Path: physics insights > misc > How the Internet Makes People Stupid

Many people who see this page will consider it so obviously true and trivial that it wasn't worth stating.  Most of the rest will think it's so off the wall bogus that the author must be a robot minion of the Illuminati.  Hopefully there will also be a few people standing on a middle ground, who will find something of interest here.

Why?

After arguing with someone about something (about which they were clearly wrong) I started wondering how I knew that I was right about stuff.  How do I know the things I know are true?  And why do I believe these things are true, rather than some other things?  And why are some people so dead certain of things that are obviously false?

My initial feeling that I had some special, exceptionally clever system for deciding what was true eventually gave way to the realization that we all do it pretty much the same way.  This page is a summary of my conclusions.

Uncertainty

In general, there is no such thing as "absolute" knowledge.  The best we can achieve is what we might call "reasonable certainty".  Our concern on this page is to figure out which things we should be "reasonably certain" are true.

Consider this list of questions.  For the ones where you know the answer, ask yourself how you know; that's the point of this exercise.

1. Did Abraham Lincoln really exist?
2. Is the Sun really a solid ball of graphite, with a gaseous atmosphere a few hundred miles thick?
3. Is the Moon more than 100,000 miles away?
4. Did the World Trade Center get hit by airplanes on 9/11?
5. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the Moon landings?
6. Does Philadelphia really exist?
7. And finally, do we actually live in the world of the Matrix?

I don't expect anyone who reads this to be able to answer more than a few of these from their own experience.  (Were you in New York on 9/11?  If not, you're taking someone else's word for it as regards the airplanes.)  Most of the time, we're dependent on information we got from someone else.  But people can be wrong, they can lie, experiments can be botched, and even our own memories can be wrong, as studies of eye witnesses have shown.  So, how do we know what's true?  If you've never been there, how do you know Philadelphia exists?  (And if you have been there, how did you know you really were in Philadelphia?  Did you walk there, checking landmarks to be sure of where you were, or check your location with your own sextant and clock after you arrived?  Or did you just take someone else's word for it?)

Appeal to Authority

When we don't know the answer to a question, we look for someone who does.  In arguments on the Internet, that's commonly reviled as appeal to authority.  In fact, unless you're an incredible polymath, you probably answer nearly all questions of fact which you encounter by "appeal to authority".  What year is it?  Check the calendar.  What time is it? Check your phone, which (you've been told) receives the time from a central source, which (you've been told) is accurate.

This is inevitable, and has been true for thousands of years (except the cell phone part).  Finding genuinely new facts on your own, and confirming that things we think we know really are true using your own resources, is very difficult, and there isn't time to do more than a small amount of it.  So, nearly all the time, we depend on appeal to authority.

That brings us to the central question, which determines what we think is true, and leads directly to the problem of conspiracy theories and Internet-based stupidity:  Who is an authority?  How do we know who to believe?

Conspiracy Theories Introduced

A "conspiracy theory" is an assertion which is generally considered false by "mainstream" information sources, but which is asserted by a minority to describe the true state of affairs.  In order for it to be true, the "mainstream" sources must be conspiring to tell us otherwise, either intentionally or through shared stupidity.

We'll have more to say about them later, but for now we need one fact about conspiracy theories:  They are irrefutable. By their nature, it is impossible to prove them wrong.  (By Popper's criteria, therefore, they're not valid theories, as they are not falsifiable.)  The theory just bends to accommodate new evidence.  Do you think we went to the Moon because you saw it on live TV?  The TV feed was faked.  Do you know Buzz Aldrin personally, and he told you he went to the Moon?  He lied to you.  Are you Buzz Aldrin?  If you really believe you were on the Moon, then you've had false memories implanted in you by the CIA, through a course of drugs and hypnosis, so you think you went to the Moon but you really didn't.

Before the Internet, it was rare to find someone who accepted conspiracy theories and rejected mainstream beliefs.  In the Internet era, it has become depressingly common.  On the remainder of this page, we'll be considering why that's true.  We'll also be looking at the question of how we can be so sure most conspiracy theories are incorrect, given that they can't be proved wrong.

