I. Motivating Conspiracy Thinking, or, What They Get Right
There are lots of false beliefs that we can have, at various levels of complexity. I’ve had various beliefs over time about how healthy bread is for me, how powerful Germany is as a nation-state compared to the rest of the world, and even how (or how well) my government works. Some of these beliefs have been truer or falser than others; some flatly true or false. It is my hope that I can believe true things as much as possible. In the case of conspiracies then, I hope to believe that conspiracies exist when they do exist, and not to believe that they exist when they don’t.
So let’s get something out of the way: there are real conspiracies. Governments have conducted secret programs on their own citizens, security agencies have undermined foreign powers, corporations have conspired to manipulate and control the public. To say otherwise is to live in a world of fantasy where either all groups are powerless or all groups have super-nice goals all the time. We obviously don’t live in that world.
So here we have thing Number 1 that conspiracy theories get right:
Realpolitik.
Often people, organisations, and governments have bad goals and do terrible things. Often, for various reasons, these things are done covertly.
We have lots of good examples of this. Various fossil fuel companies including Exxon, who are powerful actors with lots of monetary interest in the status quo, made and enacted plans to stall action on climate change. They lobbied politicians, often lining their pockets with generous donations. They funded various individuals and media organisations to spread disinformation on climate change. They took many legal and economic opportunities to delay, defund, and outright sabotage green energy initiatives. When that failed, they tried to use every other tactic in the book, including very clever ploys like shifting the conversation onto the carbon footprints of individuals so as to avoid discussion of systemic change in the energy market. Much of this wasn’t publicly known until years after the fact, and some elements we are still learning about. When I visualise this, I see a kind of metaphorical octopus, or multiple octopuses, their powerful tentacles wrapping themselves around lobbyists, politicians, companies, and even whole industries, stretching across oceans and forwards into the future. So: did various companies in the fossil fuel industry conspire to delay the transition to renewable energy? Yes, absolutely. This is a classic case in my book.
How about another famous conspiracy (of sorts): that time the CIA tried to figure out how to mind control people. The CIA, which is has a significant degree of power and autonomy separate to the US government proper, ran a program called MK Ultra during the 1950s and 60s that was designed to investigate methods of weakening human resistance, extracting confessions, and even manipulating the minds of foreign leaders. Had they succeeded, it is likely they would have used these techniques in unscrupulous and illegal ways, potentially even on their own citizenry in certain cases. Conspiracy? Yes.
In fact the US government has a lot of this stuff in its closet: trying to drive Martin Luther King to suicide, testing psychedelic drugs on unsuspecting people of colour, even forcibly sterilising people they deemed inferior.
A lot of what makes something a conspiracy (as opposed to just a Terrible Thing Done by a Group) is how much public attention it gets. Was the Holocaust a conspiracy? It fits the definition, sure. But since we all know about it, no-one would really say “I’m a conspiracy theorist: I believe that Nazi Germany conspired to kill millions of Jews.” The reason is that everyone already a) knows about this, and b) believes that it happened. Which is why the only beliefs about the Holocaust that we label ‘conspiracy theories’ are ones that involve unknown and unusual claims like “the Holocaust is actually made up.”
This leads me to the second thing conspiracy theorists get right.
Reality is Weird
Lots of things that sound unbelievable turn out to be true. The world is strange, especially when humans are involved.
MK-Ultra sounds like the kind of thing you’d read in a pulp thriller or see in a sci-fi movie starring Tom Cruise. But it’s real, and often these real, wild-sounding events are the fodder that inspire the fiction we find so unbelievable. Yes, government agencies have tried to figure out how to control people’s minds. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg probably wants everyone to live in his Metaverse and make all their purchases in Metabucks so he becomes the richest most powerful person in history or whatever. Yes, there was a billionaire pedophile island that a bunch of powerful people likely visited. And yes, the US government has now admitted that their military has been tracking a bunch of UFOs (now called UAPs to sound more respectable) and doesn’t seem to know what they are. I try to never dismiss a claim because it sounds odd, because odd things happen all the time. It’s better to reason through each case individually.
