Timeline for What is the correct, pragmatic, reasoning response to conspiracy theories?
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6 events
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| Sep 17, 2018 at 17:21 | comment | added | labreuer | @DavidBlomstrom: There has been a tremendous amount of work on what qualifies as good history and I've only seen bits and pieces. What I surmise is that you want simple models with redundant evidence so that as more artifacts are unearthed, they largely corroborate your current model. See Wikipedia's Bootstrapping (statistics). But falsifying evidence is not the only metric historians use to prefer one model/explanation over another. It's probably just the simplest! | |
| Jan 17, 2014 at 3:42 | comment | added | labreuer | @Ingo, we can fire lasers at the moon and hit retroreflectors placed there, which is surely some kind of evidence. My second paragraph also applies. And yep, if we aren't predicating any actions on whether it happened, then it [probably] doesn't matter. | |
| Jan 16, 2014 at 16:02 | comment | added | Ingo | Another example was "Moon landing". What could one possibly predict therefrom? In fact, the Moon landing is totally irrelevant for the majority of humans. Hence in such cases, I wouldn't even try to disprove. I couldn't care less would be a more appropriate answer. | |
| Jan 16, 2014 at 1:04 | comment | added | labreuer | The historian's model is still falsifiable though, unlike the conspiracy theorist who can always come up for a reason why it was that way. So I think this falls under my second paragraph? | |
| Jan 15, 2014 at 21:28 | comment | added | dwjohnston | Can you make a similar request of historians? For example when historians say 'At the boston tea party, a bunch of men dressed as indians and threw the tea overboard, their motives were... we know this because it's documented in the following...'. This is the historians model of what happened in the world. However, we can't really expect them to make any prediction from this, but this doesn't discount the veracity of their model. | |
| Jan 15, 2014 at 19:11 | history | answered | labreuer | CC BY-SA 3.0 |