Confirmation Bias in a Simple World

Long ago, when there were fewer people and they lived in isolated communities (or tribes, or whatever), it was straightforward to assemble a mental model of the sources of knowledge.  People who were reliable would become known for that.  On the other hand, people who were unreliable, or made up stories, and often were proved wrong, would soon be known as well.  When new information arrived, one could test it against what one already knew, and evaluate the source in the light of what one knew about everyone in the group, and get a pretty good idea of whether it was likely to be true or not.

In the pre-Internet but post-industrial era, our information sources were still limited.  If you wanted to learn about something technical (such as the theory of relativity, or how a Saturn V rocket worked) you could look in an encyclopedia (if you owned one), you could visit the library, or you could read about it in a magazine such as Science News or read about it in a newspaper.  If you were in school, you could ask a teacher.  These were all what we might call very mainstream sources -- it was unlikely you'd ever encounter an "alternative" point of view this way.  Television news was generally restricted to the three major networks and PBS, and they were nearly as "mainstream" as the encyclopedia or your high school physics teacher.  (We'll have more to say about Fox later.)

In that world, if you happened to run across an "alternative" point of view, it would fail to fit in with what you knew, it would fail to fit with information you could find in sources you "knew" were accurate, and if you asked anyone whose opinion you respected about it, chances are they'd tell you it was wrong.  Consequently, you would tend to reject it as being unlikely to be true.  I recall running across a book in the library which claimed to refute Special Relativity, back long before the Internet existed.  I didn't know enough to judge it at the time, but one thing stood out for me:  It didn't fit with anything else I read at that time, and it absolutely didn't fit with anything I subsequently learned about relativity.  So, I eventually wrote it off as a rather strange bit of crackpottery.

Judging new information based on whether it fits with what you already know is confirmation bias.  In a primitive world it's an extremely useful tool for weeding out nonsense.

Perhaps the best known statement of the principle of confirmation bias as a useful tool is "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof".  That is confirmation bias in a nutshell.  Something "extraordinary" is something "out of the ordinary".  In other words, if a claim is not what we expect, then it is probably false.

Confirmation Bias on the Internet

In the presence of the Internet, there are problems with confirmation bias.

On the Internet, the problem of sorting out truth from nonsense is much harder.  There are a multitude of sources, and we have no direct knowledge of any of them.  Furthermore, we can find ourselves discussing things with individuals we'd never ever have encountered in the days before the Internet.  We meet them with no reputation, no prior knowledge, and no way of judging them beyond their own words.

In this milieu, if we start out suspecting something to be true, it's usually not hard to find sources on the Internet which confirm our suspicions, whether or not the thing is true.  If we have no objective criteria for judging the truth of what we see, then by selecting the sources which "fit" with what we already (think we) know, we can reinforce our initial view of things, which in turn makes it more likely that we'll select sources which agree with that view in the future.  And in short order we find ourselves posting messages on the Koreshan website, discussing the fact that astronomers are all hiding the real situation from us, which is that we live on the inner surface of an inside-out planet.

Thus, confirmation bias, which is extremely useful in a simple world, turns out to be a recipe for disaster in a "fully connected" world.  Unless you're lucky enough to start out with a "sensible" collection of beliefs into which to fit newly acquired knowledge, access to the Internet is as likely to lead you astray as to teach you anything which is correct.

As we observed earlier, confirmation bias is what nearly all of us use to filter truth from garbage (whether we realize it or not).  Only things that get past our "bias filters" are considered for serious investigation.  We have to do it this way; there's too much information, and too much nonsense, to treat all of it seriously.  The Koreshans are going about acquiring knowledge the same way the rest of us are.  It's the ease with which one can fall into the trap of using the Internet's richness to reinforce incorrect ideas that leads them on, not some innate personal failing.

