Adams' "theory" doesn't explain planetary orbits or different strength gravitational fields. It falls at the first hurdle of being able to make predictions that agree with observational evidence.
Before the Internet became widely accessible to the public, idiots were isolated. They had nothing but a local voice. Now... they have a globally accessible voice. They can even find each other and collectively agree on an extremely stupid and outlandish notion. And then all you need is for one of them to have some fortitude in trying to convince others. Like a Trumpist, who has subscribed to the intimidation, obfuscation, and deflection tactics. There are people adept at making illogical arguments that sound logical to the gullible. These people have a voice... and with YouTube (Google) enabling them to monetize on their ridiculousness, they're encouraged to pursue it. That's why we have these obnoxiously stupid hoaxes still persisting. As long as YouTube continues to allow such nonsense to be monetized, it'll always be around.
Yup. And as I said, it isn't always about actually believing what's being claimed -- it's about consciously asserting a lie that benefits your group at the expense of a rival group. Since science, education, and rational thought have come to be associated with liberal politics (as Stephen Colbert's conservative-pundit character put it, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias"), those who want to promote hardcore conservative politics refuse to admit the validity of basic scientific facts, not because they actually believe they're untrue, but because it's politically expedient to advance the propaganda that science is evil. In a different political climate, flat-Earth beliefs would be a harmless rarity, but since there's an active authoritarian movement attacking science for political ends, that makes any anti-science belief politically useful, and that feeds such nonsense notions and encourages them to come out of the woodwork. Heck, it isn't even fundamentally about left and right -- that's just the way it happens to break down in current Western politics. Those with authoritarian leanings have always been hostile to science and reason, because people who possess education and critical thinking skills are harder to fool and manipulate. So denouncing science -- or in the extreme case, imprisoning or executing scientists -- is an attempt to deprive the public of their ability to defend against an authoritarian regime's ability to define reality in whatever way suits it. It's the same thinking behind hostility toward journalists. Knowledge is power, so those who crave to monopolize power wish to deprive others of the ability to gain knowledge.
Scott Adams frankly has laughably stupid and frankly outright batshit crazy notions about most things these days, it seems, whether it be science, politics, or women. It's a shame.
I heard Scott Adams give a public lecture in California nearly 25 years ago. Back then he didn't give any indication of his subsequent descent into (seemingly, to my point of view) almost messianic, lunatic pronouncements on all sorts of things. He was fun when he was just the Dilbert guy. Now, I just shake my head sadly at the stuff he comes out with.
I was checking out some Flat Earth memes on pinterest. The level of scientific illiteracy is impressive. I get the impression that before these people discovered the FE Movement, they were confused by the fact that rivers could flow north. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/2e/cf/d8/2ecfd844c79b391f6f2ee0bfc2b0e24a.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/a6/de/5f/a6de5f6108ea15abc145eda05cfe0ca6.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/30/02/08/3002088c98c3f160b6ae9ffea2f59a27.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/d3/3d/b5/d33db5ca61c4021259426ba238713338.jpg http://whotfetw.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Flat-Earth-Memes-415-17.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/51/10/64/5110645bb4c59237da9feeb2b73064a1.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/2a/8d/7e/2a8d7ea1d4aa588ee89c62197a90883d.png https://theflatearthtranny.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/ctirkj3weaakasx.jpg?w=840 https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/81/17/5d/81175da3a128c1effa526f1509d9cbc7.jpg
For years I've been convinced that the proliferation of conspiracy theories is the greatest danger facing our civilization. It's an epidemic. There are over 20% of Americans that don't believe in actual events of astronauts landing on the surface of the Moon, there are millions of people now convinced that we have vast evidence of ancient aliens contributing to the ancient civilizations, people believe in secret societies that truly rule the world and that the democratic processes are smoke screen for the masses. In my subjective opinion, most people in the world don't know what to believe, they're more likely to put trust in an obscure blogger or vlogger over an established news outlet because the latter has to be controlled by the malicious establishment. The flat earthers are just too far out there even for most conspiracists to take them seriously. On the surface one could say "What's the big deal?" but in reality the impact is tremendous, I firmly believe it has contributed to the demise of democracy in the form of the election of the current U.S. President and the rise in popularity of radical Right and Left movements all over the civilized world. The very understanding of reality is being shattered in the minds of hundreds of millions of people. In my subjective opinion the majority of the general population believes in massive government cover ups and that "mainstream" science, history, basic information on our reality is falsified.
