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.
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.
@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.
@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!)
@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.
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.