So that is my opening to anyone who believes in conspiracy theories, regardless of whether you like that term: you are right. Conspiracies exist. Sometimes they are huge, involving powerful people, tonnes of money, and big organisations like transnational corporations or government agencies. I think that it must be really painful to be constantly dismissed or talked down to if you believe certain theories, and that’s the absolute last thing that I want to associate myself with. You are not stupid because you believe that COVID-19 was a planned event, or that the US government is lying about their knowledge of UAPs. No given belief makes someone unworthy of consideration. Instead, I’d like to examine some of the motivating intuitions of conspiracy thinking, and how they (like all cognitive tools) can get things right or go astray.
II. Cracks in the Globe
There are levels of conspiracy theorising. Let’s say most popular theories fall into one of these camps, roughly escalating in magnitude of the conspiracy:
Level 1) eg. Watergate, Epstein didn’t kill himself
Level 2) eg. COVID-19 denialism
Level 3) eg. Flat Earth, Satanic New World Order
This is a pretty crude taxonomy, but I mention it partly to confess that I don’t know exactly how to deal with some Level 3 beliefs, because of the radical scale at play. Still, there’s something interesting that I notice with this breakdown. Level 1 beliefs are generally very plausible whether they’re true or not, because they tend to involve a known group doing something to benefit themselves in a way that is relatively achievable given their resources. Things like assassinations, spying schemes, and dodgy CIA programs all fall into this category because whether they happen to be true or not, most of them very well could be true by even conservative standards. As a result, many Level 1 conspiracy theories must be evaluated individually on the basis of the evidence provided, where we can assign likelihoods of truth with rough probability estimates.
But what I’d really like to talk about are Levels 2 and 3, where claims scale up somewhat. There are reasons why some of these theories may be true, but I’d also like to talk about some of the intuitions that motivate these larger theories, and how they can lead us astray. So here’s thing Number 1 that conspiracy theories often get wrong:
Agential Uniformity
Conspiracy theories often overestimate the cohesion of groups or systems, seeing one big connected agent when there are in fact many fractured agents, some directly at odds with each other.
Let’s take the idea that COVID-19 was an intentional scheme, a ‘plandemic’ used by global powers to institute some kind of global control through vaccines or lockdowns or these sorts of measures. I’ve heard a few different versions of this hypothesis, ranging from COVID-19 not being real at all (or being a mild flu) to it actually being a very deadly virus used to reduce global population. Regardless, such a scheme would obviously be a massive undertaking. Not too big for the powers that be, maybe. But who are the powers that be? And are they really one unified group? It’s complicated.
A plandemic scheme would involve getting basically every country’s government on board with this plan: everyone from the Prime Minister of Australia to Xi Xinping to the President of the United States. It would also involve getting on board every official medical organisation, within every country, as well as big international organisations. It is fine to point to a shadowy cabal of global financial elites that are controlling all this, but to endorse this theory is to make an enormous claim about the uniformity of global systems. Whoever this evil group is, they have to get on board a bunch of countries that are at complete odds with each other: it requires the American government colluding with Russia and China, and Russia colluding with Ukraine, and doctors and scientists and all large media companies and corporations colluding together despite having very different organisations and interests that are sometimes completely removed from one another.