So, how do we know we're right?  How do we know that the Koreshans aren't the ones who have it right, and all the rest of us are confused?  For that matter, how do we know Philadelphia really exists?

There is an answer to this.  It should be taught in school alongside the scientific method (but it's not, last I heard).  It's the defense against Internet craziness, and it's what we'll consider next.

Occam's Razor, Understood as a Law

I've often seen Occam's Razor presented as a "rule of thumb", and, as I understand it, its original description involved choosing less complex solutions on the grounds of esthetics.

It's generally stated as something along the lines of "One should not unnecessarily multiply assumptions".

In fact, while this may be how Occam stated it, there is a sound mathematical principle at work here, and Occam's razor can be restated as a law rather than a rule of thumb.

The probability of several independent events all occurring is the product of their individual probabilities.

Thus, if a statement depends on some collection of assumptions, the probability that the statement is correct is the product of the probabilities that each of the assumptions is correct.  While we can't generally know the exact probability that any particular assumption is correct, we can, at least, be quite sure that the probability of each assumption will be between 0 and 1, and we may be able to guess whether it's closer to 1 or 0.

Consequently, if we have two statements, and we can figure out that one of them requires many more (independent) assumptions to be true than the other, then we can conclude that the one with fewer assumptions is more probably correct.  And if the difference in assumptions is extreme, we can conclude that the statement with fewer assumptions is far more likely to be true.  This is not just a matter of esthetics; it means something specific.  If we're faced by a series of decisions, and in each decision, we are given two conflicting statements and need to guess which is correct, and, when we have nothing else to go on, we always choose the statement which embodies fewer (improbable) assumptions, we'll find that most of the time we made the right choice.  And there is no issue of "esthetics" involved.

We'll come back to Occam's razor after we spend some time looking at the scientific method, and how it's actually used to sort out truth from confusion.

Pre-Science:  "Joe said so"

In the pre-scientific world, a great deal of what was "known" (beyond that which was tested in daily existence) was believed to be true only because some "accepted authority" had said so.  This was totally unchecked "appeal to authority".  If Aristotle (for example) said it, it must be true.  (So, for example, the function of the lungs was to cool the body -- Aristotle said so, and he was usually right about stuff.)

In the absence of any tool beyond confirmation bias, this is a rational way to proceed:  Look for someone we know has been a reliable source in the past.  They are more likely to be correct than someone who has no track record.

On the Internet, where determining whether someone is "generally reliable" or not is far more difficult, the "Joe said so" principle is even shakier than it was in the pre-scientific world.

The Scientific Method:  Replication is Vital

The discovery of the scientific method was revolutionary.  It replaced the unreliable "Joe said so" with a way of determining, to high probability, what is actually true.

When we're introduced to the scientific method in school, we're typically told that it involves observing, then making a theory, making predictions from the theory, and then testing the predictions.  If the predictions are not born out, then we reject the theory and start over.  We're also told that testing the predictions and rejecting the theory if it's proved false is what distinguishes scientific societies from pre-scientific societies.

This is true enough, and it already puts conspiracy theories in a shaky position, since by their nature they typically cannot be used to make testable predictions.  However, there is an additional, extremely important step, which is replication.  When one person has tested something and confirmed it, we have reason to believe it might be true.  But until other people have also tested it and confirmed the original result, it is, at best, a tentative conclusion.

It is replication which distinguishes a confirmed probably-true fact from something which we know to be true because "Joe said so".  The reason lies with Occam's razor.  To see this, assume we have a result -- say, "antarctic fish blood freezes below the freezing point of pure water".  Now, consider the assertion that the result is false.  What assumptions must hold in order for the result to be false?

If one researcher has done one experiment which supported the result, then for the result to be false, just one experiment must have been botched.  Someone misread a thermometer, or a frustrated grad student made up some numbers instead of making real measurements, or any number of other things went wrong.

On the other hand, if the experiment has been replicated by five different labs, then in order for the result to be wrong, every one of those experiments would have to have been botched.  If it's been replicated, then we need to make many more assumptions to arrive at the conclusion that the result is wrong.

