Hindsight and Survivorship Bias in Conspiracy Theory

By Kyle Mamounis of www.nutricrinology.com

The recent (and nearly forgotten) shooting in Las Vegas, complete with shifting story, generated a fresh bout of conspiracy theories. I like conspiracy theories. I believe a good many of them are likely true. The state, after all, is a conspiracy of which libertarians and anarchists theorize.

Spending time on the internet, however, may provide you a supply of conspiracy theories that rapidly outstrips your demand. Conversely, conspiracy theory skeptics present a nauseating level of smugness and dismissal. Those that believe because they want to believe contrasted with those who hold conspiracy theories a priori false.

Henri Poincaré:

“To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.”

Both the naïve believer and the naïve skeptic err, committing Type I and Type II errors through hindsight and survivorship biases.

The error of the conspiracy theorist

The hardcore conspiracy theorist sees all events as tightly orchestrated. Information leaks are intentional, carefully designed to demoralize the public. Whistle blowers confirming only some theories are “controlled opposition.” Visible failures are distractions, to hide a larger coup elsewhere. The unfalsifiable hypotheses set forth by many conspiracy theorists are impenetrable.

What is there to discuss, if both hidden as well as leaked information both serve to confirm total conspiratorial control?

This thinking is reminiscent of Marxist class analysis, whereby a working-class person holding non-Marxist views cannot truly disagree, but is experiencing false consciousness.

The error of the skeptic

The skeptic has an unfalsifiable hypothesis as well. Conspiracies cannot exist, he claims, because someone involved would leak the information, promptly ending the conspiracy. Conspiring state actors would jealously guard incriminating information, never declassifying or releasing documents; therefore any released information disproves the existence of conspiracy. “Debunkers” are heralded, even if only addressing one part, usually the weakest, of a conspiracy theory.

Failures of any kind prove that no cabals exert any meaningful control; the inability to do any one thing serves as proof of the inability to do all things.

The government is too incompetent to efficiently deliver mail, how could it pull off a grand conspiracy?

Conspiracies, like all organic phenomena, are under selective pressures. A conspiracy that is easily understandable to the public, motivating opposition, is stillborn.

It is only schemes bamboozling to the public that can develop into successful conspiracies, as in nature only the organisms for us to observe are those that successfully fit an available niche.

The tendency of skeptics to claim that a conspiracy theory is too outlandish to be true, thus dismissing it, presents an opportunity that can be leveraged by conspirators.

How long do parents live in denial that their drug-addicted child is stealing from them? Would he ever have been able to do so if the idea didn’t initially seem unbelievable?

The psychosocial dynamics of financial bubbles illustrate this concept:

Q1: The month before the infamous housing bubble “popped,” was there a housing bubble?

Q2: Did some people (many of them part of the liberty movement) have and attempt to communicate to the public knowledge to this effect?

Q3: Did that attempt at communication mean that the bubble didn’t exist, or that it was so powerful it would never pop?

A financial bubble cannot inflate if the entire society is aware of its potential; as well a conspiracy could not develop under those conditions. Potential house buyers and mortgage lenders wouldn’t expose themselves to a market that they believed would soon violently reverse.

The error here is survivorship bias.

It is precisely because these particular concepts are not grasped by the public that the existence of bubbles and conspiracies is possible. Something about housing prices going up ad infinitum was believable to the public; mutatis mutandis, the government not telling the truth about 9/11 is not believable.

Bubbles don’t pop, and conspiracies aren’t uncovered, simply because information is available that undermine them. The public must be comprehend the information and be motivated to act upon it.

Consider that prey develop defenses against predators, yet still predators exist.

Surviving the selective process, they become the observed sample. There is a graveyard of proto-predators, never having succeeded sufficiently to produce numbers observable to scientists. Similarly, conspiracy schemers may be failing all of the time, but these failures are not observed since they never rise to prominence in the first place.

An example of hindsight bias in conspiracy theories can be seen in so-called “predictive programming.”

A list of comic books, movies, and video games supposedly predicted the felling of the Twin Towers on 9/11.

Taken together, the images are admittedly quite compelling. Videos and articles exist connecting past art and media to many historical events.

But what about the art and media that doesn’t predict future events, how should we consider that?

What of historical events that aren’t foreshadowed in art and media?

If you ignore those two categories, then the pieces that appear to predict are compelling. If you include them, then the seemingly predictive pieces can begin to look like they are cherry picked from an enormous random sample. This illustrates the difference between forward and the reverse processes. In hindsight, many things can be postdictively explained as causative, but the true test of an explanation is predictive ability.

“Predictive programming,” if only suggested after an event, is really “postdictive programming.”

Upon seeing a town with a large living population, the naïve believer concludes that no one must ever die there. Meanwhile his friend, the naïve skeptic, strolls through the graveyard, exclaiming “look at all of these headstones, surely there can’t be anyone left alive in all of the town!”

For the history you didn’t learn in school, check out Liberty Classroom:

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