All of this is not to say that collusion can’t happen. But global conspiracy theories tend to vastly underestimate how radically difficult it would be to get these groups to work together with no defectors. The world is genuinely, truly complicated. Many country’s governments actively hate each other and want to see the other fail. The same goes for competing corporations. And then we have the medical research community, which is separated into vast numbers of separate and often independent institutions. Different groups want different things, and this is apparent in their actions over time. When we look back at history, even the last twenty years or so, we see exactly what we’d expect to see if there was a bunch of competing groups rather than one monolothic global power structure. We see trade wars, armed conflicts, market competition, academic disputes, financial and economic winners and losers. To claim that a plandemic is a good hypothesis for the COVID-19 situation, we must be prepared to claim that thousands of global leaders of nations, companies, and independent organisations are all part of one with a single shared goal. I think that this is the fundamental problem with these claims: it sees uniformity when there is actually complexity, division, and competition. There’s a reason why conspiracies that get ‘proven’ to the point where nearly everyone must believe them are conspiracies conducted by a single, more unitary group like a single government, or a single government agency, or a single industry with shared goals in a given instance.
This brings me to the second intuition which I think can sometimes go astray.
Hyperagency
Conspiracy theories often overestimate the power of the agents in question.
Some organisations so have a lot of power. The United States government comes to mind, given that it is plausibly the most powerful political entity in human history. It’s so powerful that even subsidiary agencies within its structure can be thought of as being remarkably powerful. The NSA conducts mass surveillance of American citizens, and the CIA was instrumental in the overthrowing of many democratically elected leaders in Latin America.
The same can be said of other governments, as well as international organisations and corporations. The CCP makes dissidents in China disappear. Exxon colluded with a few other companies to halt the transition of an entire industry for decades. The International Monetary Fund sets expansive and demanding terms for financial bailouts given to struggling countries. Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons. Anyone who says that COVID-19 definitely couldn’t have been bioengineered or that Epstein couldn’t have been assassinated is obviously oblivious to the scale of power that some organisations have in the world today.
And yet. The level of agency that I see some conspiracy theories ascribing to various groups boggles the mind. We’re struggling to get climate change under control yet even relatively small countries are claimed to have the power to alter the weather at will.
Reality, as usual, demands complexity. How much power do big organisations have in the world? A whole lot, and not a lot, all at once. China can’t get tiny Hong Kong under control. Russia can’t seem to invade a relatively small country it shares a border with. Exxon couldn’t stop the green energy revolution. the US President routinely fails to pass even modest laws. The CIA couldn’t figure out mind control (unless that’s just what they want me to think). No-one could stop Sweden from trying out a liberal policy towards COVID lockdowns, or China from forging ahead with its hard-headed zero-COVID strategy. The USA just left Afghanistan to the Taliban after years of fighting. The NSA couldn’t stop a guy from leaking their covert surveillance of American citizens. China can’t even seem to develop and roll out an mRNA vaccine that works, despite being one of the most powerful countries on Earth. We’ve nearly experienced nuclear war multiple times because big, powerful nations have silly accidents like the time that the US thought a nuclear training video represented a real nuclear strike on their country. And Australia’s last Prime Minister couldn’t stop the vast majority of Australians from hating his guts.
Truthfully, it is very impressive what humans can accomplish when working together. But all endeavours, even at the most elite levels of the world, are riddled with mistakes, incompetence, and the cold hard limits of reality. To put it another way: I think that Xi Xinping would probably love to reign over a global totalitarian state. But as it stands, he’s struggling with a real estate crisis and an ageing population in China, and he has no idea what to do about any of it. Power is real, but limited.
Now for the final intuition that I think can lead us astray.
Incentive Confusion
Conspiracy theories often fail to properly consider the incentives that groups have, resulting in claims about conspiracies that wouldn’t actually benefit the powerful groups in question.
Eg why the hell would it benefit world elites to kill 90% of the population? Any CEO or President is worried about not having ENOUGH citizens/ employees. It's easy to ascribe blanket evil motives, but unless the people in charge are pure psychopaths, there's usually something more going on. Unfortunately we had a few bad dictators in the Twentieth century who seemed to be deeply genocidal, and it's made us see their archetype everywhere.