Replication is needed to rule out errors on the part of the researches, and also to rule out fraud.  The honor system never works very well when humans are involved (consider the lock on your front door).

Much is made of peer reviewed journals in discussions of modern science.  In fact, while peer review assures that bad articles are less likely to be printed, and feedback from peer review may cause articles to be improved before being published, and while peer review saves journal editors a bundle of work (without it, they'd need to review every article carefully themselves), peer review cannot prevent fraud.  A well done article with cooked data will not get caught by peer review, unless the data is so badly cooked that it's obviously impossible.

The real guards against fraud are publicity (when it's caught) and replication (which can lead to the realization that a particular result must be wrong).  Papers reporting replications of earlier results can be published in Arxiv just as easily as they can be published in peer reviewed literature, and they'll have just as much validity.

Studies

Experiments done in a laboratory are valuable but ultimately they only tell us what happens during experiments.  In some fields, such as physics, that's all we need to know.  However, in the life sciences in general, and in the field of medicine in particular, there are too many variables in the real world to allow exact modeling of real situations in a laboratory setting.  Furthermore, there are a lot of questions involving impact of lifestyles on health which can't be answered with simple laboratory experiments.

For such things, researchers do studies.  They examine matched groups of people between which only one or a few variables are changed, or they follow a group of people over a period of time during which various procedures may be done, and they observe the results.

Studies, just like other experiments, are most convincing when they're replicated.  However, some studies -- in particular, large longitudinal studies -- can be very convincing even when not replicated.   This is because the actual "experiment" consists of analyzing the data gathered in the study and, if the raw data is published (as it it normally is), any other researcher can redo the data analysis, and can look for other causes or effects which might explain the data, which effectively "replicates" the original researcher's conclusion.

It is worth mentioning in passing that "alternative medicine" tends to be severely lacking in studies which support the claims of its practitioners, and in fact advocates of alternative medicine are often very critical both of the use of studies and of the mainstream journals in which results are commonly published.  We may have more to say about this later.

Lies

Lies are anathema to mainstream science.  When a researcher is caught lying about his results, the major journals typically retract all of his papers, and every paper on which he collaborated is carefully examined to see if he had any influence over the raw data.  If he did, those papers may be retracted, too, because he's no longer considered reliable.

Justice can be draconian.  A researcher who lies about his data, and is caught, has probably just ended his career.

This is not true in the world of conspiracy theories, but it ought to be.  As soon as someone who is expounding an "alternative" theory is caught in an outright lie, we know that they cannot be trusted.  From that point on, everything they say should be viewed with suspicion.  Unless we know it to be true from third party sources, we should assume anything else they say is also a lie.

This is harsh.  However, it is completely natural; it is, in fact, the flip side of confirmation bias:  When you know someone is unreliable, do not accept what they say at face value.  Confirmation bias, our most basic tool, though hazardous in the world of the Internet, remains valuable.

More on Conspiracy Theories

We've made the point that conspiracy theories are not falsifiable.  There are other hallmarks of such theories, and there is also the very interesting question of where they come from.

Poisoning the Well

Even more than the lack of falsifiability, the primary hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that it includes the assertion that mainstream sources cannot be trusted.  So, you can't refute it just by looking in the Encyclopedia Britannica or checking a copy of Science magazine, because they are part of the conspiracy.   The term for this is "poisoning the well" -- your main source of information which you might use to refute the theory has been "poisoned".

In some cases, we're told that all conventional sources are confused, misled, or ignorant; in other cases we're told that the conventional sources are actively suppressing the "new knowledge".  But one way or another, the point is made that conventional sources are not to be trusted.  This must be the case; otherwise the theory would be shown wrong from the get-go.

Irrefutable

As we said earlier, conspiracy theories are irrefutable.  In the crudest version, any attempt at proving a conspiracy theory wrong by introducing a new fact can be countered by enlarging the alleged conspiracy to include the source of the new fact.  Doing so increases the number of assumptions which must be true in order for the theory to be correct, and so makes it even less probable when viewed with Occam's razor.

