Conspiracy

[notjenschiz]

Originally published at Jason's Fresh Produce. You can comment here or there.

Conspiracy Theory with Mel Gibson was, in my opinion, a very enjoyable movie, but disappointingly low tech.

Lots of movies and cop dramas nowadays have the archetypal tac board with obsessively clipped newspaper articles and colored bits of string connecting seemingly

Comments

[rsheslin]

Isn't that a Facebook app? ;)

[swmartin]

But if you put your analysis into digital format, then the government can go in and CHANGE YOUR FILES! Anything on a computer screen is just what THEY want you to see!!!

Also, you're asking computers to do something they're still not very good at -- pattern recognition. In contrast, human brains are so good at it that we routinely see recognizable shapes in clouds and shadows. That ability, to see patterns which AREN'T EVEN THERE, is what conspiracy theory rests on.

[ian_tiberius]

Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing that AI utterly and completely fails at, although I think that pattern recognition is the lesser of two problems. The biggest problem is the absence of data, at least in a format that a computer can work with.

Let's take the archetypal conspiracy theory: that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone. What is a computer going to do with Lee Harvey Oswald's time in the Soviet Union? How would a computer take the theory that Kennedy's body was tampered with to make it look as if he had only been shot from the rear and connect it to...well...anything?

Essentially, your options would be 1) shitty pattern-matching search ("JOHN Connally takes a bullet; Kennedy succeeded by Lyndon JOHNston? Conspiracy!") or 2) something involving the ability to process written material and actually understand what it means, which would be the holy grail of artificial intelligence research and which we are by no means even remotely close to.

[notjenschiz]

well, we could at least use it as an aid to enhance our own pattern matching: "find me all instances of earthquakes that occurred within 1 hour and 50 miles of the middle of nevada."

[swmartin]

Your example of a shitty pattern-matching search actually sounds exactly like half the conspiracy theories out there, since so many depend on numerology and other "hidden codes".

Looked at that way, computer searches for conspiracy evidence might actually be fruitful. After all, the point of conspiracy theory isn't to analyze the data and discover unexpected patterns. In actual practice, conspiracy theorists start with the conspiracy as an axiom and then search through the data to find any half-assed connections which gullible people like themselves will accept as "proof".