Economists love talking about incentives, with good reason. Incentives are a great tool to model behaviour. Exxon is a fossil fuel company with lots of money. Climate change implies the end of their business model, their power, and their money. Ergo, they have incentives to fund climate-denialist media, lobby politicians, and greenwash themselves to obscure their business practises. For a conspiracy to go ahead, the group or groups conducting need not only the power to carry out the conspiracy, they need the motivation. This is way fossil fuel companies make such a great case study of a conspiracy theory, because not only did they have a tonne of money and politician connections to carry out their conspiracy, their incentives were strongly aligned with carrying it out.
Once again though, when we look at conspiracy theories at Level 2 or beyond, they often struggle to provide coherent accounts of the incentives involved. Let’s return to the COVID-19 plandemic hypothesis. Presumably a shadowy cabal of global elites wants to control as much wealth and political power as they can. How likely was a planned global pandemic to achieve their aims?
Some people claim that this global elite wants to vastly reduce the global population to one billion people or so. A pandemic would be a good way to do that, ignoring the fact that COVID-19 was clearly nowhere near deadly enough to achieve that. But why would the elite want to reduce the population like that? More people means more workers to build their global empire, more chattel to rule over, and (importantly) more economic activity to bring in wealth to their greedy pockets. If I was part of a shadowy global elite, reducing the population would be the last thing I’d want to do. There’s a reason why countries like China are now scrambling to try to get their citizens to have more children, and why countries like Australia and America bring in young immigrants. Population means power and wealth. The incentives simply don’t line up.
Okay, so maybe the goal of the plandemic was more modest than that: it gives the elites an excuse to enact more authoritarian policies. This is a much better theory already: a shadowy global elite would probably want greater control over regular people, and crises are a historically good time to push through this sort of thing. After 9/11, countries around the world enacted laws which increased surveillance and extended the ability of governments to detain people or waive their rights, all in the name of security. Similarly, Naomi Klein describes in her book ‘The Shock Doctrine’ that economic or political crises have been used to advance neoliberal economic policies that would otherwise have come under greater scrutiny and criticism.
So does this more modest plandemic theory hold up? I’m not so sure. To take Australia as a case study, let’s say that the Australian government under Scott Morrison was under the thumb of this global elite. When the the plandemic began, they called him and told him to use this opportunity to crush the freedoms of Australians. He goes ahead: temporary lockdowns while we wait for vaccine rollout, firing government workers who refuse to get vaccinated, the works. These are restrictions in freedoms for sure. The problem is that I’m not sure these incentives add up. First, a lot of these things were both obvious and temporary, and were described as such from the beginning. They were big public changes that dominated people’s lives and provoked massive resistance, far from the clever and quiet legal changes that occurred during the years after 9/11. The people in charge of Australia suffered public backlash (Morrison lost the election after this) and endured an economic recession that was immensely costly for these elites. And it was all done over temporary changes that have now been rolled back. Not exactly a masterstroke of authoritarian scheming.
If I was part of the shadowy elite, I would have used the pandemic to start passing quiet ‘pandemic preparedness’ laws that allowed my agencies permanent and expansive powers, or given the UN a bunch of emergency powers or something a little more consequential. Instead what we saw was a bunch of countries implement an eclectic and partial patchwork of rules and restrictions which mostly lasted as long as the largest wave of COVID-19. Don’t get me wrong, governments did also use this crisis in some cases to increase authoritarianism. But here again we run into the previous problems of scope uniformity: countries are different and are run by different people, as are corporations or international organisations. The COVID-19 related conspiracies that are most plausible are ones that take this narrowness into account: China accidentally leaked COVID from a research lab but didn’t want to admit it, or Country X used COVID as an excuse to pass a law that restricts free speech unreasonably.
The example of Australia that I just gave might be a little messy, but I hope that the central points holds. When we consider how plausible a given conspiracy is, we can consider how well it aligns with the incentives of groups involved. There are good reasons why various elites might have wanted Epstein or MLK dead for example. There are less good reasons for companies and governments to want a global virus that killed the economic activity they rely on and which everyone was always eventually going to catch, elites included.