On the other hand, almost any of the popular conspiracy theories could easily be proved correct ... if only the right data would surface, or someone in the conspiracy would "crack" and spill the beans.  But somehow it never happens.

The Gish Gallop

This wonderful term -- "Gish Gallop" -- comes to you from TVTropes and puts a name to a familiar phenomenon.  In an argument about a conspiracy theory, it's common to encounter a series of objections thrown up against the conventional viewpoint.  They are generally simple objections to raise, but each one would take significant effort to prove incorrect.  Furthermore, it's common to encounter objections that only someone with a technical background would recognize as being specious.  This approach is intended to overwhelm opposition, and to convince anyone who is not a specialist.  It can be very effective.  You won't usually see it used to support conventional science -- most conclusions of mainstream science are supported by relatively limited numbers of solid tests rather than large numbers of trivial points.

As an example, if you watch one of the Moon landing hoax videos, you may be told that:

1. Due to the lack of atmosphere, stars should have been visible in the Apollo photos on the Moon.  They aren't; therefore the photos were (badly and stupidly) faked.
2. Shadows cast by sunlight are parallel due to the extreme distance to the Sun.  The shadows in many of the Apollo photographs are not parallel; they converge.  Therefore they were shot with a close-up light source, not sunlight, and so they must have been faked.
3. The shadows in the Apollo photographs are not inky-black, as we might expect with no atmosphere.  Therefore a fill light must have been used.  NASA denies that.  So, they're lying and the whole thing was faked.
4. Lack of atmosphere on the Moon means ultraviolet levels are extremely high -- so high, in fact, that any conventional camera would have had its film fogged by the ambient UV.  The slides from the Moon are clear and sharp, and not fogged; therefore they were not shot on the Moon, and they must have been faked.
5. The camera used was fixed to a fitting on the chest of the astronaut's space suit.  Yet some of the pictures could not possibly have been taken with the camera in that position!  Therefore the pictures must have been faked.
6. The radiation in the Van Allen belts is so intense that the astronauts would have died before they got to the Moon.
7. The claim by NASA that they went through the radiation belts really fast, and so weren't there very long, and got a sublethal dose is bogus -- it's like the claim that if you run through the rain you'll get less wet.  That's false.  And so's the claim about going through the Van Allen belts really fast.  (And Mythbusters tested the 'run through the rain' one and got the wrong answer, darn it (running got them wetter), apparently due to a flaw in their setup, and so supported the hoax theorists on this one.  We may have more to say about this later.  Replication is all!)
8. There was no blast crater under the LEM, and we expected to see one.  Therefore it must have been faked.
9. There was video footage of the LEM taking off at the end of the mission.  Who shot that footage?  It's impossible -- there was nobody on the Moon to do it!  Therefore they weren't on the Moon -- it was faked.

The list goes on.  These are some of the points I can recall off the top of my head.  Every one of them can be refuted easily.  However, by "easily" I mean it would take at least a few sentences of text, and ten or twenty minutes of research.  So, to hit all the entries in this Gish gallop I'd need to invest several hours, and in that time someone who was determined to find flaws in the Moon missions could come up with yet more points that would take time to refute.

When confronted with something like this, an effective initial approach is to glance down the list and see if there are any obvious lies.   (A lie is not just an error -- a lie is a false statement we can be sure the author knew was false.) If there aren't, then maybe it's something to take seriously.  If there are, on the other hand, maybe we should throw it all in recycling and go read Knights of the Dinner Table.

The first objection, that the stars should have been visible in the photos, may seem totally startling (and convincing) when first encountered.  It can be refuted but it takes some work.  In a page elsewhere on this site I show the results of experiments with a camera at night which indicated that the photos should appear very much as they do (the issue is dynamic range) but it's a confusing enough issue that the authors of the 'hoax' video could have just been mistaken about it.  So we won't call it a "lie".

