Decoding the Gurus - Supplementary Materials 10: Rigorous Conspiracy Hypothesising about the Trump Shooting

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

A special Supplementary Material where we take a gander at some of the reactions to the recent assassination attempt on Trump and then dig deeper with some responsible model conspiracy hypothesizing with Bret and Heather. Also featuring:Our completely predictable response to the shootingJohn Cusack's Conspiracy TheoryTim Kennedy's Conspiracy Venn DiagramScientific Cosplay with Bret and HeatherLearning about logic with HeatherThe Lab Leak theory revisited with BretThe Fall of Plato's CaveMind Controlled ShootersThe Unity 2024 PlatformThe full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (57 mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurusLinks Cave of Mirrors: The 234th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather HeyingTim Kennedy: How Leadership Failures Led to an Assassination Attempt on TrumpJohn Cusack's conspiracy tweet

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's supplementary material number 10, Matt. We've made it to the number 10 and that is when, oh, also that's Matt. He's Matthew Brown. He's a psychologist of some description, a statistician. What is he? He lives in Australia. He does all sorts of things. He's had a statistician. What is he? He lives in Australia. He does all sorts of things. He's had a varied career.

And I am Chris Kavner, a anthropologist, psychologist, something. We're academics. We're in the field, but we are here to talk about gurus and discourse nonsense and all that. But it's 10, Matt. The reason I was mentioning that is back when we started the podcast,

there was a piece of advice given by Mickey Inslect, which is just general podcast advice. If you get past 10 episodes, you're probably going to continue on. Yeah. So we're back at the start. We did continue on with the uh original series and we'll continue on with this we will we can't not do it because we don't want to contaminate our serious decoding episodes with random bits of trivia news items and things that upset us um and it's a safe space

for you and me to yeah chew the. That's right. That's right. So for anybody who might be tempted to complain about the format, just remember, you still get the decoding episodes and they're not purer than they previously were. It's like they've been cut with less altering material there. So they're not pure. material there so they're not pure and instead you have this section which is less pure but you know it gives you a chance to deal with issues that are less substantial or require less investment of clipping in certain respects i like that analogy it means that these episodes are 100 percent telcom powder that's that's the metaphor. Is that the way?

Well, that's possibly true. Let's see, Mark. The thing is, as is often the case, I'm not supposed to have that many clips for these, but I do. I've got quite a lot. So, you know, the assassination attempt, that will be a significant thing that has happened.

And I feel that our stance on that won't be shocking to anyone like i'm assuming matt that you're not for political assassinations including of people that you don't like politically and think that that's a bad thing for that to become a normal part of the political process would that be fair in principle i'm against assassination yes uh i mean the the main thing that's disappointing about this one of course is that it provided trump with an amazing photo opportunity and uh i feel may well have sealed the deal in terms of the election not that i'm making any predictions yeah i suspect that's true as well but like in general i would say it's not good whenever there's like an

assassination attempt of even a demagogue right you know i really dislike nigel farage but i don't want people to take him out but inevitably after that event happened the discourse was going to go crazy it could have went much worse if the assassination had been successful. I have no idea what would have happened in the US in that, but I would imagine it would have been a much stronger reaction. In any case, like Matt mentioned, there was images that came out. Trump was very defiant after it, stood up, pumped his fist, said, fight, fight, fight. And there was an almost too perfect image of him kind of standing up with the American

flag, wafting behind him with a blood splattered face, which has now gone around everyone and will become an iconic photograph. It already is. So yes, this has been, especially in the current electoral process where you have Biden coming across as not robust and relatively feeble, not presenting themselves well, and a lot of things being about cognitive decline. Then you have this example of somebody getting shot and like springing back up and yelling fight. There's a quite strong contrast visually and narratively there. So I think this is trouble. I think it's trouble in terms of if

you wanted to see Biden elected, which I think most liberal people do. But in the US, you essentially have a 50-50 split and it is usually down to a handful of states in the u.s so it's probably going to be the same thing but it does look like barring other things happening that trump is likely to win and i think most of the polls are leaning in that direction now so that's going to be fun for the world. Yeah, yeah. It's not going to be great for many of the rest of us from the world, probably. I don't know. We'll see.