III. Towards Better Conspiracy Theories
I want to shut up about criticising conspiracy theories now, but I hope that I’ve done an okay job of laying out what they can get right and wrong, in general terms. Even if you disagree with my examples, hopefully you can see the sense in the five dotpoints that I laid out as general rules for conspiracies to operate.
I’d like to focus on something unifying to all this: aiming for true beliefs. I am trying, as hard and as I can not to think of conspiracy theories as a single entity that you can accept or reject. The point is that different claims about conspiracies have wildly different levels of realpolitik, weirdness, scope uniformity, hyperagency, and incentive analysis at play. If we really care about believing true things, and not believing false things, then we can’t say that we ‘believe conspiracy theories’ or that ‘conspiracy theories are stupid’. Each theory is its own beast.
I’d like to crystallise the three problems that I have with some conspiracy thinking into something useful for evaluating theories. These ideas aren’t supposed to be a hammer to win arguments with. I want to be able to use them as rough heuristics to evaluate theories. So here are the three heuristics:
Ask yourself whether the entity that you’re thinking of as a single agent is really a single agent. Is it one group with the same goals? Or is it a bunch of different groups with divergent goals and interests?
Ask yourself how much power the entity realistically has to act in the world, given known information and past track record. Could they pull off something on the scale that your theory suggests, as successfully as your theory suggests?
Ask yourself which incentives drive the entity, and whether they honestly align with the actions your theory suggests they have taken/ are taking. If you were in their position, with the goals that you think they have, how would you act? Would you take the action your theory suggests, or would you do something different?
I’d like to add two more general purpose tools to this set. These are two of my favourite cognitive tools, and I am prone to get unreasonably excited about them in conversation.
The first is counterfactual thinking. This involves imagining two possible versions of the world, ignoring for the moment which one you’re in, and asking yourself which seems more plausible. To take an example, let’s use climate change. I find myself in a world where the weather year to year seems more volatile, and a bunch of groups have been talking about how human activity is changing the climate. Interesting. I can form two hypotheses and imagine them as two different worlds. Which one does it seem more likely that I’m in?
World 1: Humans burned a bunch of fossil fuels, which released greenhouse gases that are affecting the Earth’s weather systems. Thousands of scientists in different countries, working for different organisations (governmental, academic, nonprofit, and for-profit), in different scientific fields from meteorology to oceanology all reached near consensus that this was happening. Fossil fuel companies also knew this was happening (having said so openly) but were financially threatened by this and funded a misinformation campaign to make people doubt climate change.
World 2: Burning fossil fuels does not affect the climate, but a group of global elites decided to create the claim that they do affect the climate in order to enact laws which give them greater control over the population. They paid nearly every scientific organisation in the world to create false scientific results and to lie to the public about this. They manage to get most global political leaders in line except for some pesky right-wing holdouts. Fossil fuel companies admit that climate change exist for some reason.
I hope I’m not being uncharitable to the World 2 hypothesis, but I think it’s pretty clear how brutally it fails. Not only does it fail to hold up to our three conspiracy heuristics, but it doesn’t even make internal sense. Every scientific institution in the world? Hell, I know some scientists that have worked on research which corroborates anthropogenic climate change. Are they in on it? It also fails to account for the absolutely bizarre case of every fossil fuel company freely admitting that climate change is real and manmade, and the extensive documentation that they have funded what they freely admit to be a misinformation campaign. It doesn’t add up. If I look at these two worlds, it seems far more likely that I’m living in World 1.
Counterfactual thinking isn’t really much different from thinking normally about which beliefs to hold. But I think the mental act of holding two hypothetical worlds suspended before you, and asking which is a) more internally consistent, and b) more consistent with the information you have about the real world, is really useful.