However, speaking as an amateur photographer and artist, the second point -- shadows cast by sunlight are parallel -- did indeed jump out at me as being off-the-wall bogus.  The examples shown in the video were carefully selected to show parallel shadows, but anyone who has learned perspective drawing knows the claim is false; shadows in a photograph are rarely parallel.  If the producers of the video had any grasp of the principles of graphics (and they claimed to be graphics experts) they knew it too.  Therefore, that is a lie, not just an error.

The fourth and fifth points also turn out to be trivially false, and the authors should certainly have known they were false, so I'd call them lies as well.  UV filters have been available for cameras since at least the 1950's, so the UV would not have fogged the film (and Hasselblad, which made the camera, knows all about stuff like this).  So point 4 is wrong, and the authors should have known it.  Point 5 is a flat-out lie, as a few minutes of research on the Internet revealed -- the camera was designed to be clipped to the astronaut's suit or to be held in a gloved hand and could be used either way.

We conclude that somebody seeded this list with lies, and so, using our good friend Confirmation Bias, we should assume that anything on it which we can't independently verify is also false because it comes to us from an unreliable source.

Malicious People versus Misguided People

Where do conspiracy theories come from, and who spreads them?

Most people who spread them are well meaning but wrong (and have no understanding of Occam's Razor).  The Moon landing hoax conspiracy theory probably sucks a lot of people in because of the lack of stars in the photos.  It's extremely surprising and the reasons for it are beyond the photographic understanding of most people.  Once someone has the idea that it might have been faked, it's easy to find lots of "information" on the Internet to support that notion.

But someone took the theory to the next level.  The Gish gallop of Moon landing hoax nonsense I showed above contained a number of outright lies, which would have been recognized as lies by anyone with the expertise to put together such a list to start with.  Therefore, someone intentionally created a series of misleading arguments to convince people the Moon landings were false.  Since they were willing to lie to support the claim, we're left with the suspicion that, not only are they unscrupulous, they also know perfectly well that the hoax claims they're spreading are false.

It may not be immediately clear why anyone would do that, but I can see signs of it in all the major conspiracy theories I've encountered.  In back of the theories, there are malicious people who are willing to just make stuff up to support the theory.  Most of the people who repeat the theories are merely misguided and ignorant, but it takes a certain amount of expertise and a lot of ill will to create the arguments which support them.

The Financial Motive that's Hidden in Plain Sight

One common argument in favor of conspiracy theories is that the people spreading them have nothing to gain.  They are putting in their time and labor to spread "the truth", and gaining nothing from it, so they must be fundamentally honest and well meaning.  There is a flaw in this, however, which is that those who spread the theories often do gain something from them.  The people selling Moon landing hoax videos are selling them, not giving them away for free on Youtube.  The man who helped some burn victims out of the elevator in the basement of the World Trade Center shortly before it collapsed, and who subsequently told a bizarre tale of explosions and inexplicable fires, later went on a lecture tour charging, IIRC, something well over a thousand dollars for each appearance.  Financial incentives to lie should not be ignored.

The people I knew who handed out videos and literature at Truth Out rallies gained nothing from it, and were apparently completely sincere, but they were also not the originators of the ideas about 9/11 which were they were spreading.  On the other hand, Thierry Meyssan, who claimed the Pentagon was hit by a truck bomb, not a plane, sold a huge pile of books asserting there was no airplane (his book has been translated into 25 languages).  Did he have a financial incentive?  Obviously!  When the "truck bomb" version of his theory was disproved (by, among other things, recovery of a bunch of airplane pieces) he didn't back down, but changed the claim, to say there was a plane alright but it was a Global Hawk drone, not a Boeing.  And so the theory that there was no passenger plane involved proved unkillable (just as all conspiracy theories do).

This is perhaps the worst thing the Internet does:  It gives the authors of conspiracy theories -- who are not at all well-meaning -- a far larger audience than they would otherwise have.

