Steven Pinker explains the cognitive biases we all suffer from and how they can short-circuit rational thinking and lead us into believing stupid things. Skip to 12:15 to bypass the preamble.

  • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    He planned the coups in Iran, Guatemala and Cuba but those didn’t involve any assassinations. Is Dulles being an assassin part of the conspiracy as well? No evidence seems to exist.

    That’s a joke, surely. You can’t possibly be that ignorant of history.

    And how many people were involved with this? Because it sounds like every single CIA director (and probably a few deputies) since then would have to be “in on it”. And not one person has said something, or accidentally dropped a receipt or a recording or any physical evidence whatsoever?

    Wow, it’s so shocking that the organization that’s in charge of espionage would not accidentally drop major incriminating evidence against themselves. Clearly this proves I’m wrong.

    Wait a minute though, the CIA has records on the Kennedy assassination that have, to date, not been declassified, and they’ve somehow managed to avoid leaking them to the public. How many people are involved in maintaining that classified information? Are you really telling me that not one person has said something, or accidentally dropped those records directly in front of a journalist? Clearly, the only conclusion is that those classified documents don’t actually exist. Or… maybe the CIA is capable of keeping secrets, you know, like, the thing that it’s their job to do?

    Sort of like the Moon landing conspiracy.

    The moon landing conspiracy can easily be disproved scientifically through available evidence, it is not comparable.

    The bullet was eventually linked to a gun Oswald owned and Mrs Oswald testified that he did it, but this didn’t come out until later.

    No, the bullet was shown to have come from the same type of gun that he owned, not the specific one. The evidence is still circumstantial.

    Regardless, this doesn’t prove anything.

    No investigation is perfect and the more plausible explanation is mistakes happen. In order for it not to be a mistake, it has to be part of a chain of deliberate events each with its own probability of being true and each with its own chance of going wrong. So we have to deny the possibility that a single mistake is the plausible explanation in order to allow us to believe that the very implausible event chain (ongoing apparently) of hundreds of possibilities all compounding was executed flawlessly, is true.

    There’s a lot more than one single mistake. If you actually look into the evidence, you’ll see that.

    My narrative is not a “very implausible event chain.” You haven’t established even a single link in that chain that would be “very implausible.”