Conspiracism

A false Epistemology that attributes errors, choices, and emergent regularities to a duplicitous cabal that places its own interests above those of the public, rather than to more mundane explanations.

Conspiracism is bad explanation-making. It substitutes intentional villainy for emergent phenomena, systemic failures, and ordinary human error. It is easy to vary — any counter-evidence is reinterpreted as further evidence of the conspiracy.

Connections

• •A false Epistemology — a broken method of generating explanations
• •Produces explanations that are easy to vary, not hard to vary
• •Misunderstands Emergence — attributing emergent patterns to deliberate design
• •Resists Criticism — making it function like an Anti-Rational Meme
• •Opposed by Critical Rationalism — which demands testable, hard-to-vary explanations
• •Related to Creationism — both invoke intentional agents where none are needed