission”, when to be useful, they should be arguing against “Masks reduce transmission”.
In the most extreme cases they also assume vast conspiracies that I assign a very low prior probability to simply based on “people can’t do that sort of thing on that scale without screwing up”. Paradoxically enough, very often conspiratorial beliefs assume more rationality and convergent behaviour (from the elites seen as hostile) than is warranted!
I’d say the main flaws in conspiracy theories are that they tend to assume that coordination is easy, especially when the conspiracy requires a large group of people to do something, generally assumes agency/homunculi too much, and underestimates the costs of secrecy, especially when trying to do complicated tasks. As a bonus, it also suffers from the problem of a lot of claimed conspiracy theories being told in a way that talks about it as though it was a narrative, which tends to be a general problem around a lot of subjects.
It’s already hard enough to cooperate openly, and secrecy amplifies this difficulty a lot, so much so that conspiracies that are attempted usually go nowhere, and the successful conspiracies are a very rare set of the set of all conspiracies attempted.
Yeah, that’s what I meant when I said people can’t do that sort of thing on that scale without screwing it up. It just breaks down at some point.
Counterpoint: PRISM, which was a very large, very complex operation dispersed over dozens or hundreds of locales, multiple governments, many private companies, etc., that managed to stay secret for at least a decade.
I wouldn’t be surprised if something a bit less ambitious could be hidden for at least half a century.
That is an interesting counterpoint, but there’s the fact that things like PRISM can exist in at least something like a pseudo-legal space; if government spooks come to you and ask you to do X and Y because terrorism, and it sounds legit, that’s probably a strong coordination mechanism. It still came out eventually.
To compare with COVID-19, there probably are forms of more or less convergent behaviours that produce a conspiracy like appearance, but no space for real large conspiracies of that sort I can think of. My most nigh-conspiratorial C19 opinions are that early “masks are useless” recommendations were more of a ploy to protect PPE stocks than genuine advice, and that regardless of its truth, a lab leak was discounted way too quickly and too thoroughly for political reasons. Both these though don’t require large active conspiracies, but simply convergent interests and biases across specific groups of people.
There’s no way that would apply to the people working at a facility intercepting high end Cisco routers by the truckload and planting backdoors on them, likely mostly bound for large enterprises of certain countries. No credible terrorist groups, or even all of them combined, would order so many thousands of high end routers month after month.