futureProjects-ConspiracyProject

When there is a choice between two mutually incompatible systems of beliefs, how to know which one to choose? This involves some criterion of how each system "holds together", not only with itself, but also with all of your other beliefs.

Are there UFOs?

Some people say yes, some say no. How to know who to believe? "Science" says no, but could that just be groupthink? We need to assess if the debunker's point of view really satisfactorally addresses all of the evidence, or on the other hand if there are "loose ends" that seem sufficienly important.

Are we being misled by a vast conspiracy?

Illuminatus trilogy. Political conspiracy, a secret society running the world. Maybe there is one, how would you know?

Well, in reality, maybe you could know. Humans make mistakes. Surely there would be some things that would require explanations; surely some coverups would not "ring true".

But if the media were controlled, maybe these topics would just not gather attention from the cybernetic "mind" of the common people.

Perhaps, though, we could detect when "loose ends" were not receiving the attention they deserve. Some "loose ends" would be particularly "telling"; for instance, if I was killed in a strange accident shortly before publishing this theory, that would probably have more impact on your probability estimate of a giant conspiracy than other unusual events.

Cognitive science: conflicting belief systems

A single human can hold in their head ideas which logically conflict. Science vs. some religions. Some ethical systems vs. some political ideologies. We just don't have the computational power to chase down ever implication of every idea that we hold (CommunityWiki:ConservationOfRationality, started by LionKimbro? btw). Nonmonotonic logics try to make this sensible. But I want to ask a different question. Sometimes, people decide their beliefs are inconsistent and there is a shakeup, a paradigm shift. Under what conditions do people let sleeping dogs lie (just live with the contradictions), and under what conditions do they force a resolution (a choice of one system over another); and even more importantly, when they force a resolution, how do they choose which of the systems of logical ideas wins?

Following a conversation

You are listening to a conversation at a party, but you are having a lot of trouble hearing it. Pretty much every sentence has some gaps. If the noise is just too large, you can't make any sense of what is going on (you "don't have a clue"). If it is less, you have this vague but unworkably large set of "possible worlds"; sometimes you think you know what has been said, but then you lose it (you "have a clue", but not much else). What is "losing it"? You have some shared context, but then you miss something, then everyone else has shared context that you don't have, and this causes a dynamic in which your amount of shared context converges to 0 over time.

If the noise is even less, though, there is a phase change; everything snaps into place; like a Bayesian-driven NLP engine, you use some of your information to generate constraints on what topics are being discussed (and even, using syntax, what words are being said; that's what some A.I. can already do), and then, even though you don't get every sentence, you are "clued in"; you are "on the same page"; you have shared context. You can follow the conversation. Rather than converging to 0, the percentage quantity of your "context" is converging to some steady-state (there are fluctuations, to be sure, but then it goes back to that steady-state, determined by the noise level).

Conclusion

I feel like similar mathematical models could be used for these phenomena.

The question of whether or not there are UFOs is a question of two conflicting belief systems. We need to formalize the "how does it hold together with the facts" criterion in order to create a numerical metric telling us how good the UFO vs. debunker belief systems are.

The question of "is there a giant conspiracy" is similar. At what point is some conspiracy theory a "kook theory", and at what point is it viable? What, formally, defines that line?

"Following a conversation" is another example of