The second tool I’d like to introduce is making your beliefs pay rent. This involves two parts. The first is to make it concrete. A frustration that a lot of people have with conspiracy theories is that they amount to a vague set of claims, with a vague perpetrator and vague set of possibly relevant outcomes. These theories become very difficult to evaluate and so often avoid scrutiny, because they aren’t even specific enough to criticise. Who is conducting said conspiracy? How? What is the goal of the conspiracy exactly? And importantly, which outcomes are associated with it? I’ve seen plandemic theories that make grandiose claims about how far the conspiracy goes, and how every single piece of news connects back to it. When pressed, these people often struggle to pin down exactly what they believe, and which events they are actually willing to connect to the conspiracy. So it’s important to scrutinise beliefs that we hold, and be honest and concrete about what we actually do and don’t believe. Otherwise we can wind up making vague, non-falsifiable claims which are a) epistemically useless, and b) annoying.
But the second part of making your beliefs pay rent is by making specific, public predictions or bets to keep yourself on track. To quote straight from the above link:
Any belief should restrict which experiences to anticipate, to be potentially useful and thereby pay rent and earn its keep in your mind, so to speak. If a belief does not affect what you anticipate experiencing—if the world would look exactly the same whether the belief is true or whether it is false—then how could you possibly tell if it were false? And if there's no circumstance under which you would be able to notice your belief were false, then why do you believe it now?
Beliefs should affect what we expect to see from the world in the future, and should help us make predictions. This is especially true of theories like conspiracy theories that tend to focus on large events, involving political and economic actors that carry global import. So to test the accuracy of our beliefs, we should be happy to make honest, specific, public predictions of what we think is likely to happen. Otherwise, a claim is just an aesthetic that you wear like a coat.
I’m going to go ahead and make a few predictions here as an example, and to hold my own feet to the fire.
a. I predict that there will be no major adverse reactions to the major American COVID vaccines (Pfizer and Astra-Zeneca) in the next ten years. I define major adverse reactions as an effect which both affects at least 10% of those vaccinated (without similar effects in the unvaccinated population), and is serious enough to require medical intervention (such as a doctor’s visit, or hospitalisation).
b. I predict that in 2025, conditional on no disjunctive advance in technology (eg. artificial general intelligence smart enough to beat humans at standardised tests across multiple domains), there will be no global entity (corporation, nation-state, or international entity such as the United Nations) which has sovereignty or ownership over more than 30% of global GDP.
c. I predict that by 2030, conditional on no disjunctive advance technology (like AGI), the global order will remain largely the same as it is in 2022. By ‘the same’ I mean that the United Nations exists but does not have expanded powers or sovereignty (and five countries still have veto power in the General Assembly), that there will be multiple powerful nations including the USA and China, and multiple transnational corporations. I’m happy to be rather permissive with what counts as a falsification of this claim, to avoid having to detail every element of what I consider to be the ‘global order’.
Feel free to suggest more specific prediction topics for me in the comments. I’m also happy to bet against things like Australian legislation which significantly reduces individual rights in an explicitly non-temporary way this decade, or against global economic collapse this decade, given my grasp on the evidence.
So, to add these tools to our list of heuristics:
Counterfactual Thinking
Compare two possible worlds based off the competing theories for an event or system, and ask which is more likely to be the world you live in.
Making Your Beliefs Pay Rent
Make public (even just with a friend), specific predictions or bets that put your beliefs about the world to the test. Notice if the increased stakes make you less certain about a theory that you previously endorsed confidently.
IV. Closing Thoughts, or, The Tragedy of the Age
At the bottom of all this is a festering problem that I cannot solve with clever heuristics. We live in a big world with billions of people and thousands of groups, all making claims that are increasingly visible to us via social media. Much ink has been spilled fretting about social media ‘bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’, but at the core of it is an anxiety about the difficulty of getting to truth and how much harder it gets once you have an order-of-magnitude more plausible voices shouting in your ear every time you log on. You can find arguments and research to support basically any position or belief. A lot of it is very compelling and plausible, even when it’s false. We have busy lives, and yet we are supposed to take on the extra role of evaluating every claim that we see for truth, using a network of other information that may be just as unreliable.
