Epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) is important because it underlies the problem of truth in economics and in all other area of rational research and discourse. Epistemology is also relevant to conspiracies theories. As philosopher Robert Nozick pointed out, in the social sciences, invisible-hand explanations are always preferable because otherwise the conclusion is planted in the premises–a vindication of Adam Smith and classical-liberal economics!
The Ptolemaic system of astronomy also faced an epistemological trap in explaining the movement of planets and stars with the help of epicycles (cycles moving on other circles). When an empirical observation contradicted the system’s predictions, the astronomer only needed to add an epicycle to make the theory fit the fact. Similarly, adding one new conspirator or a new conspiratorial component can always explain away, ad infinitum, any objection to a given conspiracy. Only much later, with the work of mathematician Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier in the 18th century, did we start understanding that any smooth curve or movement in space can be approximated with a sufficient number of epicycles.
Ptolemy’s theory was more complicated than needed to understand, and to better understand, the movement of planets and stars. Just like Ptolemaic astronomy, conspiracy theories (at least complex ones) violate Occam’s razor, that is, the principle that “pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate,” or “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” In other words, of two explanatory theories, the simplest one should be preferred ceteris paribus. Granted that it is not always clear what “the simplest” means.
Conspiracies are not impossible, but the more complex and the less incentive-compatible they are, the lower their probability. (See my post “Why a Vast Election Fraud is Highly Implausible” and its complement, “Implausible Conspiracy and Unfair Election.)
The shaky epistemological status of conspiracy theories can be illustrated by a recent Facebook post of mine and the comment of Professor Sinclair Davidson, an economist at RMIT University in Australia. I posted:
Here is another [I should have written: “the correct”] conspiracy theory: The Deep State approached Trump around 2015 and asked him to run for president, assuring him of their support. “We know how to run elections,” they told him. The Deep State needed some puppet or clown who would make individual liberty (including the 1st and 2nd Amendments) look totally cranky, thereby preparing the terrain for a future dictator. They told Trump that only he, with his genius, his legendary honesty, and his golf game, could play this important role. Alas, Trump fell in love with the job (as he did with the North Korean dictator), the tweets, the honors, the constant attention, and broke with his Deep State handlers. We saw the consequence on November 3.
Sinclair Davidson brillantly commented:
I have a different theory: Deep state approached Trump exactly like you said but lost control of the 2016 election. He was the patsy meant to lose. Now we see 2020.
Conspiracies can explain any event (even in the physical world if the gods, like Greek gods, engage in conspiracies), and a large number of different conspiracies can explain the same event. Hence conspiracy theories are generally useless, at best.
READER COMMENTS
Stéphane Couvreur
Dec 3 2020 at 7:31am
On the Fourier basis of the Ptolemaic system, here is an excellent explanation, with a “reductio ad Homer Simpson” as a bonus… 😉
https://youtu.be/qS4H6PEcCCA
Thomas Hutcheson
Dec 3 2020 at 8:17am
The problem with the Ptolemaic system was that it was a-theoretic, not derivable from a theory about how objects actually moved in space. It was “underdetermined” in the way this “flaw” in Machine Learning is.https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/google-reveals-major-hidden-weakness-in-machine-learning?utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AllDiscovermagazinecomContent+%28All+DISCOVERmagazine.com+stories%29&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 3 2020 at 10:41am
@Thomas: Can we really say that the Ptolemaic system was a-theoretic? Assume that the earth is at the center of the earth. From that assumption, develop a logical-mathematical model of the position of celestial bodies. Check the model predictions against observations. In the Ptolemaic model, they generally match. Wasn’t the problem that the model was too easy to tweak–that is, to get ad hoc modifications (and complications) to account for unexplained observations? In somewhat different words, the theory was wrong.
Thomas Hutcheson
Dec 3 2020 at 8:27pm
My understanding (I’m not an expert) is that the Ptolemaic system did not really conceptualize physical objects traversing the epicycles. It was just a way of predicting positions of points of light. And it did so better than the first Copernican calculations.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 3 2020 at 8:12pm
The Copernican and then the Keplerian systems were introduced well before Newton’s theory of universal gravitation.
And, if there is a fundamental distinction between description and theory, that distinction is not clear-cut.
Mark Z
Dec 4 2020 at 12:51am
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say the Ptolemaic model was overdetermined? One could come up with a complicated system of equations that explains any particular set of observations, but the posited model always fails to generalize to new observations because it is highly specified to the original set of observations (and so with each new set of observations, the model must be made even more complex to fit the data). This is also a problem in machine learning.
