Conspiracies

Nicholas Nassim Taleb's  first book was Fooled By Randomness, describing how we often assign meaning to events that are simply random. If you put up a random number generator of a baseball hitter who bats .280 for the season, you will find some games when he goes 5 for 5, and some when he goes 0 for 4 three games in a row. The player, and the coaches and fans will attribute the hitting streak or drought to some meaningful baseball idea.  "I've just been seeing the ball really well." "He's always been a streaky hitter." These are not necessarily untrue. They could be baseball explained. But it is usually more accurate when the hitter notes "I'm hitting the ball well, it just happens to be right at people." A lot of the difference between one struck ball and the next is so tiny that it could not possibly be under the hitter's control.  A certain skill level, which includes both muscle ability and focus and is stable over time, will yield a predictable number of hits.  They will not arrive in predictable patterns, however.

A man suffering from mania approached me in a bar about five years ago (I made the mistake of making eye contact and nodding) and had printouts of the numbers he was receiving from satellite readings which proved aliens were trying to communicate with the world through him. He was particularly taken with digits occurring three times in a row, which he assured me was too unlikely to happen by chance.  If there were three fives in a row, it meant something. He had studied math, he said, and knew that the odds against three fives showing up in a row were quite small.  He did not accept my explanation that such occurrences were in fact the most natural thing in the world, and exactly what we should expect out of long chains of digits. I gave it up quickly.  He was not able to hear.

It's not just numbers. You wait on three customers in a row whose surname begins with "M."  What are the odds, eh? Three green cars parked near each other! Joe Biden appears on TV at the exact moment you were reading about him!

There's one going on in Austin at the moment. There is not a statistical increase in murders of young men greater than in other cities in America, yet many people are convinced there is a serial killer taking them out. The coincidences are not even fully there. Some of the murders are not taking place where the theory says they should, yet they are being counted against the total anyway. What is counted as evidence starts getting stranger and stranger.  As I have said before about paranoia (rather similar) or depression/anxiety, the condition appears first, then the target is identified. People decide that someone must be stealing our bodily fluids, and it doesn't matter that there is not any actual diminution of fluid, we just know it is true. Knowing this, we identify who it must be. If people disagree, we might even begin to suspect them of covering up the crime.

But for strangeness, you should check out what is going on in Canton, MA at the moment. If you don't want to sign in, I was given a summary I like pretty well. John, O'Keefe, a Boston police officer who lives in Canton (a southern suburb) was found dead in the snow in Canton. The prosecution says that he and his girlfriend Karen Read had been drinking and arguing throughout the weekend. She dropped him off at home and hit him with her car on the way out while doing a three-point turn. He was found dead in the snow. The defense is trying to suggest there is a reasonable chance that he went inside, was beaten to death by one or more of his friends for unknown reasons and thrown out of the house, where he died in the snow. 

Well, I don't fault them for that.  The defense has got to say something. If that's the best they've got, they have to go with it.  She has hired Kevin Spacey's attorney, which is likely a lot of money, and they've got to find something so there is at least enough doubt that a jury won't think she definitely did it.

But into the mix come the conspiracists, who are running with this idea and expanding on it. I thought this site by Aidan Kearney, DrTurtleboy, was so bizarre that it must be a parody, but no, it's for real. He calls himself an investigative journalist, and is from a few towns over in Worcester. He is now one of the main spokespeople for the idea that the people in the house who beat him to death immediately coordinated with the Canton PD to protect the main killer, and the police went along with it because he is a local boy and his family is prominent.  Grew up there. But as things have gone along the list of people who are in on the coverup has grown.  It's basically everyone in town, it seems. All the connections are just normal things you would find in any town.  One of the many people in the house that night is from a family that owns a longstanding pizza place.  The pizza place sponsors a little league team. One of the kids of the officer played on that team, and he runs a picture of the kid as if he is part of the coverup, wittingly or unwittingly, because he is suggesting legitimacy that this family is respectable, because he is wearing its name on his shirt. 

Kearney has gone back to the 1994 Canton High School Yearbook to show that even then, the Alberts had people they wanted to get rid of, but all the girls liked them anyway. Basically, any stray fact that passes by him that mentions any of the people in the story is reinterpreted as showing either a secret connection, a longstanding friendship (evidence that they too would cover this up for a pal) or direct evidence of lying. Local police forces looking into the matter are furious with this guy, because he is trying to pass off everyday police procedure as some sort of sinister special treatment, either for the Alberts and McCabes or against Karen Read. One officer misspelled one of the names, which proves he is lying.

DrTurtleboy seems to gravitate to some right-wing types, but he doesn't seem to have any true political issues, and there are plenty of people on the right he doesn't like much.  If you read his site, you will see that he spends most of his energy showing how persecuted he is, because he is bravely exposing all this corruption in the Canton PD and throughout the town, in addition to other issues in Massachusetts towns. Why any, never mind all, of these people in the house would have wanted O'Keefe dead is not explored. You'd think someone would be curious about that angle.

From my nostalgia tour, let me assure you that the people you grew up with and went to school with seldom even answer your emails, never mind covering up a murder for you. 

This is going to tie in with the issue of memory and chronology, and how misunderstanding and misinterpreting situations often involves getting the chronology wrong. I find that chronology is key for my remembering people and events, but my wife does not use that as her memory framework. I can recall who I went to third grade with, because I have them clearly tied to third grade.  Someone we met at church may have a name that sounds familiar, but because I don't even have a year to put them in, I do not recall them well at all unless other cues are built in.