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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

> However, some conspiracy theories turn out to be true, so we can't discount all of them without a merits-based examination of each hypothesis.)

No. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Unless evidence moves the Bayesian priors, conspiracy theories should be regarded as the garbage they are.

I don't subscribe to the post-truth society.

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> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Such as this person clearly needing "mental help" because they implied collusion/corruption. Nobody asked or expected anyone to believe anything based on their statement, rather we are asked to believe it must be insane to make such a statement.

What's extraordinary about conspiracies?

What is ordinary about them is a better question. The burden of proof is absolutely in your ballpark here.

Can you prove these aren't just crackpot theories? Do you have any primary sources or tangible evidence to support your claims?

Other way around. You're the one who said they were "extraordinary."

In the absence of evidence of the extraordinary, it seems most prudent to fall back to the ordinary in the vein of Occam’s razor. If you see a bright flash and then a tree catches fire, do you assume it’s lightning or a deep state conspiracy?

I argued they're so ordinary and pervasive that considering that angle should be more common:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_psycholog...

> What's extraordinary about conspiracies?

1) Humans suck at keeping their mouths shut

2) Most conspiracy theories posit excessive competence (itself extremely rare) that somehow defies all the weird things that reality can throw at you and make things fail.

Most "conspiracies" had plenty of evidence even at the time--people chose to ignore it because it benefited them. See: Epstein, Weinstein, Cosby, etc.

So, real conspiracies that people don't know about do exist--but they are tremendously rare.

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