But the thing about these kind of events is, and it doesn't have to be Donald Trump, it could be literally anyone, but I think he is a salient figure. Whenever there's an event like this, particularly an assassination attempt, successful or unsuccessful, it immediately attracts conspiracy theorists of every stripe, from left and right. So, you know, there are various details that will emerge in the coming

weeks and months about the shooter and how the security field and all this kind of thing. So that will all remain to be found out. But the facts as they exist at the minute was that there was a lone shooter on the rooftop who managed to get up, you know, via some slip up in the security perimeter and shot at Trump and then was shot by snipers and killed. And that's it. But the issue is that the police that he was shooting from looks to be a very obvious potential site for somebody to position them as a sniper, especially in hindsight. So the immediate reaction of people is how could that be possible? The Secret Service, you know, they're well trained and professional. So that kind of thing shouldn't be possible unless there's something else afoot, right? And so you have, for example, just to show the distribution, you have John Cusack, you know, the actor,

left wing liberal guy saying, I hate conspiracy theories, because they avoid the open conspiracies we see with our eyes for rabbit hole nonsense. That said, it's unthinkable that the Secret Service doesn't cover the one roof staring at the stage. Zero chance. Also, no Secret Service action in history lets the candidate stop for a photo op. They cover the body and move it offside about as fast and completely as possible to imagine see reagan assassination attempt makes zero sense i saw from this angle this is him

saying it was a assed event in order to increase support for trump yeah yeah you think that like i don't i don't know how unlikely it is that the Secret Service wouldn't have people stationed on that roof and I don't know how unlikely it is they would let Trump stand up and raise his fist or whatever. I don't know about any of that. But the problem with that story is that that was a real bullet, right, that was fired that clipped his ear. Well, there was somebody else killed.

Killed, yeah. And there is no way that if your intention was to big trump up that your strategy would be to fire a bullet that would take off his ear nobody nobody is that good a shot so yeah there's some problems with that one yeah so the story there does not make sense and And Brett Weinstein wanted to make clear that that is the conspiracy theory that he would not endorse. So he responded to these events saying, if you wish that the assassin had killed President Trump, your values are indefensible.

If you think that Trump's team might have orchestrated this, your ability to reason has failed you. Then he followed this up just to clarify because he got responses from his audience i don't know why this tweet confused people i'm not discounting the possibility that there was more to the attempt on president trump's life than meets the eye i think that is highly likely but i find the idea that trump's team staged this impossible to imagine yeah he's down with conspiratorial thinking make no mistake there's gotta be something more going on but not not one

that makes the republicans out to be the bad guys right that's that he's not into that one yeah yeah that's it and chris williamson had on the retired mma fighter and ex-military i might even be back in the military guy tim Tim Kennedy. This is a guy who hosted a series to find Hitler, the living Hitler, because of course he's not actually dead, right? Let me guess, he's wearing a Panama hat in Venezuela. Quite possibly. So Tim Kennedy is a bit of a conspiratorial fool, but somebody with military credentials. And in his take, he had a little Venn diagram and all of them, John Cusack, Brett Weinstein, and Tip Kennedy, all of them start out by saying, look, I'm not like these stupid conspiracy theorists who just immediately come out with the most

harebrained theories. No, it wasn't a conspiracy theory. But then as they go on, they essentially outline that they are conspiracy theorists and they have a conspiracy. It's then as they go on, they essentially outline that they are conspiracy theorists and they have a conspiracy. It's just that they want the Frieza in more complex terms. So in his case, he drew three band diagrams, one saying lone shooter, the other saying enemy of Trump, and the other saying an inside job, right? These are all possibilities. It could be like a lone shooter who is just taking action on his own could be enemies of trump within the government to give him a crap security detail and in the hope that somebody could penetrate it or it could be an inside job where it was actually

people in his own network that you know wanted to take him out and he drew the three van diagrams then basically said in his reading it's in the middle of all of these it's the intersection of all of them it's all three it's all three okay so a lone gun and he linked it to the dei agenda dei agenda as well so but how does that make sense logically so how can it be a lone gunman and someone who's been so i'm glad you asked my so it's the government has been taken over the deep state is in effect there's the corrupt dei initiatives and all this so they have instilled these values that are producing like limp-wristed secret service people women in the high positions who aren't big enough to protect Trump.

So that's the ideology. Then they won't extend the best protection to Trump. The Biden administration is saying not their best. They're refusing to give protection to RFK Jr. that he deserves in the hope that something might take place. And then because of the rhetoric around Trump being Hitler, they're motivating lone shooters to take action. So they've made this perfect cocktail of an incompetent security apparatus, plus the motivation to kill Trump. So it's kind of like all of them are coming together in the perfect storm to a new world. But that's not a conspiracy theory.

