A way that smart people reach conclusions based on faulty premises

One of my most fundamental insights into the conditions that we live under, is that with regards to most situations, events and phenomenon, we only have access to our own distorted perceptions, of a very limited amount of the total input that pertains to the situation, event or phenomenon. 

With this in mind, I want to talk about a curious observation that I’ve made, especially among people that are generally regarded as pretty smart. Namely that they often tend to dismiss claims as untrue, because from where they currently stand, they cannot see how said claims could possibly be true. 

Let’s take something that I hear over and over again with regards to “conspiracy theories”. Namely that for certain conspiracies to be true, too many people have to be in on it and there is just no way that no one would blow the whistle. Or that those conspiring would never be able to get along and therefore the conspiracy would fall apart due to internal power struggles. 

Here I want to ask some important questions, aimed at expanding the information-processing perspective. Because so much is dependent on what perspective we take and what questions we ask ourselves.

I’m not saying that what I just said cannot be used to invalidate certain conspiracy theories. Perhaps these are even waterproof arguments against every conspiracy theory that exists and ever has existed. But do you really know this? What do you base such knowledge on? Do you know that there is no possible way to organize a cover-up in such a way, that only a handful of people know what is really going on, even though a large mass of people have to be involved in the totality of the conspiracy? Do you know for a fact that no one has tried to blow the whistle? Can you for example know that all people have basically the same psychology, which would make the cooperation required for the cover-ups impossible? Do you know that there are no ways around such obstacles? Do you even know that everyone that runs the world are humans?

The last question was meant to provoke. But how do you really know? That something sounds too far out to be true has never been a guarantee that it is false. Why do we assume that we know so much more about the world today, than we did 2000 years ago? Hasn’t the whole of human history been one discovery after another, of how little we know about the world and existence itself?

I don’t think that Occam’s razor was meant to be used to discard any alternative explanation to the most obvious one. Especially when we lack firm criteria to determine which explanation is the most obvious one. Is it the one that the majority believes? The one spouted by the mass media and the public figures that function within the establishment? How and why is it so? Do you feel that the people that you put your trust in have earned your trust?