The Situation Room
EXTRACT YOUR HEAD AND START THINKING
Why smart people believe in weird things:
Unfortunately, there is no formal definition of a weird thing that most people can agree upon, because it depends so much on the particular claim being made in the context of the knowledge base that surrounds it and the individual or community proclaiming it. One person’s weird belief might be another’s normal theory, and a weird belief at one time might subsequently become normal. Stones falling from the sky were once the belief of a few daffy Englishmen; today we have an accepted theory of meteorites. In the jargon of science philosopher Thomas Kuhn, revolutionary ideas that are initially anathema to the accepted paradigm, in time may become normal science as the field undergoes a paradigm shift. Still, we can formulate a general outline of what might constitute a weird thing as we consider specific examples. For the most part, what I mean by a “weird thing” is:
- a claim unaccepted by most people in that particular field of study,
- a claim that is either logically impossible or highly unlikely, and/or
- a claim for which the evidence is largely anecdotal and uncorroborated.
For those of us in the business of debunking bunk and explaining the unexplained, this is what I call the Hard Question: why do smart people believe weird things? My Easy Answer will seem somewhat paradoxical at first: Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.
Michael Shermer, Why People Believe in Weird Things excerpt. http://www.michaelshermer.com/weird-things/excerpt/
A conspiracy theory is an explanatory proposition that accuses one or more persons, a group, or an organization of having caused or covered up, through secret planning and deliberate action, an illegal or harmful event or situation.
Some scholars suggest that people formulate conspiracy theories to explain, for example, power relations in social groups and the existence of evil forces. It has been suggested by some thinkers that conspiracy theories have chiefly psychological or socio-political origins. Proposed psychological origins include projection; the personal need to explain “a significant event [with] a significant cause;" and the product of various kinds and stages of thought disorder, such as paranoid disposition, ranging in severity to diagnosable mental illnesses. Similarly, socio-political origins may be discovered in the need of people to believe in event causation rather than suffer the insecurity of a random world and universe.
The effects of a world view that places conspiracy theories centrally in the unfolding of history have been debated, with some saying that it has become “the dominant paradigm of political action in the public mind." Although the term "conspiracy theory" has acquired a derogatory meaning over time, it has also been used by some to refer to actual, proven conspiracies, such as historical regimes that have colluded to form real conspiracies within and without (e.g., Hitler and Stalin agreeing to divide Europe) and used conspiracies to manipulate their subjects (e.g., Hitler's “Jewish conspiracy”).
According to some psychologists, a person who believes in one conspiracy theory tends to believe in others.
Information is an important commodity. Nations, corporations and individuals protect secret information with encryption, using a variety of methods ranging from substituting one letter for another to using a complex algorithm to encrypt a message. On the other side of the information equation are people who use a combination of logic and intuition to uncover secret information. These people are cryptanalysts, also known as code breakers.
A person who communicates through secret writing is called a cryptographer. Cryptographers might use codes, ciphers or a combination of both to keep messages safe from others. What cryptographers create, cryptanalysts attempt to unravel.
Throughout the history of cryptography, people who created codes or ciphers were often convinced their systems were unbreakable. Cryptanalysts have proven these people wrong by relying on everything from the scientific method to a lucky guess. Today, even the amazingly complex encryption schemes common in Internet transactions may have a limited useful lifetime – quantum computing might make solving such difficult equations a snap.
Jonathan Strickland, http://science.howstuffworks.com/code-breaker.htm
Declassification is the process of documents that formerly were classified as secret ceasing to be so restricted, often under the principle of freedom of information. Procedures for declassification vary by country. Papers may be withheld without being classified as secret, and eventually made available.