There are ways through this thicket of course. Not easy ways that I can jot down in a sentence, but we can truly increase our scientific literacy and our media literacy in ways that make us better at arriving at truth. But such a project is more than I can fit in this blog post.
I need to express, at this point, having exhausted all my cleverness and concepts, how much pain I feel at this situation. We routinely see families torn apart over disagreements in beliefs, and the propagation of dangerously false ideas. Putting aside all of the theorising, I just want to live in the same conceptual world as my father, to share a basic understanding of what is going on around us. We currently do not. And though my family remains basically intact, I do see some cracks. He is a good man, a smart and kind man who I worry is drifting into currents that drag people towards dark and confusing places. This post, before anything, is an attempt to bridge a gap between us.
I’d like to close with some thoughts about what you can do if you believe in at least some conspiracies. I think that the heart of conspiracy thinking is a concern about power, and its imbalance. Conspiracy theorists worry about who has power, how much power, and what is being done with it. And so, if you would like to be pragmatic about this, I think there are a few causes you can support.
Politics geared towards egalitarianism, democratic reform, and political/corporate transparency. The more wealth and political power is redistributed downwards and outwards, the less real conspiracies can come to pass. Likewise, the more transparent and engaging the political system (and corporate systems) are, the more we can avoid abuses of power. There are grassroots organisations you can join, as well as political parties depending on your country. The Greens in Australia are deeply committed to these sorts of activities. In America there are movements to reform the voting system, break the two-party hold on American politics and make voting more representative. There are also movements targeting transparency. At the moment the Democratic Party (especially the newer crop of Justice Democrats) have shown more initiative in working on policy reform in these areas than Republicans, though this could change in future.
Put simply, it’s harder to imagine the Finnish government pulling off evil conspiracies than it is to imagine other groups (like the American government) pulling off similar conspiracies. The reason is a combination of their high levels of economic equality, common-sense regulations of private entities, and their robust and transparent democratic institutions. If you are concerned about abuses of power, these reforms should be your outlet.
Other issues. Some problems in the world are caused by conspiracies. Others are not. I hope this uncontroversial opinion can be used as a springboard to expand our focus on improving the world. I think there are three big cause areas that are not traditional conspiracies but are still worth considering and potentially getting involved with.
The first is global health and development. There are a lot of poor people in the world, and we can help them in very effective and cheap ways. Two suggestions are malaria nets which are well-evidenced to save the lives of children and pregnant women, and direct cash transfers which powerfully and immediately improve quality of life in poor villages.
The second is animal welfare. In much of the world, farmed animals are treated horribly, in ways we would not approve of were they replaced with common pets like dogs. There are successful movements underway to do things like reduce intense factory farming and to get big grocery chains to agree not to sell caged eggs. These movements result in much less suffering for farmed animals, which I think is a noble goal.
The third is mitigating existential risks like pandemics, nuclear war, and novel technologies. Some dangers to civilisation are from bad people doing bad things. Others are more complicated. Pandemics can arise zoonotically from close human-animal contact (eg. wet markets), or through accidental lab leaks during viral research, or even potentially through bioengineered viruses released by terrorist groups. There are ways that we can reduce these risks. Another example is nuclear war, which is kind of an anti-conspiracy. If only Biden and Putin would conspire together, then we wouldn’t have to worry about them blowing each other up! Avoiding nuclear war through measures like treaties and disarmament is really important.
It is my honest hope that we can converge on truth together, and improve the world in ways that matter. In the meantime all I have is the mantra I began with. Let’s try to believe in conspiracies that are true, and not to believe in conspiracies that are false.
With love and - I hope - humility,
Conor.