Well, it certainly doesn't help when the occasional conspiracy theory turns out to be partly or completely true. Like 1953 Iranian coup orchestrated by the CIA and MI6, or the Maddox firing first in the first Gulf on Tonkin incident, and the second being imaginary, or the FBI surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting political organizations like communist and socialist organizations, the Black Panthers, the Civil Rights Movement (including Martin Luther King), almost any group protesting the Vietnam War, and the Women's Rights Movement[/url, the planned false flag attack on US citizens by the US military to be blamed on Cuba[/url, or the CIA manipulating news media for propaganda purposes up till the early 1970s. And who still believes the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was motivated by Saddam Hussein having WMDs?! And sometimes, conspiracy theories even become mainstream and aren't called a theory anymore. We can see that currently with the Trump-Russia connection. There's been a lot of accusations, based on some hints, but no evidence that the public can actually see and judge for themselves. Yet, it's almost presented as fact. Now, as I've shown above, some conspiracy theories are in time revealed to be fact, so the Trump-Russia connection might very well be true, but at this point, from what the public has actually seen, it's still a theory. So you really shouldn't lump all conspiracy theories together. Yes, a lot of them are nuts, and the Fake Moon Landing one is a good example, as is the Flat Earth Theory that's being discussed in this thread. But some have more merit than others, based on what history has taught us. But established (what's the word even mean, other than "it's been around for a while") media is to no small part to blame for this. All those news channels are owned by big corporations (MSNBC by Comcast, CNN by Time Warner, Fox News by Rupert Murdock), and most newspapers are as well (The New York Times is co-owned by Carlos Slim, The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, etc.) and their goal is not primarily bringing the truth but to make money. And that last part is becoming troubling for a news media outlet that is owned by people or companies that have other, maybe even bigger, business interests. For example, Comcast, owner of MSNBC, is a supplier of telecommunications in the U.S., including internet connections. Now, the FCC is in the process of relaxing Net Neutrality regulations, which could make Comcast a lot of money, but that would be to the detriment of the consumer. Any reporting MSNBC might do on Net Neutrality is immediately suspicious. Another example, Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, is also the owner of Amazon. Amazon has a 600 million dollar contract with the CIA. I don't know what The Washington Post is worth, but I can't imagine it being anywhere near that. That is a big conflict of interest. And let's not forget the news media's role in the Iraq Invasion of 2003 (Phil Donahue being anti-war was at least part of the reasons MSNBC cancelled his talk show in early 2003), or how they gave Donald Trump 2 billion dollars worth of free media coverage, and that was just up to March 2016. Of course, you shouldn't take bloggers and vloggers at their word (although there's also that lumping together again, as there's a lot of space between, say, The Humanist Report and InfoWars), but you should be sceptical of the mainstream media, as well. My personal method is to not rely on just one news media outlet, but to inform myself from both mainstream and fringe media to get a bigger picture, and always use critical thinking while consuming news media.
In scientific usage (and I know we're not talking science here, but I'm offering an analogy, so bear with me), the term "theory" has nothing to do with whether a model has been confirmed or not. A theory is a model that codifies and explains a set of data ("facts") and makes predictions that can be tested to determine its reliability. A theory that's been supported by the evidence is still called a theory, for instance relativity theory or quantum theory (or music theory or color theory or game theory -- these are not assertions that a thing exists, but rather models that codify how and why it functions). A theory that's contradicted by new evidence is modified or abandoned in favor of a theory that fits the evidence. "Theory" doesn't mean true or false, it means testable. And that's the thing about conspiracy theories. Of course there are some conspiracies, and if we approach the evidence rationally, it will confirm some conspiracies as real and refute others as unreal. Indeed, real conspiracies usually do come out; there have been mathematical models showing that the larger a conspiracy is, the sooner it will be exposed. The more people are in the know, the more inevitable it becomes that somebody will accidentally or intentionally reveal what they know. Which is why the fictional conceit of the vast, overarching conspiracy that lasts forever and is never exposed is absurd. Real large-scale conspiracies, like Watergate, Iran-Contra, and so forth, inevitably get found out. It's the conspiracy theories unsupported by evidence that are nonsense. The problem is that conspiracy theorists don't think in such a rational way. Rather than reasoning from evidence to conclusion, they start with the conclusion they assume is true and interpret the evidence through that assumption. Since they're convinced that a secret conspiracy exists, then they interpret the complete absence of evidence for it as proof that it's being covered up. If multiple sources independently refute the theory, then they all must be in on the conspiracy and it's even vaster and more pervasive than we thought. It's self-fulfilling, circular argument. It's a delusional way of thinking that shouldn't be equated with the rational investigative process that is necessary for exposing the real conspiracies carried out by people in power, any more than UFO cults should be equated with the scientific search for extraterrestrial life, or homeopathic "cures" should be mistaken for actual medicine. The thing that convinced me most solidly that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President Kennedy was that at least three different investigations -- the Warren Commission, a CBS team led by Walter Cronkite, and an investigation by PBS's NOVA -- all independently came to that same conclusion. There's only one right answer and many wrong answers, so if multiple different sources come up with multiple different answers, like the various Kennedy conspiracy theories out there, then most or all of them have to be wrong, but if multiple different sources independently reach the same answer, that's pretty solid evidence that it's the right one. (That's the whole basis of science, in fact -- any result must be repeatable, arrived at independently by multiple sources to rule out bias and human error.) What's more, Cronkite started out believing Oswald didn't act alone, set out to refute the Warren Commission's findings, and ended up concluding that they were correct after all. If you set out with a preconception and "prove" that it's right, then your bias could've contaminated your results, so that conclusion can't be trusted. But if you set out trying to prove one thing and end up convincing yourself of its exact opposite, as Cronkite did, that means the evidence outweighed your belief instead of the other way around, and that makes it a very compelling result.
When I see a work of fiction about a conspiracy so vast and pervasive that it's basically completely engulfed the entire government/establishment/etc., I have to wonder -- how is it even a conspiracy, then? It's just the establishment. If the people behind it control the whole system, why are they still bothering to hide? And who are they hiding from?
Uh, ... I'm not sure whether you agree with my post or not, and whether it is based on content or semantics.
I don't care for the way you used the word "theory" as something that isn't yet a fact -- rather, a theory is something larger than a fact, a model that offers a possible explanation for a set of pre-established facts (e.g. the facts of how the planets move in space, or the facts surrounding an assassination) and makes predictions that can be tested against new facts. Aside from that, though, I agree with your overall premise, and I'm suggesting that the more formal idea of a theory is useful in discussing that premise, because a theory should be testable and should be amended or abandoned if the evidence doesn't fit it. Rational people who use that method can distinguish between real conspiracies and delusional fantasies. The problem is, the term "conspiracy theory" has unfortunately become associated primarily with the latter category, and with the paranoid, self-fulfilling beliefs of people who don't have a clue how theories are actually supposed to work. So it takes a concept that should be an antidote against that kind of thinking and uses it as a shorthand for that kind of thinking, and that's unfortunate.