Complexification
by JS
Every so often I come across conspiracies relating to 9-11. Example. For some reason I found these theories deeply disturbing, especially considering the quality of evidence in the accepted narrative. Then I remembered that some people have an innate inability to understand complexity, and I started feeling better.
UPDATE: I’ve been taken to task (rightly so) for being too elitist. Though in my defense, the more popular opinion in this case is to believe the 9-11 commission’s report. So that may mean I’m a populist, since my dig was intended only for the minority of conspiracy theorists who believe that 9-11 was perpetrated by the US government. I don’t want to get into a point by point rebuttal with prevailing alternative theories as to why the towers fell, since the PBS link above includes that from the lead engineer investigating the collapse.
In my view, the evidence presented by S. Shyam Sunder shows that if you take 747s and crash them into the WTC towers, the towers would collapse. The evidence in this case, however, involves understanding that many factors (not for instance just the heat put out by burning jet fuel) caused the collapse. So when conspiracy theorists make the claim that jet fuel doesn’t burn at a high enough temperature to cause structural failure, they seem to be ignoring the many interrelated factors also at play (that a third of the support columns were already sheared on impact, that fire insulation insulation was stripped from many columns by the concussive force of the impact, that even when heated to relatively low temperatures steel loses a lot of structural integrity).
Well, that was the thinking that led to my original glib remark. I think the tendency for people to believe in conspiracies is interesting in its own right. It seems to stem from people associating collusion closely with agency, so when a minimal number of facts describe an event, we sort of fill in the rest of the facts based on some template model for how we believe people act, for many of us (yes, me included) that includes an inclination for assuming collusion among actors – hence a conspiracy.