"How Do You Know?"

We shall now come back to the list of questions we started with, and consider how we know the answers to them, using Occam's razor as needed to choose between alternatives.

Did Abraham Lincoln really exist?

We only know that Lincoln existed because we are told he existed.  Nobody alive today actually remembers him.  So how do we know the sources which tell us he existed are telling the truth?  Let's look at the assumptions which are involved.

To conclude that Lincoln did exist, we need to assume that the sources which tell us that historical records (documents in libraries, government archives, and so forth) exist that discuss his existence are what they seem, and that anecdotes we may read of people who knew Lincoln, or, more recently, knew old people who had known Lincoln, are generally correct.  Furthermore, we have no need to assume these sources are all correct, nor that any of them are completely correct -- all we need to do is assume that some of them are generally correct in that they report on a real historical personage.

To conclude that Lincoln did not exist, we must assume that every source which tells us there are historical records showing his existence is false, or we need to assume that the historical records themselves are false, which doesn't make much sense unless they are fabrications.  Furthermore, we must assume that anecdotes about Lincoln which have been handed down a couple generations are false -- presumably, they're all fabrications, or mis-attributions to Lincoln of things done by someone else.  This amounts to a very large number of assumptions about a diverse collection of sources, and the assumptions must all be correct in order to conclude Lincoln didn't exist.  If even a single source which discusses Lincoln's existence is correct, then we can't conclude he didn't exist.  Furthermore, once we've assumed there are a massive number of fabricated sources about him, we are left wondering why someone did this -- and we'll need to make yet more assumptions to explain the behavior of the fabricators.

By comparing the set of assumptions we need to make, it should be easy to see that the assertion Lincoln existed is far more probable than the assertion that he did not exist.

Is the Sun really a solid ball of graphite, with a gaseous atmosphere a few hundred miles thick?

This is a real claim which I ran across on the Internet.  Somebody wrote a book about it, in fact, which you could go and purchase, though I wouldn't recommend it.

If you're an astronomer you may feel quite certain that you know the answer to this.  For the rest of us, though, we're just going by what we're told, so we need to consider how reliable the sources are.  Like the case of Lincoln's existence, the "nonstandard" claim falls apart pretty quickly when we look at the assumptions which go into the assertion.

First, to conclude that the Sun is a ball of gas (or plasma), as is commonly believed, we need to assume that at least some of the reports we read of what astronomers have learned about it are correct, and we need to assume that at least some of the astronomers in question were neither deluded nor dishonest, and we need to assume that at least some of the experiments on which they based this conclusion were well done and produced correct results.  This doesn't sound unlikely!

On the other hand, for the Sun to be made of solid graphite, we would need to assume that either all the reports we've read of what astronomers have learned were either mistaken or fabricated, or that all the astronomers who have concluded that the Sun is a ball of gas were incompetent fools or liars (or both), or that all the experiments on which they based their conclusions were botched or faked.  This is a lot of independent assumptions -- and they all must be true in order for the "Ball of graphite" assertion to be correct.

So, it's easy to see that it's extremely unlikely that the Sun is a solid ball of graphite.

Is the Moon more than 100,000 miles away?

In fact we're told it's about 240,000 miles away, which is much farther than 100,000 miles.  But how do we know?

We again are dependent on astronomers for the answer to this one.  We, who are not experts, need to decide how reliable we think the experts are.

According to information found on line, the distance to the moon has been tested very extensively, both via trigonometry (measuring angles to determine its distance) and by direct measurement (bouncing radar and light off the Moon and measuring the round trip delay).  Furthermore, it's been directly verified by spacecraft which actually went to the Moon, and whose velocity and trip time where both known.

Like the claim that the Sun is a ball of gas, we need to assume that a very large group of records have been falsified, or that a large group of people are lying to us or are totally confused, and all of the generally independent reports on the Moon's distance must be wrong.  Thus, an extremely large number of independent assumptions are needed for us to believe that the Moon is less than 100,000 miles away, and so we conclude that it's extremely unlikely that they could all be true -- and so we conclude that the Moon is, with very high probability, about as far away as we've been told it is, which is indeed much farther away than 100,000 miles.

