New rule: you can't call something a "conspiracy theory" if it's covering a single actor and coherently explains its observable actions
@Yoav On the contrary, counting many individual humans as being a "single actor" is the very essence of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists would doubtless say that the Illuminati are a single actor.
@othermaciej to be clear, the "rule" wasn't referring to any one company/organization in particular, just for the use of "this is a conspiracy theory" as a rhetorical device to reject potentially valid arguments
@othermaciej To illustrate: If someone were to say "The Chrome team ships lots of new APIs because of Google's performance evaluation system" or "The Chrome team ships lots of new APIs in order to enable more of computing to happen on the web, where Google can index that content", none of these claims would be a conspiracy theory. That doesn't mean they are necessarily correct :)
@othermaciej Both of these claims would refer to Google/Chrome as a single actor, which is admittedly simplistic, but at the same time, organizations do exist as a social construct that motivates individual behavior. These organizations create systems and fund the things they care about collectively. If I were to try and refute the above claims, dismissing them as a conspiracy theory would not be sufficient
@Yoav If you consider “a social construct that motivates individual behavior” to be equivalent to “a single actor”, then by your rule, nothing can be called a conspiracy theory. (Every conspiracy theory proponent believes the theory can explain all the relevant actions of its subject, so that part is trivial). That makes it a poor rule, because conspiracy theories exist.
However, I think the most apt critique is not “conspiracy theory” but “psychologizing”, or “mind reading” — pretending to know the reasons for other people’s actions without direct evidence or even against their stated reasons. Now of course we can’t help speculating, but imagining another’s motivations, and then getting angry about it, crosses the line on both courtesy and honesty.
For example if I said “Yoav isn’t finely parsing what counts a a conspiracy theory out of care for accurate rhetoric; he’s just looking to endorse an anti-Apple hate campaign with plausible deniability”, that would not be a conspiracy theory because it’s just one person, but it would be psychologizing. Even if I claimed this theory also explained other actions like starring a certain post on this very platform.
Another valid critique, that’s also akin to conspiratorial thinking, is the theory that can explain anything. If a theory is validated both when X happens and when X doesn’t happen, then the theory has no predictive power and is just a bad theory. Many conspiracy theories have this same property, that they can explain any possible turn of events. But sure, there are other kinds of low quality theories that can explain any outcome.