Jose Pablo
Dec 4 2020 at 4:08pm
Maybe the econometrics’ saturation in “modern economics”, analyzing ever smaller problems with limited regard to overarching coherent theories, is a Ptolemaic approach to the subject..
We are building beautiful (sometimes) armillary spheres.
Alan Goldhammer
Dec 3 2020 at 9:21am
Perhaps not. The latest report indicates President Trump has collected $170M to help fund efforts overturn the election results. He gets to keep all the money and use it for a variety of purposes in the future.
I look at this as another example of ‘Tulipmania’ and other popular delusions that were amply documented by Charles Mackay in his book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” This one was published back in 1851!
Craig
Dec 3 2020 at 2:36pm
Have a hankering to watch some episodes of die Wochenschau. Credible enough to the average German until Barbarossa stalled in the winter of 1941. At the Wannsee Conference, Himmler is reputed to have said that the Endlösung must remain unwritten.
Of course the Professor makes a good point here nevertheless: “Conspiracies are not impossible, but the more complex and the less incentive-compatible they are, the lower their probability.”
Isn’t capturing the federal government the ultimate prize, is there a large one in the US? Beyond that though, believe it or not, is there not this low-boil Cyberwar? Turns out there are an insane number of people in this world who are insanely driven to be a general miscreant. They do it simply because they can.
We live in an age where small groups (example: “A hacker group tried to hijack 900,000 WordPress sites over the last week”) can have outsized consequences: https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-hacker-group-tried-to-hijack-900000-wordpress-sites-over-the-last-week/
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 3 2020 at 4:36pm
@Craig: The benefits to each participating individual must be higher than his own expected costs. Benefits include the thrill–but few are willing to spend the rest of their life in jail for the thrill. (Some are, and they are probably already in jail.) Costs include the probability of being caught multiplied by the penalty. This is what I tried to say in https://www.econlib.org/why-a-vast-election-fraud-is-highly-implausible/.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 3 2020 at 8:19pm
I’ve been writing my own ‘blog entry on conspiracy. I don’t want to hijack yours by presenting a draft here, but I none-the-less I want to make some of the same points here.
The most general sense of the word “conspiracy” is combination for shared purpose. Plainly some people are speaking and writing of a narrower conception; it is important, then, to define terms.
A conspiracy is distinct from a hidden-hand process in that the latter obtains when a framework results in an outcome regardless of whether it is the purpose of any participant, let alone a shared purpose.
Chance, hidden-hand processes, and centrally-coordinated conspiracies do not exhaust the possibilities when dealing with outcomes from collective behavior that are not acknowledged purposes. For example, the long-standing journalistic practice of swiftly mentioning that a corrupt official is associated with an unfavored party, while delaying or altogether avoiding mention if the official were associated with a favored party, is combination for unacknowledged shared purpose, but does not involve central coordination nor even much-if-any signalling amongst the participants. Both those who theorize centralized conspiracies and those who deny conspiracies altogether need to consider whether and when outcomes may instead be results of such processes.
Weir
Dec 4 2020 at 12:35am
There was a poll commissioned by The Economist in 2018. Two out of three Democrats declared that “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President.”
They could have entertained any number of invisible hand explanations for Clinton’s defeat. What the conspiracy theorists adopted instead was a hidden hand explanation, or a Mano Nera explanation. Call it a Cosa Nostra explanation. Kremlin gangsters were said to have rigged the Diebold machines or flipped the numbers somehow to change the tallies.
It didn’t matter to these conspiracy theorists that Iran is a Russian ally and Trump’s actions have been hostile to Iranian interests. It didn’t matter that Trump’s actions in support of fracking and in support of oil and gas pipelines in America are hostile to Russian interests. (These particular conspiracy theorists don’t seem to have ever asked themselves cui bono, who benefits.)
But conspiracy theorists thrive in their epistemic bubbles and their safe spaces.
If you never read or watch or listen to anyone who doesn’t already agree that Russia “hacked the election” or asks the pesky question about why Trump never delivered any payback to his handlers in the Kremlin, then you end up like Neera Tanden: “Why would hackers hack in unless they could change results? What’s the point?”
If you’re like Neera Tanden you insist that the Steele dossier was “mostly proven to be true.” You call it a “lie” that the voting machines weren’t tampered with. And eventually you simply delete hundreds of embarrassing Tweets about blackmail and treason and fraud.
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