Razoring Through The World of Nut-Jobs

There are a wide range of ideas that people come up with and someone like me who hangs out a lot on the internet runs into them all the time. I'm actually rather fascinated by the folks that seem to leave proportional reason behind in a rush to affirm all kinds of "over the top" ideas. When they get into them far enough they start to sound reasonable, which is a little scary.

What I'm talking about is all the conspiracy theorists, doomsdayers, ufo-olgists, environmental wackos and the like. The ideas often have a certain plausibility but often simply segue into total lunacy, but the surface plausibility sucks you in. How do you respond to these things?

On the flip side is the folks who think nothing is ever really wrong, that everyone sounding an alarm is a wacko. That doesn't seem entirely reasonable either since bad things do happen and sometimes the most well-intended things turn out to have wildly unexpected and disastrous consequences.

My strategy is to try to understand the claims when I encounter them and then see if they make sense on the whole. It's often important to see what the reaction to the claims is. So many of these things are just totally crazy like the idea that the government was involved in dropping the Twin Towers as part of some conspiracy. I think you really have to be wearing a tin-foil hat to believe that. One of the most useful tools to at least prompt questioning of a wild idea is Occam's Razor, which simply stated says: "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." which might be further reduced to the idea that the best explanation for something is likely to be the simplest. So complex theories are less likely than simple ones.

Every now and then I'll trot this out to try to slice up a conspiracy theory or other off the wall idea. Another principle worth mentioning is Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." I particularly like the fact that one of my favorite science fiction writers, Robert Heinlein, used a version of this before Hanlon. Between Occam's Razor and Hanlon's Razor one can cut through a lot of the nonsense.