Did the World Trade Center get hit by airplanes on 9/11?

The alternative claim is that the WTC was brought down by explosives.

For my part, all I need to assume here is that the videos of the WTC collapse really did show the WTC collapse.  After watching a nauseating number of videos of actual building demolitions, and considering what it would take to do a computer controlled series of explosions to simulate the kind of collapse we see on the WTC videos, I can say with some certainty that the Twin Towers could not have been demolished with explosives.  So, there must have been some airplanes involved, as per the official story.  (And, no, I can't explain the behavior of Steven Jones, who is a physicist and should know better.)

For those who had less time on their hands or less experience with computers, it's not as obvious.  The question we're considering here, though, is pretty simple:  Did the Towers, or did they not, get hit with airplanes?  (For now, let's not worry about what actually caused the collapse.)

For the assertion that there were no airplanes involved to be correct, we need to assume:

1. The videos of the second impact were faked.  They've been analyzed extensively, particularly by people looking for evidence that there were missiles or other objects present in addition to the airplane, and if the videos were faked, they were astonishingly well done.
2. All the eyewitnesses in New York City who silently acquiesced to the "mainstream" story either imagined an airplane or were somehow too intimidated to mention that they were there and by golly there weren't any planes present.
3. A number of witnesses who specifically claimed to see the second airplane (including at least one who denied the government story and claimed it wasn't a passenger plane) all were mistaken or lying.
4. We need to assume that the government story of tracking the planes on radar and sending military jets after them (too late) was fabricated, and all military personnel who were supposedly involved in the chase must therefore be lying or at least acquiescing in the lie by remaining silent.

And all of these largely independent assumptions must be true, if there were no airplanes present.  It's not hard to see this is extremely improbable.

Did Stanley Kubrick fake the Moon landings?

I've already touched on this one, above, and I'm not going to go into detail here.

We'll just observe that there were a very large number of people involved in the Moon shots, and a large number of them would all have to have been lying had they been faked.  Conversely, all we need to assume in order to conclude the landings took place as claimed is that the scientists and engineers of the time found ways around the (very real) difficulties of the missions.

Not many of us can assess the real difficulty of a moon shot with any confidence.  However, most of us have some idea how easy it is to get large groups of people to cooperate, and it's not hard to see that the likelihood that everyone from the astronauts themselves, through the ground crew in Australia (where the Apollo 11 downlink was located), through the mission control people in Houston, to the astronomers who worked for NASA (one of whom I know personally, for whatever that's worth), to all the people involved in launching and retrieving the Apollo capsules, all cooperated to hide the truth is really, really unlikely.

So, Does Philadelphia Exist, or Not?

To answer this, we once again need to count up our assumptions.

If we are to conclude that Philadelphia does not exist, then we must assume that there is an enormous amount of infrastructure, in books, on television, on airport marquees, and even on the Internet, which has just one purpose: to present the illusion that there's a city by that name in eastern Pennsylvania.

And all of that infrastructure was constructed faultlessly, and with the cooperation of thousands of people, and none of them spilled the beans to us about the fraud. We can say, very roughly, that we are making one assumption per person involved in setting this up.  That is a lot of assumptions.  All those people must have behaved in a way that appears to us to make no sense, just to keep up the facade; any of them could have broken the illusion, but none did.  So we need to multiply together the probabilities that all those thousands of people would have behaved in this one strange way.  It seems unlikely that one person would be willing to do that; what's the probability that thousands of them would?  Any probability that's significantly smaller than 1, when multiplied by itself several thousand times, will produce a result that's nearly zero.  And so we can conclude that the probability that Philadelphia doesn't exist is nearly zero.

And finally, do we actually live in the world of the Matrix?

I'm going to leave this one as an exercise for the reader.




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