A recent episode of the podcast Skeptoid (#416, 5/27/2014, "5 Conspiracy Theories that Turned Out to Be True... Maybe?") Brian Dunning discusses what he defines as a true conspiracy theory and how although there are many examples of conspiracies, there haven’t really been any conspiracy theories that have been proven true. Link: http://ift.tt/1mIWaVv
His definition of what would be a conspiracy proven true would be
He then goes on to discuss the top five conspiracy theories sent to him by listeners of Joe Rogan’s podcast, and how none of them fit his definition per se
For the sake of argument this is a fairly narrow definition of criteria for true conspiracy theories. #2 in the definition seems arbitrary, if "law enforcement" knows something, but that is classified or not made public, then that doesn’t really mean that someone on the outside of who made that hypothesis was fitting back facts, and same for the Media, if someone in the media reports on it, but it isn’t widely accepted, or the government denies it, then that is the very stuff of conspiracy theories, so I don’t see why we would eliminate those cases. I think it is very interesting and important to know about government involved conspiracies themselves, regardless of how well they were predicted. I would have defined as members of the government conspiracy as the government abused it’s power to perform some harmful actions and then attempted to cover up that event.
If we are to follow the Skeptoid definition, then I could think of another other candidates.
Project Echelon conspiracy theories from late 90’s, that NSA and UK GCHQ (+Canada, Australia and New Zealand) were all listening on all sorts of private communications of their citizens, specifically an element of this was massive voice data collection, I remember hearing this one on programs like Coast to Coast back then. Example of the early reporting I could find from 1999: http://ift.tt/1mIWaVw.
Now as we all know thanks to Snowden’s NSA leaks, there were in fact, programs that were used to collect data from all kinds of sources, voice data being collected by one called “Nucleon” (which apparently was fed in to the wider PRISM program) source: http://ift.tt/1wTgJ8H
Are there any others? I also don't think it has to be U.S. specific.
His definition of what would be a conspiracy proven true would be
- it must be specific enough to be falsifiable.
- It must be known to the conspiracy theorist before it's discovered by the media or law enforcement.
He then goes on to discuss the top five conspiracy theories sent to him by listeners of Joe Rogan’s podcast, and how none of them fit his definition per se
- The Gulf of Tonkin
- COINTELPRO
- Government Assassination of MLK jr.
- Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
- CIA Drugs for Guns
For the sake of argument this is a fairly narrow definition of criteria for true conspiracy theories. #2 in the definition seems arbitrary, if "law enforcement" knows something, but that is classified or not made public, then that doesn’t really mean that someone on the outside of who made that hypothesis was fitting back facts, and same for the Media, if someone in the media reports on it, but it isn’t widely accepted, or the government denies it, then that is the very stuff of conspiracy theories, so I don’t see why we would eliminate those cases. I think it is very interesting and important to know about government involved conspiracies themselves, regardless of how well they were predicted. I would have defined as members of the government conspiracy as the government abused it’s power to perform some harmful actions and then attempted to cover up that event.
If we are to follow the Skeptoid definition, then I could think of another other candidates.
Project Echelon conspiracy theories from late 90’s, that NSA and UK GCHQ (+Canada, Australia and New Zealand) were all listening on all sorts of private communications of their citizens, specifically an element of this was massive voice data collection, I remember hearing this one on programs like Coast to Coast back then. Example of the early reporting I could find from 1999: http://ift.tt/1mIWaVw.
Now as we all know thanks to Snowden’s NSA leaks, there were in fact, programs that were used to collect data from all kinds of sources, voice data being collected by one called “Nucleon” (which apparently was fed in to the wider PRISM program) source: http://ift.tt/1wTgJ8H
Are there any others? I also don't think it has to be U.S. specific.
via JREF Forum http://ift.tt/1wTi7Ig
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