Looking at the press association example, I think that one problem here is that similar ideas are being blurred, and given a single probability instead of separate ones.
A lot of the theories involving press/politician association involve conspiracy to conceal specific, high impact information from the public, or similar levels of dysfunction of the media. Most of these are low probability (I can’t think of any counterexamples offhand); as far as I know either no or a very small percentage of such theories have been demonstrated as true over time.
Different theories involving association have different probabilities. The Leveson Inquiry is providing reasonably strong evidence for influence and close social connections, so the proposition that that existed would seem to have been fairly accurate.
I don’t know what exactly you heard described as a conspiracy theory, in the fairly large space of possible theories, but it seems to me that that example is a good case where it is important to review the evidence for, and recognise fallacies (including overestimation of the probability of agency) in a specific theory, rather than decide what classification of theory it falls into, and judge it based on whether theories in that classification are generally “conspiracy theories”.
Looking at the press association example, I think that one problem here is that similar ideas are being blurred, and given a single probability instead of separate ones.
A lot of the theories involving press/politician association involve conspiracy to conceal specific, high impact information from the public, or similar levels of dysfunction of the media. Most of these are low probability (I can’t think of any counterexamples offhand); as far as I know either no or a very small percentage of such theories have been demonstrated as true over time.
Different theories involving association have different probabilities. The Leveson Inquiry is providing reasonably strong evidence for influence and close social connections, so the proposition that that existed would seem to have been fairly accurate.
I don’t know what exactly you heard described as a conspiracy theory, in the fairly large space of possible theories, but it seems to me that that example is a good case where it is important to review the evidence for, and recognise fallacies (including overestimation of the probability of agency) in a specific theory, rather than decide what classification of theory it falls into, and judge it based on whether theories in that classification are generally “conspiracy theories”.