The movies
The Game by David Fincher
Inherent Vice by Paul Thomas Anderson
Chinatown by Polanksy
Lorenzo's Videos
[<https://youtu.be/KYKOLwt8pwo>](<https://youtu.be/KYKOLwt8pwo>)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE2-zYEldGc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NiYeQ-LFl8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGrfN3v5JL8
Daniel's work
[<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOiwffJEBQQ&index=35>](<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOiwffJEBQQ&index=35>)
[<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUnGt5FZuRU>](<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUnGt5FZuRU>)
[<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io_5Lzm8864>](<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io_5Lzm8864>)
Conspiracy Theories by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule
"In a Scripps-Howard Poll in 2006, with an error margin of 4 percent, some 36 percent of respondents assented to the claim that “federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center or took no action to stop them.”3 Sixteen percent said that it was either very likely or somewhat likely that “the collapse of the twin towers in New York was aided by explosives secretly planted in the two buildings.”
"Among sober-minded Canadians, a September 2006 poll found that 22 percent believe that “the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 had nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden and were actually a plot by influential Americans.”
"In a poll conducted in seven Muslim countries, 78 percent of respondents said that they do not believe the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Arabs. The most popular account, in these countries, is that 9/11 was the work of the U.S. or Israeli governments"
"Karl Popper famously argued that conspiracy theories overlook the pervasive unintended consequences of political and social action; they assume that all consequences must have been intended by someone.15 The basic idea is that many social effects, including large movements in the economy, occur as a result of the acts and omissions of many people, none of whom intended to cause those effects. The Great Depression of the 1930s was not self-consciously engineered by anyone"
"Their appeal lies in the attribution of otherwise inexplicable events to intentional action, and to an unwillingness to accept the possibility that significant adverse consequences may be a product of invisible hand mechanisms"
"A broader point is that conspiracy theories overestimate the competence and discretion of officials and bureaucracies, who are assumed to be able to make and carry out sophisticated secret plans, despite abundant evidence that in open societies government action does not usually remain secret for very long"
"In a closed society, secrets are not difficult to keep, and distrust of official accounts makes a great deal of sense. In such societies, conspiracy theories are both more likely to be true and harder to show to be false in light of available information"
"individuals embedded in isolated groups or small, self-enclosed networks who are exposed only to skewed information will more often hold conspiracy theories that are justified, relative to their limited informational environment. Holocaust denials might themselves be considered in this light. When isolated groups operate within a society that is both wider and more open, their theories may be unjustified from the standpoint of the wider society but justified from the standpoint of the group if it maintains its isolation."
"Conspiracy entrepreneurs: French author Thierry Meyssan, whose book “9/11: The Big Lie” became a bestseller and a sensation for its claims that the Pentagon explosion on 9/11 was caused by a missile, fired as the opening salvo of a coup d’etat by the military-industrial complex, rather than by American Airlines Flight"
"Members of informationally and socially isolated groups tend to display a kind of paranoid cognition46 and become increasingly distrustful or suspicious of the motives of others or of the larger society, falling into a “sinister attribution error.”47 This error occurs when people feel that they are under pervasive scrutiny, and hence they attribute personalistic motives to outsiders and overestimate the amount of attention they receive. Benign actions that happen to disadvantage the group are taken as purposeful plots, intended to harm."
"In 2004, the U.S. government set up a broadcast network for the Middle East – Al-Hurrah, “the Free One” – that puts out news and third-party opinion. In May 2007, a House subcommittee called a hearing to investigate reports that Al-Hurrah had broadcast “terrorist” content, including “a 68-minute call to arms against Israelis by a senior figure of the terrorist group Hezbollah; [and] deferential coverage of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial conference . . . ”.81 Legislators sharply questioned officials of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the government corporation that ultimately funds Al-Hurrah, and those officials had to promise to address the legislators’ concerns. Those problems, however, were part and parcel of a broader strategy for enhancing credibility by permitting other viewpoints and voices on the air"
https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5
"In most ARG-like games apophenia is the plague of designers and players, sometimes leading participants to wander further and further away from the plot and causing designers to scramble to get them back or (better yet) incorporate their ideas."
"QAnon grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come to the intended misunderstanding. Maybe “guided apophenia” is a better phrase. Guided because the puppet masters are directly involved in hinting about the desired conclusions. They have pre-seeded the conclusions. They are constantly getting the player lost by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning for them that fits the propaganda message Q is delivering."
"It’s like a Darwinian fiction lab, where the best stories and the most engaging and satisfying misinterpretations rise to the top and are then elaborated upon for the next version."
"Real people in the government with important information to disseminate deliver it as fast as possible usually all in one go. They don’t make you solve things. They try to be as specific as possible. They are whistle blowers. Daniel Ellsberg (the Pentagon Papers). Edward Snowden. Chelsea Manning. Etc. Q is NOT a whistleblower. Q is a “plot device”. Q is fictional and acts exactly like a fictional character acts. This is because the purpose of Q is not to divulge actual information, but to create fiction."
"If the ideas are generated by us, however, then these are the ideas we defend. If we “create” the ideas in our own minds, they become fused much more intently into our personality. They’re OURS. There is no friction. Guiding people to arrive at YOUR conclusions is a perfect way to get people to accept a new and conflicting ideology."
"Several Q drops insinuate that the ruling class of occultists have the mandate to tell each other who they are through symbolism. A requirement even. This is a way of creating a rich set of random data that can be linked together by group-think to support the main theory."
"The participant is having fun looking around and “solving” riddles reinforced by dopamine rushes and the feeling of being involved in something that no one else knows. They are also now part of a growing, active, and friendly community. Everything they see and hear creates further doubt about people and things they already doubt. Every new theory is easy to understand, compelling, and arrived at through their own ability to reason. Now to doubt certain ideas is to doubt themselves, their ability to see the truth, their community, and maybe the world around them. Quickly, the game is creating an alternate POV that is immensely psychologically satisfying and seems to be supported on all sides as the truth."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/indian-health-service-repeatedly-did-nothing-to-stop-pediatrician-from-sexually-abusing-patients-report-finds-11633481914
"If anything, schizophrenia can be a ratiocinating illness, particularly in its early phases. From the turn of the century, the great students of schizophrenia noted that its sufferers included people with fine minds and that the delusions which often, though not always, come with the disorder involve subtle, sophisticated, complex flights of thought. Emil Kraepelin, who defined the disorder for the first time in 1896, described “dementia praecox,” as he called the illness, not as the shattering of reason but as causing “predominant damage to the emotional life and the will.” Louis A. Sass, a psychologist at Rutgers University, calls it “not an escape from reason but an exacerbation of that thoroughgoing illness Dostoevsky imagined … at least in some of its forms … a heightening rather than a dimming of conscious awareness, and an alienation not from reason but from emotion, instincts and the will." — “A Beautiful Mind” by Sylvia Nasar