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.
@othermaciej I think the main difference here is that there's no evidence that the illuminati exist as an organization, where there is evidence that e.g. Google exists as an org.
@Yoav Do you consider that a requirement for something to be a conspiracy theory? That it’s about a nonexistent group? Or that it can’t be about a group that’s an organization? If so, that would be a very idiosyncratic definition of “conspiracy theory” which doesn’t seem to align with Wikipedia, dictionaries, or common usage. Consider that Freemasonry indisputably exists as an organization.
@Yoav I would say read the rest of the Wikipedia article and see if that holds up. If “Freemasonry” and “The Catholic Church” (both mentioned as popular subjects of conspiracies) are covert and plural, than so are Apple and Google in the relevant sense.
@Yoav but to be more specific about where I think you’re misreading the OED definition:
1. The use of “agency” in the spec. clause is singular, which contradictions your interpretation that a single org can’t fit the “parties” part of the first clause (either multiple people within one org count; or they are merely writing a dictionary, not a standard, so omitted “one or more”).
2. “spec.” introduces a narrower sense, rather than modifying the first given sense, so “covert” is optional.
@othermaciej From Wikipedia/Oxford, they define a conspiracy theory as: "the theory that an event or phenomenon occurs as a result of a conspiracy between interested parties; spec. a belief that some covert but influential agency (typically political in motivation and oppressive in intent) is responsible for an unexplained event."
Note both "parties" and "covert". In my view, a theory about a single non-covert party does not qualify as a "conspiracy theory" (but it could still be wrong!)