Flooded with an onslaught of fake information and conspiracies, I found myself indulging a few of them lately, mostly out of humour. Thankfully, I caught myself before things got bad but it raised a question: how do I differentiate a good conspiracy from a revolutionary scientific idea?
Ideas are only considered scientific if and only if they are falsifiable (that something can be proven wrong by an experiment or observation). If you ask a conspiracy theorist why they believe in some idea, they might give a myriad of reasons. But to truly differentiate between those that are intellectually honest and those that subscribe to a convenient reality, I’d have to ask them what they would need to see to prove themselves wrong. Chances are, they won’t be able to answer that question or they’ll throw a strawman argument at it. For example, how do we verifiably show gravity exists? You could toss a ball up and see it come back down. But this might not work in space. Or if it’s a balloon. Or any number of different scenarios. You’d have to create a good experiment, with controls and double blinds, etc. And at the end of it, the best you can do is fail to disprove something (as opposed to being able to definitively prove something). So do we know anything or is this an admission that our most cherished ‘facts’ are simply things we haven’t been able to disprove.
And hence this great epiphany: we know nothing. Godel went further to show that even consistent mathematical systems can’t be comprehensive. Even within the rigorous structure of mathematics, there exist truths that cannot be proven within the system itself. Many systems around the world are not formalized. A purely syllogistic approach can oversimplify these complex systems, leading to incomplete or misleading conclusions. For example, how the mind works is still unformalized - it’s the equivalent of an alien coming to earth and making conclusions about us by analyzing our streets. How the climate affects us precisely is still an active area of research because we haven’t been able to find an effective way to solve large fluid modeling problems. Even something as natural as evolution has open problems that force biologists to consider even more comprehensive theories. While absolute syllogistic patterns have their place in formal logic and mathematics, they can sometimes be restrictive when applied to the multifaceted nature of real-world problems. These rigid structures often fail to capture the dynamic and interconnected reality we live in.
So a pure syllogistic framework isn’t comprehensive enough to understand the full complexity of the world. A more comprehensive framework would, therefore, involve not just syllogistic reasoning but also systems thinking, which considers how parts interact within a whole. In such a framework, the goal isn’t to arrive at an unassailable “truth” but to develop models and ideas that are robust, flexible, and open to evolution.
So, while a good conspiracy may offer an alluring simplicity or narrative cohesion, a revolutionary scientific idea remains messy, provisional, and always subject to change. The latter embraces uncertainty as a tool for progress; the former fears it as a threat to its narrative.
This realization forces me to remain vigilant, not just against external misinformation but against the human tendency to seek simple answers to complex questions. In the end, the pursuit of knowledge isn’t about knowing everything - it’s about learning how to navigate the vast, uncharted territory of what we don’t yet understand.