ROGER ANDERTON <r.j.ander...@btinternet.com> wrote: conspiracy theories are about pattern recognition in human behaviour, and > there are conspiracy facts - > > e.g. > Tuskegee Experiment: The Infamous Syphilis Study > There are indeed, but they are few and far between. Just because some small number of conspiracy theories turned out to be true, that is not a good reason to assume that most are true, or that all are true.
The thing is, most institutions work, most of the time. They would not survive otherwise. Over the centuries, institutions have developed various rules, traditions and so on to guard against events like the infamous syphilis study. Everyone knows that these rules and traditions sometimes fail catastrophically, but we also know they work most of the time, because if they did not, these institutions would fail. They would go extinct. Aviation has the strongest tradition of careful engineering, checking and double checking for problems, because flying millions of people at 30,000 feet close to the speed of sound is a difficult and dangerous thing to do. If aviation were not hyper-careful, airplanes would often crash. No one would fly on airplanes. Boeing and the others would go out of business. Yet despite that, we all know there are catastrophic failures in aviation, and even corruption and deliberate covering up of problems. See: *Boeing Charged with 737 Max Fraud Conspiracy and Agrees to Pay over $2.5 Billion* https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-conspiracy-and-agrees-pay-over-25-billion Just because that happened once, that does not mean it happens all the time and you can never trust Boeing or any other part of the aviation industry. It is certain you can trust them, because airplanes seldom crash. It is foolish to think the authorities are always right, and there is never any corruption, cover ups, or conspiracy. It is equally foolish to think that everything is always corrupt, and all of the conspiracy theories bandied about are true. You have to use good judgement and logic. Of course, you can always be wrong. Some of the people who spread conspiracy theories are themselves corrupt. Some work for the Russian government. Their purpose is to disrupt U.S. society and destroy our institutions. You should not trust everyone who tells you there is a criminal conspiracy. They may have ulterior motives. Some of them are extremely gullible, ignorant, or flat out crazy.
