There is a tendency for real doctors with backing from Academia or whoever’s in charge of deciding how you science to just plain getting it wrong and not realizing it for a long time.
Homeopathy is a good example of this, as it appeared to get great results when it was created during the Bubonic Plague and had such staying power to the point that in the 1800’s it was considered a legitimate and mainstream field of medical practice.
Now today we know Homeopathy is nonsense… Remembers New Age Healing is still a thing Okay, those of us with sense know homeopathy is garbage. With the only reason it was getting such wonderful results was because the state of medicine for a long period of time in human history was so god awful that not getting any treatment at all was actually the smarter idea. Since Homeopathy is basically just “No medicine at all”, that’s exactly what was happening with its success.
Incidentally this is also why the Christian Science movement (Which was neither Christian nor Science) had so many people behind it, people were genuinely living longer from it because it required people to stop smoking at a time when no one knew smoking killed you.
Anyhow. With that in mind, I want to know if there’s a case where the exact opposite happened.
Where Scientists got together on a subject, said “Wow, only an idiot would believe this. This clearly does not work, can not work, and is totally impossible.”
Only for someone to turn around, throw down research proving that there was no pseudo in this proposed pseudoscience with their finest “Ya know I had to do it 'em” face.
The closest I can think of is how people believed that Germ Theory, the idea that tiny invisible creatures were making us all sick, were the ramblings of a mad man. But that was more a refusal to look at evidence, not having evidence that said “No” that was replaced by better evidence that said “Disregard that, the answer is actually Yes”
Can anyone who sciences for a living instead of merely reading science articles as a hobby and understanding basically only a quarter of them at best tell me if something like that has happened?
Thank you, have a nice day.
The Dead Internet conspiracy theory was written with total crackpot paranoid thinking about ruling elites, likely antisemitic undertones, and general tinfoil hat reasoning about AI. Plus generative language models were nowhere near advanced or skilled enough at the time the conspiracy was purported to be happening.
But it was accidentally prophetic in at least two ways by 2024:
It wasn’t due to the illuminati, the Jews, or anything weird and bigoted conspiracies of old have traditionally blamed. It was thanks to billionaires, corporate and government espionage, AI grifters, and unregulated scammer networks (digital currency counts too) jumping onto the same technology at the same time and ruining everything on the Internet in similar ways.
This is the first I’m hearing of antisemitism being at all related. Where did this come from?
Secret ruling elites is a dog whistle - it’s Nazi cabalistic rhetoric. See also Protocols of the Elders of Zion: a Nazi propaganda piece.
Okay but what does that have to do with dead internet theory? Last I saw, it just suggests that internet comments are largely bot-generated.
As the original comment said: the origins of dead Internet theory pre-date the prevalence of LLMs and are conspiracy theories about shadowy cabals of elites controlling the Internet
I feel like that commenter is inserting their own head cannon into this. Dead internet theory isn’t that old, it started in 2021 when LLMs were already well into development and in public use. And unless the guy who originally posted the theory also had some secret manifesto I’m unaware of, the theory had nothing to do with “elites” at all.
I’m fairly certain variations on the dead internet theory have been floating around well before 2021. Here’s a variation of it on Reddit from 9 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/348vlx/what_bot_accounts_on_reddit_should_people_know/
Apparently the idea stems from the IRC days where the first user to join a channel would receive admin rights. So people wrote bots to stay in channels and only grant admin rights to specific users joining. Then came more novelty bots that would stick around in channels, even bots that “chatted” with one another. When you’d join a channel and ask if there were any humans around they’d answer “just bots”, which eventually became a meme and then regular humans started saying that too as a joke.
That idea morphed into the “Everyone on Reddit is a bot except you” meme, which coupled with obvious bot activity on Twitter turned into the “Dead Internet Theory”, which basically takes the meme seriously. One of the original versions of that theory is this one: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/
Some excerpts:
Quite clearly appears to be blaming a secretive cabal/corporarions/US government for the whole thing, so it’s definitely blaming “the elites”.
So forget that the original author blamed a Jewish cabal, and look at where we are. The causes may have been wrong (deeply wrong) but the effects are looking remarkably similar and we need to be able to talk about the real reasons without getting getting caught up in this “it’s all anti-semetic lies” trap.
Dead internet theory goes quite a bit further than what people mean when they talk about seeing more bots. Ardent believers of DIT think 90%+ of online interactions are not real for example, and that the US government has more advanced AI tech to fake these interactions than what is publicly known.
I’m not sure I’d mark every “the government is behind X/Y” conspiracy theory as anti-semitic either. The issue is more that those theories act as gateways towards more extreme conspiracy theories (which are more likely to be actually anti-semitic).
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a Russian propaganda piece. Russians were arguably the all time champs of anti-semitism and pograms (the word is even Russian in origin) before the Nazis industrialized them. Of course the Nazis used it, but it didn’t originate with them.
Fair point - Imperial Russia was the origin. It’s just most famous as Nazi primary school literature.
OP is inadvertantly providing another example: the phrase “conspiracy theory”. It was coined by the US government as a way to discredit ideas - to make people look like crackpots. Lots of negative propaganda was created around that phrase.
Fast forward to today and “conspiracy theory”, though admittedly still tainted in various ways, has made a resurgence. Things that would have gotten you laughed out of the room are now proven fact(like Iran-Contra, for a simple and fairly uncontroversial example).
That’s part of why that move to coin that phrase was so powerful. There are real conspiracies/intelligence agency operations (like regime changes in several countries during the 20th century), and then there are completely idiotic ideas and takes (like flat earth) and ones that were never meant to be taken serious (like birds aren’t real).
That makes it really tedious to weed out the bullshit and distinguish it from the stuff that has substance.
I wouldn’t worry too much about it, *NEARLY * every conspiracy theory ties back to Anti-Semitism and I’m not even joking.
Faked Moon Landing? Flat Earth? Holocaust Denial?
“Jews did it bro” - Asshole who insists he’s “Just asking questions”
Edit: Clarified hyperbole
I’m going to have to disagree with you because obviously, not every single conspiracy theory, across all time and cultures and context is anti semitic.
But that’s what the literal words you used state.
We can even test this theory by inventing our own conspiracy theories.
That’s a dumb take, when they are obviously talking about contemporary western society, and they are being reductive.
Uncontacted tropical villages probably blame other things in their conspiracy theories.
Dude. Just take a stroll along X (Twitter) or YouTube comments.
Sooooooo many bots linked to profiles with Ai generated images talking to each other. It’s wild.
the dead internet can easily be solved so not sure it’s that prophetic. various easy ways to verify humans exist while keeping anonymity if you wish. these same mechanisms can be used for voting.