That is just acknowledging the facts. Yeah, I guess the common denominator with these conspiracy theories is how much weight is placed on those prior assumptions that are built into them. There's an agenda to create weak and ineffectual security agents like here he would place a huge amount of weight on that and you add all those things up and people build themselves into a situation where to them their conspiracy theory is kind of the only logical or at least the most probable explanation for events so that they never

believe they're doing in a conspiracy theory because they they just wait everything wrong don't they yeah i'm going to give a bit more illustration of this because brett and heller released an episode of the dark horse they're 234 episode but they've they've got a lot of episodes and the cave of mirrors was the name of it. And it's talking about the assassination attempt and their ideas around it. And it's very classic Brett and Heller, but it also speaks to all this confluence of conspiratorial reasoning that we just talked about. And I've got a couple of clips.

The first one is just to remind you how good Brett and Heller are at doing the kind of scientific, rigorous cosplay as they advance their conspiracy hypothesis. So listen to this. The argument is, if we look at the history of assassinations, especially assassinations of American presidents and presidential candidates, that there is a pattern that is evident, which is most assassinations are the work of lone gun nuts. And therefore, we should be very reluctant to look beyond that unless there's reason to, unless there's evidence to. And on the one hand, logically speaking, that makes sense, but it, uh, it runs afoul of a higher

logic, which I want to make evident. So the higher logic is this and forgive the, the academic, uh, uh, detour, but there are two kinds of error that we discuss in, uh, in science. One is called random error. That's just noise. And the other is called systematic error. And while it sounds like in some ways systematic error would be better because it's organized, in fact, it is way worse. Random error is error that goes in an arbitrary direction. So sometimes a data point will push you towards a hypothesis you're trying to test when your hypothesis isn't even true okay so this all sounds like a preamble chris for this little little detour to explain about random error and bias or systematic error um like essentially they're responding to an article from michael schirmer which was pointing out that most

assassinations are done by lone figures and it actually isn't conspiracies even though they're constantly alleged and they're arguing that this is wrong because they're conspiracy theorists, right? So they want to say that that is assuming that the official account is actually correct and that there's a systematic error because people are believing the official accounts so but but it's that thing about okay let me talk about these academic terms that we have called systematic and random error and these are important concepts and it you know like it just gives the impression that they're approaching this like careful scientists yeah yeah i mean like i know what he's saying right He's saying that the data that you think you have about most shootings being the work of crazy lone gunmen, that data is wrong. So you're operating from the wrong assumption.

Actually, that data is perturbed towards that, whereas actually they weren't mostly lone gunmen, right? So like it's a very loose analogy to map systematic error and random random error statistical concepts to what he's saying which is basically that you can't trust anything yeah yeah that the official story is telling you and that's that's just a straight up conspiratorial claim that's all he's saying right so he's saying that yeah he's saying that which is bog standard conspiratorial claim without any evidence. The little preamble, the little sidetrack

into statistical terminology there, it's just window dressing, isn't it? Yeah, but it gives a certain impression. And like one other thing is that they're so long-winded. I mean, I know the people in glass houses shoot at throw stones, but it takes them literal hours to get to the main conspiracy in this. And they cover lots of mini conspiracies

before they get there, but it's actually like two hours in before they get to their final conspiracy. And there's so many sidetracks about various things, including that they knew Jack Black at school and what he was like. Yeah.

And also, you know, various scientific side tracks and whatnot. It just takes them such a long time. But, Chris, this is a recurring theme, right? Remember we noticed this with Jordan Peterson early on, for instance, where you get asked a direct question and then we'll embark on this monologue and visit all of these different places. It's all very obscure. It's all very dense

the connections between points are really long and if you're trying to follow along you cannot help but lose the thread of multiple points between the time that he starts his answer and the time that he finishes his answer and i think we agreed that that kind of style is is a feature not a bug as far as these people are concerned because it's actually quite helpful right after that two hour long preamble before they they claim the silly thing it serves to give the impression that they've built up some form of argument some some some mountain of evidence yes i know i know it doesn't it's also like the famous clip that we always play is Brett talking about how he isn't a conspiracy theorist. He advances conspiracy hypotheses,

right? And he loves to use this to argue that actually it's being a good scientist to entertain various hypotheses. So here's a bit more about this. And also you'll hear some of the dynamics about like clattering the audience. But the question of how we're going to deal with what appears to have happened, what it might mean beyond the obvious is not straightforward. And what I think our audience expects from us and what we can do is we can model the very difficult question of how you responsibly engage in evaluating circumstances like this, where very few of us were present. The information that we have is filtered both intentionally, uh, and accidentally by algorithms and things like that. How are we to reason through what, you know, what are the, what are the bounds of what we are allowed to consider here? And what are the, what is the,

uh, the appropriate toolkit to bring to bear? Does that sound fair enough? You're asking, what are you asking me? Um, that, that, that's, does that seem like a reasonable way to approach this? Sure. Okay. So first question I wanted to address, I saw a lot of unavoidable, um, theor That is, the advancing of hypotheses is theorizing. You don't advance theories, you advance hypotheses. So an awful lot of theorizing about possible conspiracies that might go beyond the obvious in the case of the attempt on President Trump's life. I was surprised by the sloppiness of some of it this is just so much waffle and window dressing right you know we advance hypotheses we don't advance theories this is an important thing i

said this to my students all the time these are important scientific principles we know he's just saying yeah he's just conspiracy theorizing but he wants to say that there are stupid conspiracy theories right like and there's and then there is what he's about to do but all that preamble as well like i think our audience has come to expect that we will carefully evaluate this and you know and talk about algorithms and intentional and accidental filtering of information it's that's right we have to think carefully about what's the most responsible way to engage in in speculation and hypothesizing given that you know we're working with incomplete information all is not apparent but let's proceed let's proceed responsibly yeah let's proceed i did like as well that heller's response in the middle of it was when he like set her up to agree she was like what and then oh yeah sure

yeah that's i really like the idea that she's just kind of tuning out while he does these things you know what i mean just having a bit of a mental break, which I would too if I was sitting there next to her. But lest you think that Heller is epistemically better and more well-grounded, let's hear her talk a little bit about the kind of logic that she brings to bear, some of the epistemic tools she has in her toolbox. Michael Shermer, in his piece that you showed briefly,

arguing that lone gun nuts are the expected, all lead to this supposition that most moderns are walking around with, which is that the null hypothesis is it was one guy. The null is that it was one guy. Imagining anything else, that takes special evidence, and you're going to have to prove it. If the null hypothesis, if the default hypothesis is it was one guy because of Hanlon's razor, because of Occam's razor, because of parsimony, because of all of these things, then in order to credibly propose that it was anything more than one guy, the burden is on you. incredibly propose that it was anything more than one guy the burden is on you and i think we're part of where we have we have gotten and thinking about this is actually under conditions as complex as this there is no no that you that you you cannot to and so it will sound

if you if if you start down this road it's like nope i don't think the null should be lone gun nut oh you're freaking conspiracy theorist conspiracy hypothesis uh and so you think the null should be conspiracy no i think there shouldn't be a null here yeah i think i think that what we need to go in with is we don't know we are open and uh there are so many observations here of maybe incompetence across every domain across every every possibility and maybe not but the null is not one therefore i have to work harder to prove conspiracy the null is we don't know that was fun reasoning thank you for playing that chris i i enjoyed that i mean again with the scientific language right no hypotheses and alternative hypotheses and

yet the i think what she's saying is don't assume that it's one explanation or the other as a default and rather have an open everything. Everything is equally plausible, which is a stupid. It's not true. I mean, like, let's take a different example, right? The police turn up at someone's house and there's a woman lying unconscious on the floor or has been murdered or something like that, or a man, whatever. They are going to do things like interview family members. They're going to do other things as well. That's something that they assume that it's going to be someone else who's living in the house

but it often is right and it's not that they're like discounting any other options it's just normal investigation where you gather evidence i don't think that anyone investigating and you know the secret services and so on the security services would be investigating everything about the background of this guy, every little detail, everything, right? They're not starting off with a firm like null hypothesis that they have to get shifted from. This is, again, like it's partly just window dressing

to sort of use all these scientific terms like null hypothesis and total hypothesis and so on. It's mostly that. But it's also like it injects a version of reality, which isn't true right they actually don't operate like that at all when they're investigating crimes no but they they are correct in the sense that the default approach to this is that there was a guy on a rooftop that there's video of who shot at trump and appears to be like a 20 year old guy right yeah like that's that's

like evidence that is known right but before you commence your investigation right you've got you know the immediate reports of the ground you might start off with some facts that are known right you might know the guy because you've got his body you might have identified them you might have the gun etc and you proceed from there yeah now're going to check what was he doing? Who was he in contact with? Did he write down about this plan? All that kind of thing will be investigated. It's not going to be ruled out that there was a larger conspiracy,

that the person had help or that there was nobody else involved. But it is also more likely, given the history of various presidential assassins and whatnot, that it will be an unhinged person. So their notion is that, one, you're right, that they're kind of suggesting there won't be a consideration of alternatives, which there will be. But they're also, when they say that it's silly to apply any weeding of plausibilities to possible probabilities. Yeah, it's just not how it works. Let's say hypothetically, they looked into all of the background of this person, everyone they'd met with, phone call records, you know, I'm sure

there's like a dozen of different ways they can check every single thing. And let's say they find no contacts with suspicious things no record of meeting dodgy people no involvement with any political organizations yada yada yada then they would probably default to this person's bit nuts and and crazy like um whereas i think like heather is implying that what they should be doing is saying if they didn't find any evidence of that well they didn't find any evidence that he did like wasn't like it's absolutely like the dog that didn't bark at the night time or something then you just have to keep all those options as equally likely yeah like there's no actual clear evidence that it wasn't aliens involved in that that has not been disproven yeah and so it'd be wrong to discount that out of hand because yes it's

unlikely right but aliens presumably would be good at hiding what they're involved right and like it's the same logic it's as good as that logic the other thing too chris is that of course this hypothetical scenario where there's no evidence of anything either way absolutely none that never happens when they look at these people they find deranged facebook posts and they find weird things or they they have reports from family or friends there was a bit of a loner and and seemed out of sorts you know what i mean or i mean like there's this issue where when somebody engages in something like this that there's an assumption that like they are unusual in some respect, because most of us don't go around and like try to assassinate people. But it can be that somebody has an entirely coherent thought process and did a kind of

cost benefit analysis and decided this is the appropriate cause of action. And that can happen. Like people that are you know white supremacist shooters targeting mosques or whatever they're not mentally ill in the sense that they've got no idea about the consequences or whatever no they simply have decided their ideology means this is the correct course of action so yes that could be the case as well right yeah exactly i agree with you but to return to heather and brett i mean i think it was good you played that because it parallels what brett did before about his epistemic approach

and that it's just like he was bringing in these stats concepts to to spruce up a bog standard rationale for being a conspiracist heather here is bringing in this stuff about null hypotheses and and so on to really just she's trying to say we should keep an open mind about what conspiracy yeah oh yeah but even to be charitable keep in mind that when you're investigating these things about the cause or the motivation behind the person doing the thing that's like that's fine you know what i mean like that's a trivial thing yeah but they don't mean that because like as brett said in his tweet he wants to rule out any possibility for you know like as you pointed out there's problems with the logic there but if they were consistent they would be saying you know that you shouldn't be ruling out the possibility of this being a

staged event for trump but there is lots of reasons that you should rule that out. And they rule that out as well. What they just don't want to rule out is a plot by the deep state against Trump. Like, you know. Yeah, combined with DEI, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, they don't want to rule that out. Well, it's just annoying to me that the argument

is based on these faulty premises that the people investigating assassinations, not just this one, but all of them, have this inherent reluctance to accept any explanation that is an alone gunman explanation. Yeah. I just don't think that's true. I've had family members who have worked in ASIO, Australia's thing, and I know that's... No, they're going to check as

well that the security breaches that allowed this to happen is there any evidence of file player intentional or is it incompetence like that will absolutely be looked into in some detail for for very legitimate reasons right like they're not expecting that they're going to find some conspiracy no by insiders to murder trump but they're what expecting that they're going to find some conspiracy no by insiders to murder trump but they're what they are expecting is some flaw in their procedures and somebody maybe not doing their job 100 well and they're they're all about finding those things and fixing them yeah in any case if you want to hear this logic applied to another topic which sound familiar listen to this so it is perfectly natural at a logical level

to not treat anything as the default hypothesis. I would point out we've been here before, right? The idea that natural origins for COVID was the obvious explanation and that, you know, the Wuhan Institute of Virology required some incredible level of evidence. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at patreon.com slash decodingthegurus. Once you do, you'll get access to full-length episodes of the Decoding the Gurus podcast, including bonus shows, gurometer episodes, and decoding academia. The Decoding the Gurus podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on

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